Vehicle Selection Options

[DougPhresh]

I suppose this could rightly apply to all CM titles.

I really appreciate the equipment selection as well as the appearance selection in some titles.

As seen below, a British Mech Infantry Battalion in Shock Force 2 has a variety of options in Quick Battle:

However, as a quality of life improvement, it would be nice to know what the 4 APC options are for without exploding the OOB view and discovering through trial and error. I believe the ww2 titles do this already.

In this example:

• Sniper Team
• Platoon HQ
• APC (Includes Company and BN HQ vehicles)
• Javelin Detachment Vehicle
• Fire Support Section Vehicles
• Mortar

By comparison, below is a Russian BTR Motor Rifle Battalion in Black Sea:

The issue with Black Sea's selection is that there is not enough granularity.

A default option for the Russian Motor Rifle Battalion (or Tactical Group) BTR, is the assignment of BTR-82s to the infantry platoons in each company, but the cannon-armed BTR-82As to the weapons platoons. This makes sense and boosts organic firepower while preventing spending points on cannons that will not be fired. However the player cannot make that decision, only choosing all BTRs except for HQs. The BTRs in the weapons platoons can be deleted and replaced with single vehicle BTR-82As but they won't have the proper ammo for the support weapons as vehicle cargo.

With the variety of very expensive BMP-3Ms, I would also like to have more granular choices, like assigning APS only to valuable HQs, or to 1 company or platoon out of 3. This is similar to the Dutch assignment of CV 9035s to only a few units within a formation.

I think the best elements of both approaches should be combined. Shock Force 2 and Rome to Victory have impressed me especially with the change to how force selection works. Infantry units, while being infantry keep their organic vehicles. For example a USMC Infantry Battalion:

I believe that is how the editor has always worked, but it is a big step forward for QB. I'd like to see that standardized across the board. It is certainly better than Black Sea where a US Army Infantry Battalion appears twice. Once stripped of all vehicles under the infantry tab:

and again with all of the assigned vehicles under the mech tab:

In conclusion, the QB force selection in Shock Force 2 represents a step forward in how forces are split up into Infantry/Mech/Armour while retaining organic vehicles, but could use improvements in how labels are applied when selecting which vehicles be assigned to which sub-unit within a formation. Black Sea labels only HQ vehicles and "everybody else" and could use more categories. Moving forward, having QB selection mirror the editor, with more granularity in assigning particular vehicles to subunits and clearer labeling would be a quality of life improvement across all CM titles.

Edited January 10, 2020 by DougPhresh
Clarity

[Vergeltungswaffe]

Soooo +1 to this.