Ideas how to improve WinSP MBT/WW2 !

[Marek_Tucan]

DRG said:
Neither of you two guys have been paying attention to the game. There hasn't been a "dirt" road in WinSPMBT since it was released. It's been "secondary" road for years and that covers any non paved road. It's still shows the "dirt" road graphic for ease of showing the difference between them and paved roads.

Don

I admit I didn't care for the official game designation for some time as I used these structures in this sense from the beginning of my SP mapping (that is since old SP2)

[Marcello]

The debate was about the graphics, not game mechanics.
Therefore "dirt road" was between quotation marks, because it looks like a dirt road even if does not perform that purpose. Speaking of which as I said I think that the current one is fine.
I suppose that you could change it to something more greyish, to represent the most common gravel roads and the very run down "paved" roads Plasmakrab was speaking about. But that would not be my first concern.

[Marcello]

Personally if there is a terrain that I missed that was some sort of sand berms that could be laid like bocage hedgerows. That would be very useful for iraqi maps.
Next a SPWAW style wall.
I also used to miss some sort of concrete like terrain that could be used as pavement above the zero level, as well as for structures like dams and such. However I found out that grey sand was a decent enough surrogate.

[RecruitMonty]

Walls, I really miss walls. It's murder trying to find a decent surrogate for them. So I concur. Sand berms would be a neat addition too. Not too difficult to simulate though, are they?

[Marcello]

"Sand berms would be a neat addition too. Not too difficult to simulate though, are they?"

You can simulate them by using elevation of course. Thing is, most engineering berms aren't 50 meters wide. Plus some properties would be lacking.

Think to things like these.

http://www.thewideawakecafe.com/wp-c...ads/feat07.jpe

http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/26864...30FDCFC4C15FBB

[PlasmaKrab]

As Marcello said, you can simulate large sand berms and similar by using terrain elevation. I generally go for this for fortified bases and the like. Real, urban-terrain walls are much harder to come by, as well as fences as a minor note. Ever tried to make a map of downtown Berlin pre-reunification?
Looks like you are mostly talking about lower human-scale berms here, right? Like ones used for low-level fortifications, e.g. around dug-in tanks?
If we consider infantry entrenchments, the game detail level is low enough you can assume that berms are implied in trenches and infantry caches, and that e.g. rough terrain is good enough for the rest.
Back to the point, the one place where I'd gladly see berms is indeed around buried tanks. Right now they get the same sandbag circle as crewed weapons, which I can understand from a game mechanics perspective, but if at all possible, I think some within-hex sand berms like these for dug-in vehicles would be nice eye candy. Replace sand with earth and you have the summer variant.

For the smaller stuff, I don't think you can expect that level of detail in 50m hexes, and the larger stuff (aircraft shelters and base defenses) can be dealt with using elevation.

[Marcello]

"Looks like you are mostly talking about lower human-scale berms here, right? Like ones used for low-level fortifications, e.g. around dug-in tanks?"

Mostly about the zillion of berms which are built in Iraq.
These do not typically include trenches and are used in a variety of places such as the national borders, to enclose coalition bases etc. Rough terrain does not block LOS nowhere nearly enough to be used in their place, they are much smaller than 50m and I guess they would offer some cover as defensive positions if needs be. I can do with elevation but as it has been said they would be a nice addition.

EDIT

They are also used as obstacles for vehicles (think car bombs but not only).Elevation does not stop 2WD vehicles in the game.

[PlasmaKrab]

While we're nagging about terrain and talking about eye candy, there's two types of terrain that have been a pain due to their absence (only two, promise).

-Undergrowth, shrubland, chapparal, call it what you like. The idea is something intermediary between grass and forest, made up of tangled man-height tree saplings that make passage very, very hard for both infantry and vehicles. As I see it, it would restrict movement and visibility more than high grass, probably somewhere in the level of rough. As such, it would be a nice alternative to full-out forest in dryer climates (e.g. all around the Mediterranean, in most of the Middle East and southern Africa), and be more credible than high trees in desert maps.
In the case where forest can be superimposed on it, it would become undergrowth proper, turning a nice clean forest into a tangled vegetal mess with trees sticking out of it.
I know there have been discussions here in the past about the movement ratings of forest terrain, mostly boiling down to different people having different experiences of their local forests. As such, if you have a dedicated "undergrowth" terrain, you can use it for unkempt, impassable forest, while the "forest" terrain alone or with "forest ground" would stand for well-mannered forests with nice straight trees planted wide apart like apparently in some places in Finland.

-White rough. It may sound silly, but I've bumped head-first into this one every time I tried to map the Mediterranean coast (again). The current rough palette is excellent for sand and rock desert, including a very nice red desert ground. [self-advertisement]see my CWM Chadian campaign [/self-advertisement]
Grey rough and impassable are far too dark and best suited for northern climates, off the cuff I'd associate them with Scottish or Norwegian shores.
Just for the look of it, I would really like a lighter rocky terrain, maybe with some inbuilt vegetation.

Without both of these how am I supposed to map this or this kind of places?

Disclaimer: I have no idea if the game allows for more terrain types, in code, type or interface, I'm just bouncing ideas.