Star shells and artificial moonlight
 

Is there any way to model the use of star shells or 'Monty's Moonlight' (bouncing searchlights off of low cloud at night) which illuminate specific areas? It is possible to decrease visibility using smoke and/or dust but has anyone ever done anything that allows increased visibility?

Also, on a related topic, do muzzle flashes give position away more easily in night scenarios?

Dean

Re: Star shells and artificial moonlight
 

Nope - the original structure of the game design makes for no way to do para-illum etc. As an infantryman by training, if I could do star shells, tripflares, searchlights, real moonlight and so on - I would have.

But considering it had to be squeezed into the 1MB memory of a 386 PC back in its day, then you understand why.

SP1 ony had 48 units per side, remember.

It was only SP2 where - if you had the enormous expanded RAM size of 4 (could have been 8?) Mb, then you could have the action replay feature in PBEM. Most Pcs these days have more RAM in the processor cache than that http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif!

A lot of the design issues/limitations of the current code as it stands relate to the original requirement to squeeze a quart of game into a pint pot, back in about 1995. SP1 was considered a ginormous game back then in the days when you had to play with messy-DOS config files and tweak these for each and every game you owned.


Cheers
Andy

Re: Star shells and artificial moonlight
 

Monty's Moonlight would be best simulated by changing the overall visibility of the whole board.

Paraflares and illumination rounds could be simulated by aerial recon missions - though that will trigger the opositions AA fire which may be giving the player too much information. Something might be workable too with 0 size cargo planes and 0 man high vision para units.

Trip flares can be seen as 1 point mines - they let you know something is out there to use area fire against.

For set piece scenarios, it may be possible to use a variation of the 0 man ammo carrier demolition charge reinforcement. Make a unit with high vision rating and 0 men, set to appear on a given turn and it might last long enough to give you some intel before it dies. Have to play test this one.

Another option would be to use a zero move low survivability unit as as sort of tripflare/illum round. A while back I made a rather fanciful scenario Gruinard that featured a gamekeeper and his two dogs. The dogs weren't armed at all by they let the British player know where the Falschirmjaeger were. A refinement would be to use Pyros' movement path work to lay out a patrol route for a set of unarmed recce units - this could simulate a line of flares along a tree line for example.


Anyway there's a few thoughts to play with.

Re: Star shells and artificial moonlight
 

Thanks gentlemen. So it would seem that there are some reasonable workarounds, which I always suspected. One only needs to know where to ask the questions!!

Dean

Re: Star shells and artificial moonlight
 

My method of doing this has been to give units possibly equiped with flares a vision of 5, which makes them more capable than units without, but not as capable per se as infantry with night vision systems or the like. I've done this mainly with infantry and aircraft.

When I was messing around, I actually created tracking units that were equipped with dogs, and decided that their "vision" should be increased appropriately to note the dog's ability. This might not be all that realistic depending on the ranges at which the unit can now "see" the enemy, and that this means dog's can "smell" tanks and such, but it was a compromise of sorts. In this units I created, the dogs were not added to the overall force numbers either.

The idea of the low survivability unit "flare" is tempting as well.