Reinforcements and on board exit.

[Peter Cairns]

In CM1 reinforcements often appear " in Sight"with no warning, unlike on board units which you can hear etc. This often happened near the end of scenarios where they either appeared amngst you and caused unrealistic chaos, or turned up in formation in the sights of your force creating an unrealistic "Turkey shoot".

Given that it appears that CMx2 will create a line of sight map at the start, It like to see a system that designated a larger area for reinforcement arrival, but which did a LOS before placing so that any reinforcement that did arrive came on at a point where it couldn't be seen, or was at least in a low visibility position.

It could even be that if no "blindspot" was available they were delayed or even cancelled.

Another issue, is the possibility of allowing irregular or insurgent forces to melt away, by effectively exiting the game by entering a pre set area such as "The Souk" on a twon map, whwere they simply mingle with the civilain population or a "Disband" coomand.

Such forces would be lost to the Syrian Player, but the US palyer would have liitle way of knowing if they had "Exited" or were just laying low.

You could even lose a scenario by being held up by a force that wasn't there anymore.

Peter.

[mav1]

This problem was even worse with operations when the AI would place it's afv's in the front line in the sight of nearly all my units.

Maybe you should get a sound contact in a area just outside the map to give warning of approaching units. As well if the area that the reinforcements are meant to arrive is known to be under control of the enemy, you should be given the choice of diverting the reinforcements to another area and suffer a time delay for it. But if the enemy are not spotted in the reinforcement area then the reinforcements can be ambushed.

But the best solution is to have bigger maps, where the chances of being spotted are smaller and the chances of the reinforcement area being controlled by the enemy smaller.

[lucero1148]

What would also be a nce touch is to be able to have the reinforcements if they are coming in vehicles loaded up in a pre-designated order. That way if it's a mixed force of infantry and support units and too few vehicles to carry all of them you won't have your force scattered in the random way they appear on the scene now.

[Cpl Steiner]

Originally posted by lucero1148:

What would also be a nce touch is to be able to have the reinforcements if they are coming in vehicles loaded up in a pre-designated order. That way if it's a mixed force of infantry and support units and too few vehicles to carry all of them you won't have your force scattered in the random way they appear on the scene now.

Good point. I would like to see vehicles use roads to actually enter the map in a road column rather than just appear scattered all over the place, sometimes with passsngers not in/on them, as happens in CMx1 now. How this could be achieved though, I don't know

[MikeyD]

Reinforcements appearing in the middle of a fight is simply bad scenario design. The designer's given flags to designate where the reinforcements are to arrive (talking CMx1 here of course). Unless the player has done an unexpected 'Thunder Run' halfway cross the map into the enemy position, it shouldn't be too hard to guess where the opponent 'shouldn't' be by turn 6 of a scenario.

In CMSF, being a mobile Stryker Brigade it would be a very good idea to be able to designate "Boarded/vehicle Two" or "Dismounted/moving in-line" or "Dismounted/alerted" for a reinforcement unit, and maybe a "Reinforce/convoy" or "Reinforce/combat" for the overall group so they'll act accordingly right off the bat.

[lucero1148]

During the set-up of a scenario or op of units, reinforcements could be set up if there were reinforcement maps in addition to the set-up map we have now. That way units can be loaded as desired so when it appears it will be organized as the designer wants and not randomly by the AI.

Reinforcements can be delayed or prevented by set rules if the area is under enemy LOS of an FO, heavy weapons, tanks or even small arms. The designer can then just select what kind of fire will allow or prevent the rieinforcements to show up. That is if it's possible to do so without strainng the engine?

[Cpl Steiner]

I have played the "Take Command 2nd Manassas" demo recently, and in that game there are no obvious board or map edges. The map data only covers a finite area, but somehow the game manages to wrap one side over to the other to create what looks like one continuous landscape. On paper this sounds horrible, as you would think such wrapping would be easily detected, but in practice you cannot tell. This is most likely due to the map being of sufficient width and height to make it impossible to see both sides at once.

If CM:SF employed a similar technique, it would not be so easy to use gamey board edge tactics. If a unit strayed off the edge of the map, it would just be moving through terrain similar to that 1 or 2 km in the other direction. I suppose there would have to come a point at which the unit was prevented from going any further even using this system, but at least it would look better graphically compared to the "edge of the world" effect in CMx1. It would also extend the board beyond the obvious map edges of CMx1, possibly allowing for reinforcement placement much further away from the action.