Tank v. tank spotting.. (what a ***** mess)

[Anthony P.]

20 hours ago, Ultradave said:

I remember one scenario from CM1 where you (if I remember right), the British airborne troopers dropped into Normandy and trying to assemble and take a few houses. You were only allowed to use view 1 - the eye level view - and just tab switch between each unit. It was HARD. Lots of view blocks, so it was really difficult to form up or even determine where the objective was compared to you. I thought it simulated the confusion of the first period after the airborne drops pretty well, minus actual bullets flying at you.

I wish the fog of war would be reset to enable friendly fire and shooting up spotting icon contacts (as opposed to fully confirmed contacts).

I agree with removing the inability to command units when they drop out of the C2 "link" (it's only reasonable that e.g. small teams can be detached to go further out with general orders like "see what's around that ridge", sending squads on flanking moves, etc.), but having to respect the risk for friendly fire when own units are unable to communicate is quite arcade like. It's not fun being able to attacking through your own fire support or clearing positions covered by it because "it's just small arms".

E.g. units lacking C2 with each other at night should have to move very carefully and with small firing arcs not to start slotting each other, fire support should have to be set with firing arcs keeping ahead of friendly units clearing enemy positions ("I think I see Krauts in that building Baker company is clearing, but they're on the floor above them so let's light it up!" is probably not a realistic tactic).

[Ultradave]

Along with this I'd like to be able to click a sound/tentative contact and have it highlight which of my units has that contact, just like it works for a solid contact. That would tell me who I need to maneuver to get a better contact on it. I think this is realistic. For example, a squad gets a tentative contact. Squad leader splits off a scout team "See if you see what that is."  As long as they still remain in C2, that would then tell me what I'd need to do to fire on it. Sometimes it's only a small change in position or cover, but right now we don't know WHO needs to do that. We just have lots of tentative conctacts and have to guess who MIGHT have a LOS to one.

Dave

[Anthony P.]

Absolutely!

Tentative contacts should both be clickable and "engage-able". Preferably there should be varying degrees of uncertainty about what side a tentative contact belongs to, so that your units might end up firing on friendlies thinking them to be enemies, and holding fire against enemies who they think may be friendlies.

Another feature which would be very fun and challengning (thought came to me when you mentioned that British airborne "linking up" mission") would be units or reinforcements which the player doesn't control or even knows about until his starting/"main" unit has spotted them. E.g. you start the mission commanding some paratroopers stumbling around Normandy during the night of June 5/6 and you know that there are other units out there, but you can neither control nor see them until your unit has found them, just as how you can't see or engage enemy units until they've been found.

I've seen people make missions where paratroopers are spread out and spawn as reinforcements all over the map (CMFI years ago I think), but there the player still has the God's eye view, knows where all different units are and can control them all from the start.

I don't suppose there's a reinforcement trigger in the mission editor, i.e. that all reinforcements are just triggered by the clock? Otherwise something akin to that could be achieved with hidden objectives which spawn reinforcements when found.