Suggestion for hotkey for LOS

[Big Boss]

I find it somewhat time consuming and frustrating to try and find LOS for my Forward Observer especially when trying to find a linear target. Often in three lines and in foliage's a valid LOS can flicker on and off trying to pinpoint exactly where to target. My suggestion is to have a ALT-X hotkey switch between where a particular unit has line of sight or not. I suspect this requires a lot more programming that for example switching on objectives or not as this new feature would be highly dynamic but still would make this game even better.

Edited July 15, 2016 by Big Boss

[Big Boss]

Edited July 15, 2016 by Big Boss

[Erwin]

That would be enormously helpful IF one could rely on that LOS being "real". 

Often when one gets a unit to its waypoint position (from which one has checked LOS), only then one finds that the unit cannot see what its waypoint LOS check showed that it would see.

Figuring out LOS has always been one of the biggest time-wasting irritants in the game.  Often "what you see is NOT what you get".  Hopefully, CM3 will address this.

[A Canadian Cat]

Humm what to say that will not get me dumped on.  Probably there is no way I can phrase it, so dump away.

@Big Boss this has been asked before and Steve has even said - "nope not going to happen".  Aside from the programming effort and resources it would consume at runtime it give us way to much information that real commanders / soldiers don't have.  Since we already have a massive information advantage he feels it would be bad to give us more. 

While it is true that in RL a higher level commander would not be giving "go to this exact spot" orders but instead they would be "go to this area and cover that valley, road or whatever" and then the lower level commander and his soldiers would figure out how to get eyes on the desired area from near the location and report back if they could not / do something sensible.  So, we are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place given that we can only give "go to this exact spot" type orders.  So, I totally get your desire.  The other problem is that, as @Erwin points out the LOS tool (and the proposal you have given) has so many moving parts.  Right now it measures if the given unit can see the ground at a location given the unit's current posture (prone, kneeling, standing).  But really we might want to know if my guys were standing could they see a vehicle which would be a totally different question.  Those variables x10 plus add in how to answer how much trees will block visibility and you see that the UI for actually getting the information we need would make it hard to use.  We have a few hints with the "reverse slope" indicator which means that you cannot see the ground but you could see something higher. 

Honestly I would rather BFC focus on giving us ways to more closely simulate giving lower level units more open ended orders and have the Tac AI do some of the low level work once they "get there" than trying to give is more fine grained LOS information.  That's a lot of work too though.

[Michael Emrys]

35 minutes ago, IanL said:

Honestly I would rather BFC focus on giving us ways to more closely simulate giving lower level units more open ended orders and have the Tac AI do some of the low level work once they "get there" than trying to give is more fine grained LOS information.  That's a lot of work too though.

I'm in your camp on this as a better way to approach the problem, partly because it would offer a solution to a host of other problems as well. But your last sentence is true too.

Michael

[Big Boss]

I agree with you IanL and Michael Emrys, maybe to much work for little gain and also even more bird eye view LOS for you as the commander. But still you can point around on the map with the cursor and eventually find what you are looking for. What I wanted was just to be able to make that less of an technical inconvenience. I started using The grid effect mod awhile ago and that gives me some useful benefits when spotting so I will be content and wait for "BFC focus on giving us ways to more closely simulate giving lower level units more open ended orders and have the Tac AI do some of the low level work once they "get there".