List of future editor tweaks

[Sgt Schultz]

I am still in 'kid on Christmas morning' mode, but there are always things that can be improved later.

Things we may want to see if possible...

More groups. Contrary to popular wisdom, eight is not enough.

Adjustable ammo loadout for artillery re: smoke/HE. Some missions need more smoke, but not a huge amount of tubes on map.

Single turn reinforcements. Every five minutes loses some granularity. No para battles without every turn drops. Other things in my repertoire are not possible either.

Facing command in Group Orders. I currently have to 'steer' my orders so the endpoints face possible action. Any lateral move is ended by a pause with the force in question giving flank shots. Easily worked around physically, but it is fairly significant temporal hit.

Label the buildings in the editor for one, two or three stories. The 80's were way too good to me to try and remember all those options.

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Plan TacAI suggestions ... again if possible. I want to learn coding about as much as I want a good case of rope burns.

No soft vehicle(halftrack etc) will move past the rearmost order tile(or 1st tile entered) for a given order. We can keep 'em safe if you let us. Without more groups, the Hannomags have to come along for the trip.

No HQ will enter the final line of order tiles for a given order. We can keep those safer too.

STOP the CRISSCROSS maneuver. Gawd that's a mind killer. I don't know why(yet), but vehicles just love to move to the other flank of the next order zone from their current one, while their buddy on the other side has the same brilliant idea. Move forward! It's THAT way! Some of it is solved by making sure all order tile terrain is equal to vehicles. They will tussle and maneuver for that lone clear tile in the forest.

Edit - This behavior occurs more on short distance max assault orders it seems.

More to come...

[LarsS]

I'll just list some small things that come to mind. Stuff like AI triggers and scripting kind of goes without saying.

In SF you could use several unit orders like aquire, split teams and bail out when setting the sides up in the editor. In BN you can't. I just can't understand why this change was made. E.g., in SF I liked how you could set up empty veichles that you would crew and get rolling during the battle. This also meant that you could put the "wrong" crew in some of the veichles (like technicals, humvees and those cool British WMIKs or whatever they are called). You could also aquire all the goodies from veichles (and then remove them from the battle, if you wanted to). This was important since the AI can't use the aquire command.

Please, please, please oh-friggin-please randomize the facing of the more "natural" types of flavour objects when placing them. Having to multiple-click-turn a mapful of rocks, logs, stumps and junk piles to give them a randomized look is, well, living death.

Why the fixed roof types on the different kinds of modular buildings? Why not allow the designer to choose between red tiles, black tiles or plate by cycling all the varieties for all modular houses? Same thing with the exterior wall textures for both the modular and independent buildings.

Oh, and change one of the haystacks to a big stinking pile of manure. Guess it is easily modded though...

[Sgt Schultz]

One other thing reared its ugly head.

American armored infantry get hosed by the Plan AI if they enter mounted and then dismount.

Purchase them 'mounted'. When they dismount, they leave their bazookas in the H/Ts.

Purchase them 'dismounted'(bazookas present). Place them in H/Ts that you now had to buy after deleting the organics. When they dismount... they still leave their bazookas behind.

The work-around is of course to add an independent bazooka team to various squads. The downsides are overstrength and (sometimes)available seating in the HT.

"Acquire" is on my wish list if we cannot get the boys to take all their toys with them please.

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