Fog of war

[c_of_red]

I was under the impression that a right click just gives one the unit information screen, which would list the possible ammo load out for all units of that type, NOT what that particular unit has left on board. As far as renaming units, Greybeard over at the Blitz is famous for that. I asked him why once and he said because he could. He didn't do it to gain an advantage because he knew he wouldn't. The one time I tried re-naming a unit, my reward was a load of ICM and a burning FIST-V. It turned out that opponent shot at EVERYTHING, so he didn't care what the name was or prolly never even noticed.
There are some things you can do that you just can't ask your opponent about in the first place, since asking about them makes them not worth doing, so you might as well not do them.
I would never do my offsides play on a newbie, or even an old hand that I was playing the first time. Even though they would never know I did it. After I got to know them by playing a few games, then I might, IF I thought they would be cool with it and the circumstances warranted it. Gen SP at the blitz caught me one time. It was a map with lots of little hamlets and one big town just across the line on his side of the map. I went 90% infantry, since I was playing the Soviets and my plan involved denying him easy kill points while my soviet hordes advanced slowly thru the small town. About half way thru he wanted to know how my infantry got so far so fast, since he had the roads covered from the game start and was pretty sure no transport got into town. So I told him. He wasn't upset, but I was pretty sure he wouldn't be before I did it.

[RERomine]

You are correct in the fact that the "right click" gives you the full payload for that unit, but doesn't give you an up to date tally of what it has left during a battle. The problem is, it does give you the payload.

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Here is an example:
October, 2020
US M1A2 SEP Abrams
Urban MBT Co

Two different guns (both 120mm), but otherwise the same tank. Both have 30 rounds of HE. The difference is one has 10 rounds HEAT, no SABOT and the other has 10 rounds SABOT and no HEAT. Without being in the tank, you shouldn't be able to tell one from the other. The "right click" allows you to tell them apart and you are likely to be more aggressive against the one with just HE and HEAT.

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Greybeard is a good player. I learned a lot from him, but I've worked around the renaming thing. Some people do it to try to catch you being careless. If a hex has a group of trucks and M1A2 tanks, but they are all named M1A2, just determine which one in the stack you want to hit. Using the target option and cycling through you can pick out your target. If there are five vehicles in the hex and the middle one is your desired target, the first time the target cycle goes through, it will pick the one closest to the top of the hex, second time it will pick the second from the top, third time the third from the top (your desired target), etc. Targeting sometimes bounces around so you have to pay attention while you are doing this. This works because the game stacks the units in the hex in ID order and targeting cycles through similarly. If one whole 4-tank platoon (group B in this case) is in the hex, from top to bottom, they would be listed B0, B1, B2 and B3.

Now, I would find it quite disconcerting if you could rename your weapons. If someone fired a 120mm SABOT round at my tank and it said "Bottle Rocket" was fired at it, that would bother me. As it is, if I see that a "Truck" fired a 120mm SABOT round, even if I can't see the "Truck", I'm going to respect the capability of the gun.

One tactic or trick (depending on your perspective) is to plot artillery where I think/know someone going to eventually be. If they aren't there yet, I walk the plots around to keep them where I want them. It creates a delay since you don't want rounds to drop if they aren't likely to be there when the steel rain starts. This may be considered to be gamey, but I prefer to think of it as an "At My Command" artillery call where they are waiting back at the guns for the "Fire" command. This would be contrary to Weasel's artillery rules, so it is important to determine what the ground rules are. There is no guaranty that your enemy will walk into the impact zone, but it increases the possibility of hitting a group on the move. When it's use is permitted, I find the tactic quite effective and deadly.

[Suhiir]

Originally Posted by RERomine

One tactic or trick (depending on your perspective) is to plot artillery where I think/know someone going to eventually be. If they aren't there yet, I walk the plots around to keep them where I want them. It creates a delay since you don't want rounds to drop if they aren't likely to be there when the steel rain starts. This may be considered to be gamey, but I prefer to think of it as an "At My Command" artillery call where they are waiting back at the guns for the "Fire" command. This would be contrary to Weasel's artillery rules, so it is important to determine what the ground rules are. There is no guaranty that your enemy will walk into the impact zone, but it increases the possibility of hitting a group on the move. When it's use is permitted, I find the tactic quite effective and deadly.

Nothing at all gamey about this.
I was trained as an FO and since WinSPMBT doesn't allow you to plot a fire mission and hold the guns in readiness to fire on command you have to adjust them every turn so they don't actually fire until you want them to. It's simply side stepping a situation where game mechanics won't allow you to do something that would be, and is, commonly done.

Situations like this are no fault of the game design, just a matter of programming limitations.

[Cross]

A another thought about the right click unit info.

Being able to see the number of crew, to determine if the tank is damaged, may not be an exploit. In real life we'd probably agree that sometimes tank damage is visible, sometimes not. The more seriously the tank is damaged, the more likely the damage is visible.

In SP you can damage a tank without any crew becoming casualties; so crew losses are not a foolproof way of determining if a tank is damaged. But the more the tank is damaged, the more likely that crew will be missing. Therefore, checking unit info for missing crew could be considered a 'realistic' reflection of whether you can tell if the tank is damaged or not.

However, I do think unit info gives away too much weapon info, especially for infantry sections.

While on the topic of AFV damage and FoW. I like the damage notification ** or **** . It's possibly not the most realistic aspect of the game, particularly as it even lets you know the likely extent of the damage, but it's very satisfying Though I'm sure a case can made that experienced gunners can guesstimate how hard they just hit something.

I lean well towards the realism side of things, but in the end this is a game, and it has to be fun.

It's not like the old SPWaW spidey sense * that let you know when you were spotted. That was unrealistic and annoying.

cheers,
Cross

[RERomine]

With infantry weapons, eventually you will get to a point where you can tell pretty much what they have. The major issue seems to be with infantry AT weapons and there it depends on the weapon. There are some that probably can be spotted a click away and other won't be seen until they are prepped for fire. The Russian RPG-29 is basically a bazooka with a 6 foot long tube and readily more visible than the RPG-22 or US M72 LAW are easier to keep hidden. There is no real way to make that realistic without gutting the code. At least you have the FOW element of not knowing if the unit has any left.

I don't think people worry about small arms. They all generally have the same basic range and have the same basic capability. All squads/sections seem to have some sort of integrated machine guns and they all seem to have grenades. There to tend to be a few twists in there, but I treat them all the same; they are all dangerous and need to be destroyed as quickly as possible. Even if they don't have anything but a pistol, they have that hot line to the player who can bring in artillery if desired.

I try to keep my armor over 500m away from enemy squads/sections and it generally won't matter what they are carrying. If they get to point blank range, you might run into Rambo with a grenade.

The subject could be beat to death all day long, but I think we pretty much have what we are going to get.

[Suhiir]

Originally Posted by RERomine

With infantry weapons, eventually you will get to a point where you can tell pretty much what they have. The major issue seems to be with infantry AT weapons and there it depends on the weapon. There are some that probably can be spotted a click away and other won't be seen until they are prepped for fire. The Russian RPG-29 is basically a bazooka with a 6 foot long tube and readily more visible than the RPG-22 or US M72 LAW are easier to keep hidden. There is no real way to make that realistic without gutting the code. At least you have the FOW element of not knowing if the unit has any left.

One thing you could do if you think such units should be easier to spot is change the unit size.

Normally 2-3 man AT teams are size 0.
As a standard part of the code such units are harder to spot (even with the automatic spotting bonus you get when an ATGM fires).
If you make them size 1 they'll be more easily spotted both before and after they fire.

Just an idea for what it's worth.

[RERomine]

Originally Posted by Suhiir

One thing you could do if you think such units should be easier to spot is change the unit size.

Normally 2-3 man AT teams are size 0.
As a standard part of the code such units are harder to spot (even with the automatic spotting bonus you get when an ATGM fires).
If you make them size 1 they'll be more easily spotted both before and after they fire.

Just an idea for what it's worth.

Not meaning to be difficult, but the men will still be larger than whatever they carry so the unit should still be visible at the same point.

What really needs to be done, and it won't happen, is unit spotting needs to be independent of weapon identification. Someone has mentioned it in this thread before. Weapons would have to be assigned a "size" beyond just "warhead size". In this case "size" would represent the physical size of the weapon. It would be nice to use warhead size as a reference, but a grenade has WH=3, where a rifle has WH=1. Obviously, the rifle is larger and more visible than the grenade so that won't work. Once the "weapon size" is decided on, then it is just a matter of deciding at what range such weapon sizes could be identified. I figure weapon identification would be automatic if it was fired or used.

The big problem is the code base is complete and anything done has to be integrated into the existing code. It would effectively have to be gutted. Many suggestions by people would probably be considered if they were starting to program from scratch.

One interesting thought on unit size, does anyone know if there is a cumulative size count of units in a hex? Basically, if you have 100 snipers in one hex, would they all be unspotted (given that at that range one sniper normally would remain unseen) or would the fact they are having a "sniper convention" give away some of them?