FriendlyFire Posted February 20, 2001 Share Posted February 20, 2001 Based on "watching myself" use the CMBO interface, I've got a couple of suggestions for improvements to it. Both are simple extensions of existing concepts in the game, but they should save significant scrolling time during order plotting. I'll start a separate thread for each. The first is for convoys. When plotting the movement of multiple units along a road (i.e. a convoy) you generally want them to arrive in the same order as they started out, so that the front guy ends up at the front and the back guy ends up at the back. With CMBO, you've got two visual options to help you make this happen: 1. Show all movement paths. The problem here is that in a confined area (i.e. on a road) the movement lines overlap, so you can't tell if the back guy really is going to stop far enough back, or if he's going to ram into the guy in front whose movement path he's on top of. 2. Show just the movement path of the selected unit. Here you select the unit in front, see where its path ends, remember that location, select the unit you want to move, and plot a path to just behind the location you rememberd - or significantly behind if you're scared of artillery bursts Two problems here: all the selection going on, and the fact that you've got to remember spatial locations. Typically I use show-all-movement-paths, guess at where units "should" end if their lines are overlapping, then switch to show-only-selected-unit and select each unit in turn to view and fine-tune its final destination. I can see two alternative solutions to make this type of convoy plotting easier. Solution #1: when "show all movement paths" is selected, show the ENDPOINTS of the paths also, as solid blocks, just as is done for the selected unit. This immediately reduces the problem of overlapping lines - you don't care if they overlap as long as the endpoints are in the correct order and are equally spaced. Solution #2: add another viewing mode, which shows the movement path (and targetting too?) of the previously selected unit. No more visual clutter, and you can see exactly where the "guy in front" is going to end up, because that's the only other movement line drawn on the screen. I tend to favor the first solution, since it doesn't add another mode to the game. So how about it, BTS? Please put some end-point blocks on that map Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boris Balaban Posted February 20, 2001 Share Posted February 20, 2001 My suggestion would be like we do group movement is to select the convoy then the lead unit (all other units would follow) you would determine the movement (supposably down a road) at a convoy speed. All units would ride open hatch if they have one. Any fire on them they would automatically scatter (turn left and right off road)(this would be a chain reaction for if the front unit is fired upon the last unit will only react when the unit in front of him reacts to the unit in front of him and so on. So it might be 20 sec or more for the hole convoy to react). If a unit in back is fired upon then it would take more time for the convoy to react in front. ------------------ Boris Balaban WORK bbalaban@rim.net HOME b.balaban@home.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CMplayer Posted February 20, 2001 Share Posted February 20, 2001 Convoy movement definitely has to be in CM2. At present, the results can be pretty difficult to predict when moving vehicles in a column. regards, --Rett Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Michael emrys Posted February 21, 2001 Share Posted February 21, 2001 Originally posted by Boris Balaban: Any fire on them they would automatically scatter (turn left and right off road) Oh boy! If I ever plot an ambush against you, I know what I'm going to do: plant mines along both roadsides. Yea! Michael [This message has been edited by Michael emrys (edited 02-20-2001).] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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