Improvement proposal I - OP fire draining

[Artur]

IMHO the greatest flaw of the SP engine leads to the tactic of OP fire draining. This often leads to burning out the opponent's MBT's OP fire with suicidal jeep charges then go in for the kill with your valuable armor without taking any risk. Because of that the seasoned players never leave almost anything valuable with a clear field of view(even a narrow one) in front of them at the end of the turn because the OP fire is so vastly ineffective.

There are turn based (or sort of) games where this issue is more or less solved. The first example is the Campaign Series East Front II, where the player can set up the type of the target to fire and the range to every specific unit. This way the gamey approach will not work any more.(Picture attached).

The other example is the Combat Mission series. There you can set every unit whether to fire at armor(blue arc) or other type of target(orange arc) within a specified arc.(Pictures attached.)

There is one more example of an attempt to handle this shortcoming in SPWAw with confirmation on op fire. This works quite well in on-line and solitaire battles, but cannot be applied in PBEM games and it becomes very tedious in larger battles(and is a bit too unrealistic IMHO). Random special OP fire was also introduced to deal with this phenomenon but it became way to unrealistic as well.

My proposal is to allow the setting of the unit type for the specific unit to fire at. This may be armor, (heavy and medium tanks), light armor(light tanks and ACs), and soft targets(infantry and soft-skin vehicles&guns). Guns could be made a separate group as well.
As far as I can see this would not take so much programming to get it done you simply have to put 4 selectable controls on the unit information dialog (like the weapons) and you can select-or deselect the unit types to fire at. A check before performing the op fire is not a big deal as well.

The very best solution would be to set different ranges for every target type, that would need more interface programming, but it would pay off very well I am sure. Even if the simple version is done it will enhance this game a LOT as well and finally this OP fire soaking comedy will come to an end.

Imagine that a combined arms force would be even more effective, if the heavy ATGs and tanks will not have their OP fire burned out by jeeps, ACs and light ATGs & CS units would deal with the soft skins. It will now be even more reasonable to mix the heavy and lighter equipment than it was before.

This would help the creating of scenarios where the scenario designer can set the combined arms defense or assault force to fire at the proper target which means a good improvement for the AI play as well.

Artur.

EDIT.
There has been a fierce debate since this first post. I insert a picture of an deited screenshot how this feature would look like:

There would be 6 unit groups based on unit classes which WinSPMBT already has.

Armor (Tanks and IFVs)
Light Armor (APCS and ACs)
Soft vehicles (jeeps, trucks)
Infantry (all kind)
Guns (ATG AA)
Air (Planes and helos)

You can select what to shoot at like you select the weapons. By default all are selected and the unit will fire at everything. If something is excluded then the units of thet type will not be fired at.

Of course this is a rough grouping and not prefect but it would fulfill it's main reason and that is making the op fire draining tactic not feasible any more. (New picture is zipped in the attachment. infoscreen.png)