Wartgamer

Nu-Yawker, is that something like that nu-metal I keep hearing about? </font>

Look pal it’s all very nice watching you & the ‘lads’ rollicking around in the hay, pulling each others hair, comparing… ‘things’… but this here is a CHALLENGE thread Either get a PROPER location, an email address & a pair OR go hang out with the waffles or sumfink </font>

Don't even think about making nice. I made you look extra stupid in that other thread. You know, the other one. The one with all the stuff in it.

I suppose yer the sort that shouts at the earpiece? </font>

Snappy comeback. You must answer a tellyfone for a living?

Full Twits doing fractions. How innerestin'

I am not talking about spreading out the forces. I am talking about having either a squad with a bazookas attached, or if they are not attached. Once 'unattached', they are now two units and what impact does that have on spotting?

I wonder whose hand is up his ass. </font>

This also brings up more 1:1 questions. Will the whole concept of Spotting/Information be revamped? Will there be partial spotting? Several enemy 1:1 soldiers of an enemy 'unit' displayed yet surrounded by many 'spooks'? A quick example would be a 2 man LMG suddenly opening up. The game routines display a slew of soldiers, all spooks initially. If the gun continues to fire, perhaps one or two more definite flashes/soldiers are displayed. As the turn continues, less spooks are seen and a more definite firing point appears. Unless the LMG was in a position with no concealment at all (foxhole in the open lets say), the actual "I see a LMG" is never realized. Note: I would like to see more 'shoot'n'scoot' type infantry commands to model infantry not blasting away for a whole 'turn'. IRL, you will displace and get to alternate firing positions (or be suppressed) and the information outpour ceases. [ February 25, 2005, 10:30 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

I vote varying degrees of transparency.

It has been hinted that "false spotting" might play a role. Not only will units give false reports, but they may spot units off their true positions or even spot units that aren't there. This makes much more risky for the player to move units based on a spotting report from just 1 or 2 units, and will help decrease this problem. </font>

And that cut and paste does not have much to do with Relative Spotting.

Here's an in game example. You are a lone tank that has just come out of a forrest road that had smoke in the very front of the exit point. You bust out into a field crammed with enemy. Trucks, infantry, vehicles, weapons, armor? Could you 'count' them? Could you 'detail' them? You are swamped temporarily with information at least. The psych effect is greater as you are 'outnumbered'. In the present game, you would more than likely get a terrific amount of uber-info on the next 'update'. How will relative spotting address this? In reality, the biggest 'bird' (enemy armor) might be the 'temp' exact position intel you might process (biggest fear=sticking out). The rest might all be 'sound' contacts that you are 'aware' of but not likely to take any action against. If you were to take action against the enemy armor (focus=no scanning), you would not 'update' against the other units (...you have all been in a fight in a bar and not noticed the bouncer getting behind you right?...), but might get better detail on the Tiger Tank pointing its gun at you. [ February 25, 2005, 08:07 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

Here's an experiment that might demonstrate my points.. If the weather is nice by you, go to a park. Find a nice spot to sit down and have a view of about 6 trees about 50-100 yeards away. The trees should be seperated by distance both from each other and have a varied distance from you. They should not be 'touching' in your visual field. What I want you to do is, starting on the left, look at each tree's crown and try to find all the birds. Start at the left, look at the tree for one second (count "one-thousand-one", etc) and look at the next tree. As you start to scan from tree to tree, you will start to pick out birds. What you will notice is that any movement in your peripheral vision will strongly attract your attention. This is the natural human response to movement outside your focus. If you are really observant, you will notice certain colors/shapes attract your attention. Example, a yellow bird, catches your eye. If you are really observant, you will notice that details on the yellow bird are hard to pick out. Try to locate the birds AND memorize the position. You will notice they change position. Try to memorize details like size/color/etc. You will be rapidly overloaded with info. Luckily, the birds are not observing you and wanting to kill you (well maybe a little..). Notice, would binoculars help? Bring some. What you find is that they are very time consuming. They slow down the update rate but allow better detailing of birds. Pretend that you are shooting at a bird, try to line up your thumbs and 'shoot' one. Can you scan and fire at the same time? You are doing a 1:1 Relative Spotting experiment. The one second scan is a update function. [ February 25, 2005, 08:10 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

It depends on how they model the Relative Spotting. Its such a fundamental game-wide consideration, that I am really surprised that it isn't the topic that the designers chose to discuss first.

Not sure what's being shown in these 'bones' threads are really 'bones'. They are sort of preliminary design goals. Many developmental and coding considerations could radically change/delete/obsolete them. I would hope that 'Must-Haves' do not clash and major improvements outweigh 'Neato-ideas'.

The inclusion/exclusion of small weapons teams must have some impact on Spotting/Enemy-Recognition won't it? This is, of course, dependant on how Relative Spotting is achieved in the new game. Is there any way to do Relative Spotting without some form of Spotter based databasing? I can not see my way around this point actually. My main concern is that the game will somehow reward someone with extra spotting abilities if they break up the squads into fireteams, seperate bazookas, etc, and this allows extra battlefield intel. The sum of the parts being greater than the whole.

You have multiple people targeting your front as well as MGs targeting across the whole squad front. The US had excellent results with this against Rushes by the enemy. The M16 on full auto at close range was devastating.

Do you understand the implications of Relative Spotting?

I believe the 2 man fighting position was started in Vietnam. This is where two soldiers dig a rather small trench and pile the dirt in front of the trench. The intent is that you fire to the sides and cover the front of the person to the left and right. There is no fire to the front. The goal was to cut down attackers with fire across the front. Attackers generally fire strait into the front and would hit the berm. Digging one of these after marching all day is an incredibly tiring ordeal. In many cases, its just not even used and abandoned the next day. If you stayed there, you would improve the position. Boards/logs can be laid from the berm to the back covering the trench and reinforced with sandbags. The hole could be excavated under the berm part so that you could hunker down there while heavy stuff came in. Most NCOs that were in Vietnam told us that direct hits by even 81mm might take you out unless there was several feet of dirt above you. Rockets and heavy mortars could bounce you out of the hole.

So a Bazooka or a LMG will be, for all intents and purposes, a 'squad' in that it will have the same C&C menu? Will Squads still be 'split' as a command menu item? Will they then be a C&C unit away from the origional squad?

A. I foolishly did not as I thought I was the last guy on Earth to upgrade. B. I, foolishly, did not; as I thought I was the last guy on Earth to upgrade. C. I! foolishly? did not as, I! thought, I was? the last guy on Earth to upgrade? D. I foolishly did, not as I thought, I was the last guy on Earth to upgrade. I pick D [ February 24, 2005, 12:48 PM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

A real driver for all this is the Minimum Acceptible Turn Crunch Hour (MATCH). Given a middle of the road machine and a middle of the road sized game; How long will people be willing to sit there for, while the game crunches numbers? 1 minute, 3 minutes More?? [ February 24, 2005, 01:31 PM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

In the present system, theres some time saving measures that may not apply to the new system. The simplest time saver in the present syetm is once a unit is fully spotted/revealed, do no more spotting attempts on him till the next cycle. This is because the present system is unit based and not databased. That is, being spotted is a characteristic of the unit itself. Once spotted, twice shy. There will always be those units that are out of everyone LOS and the game must crunch through all possibilities I suppose. A useless idea (yeah, I know try to control yourselves..) at this point would have been to assign each unit 'spotting chits'. Each successful spotting attempt under the present system would have taken away a chit from the spotter. The spotting would still be a target based system but infinite spotting attempts would have been curtailed. [ February 24, 2005, 11:18 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

Heres a small example: Suppose we have a single 40 man platoon game. Each platoon has the following 'fireteams'.. 4 man HQ section (1) 1st SQD 6 man Sgt Section (2) 6 man Cpl Section (3) 2nd SQD 6 man Sgt Section (4) 6 man Cpl Section (5) 3rd SQD 6 man Sgt Section (6) 6 man Cpl Section (7) So 7 fireteams make up this platoon. Just for an example, we model each fireteam's database for each one by half the number of men in each actual fireteam (Just making this up). We give the HQ two extra to abstract its radio/commo/signal ability. So we have 22 database spots right here. (There are seven databases correct? Each one at the fireteam level) So even if all the databases were full of enemy spotted units, each spotting update would require 22 confirmations at least. If the update 'clock' was set to an update rate of 1 cycle per second, then the minimum would be 22 LOS checks/second. Suppose the databases were empty, and we are facing a 40 man platoon of enemy based around 7 fireteams. If we are to take each potential spotter (fireteam) and try to spot each enemy fireteam, then we are looking at 49 spotting checks each cycle. In 60 seconds, thats 2940 spotting checks. Mind you, the game must also do the same for the enemy platoon. Now if we were to try to spot fireteams to individual enemy soldiers, then the number goes up to 280 per second or 16800 per minute. Obviously, this number gets huge if we are to try to do this 1:1 for each soldier/database. [ February 24, 2005, 10:50 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]