Future improvements ?

[sdp]

Hi

Some thoughts on future improvements of this fantastic game;

-it would be great if the present editor could be developed in to a more user friendly WYSIWYG-editor, ie one where you could design a mission in a more visual way. (like the FMB in IL2 or for that matter the scenario editor in CM...)

(Quite frankly I’m not that interested in writing code/scripting, but in I’m very interested in making custom missions. Having an active community creating new missions has most likely lengthened CM:s lifespan with several years. But that requires an editor that’s user friendly.)

-it would also be great if there was a possibility to have missions where you fought over victory locations and the outcome were calculated on the basis of victory points. This would of course mean that battles would have to be limited in time.

And it would probably require a fair share of rewriting of the AI I guess, but still, it would make this game even better to have the option.

-why not introduce something like "force readiness" in ToW?. As I understand it this feature in CM was (is) there in order to avoid those annoying stalemates or those strange situations where you have to fight till last man standing.

-it would be a neat possibility to be able to exit your troops from the battlefield if things go terribly wrong. AFAIK this isn't possible right now, but then again i might be wrong.

regards/

sdp

[FinnN]

Originally posted by sdp:

-it would also be great if there was a possibility to have missions where you fought over victory locations and the outcome were calculated on the basis of victory points. This would of course mean that battles would have to be limited in time.

And it would probably require a fair share of rewriting of the AI I guess, but still, it would make this game even better to have the option.

-why not introduce something like "force readiness" in ToW?. As I understand it this feature in CM was (is) there in order to avoid those annoying stalemates or those strange situations where you have to fight till last man standing.

I've only had a quick look at the mission builder documentation, but I think both of these are already doable.

In the case of victory locations you could define a rectangle then set up a trigger count up the forces on each side and work out a ratio. If it's above a certain amount you win. Add a few checks for minimum numbers and hey presto - victory locations.

Modelling exhaustion could be easily done too - add up units and compare to the total number of troops at the beginning (which the mission designer will know). Do it for both sides and you could define some sort of stalemate condition.

Put them both together and start testing for them every 15 minutes after, say, 20 minutes and you can even achieve both without a 'hard' time limit.

From what I've read none of that seems too difficult, but obviously stalemate conditions etc could have no meaning in a campaign as they stand now. Now wouldn't it be good if instead of win or lose and repeat a scenario outputted the name of the trigger that caused it to end to the campaign engine? Then a scenario is chosen based on that trigger. Hey presto a branching campaign! Unless I'm missing something that would be a really easy change, or if it wasn't just outputting the end trigger from a single mission would allow for a 3rd party campaign engine.

Have fun

Finn