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Drusus

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Everything posted by Drusus

  1. Maybe the messages panel could be grouped: 1. research orders needed, 2. Things needing orders/upgrade/production orders that did have orders last turn. 3. Turn summary (spotted and so on), 4. Things needing orders etc that have been waiting 1-5 turns. 5. The rest of things. Or something like that. It would be better if you didn't have manually assign sentry for units, they would just go to the bottom of the stack and not bother you. Units needing upgrades can't even be removed from the list manually, as far as I know.
  2. You can have groups inside groups. Lets say we have group 1, which contains group 2. Trying to drag the group 1 to group 2 will result in a crash.
  3. Ships which have aggressive field orders will get stuck near enemy cities. I think the enemy city will need to contain a ship. The ship that was stuck was a dreadnought. You can get out of this situation by changing field orders to none.
  4. I would like to know where this was posted originally. Google doesn't find anything else than the battlefront.com post...
  5. There might be a point to restrict how small the arc can be. This could really help in solving the destroy the unspotted AT gun by area fire problem. If the minimum arc would be, say 5 degrees, then at 500m the minimum area would be about 40m in width. Not so easy to destroy that gun any more.
  6. I tried to play the game under the following rules: 1. No area target for vehicles if there is not recent question mark at the location. The question marks will fade slowly, and deciding what brightness is recent is up to you. If area target light is allowed to unknown locations is questionable. The idea for disallowing area target light, too, is to better simulate the poor spotting ability of vehicles, but this also prohibits recon by fire for vehicles. 2. Area target light for infantry to unknown locations is allowed. Area target is allowed only to recent locations. This is surprisingly fun. I encourage you to try it. For US troops the difference isn't that big, the question marks will be passed quite fast to troops near each other. The main difference this makes is that in real time mode you can not immediately area target enemy locations as soon as they are spotted by one of your units. The other effect is that you actually do need to keep your armor closer to your infantry in order to get those question marks. I did not see any effect to recon by fire. I haven't tried the effect on Syrian troops, but I think it would be much more noticeable.
  7. I made the suggestion to delay heavy weapons area fire always. The reason why I propose it is that out-of-LOS area fire delays will not solve anything in real time mode. You can first move the unit to LOS. Then area target the gun, without any delays. In WEGO one can micromanage the moves so that the tank will be in LOS only for the last seconds of the turn. Then you can issue the area fire order immediately in the beginning of the next turn. So, for RT this does nothing. For WEGO this would improve the situation, but not much. The reasoning why area fire delays should not be implemented is that it penalizes legitimate recon by fire. The counter argument is that recon by heavy weapons fire isn't that common. So if delays are implemented only for heavy weapons, then the delay would not be a problem for recon by fire. The counter argument is based on the assumption of uncommon heavy weapons recon by fire. I don't know if that is the case. EDIT: I must add that in my proposal, area fire is not delayed when there is a question mark at the location of the enemy ATG. If the tank crew knows the location of the ATG (or any other unit), then it can area fire immediately.
  8. No, I am not suggesting anything to do with turret alignment. The problem with heavy weapons area fire is that explosions are area effect. The inaccuracy of area fire should be really big to cancel that. Delaying the area effect weapons is in my opinion the right choice. It would make AT guns much more lethal against tanks. Another example, that out-of-LOS delays do not solve, is ambush situations. In WWII era tanks, when buttoned up, are almost blind. A concrete example: a platoon of infantry shoots at 3 tanks to make them button up from close range. Then a AT gun starts to shoot at the tanks. Let the gun be 500m away from the tanks, so that small arms fire is ineffective against it. If we go with proposal #2, the tanks can fire at the AT gun immediately (at least in RT play) when any of the players units spots the gun (supporting infantry, for example). With delayed area fire for heavy weapons, the best they can do is fire their MGs at the AT gun. That will likely only slowly suppress the AT gun, while heavy weapons would likely suppress the gun really fast and that will result in a destroyed at gun, sooner or later. I just have to add that I really like that FoW for foxholes and gamey use of area fire are the types of problems we are discussing now.
  9. This is better than nothing, but does not really solve the problem. In RT this would not do much. You could issue the area fire command immediately when in LOS. In WEGO this would do something, but not much, as one could time the moves so that the tanks would be in LOS for the last couple of seconds of the turn. Issue immediate area fire for the next turn. I would suggest again, if there is no question mark for the firing unit, then have a area fire delay. But only for heavy weapons. This would include infantry heavy weapons and all vehicle based weaponry (or maybe only heavy weapons on vehicles, too). Heavy weapon could be defined as a weapon bigger than or equal to .50. Area fire from small caliber weapons isn't that lethal anyways. In the above example this would prevent the tanks from firing at the AT gun immediately when at LOS in RT / in the beginning of the next turn. As far as I know, recon by fire with heavy weapons isn't that common. Small arms recon by fire would not be affected. If you have infantry close by to the AT gun, but not in LOS, then you could do gamey area fire command. But I don't see that as a huge problem. If we take immediate recon by fire as mandatory, then the question here is how common recon by fire with heavy weapons really is. I do not have any real world data about this, but I have a feeling that it isn't that common.
  10. I just have to add one more example where even a 30 second delay is huge. In Normandy ATG vs armor duels will be common. The scenario is following: ATG fires at an enemy tank and destroys it. It also gets spotted. There is another enemy tank outside of LoS to the ATG. Move the tank to LoS and area target the ATG. Without delays the tank is very likely going to get the first shot against the ATG. With delay the ATG will likely get the first shot, and maybe even another shot before the armor is able to return fire. In this kind of situation the 30 seconds delay really does something. It is probably going to substantially change how the game is played in those situations.
  11. The real problem here is heavy weapons. Area targeting a building is just as good as targeting a unit in the building. If the pause could be implemented only for heavy weapons (crew served heavy weapons and all vehicle weapons) it would make a big difference. I do agree that the delay is just a compromise. I think that a 30s to one minute delay would improve the game more than it would take away, but after all it is just an opinion. But 30 seconds does make a difference in certain situations and that is not an opinion. Having a second and third shot out of that RPG-29 does make a difference. Or maybe getting a javelin team out of the building roof before enemy T-72s open fire... One interesting idea is to allow area targets only to question marks but also give the player the ability to place those question marks at the HQ level. To area fire one would need to first wait the information to move down the CnC. One could have also pre-planned question marks to simulate suspected enemy locations in an attack. Probably impossible to implement due to the problem of how to deny the player the ability to spam the map with question marks.
  12. At the moment we are at the far edge of the scale: immediate area fire to any place the unit has LoS to. The other extreme is no area fire or huge delays always. In my opinion there is a better choice in the middle. Fast area fire to question marks, a small delay when firing at empty locations and a little bit bigger delay when the unit is not in CnC. Slowing down the game a bit would not be that bad. It would make attacking slower, but my gut feeling is that attacking is much faster in the game than what it is in real life.
  13. I do realize that "giving a good chance of getting a question mark" might be difficult to implement. Most likely one would add a boolean variable (or time stamp, or some data structure needed) to the unit under fire (indicating "unit under fire") and when doing next LoS check there would be increased probability of getting a question mark. If this would work, then not that difficult change to make. But this is not the point. If the delay for area fire would be at maximum 30 seconds for a unit in C2 then I don't see this as huge issue. Actually, there is (statistically) a 30 second wait in turn based mode already... As I see it, area fire is gamey and it will be gamey as long as there is God view for the player. In other words, forever. I personally think that small pauses, at maximum somewhere around a minute, usually somewhere in the 5-30 seconds range, would make area fire a bit less gamey. It would also make C2 more important. I haven't seen reasoning why this would be completely unthinkable. Of course, it could be that it doesn't work in practice, but I do not see why.
  14. We have the question marks already in game. Solution: allow immediate area fire if there is a question mark nearby. If not, then a delay based on whatever is seen fit. Then this would not affect WHY #1. WHY #2 would be affected, but we have already C2 in the game. You could place immediate area fire only if there is some information passed through C2. This would make C2 much more vital, as should be. Why #3 would of course be affected. In my opinion immediate area fire is extremely gamey, especially in real time mode. Would it be more gamey if sometimes you had an extra pause because the information about the target unit had not arrived through C2? I think not. Elmar, In your second example how is the spotting unit going to know if there is somebody in that building or not? It could be area fire. The problem is a spotting problem, not area fire problem, and it should be dealt with in that way. Maybe give a good chance of getting a question mark on that location, after that area fire would be immediate...
  15. It would be cool if you could slug it out AI vs AI. You would make the first AI plan and your opponent would make the other AI plan. No micromanagement in this one Could be a nice meta game.
  16. Just realized, this would allow easy indirect fire for on map mortars. Just don't check for LoS when area firing and it is done!
  17. I think a small pause for area fire would be good. Say +5 seconds if there is a question mark at the location, 15-30 seconds else. +5 seconds if the unit is in connection to it's HQ, 15-30 seconds else. That would give a minimum of 10 seconds to wait before fire starts and a maximum of minute. Maybe add in some experience modifiers etc. At the moment in real time play the Area Fire of God is killing realism. You can even kill unspotted enemy vehicles with area fire!
  18. Did you install the correct patch? If you bought it from battlefront.com then you should install the battlefront patch, not the Paradox one.
  19. It is not too difficult, but it is too time consuming considering what is gained. The command may seem simple to implement, but as far as I understand it is just an endless list of special cases. For example what should be done in case one of the vehicles is hit. For the same reason formations are not likely to be implemented. And I don't see them as too essential, for the blue side at least. Just split your squads.
  20. I really do think that having a separate interface for selecting preferred ammo level is the correct solution here. After this it would be trivial to implement a resupply command. I would go even further: for each different kind of a unit in the scenario make a preferred ammo level template for that kind of a unit. For example you could set the ammo level for all the regular squads in one go. Then you might alter the ammo levels of individual units after that, of course. This would be a great addition IMHO. It is too often that I need to go through my 9 squads and for each one of them: click acquire, 1000x5.56mm. And then click on that 3 man MG team and click acquire, 1000x5.56mm. Oops. Well, to tell the truth this doesn't happen too often to me. But this is only because I usually don't bother with tampering with the ammo levels at all because it is too time consuming to do so... Last example: Pooh and AT weapons for the marines squads. The interface itself could be really simple. Just list the ammo types the squad uses and for each of them have a numeric input field for the ammo level, and maybe also how much ammo per weapon using that type of ammo you have. Include total weight in there, too. Add a button "make template". Ask for confirmation if there is already a template set up. Maybe have a toggle which turns the icons of those units that don't have a template set up already to yellow so that it would not be too easy to forget some squads. The only real problem I can see is how to deal with split squads. And a quick bug report fitting in the theme... Pick a US AT team (split from a squad) during the setup. Acquire 2xJavelin missiles from a Stryker. You can't acquire the CLU from the Stryker any more (not during the setup, at least). This is in WEGO.
  21. A good approach would be a resupply order which works like this: The user gives a squad a command to resupply: Select squad, select "resupply" command and click the vehicle you want to resupply from. The squad will automatically enter the vehicle, try to resupply itself to full ammo level (perhaps to the ammo level it started the scenario with) and then return to the same location it started from. If there would be an easy to use interface for selecting the wanted supplies it would be great. The current user interface for acquiring ammo requires too much clicking and too much searching for the correct entry. A method like this should be relatively simple to implement and it would remove much micromanagement from the resupply loop.
  22. I am pretty sure this is wrong. The reason the check is made only once in a while is that there are a lot of them, and the operation is quite heavy. If you have 200 soldiers on both sides then you would have about 200*200 = 40000 checks to make. If you do this every second, there would probably be no resources left for anything else. CM:SF uses a lot of tricks to ease the burden on the CPU. But as far as I know, it still has to limit the rate of LOS checks. The way to make this work on vastly different systems is to limit the rate so low that the checks can be run on any system above minimum specs. BTW I would not be surprised to see multi-threading in CM:SF soon. The return of the blue bar tells me that the graphics calculations and actual turn calculations are perfectly separated already. If LOS checks could be ran on it's own thread and multi-core machines made the minimum, then there would be a lot more resources to throw at this problem...
  23. I don't think the game really needs anything special except for the kill list and improved quick battles to be a classic. Of course there is an endless list of things that could be improved, but they are not essential to the game. In fact, it would be appropriate to say that the engine is fundamentally fixed...
  24. In my opinion 1.10 was good and 1.11 is even better. Get it.
  25. Just wondering about HE shell against foxholes. Would a soldier standing in a foxhole have any chance of ducking a shot? The muzzle velocity is less than 1000 m/s (?) so that at a distance of 300m you would have 0.3-0.4 seconds to dug. Are there any stories of this happening in WWII, for example? The muzzle velocity of some of the guns must have been even slower. At 500 m/s you would have 0.6 seconds to dug...
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