Triggers?

[noxnoctum]

As long as there's no tcp-ip wego I play mostly SP (since even with several PBEM games going at once it's still usually only a few minutes per turn/email except at set up, and sometimes I want to play more than 10 minutes), and I was wondering if triggers will ever make it in.

Just today I was playing the second-to-last mission in the Panzer Marsch campaign, and moved my entire force to the rear of the enemy along one flank. I caught 2 sherman platoons and an M10 platoon facing the other direction and killed them all with 2 panthers. At the end of the match, I see that there was a whole other sherman platoon on top of that that was busy sitting in the woods guarding the main approach down the road on top of a whole company of infantry relatively untouched. If I'd used the main approach I probably would have gotten slaughtered, but of course I didn't. Triggers could give the AI the ability to be reactive.

It kinda killed what coulda been a tough challenge since 90% of the enemy force was facing the wrong direction. But with a simple trigger, (that uses a zone like the objective zones), you could have it check for enemy units (or maybe even certain enemy unit types or point value) at certain parts of the map and then have the AI allocate his reserves in a way that makes sense. (since a human player would have seen me killing everything on one side and reinforced that area, but the AI was not able to)

[Pak40]

I like the idea of this kind of trigger and was disappointed when I discovered it wasn't in the game. However, there are other kinds of triggers that shouldn't be included. I hated the triggers in THEATER OF WAR where X number of your units died and all the sudden you get reinforcements. It's predictable and unrealistic.

[Ranger33]

The first time I played Barkmann's Corner, the AI rolled right through my infantry on the left flank with a couple of Shermans. This scared me until I realized that the tank had completed it's orders and was now content to stare off into space for the rest of the scenario. A simple trigger like, "No contact for X minutes in Y area" could then send the tank off somewhere else, like right behind my Panther.

I posted about this before, but it seems to me that the whole system is already there to track specific units and objective zones, they just need to be linkable to movement orders.