[RERomine]

I figure I'll throw in my 2 cents.

There are some aspects of the "right click" that provide information that we shouldn't know. Ammo payload is one. There are many units that have specialized roles and there ammo payload is altered accordingly. I shouldn't be able to tell if it has 10 Sabot rounds as opposed to 25. Still, do I really care? It only takes one round to kill my tank and I'm not going to take up tracking the number and types of rounds fired by an enemy unit. For all I know, the enemy unit might be right next to an unseen ammo source. Another thing we should not know is infantry unit size. Ten men in a hex could be two 4-man patrols and one AT team or a 10-man squad. Tactically, it helps knowing you are dealing with three independent units as compared to one. I accept it because it is just how things are with the game.

On the other hand, we probably don't see as visibly damage that has been done. It was mentioned that some units might trail smoke; a tank gun tube blown off or a turret constantly pointing at the same angle would also be a sign of damage; secondary explosions in the impact zone of an artillery strike; infantry man "Bob" knows he got two enemy soldiers, etc.

The idea of renaming units isn't new. I've read stories of people renaming all there stuff to "truck". It makes targeting more complicated, but not impossible if you are careful. For those with the CD, the filter option isn't going to be tricked by a unit name change. If the firing unit is unseen, a different name could be confusing, but if the weapon can kill me I don't care if it is mounted on a tank, truck or hand carried. My unit is going to seek out cover.

I like to look at it this way. While we, the players, are just one person, our force is composed of hundreds or thousands of pairs of eyes and ears. These eyes and ears are trained for their time period. Who playing the game knows what every nation had during every time period the game covers? Nations of a given time period probably had a good idea what their most likely opponents were able to field. In those scenarios, the fog might not be as dense as we think. Even in unlikely scenarios, such as 1980 Brazil vs. South Africa, one could conclude such a war didn't just come out of no where and that the opponents studied up on each other before the shooting started. The encyclopedia and "right click" allow us to know what we probably would know if we were actually living and fighting during those time periods.

Looking at it another way, we have cases where the fog is denser than it should be. Consider an advanced scout next to a field. An enemy tank company moves out from a hidden position, across the field to another hidden position and no shots are fired. The replay won't show us a thing, even though the scout clearly saw the whole enemy unit go by. It shouldn't be that way, but again, it just is.

Overall, we probably know more and less than we should at the same time. There is no perfect answer. Eliminate the "right click" so you can tell if a unit is caring a small AT weapon such as the LAW and you don't get to see the TOW missile launcher which is big enough to be visible. You have to start trying to decide if a weapon is big enough to be seen or not. No "right click" and people will start complaining that they should have been able to see this or that. If the game had started without the "right click", people would be complaining the other way around.