CM:SF Deadend option.

[Imperial Grunt]

Originally posted by kipanderson:

Steve,

MadMinute Games http://www.madminutegames.com/ ,with their Civil War series, do something similar very successfully.

One can lock the camera to stay within 100m, 200m or whatever from a given commander/unit/character on the battlefield. Equally one can also set the camera to stay within 10m or 20m height from the given character. It is a very simple but very effect way of modelling the chaos of battle. It makes the battlefield far more dangerous in that one is reacting to events rather than controlling them… or seemingly so.

On a modern or WWII battlefield, when playing small games, locking the camera to within 10m height and 100m distance from a platoon commander, when combined with real-time rather than WEGO, would add a very new and exciting way to play. This one devise of restricting the travel of the camera adds hugely, and realisticly, to the chaos of war which is what we are all after.

I think this would be great. And to take it further, the player could give orders to subordinate units by clicking on them in the tactical map screen. The tactical map screen should be like the "battle board" I talked about above, using real military graphics and not simple red and blue dots.

The player would only physically see units and activity if his command group was within LOS of his own forces or the event. Usually the command group would be moving with the platoon that is the player's main effort or some other location to where he can best control the battle.

If the player looses radio comms with a subordinate unit, then that particular unit's location is not automatically updated on the battlemap. Units could then get "lost". The Styrkers digital suite drastically reduces this, but those systems do go down, and once a squad dismounts, only the vehicles location is digitally transmitted. Pop-ups, smoke, etc...could be put into the game for their real-world applications. Lost a squad? Order them to pop smoke or fire a red-star cluster. Of course there might be consquences for doing that with the enemy lurking about. This kind of play would present players with many real-world difficulties that no other wargame has attempted to simulate. Clauswitz said that “In war everything is simple. But in war even simple things are hard"

Jumping around from a first-person view of each squad and team to give commands would not be as realistic, if realistm is the goal. That is like a commander walking willy-nilly across the battlefield and getting behind each squad leader and teamleader to see what they see and then issue orders. Really not much different from the game in God's view mode, just more restricted.

I think there should be a time-limit option as well for the orders phase, or an over-all time limit for orders per game. So if a player takes too much time micro-managing every team he has, then he will run out of time to give orders on subsequent turns. Something to keep up some pressure rather than looking for the perfect tactical option every 60 seconds or so of game time.

This option will really put the player in the position of a young platoon commander when the **** hits the fan and the question is asked...What now lieutenant? All you got is your map, your mission, and your view of the tracers and muzzle flashes coming from that treeline or buildings 150 meters in front of you.

Make a call, or die.