some questions about SP...

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by RedGuard

I have played SP for days and I must admit that the game is awesome. But then I found some strange things happened.

1. What will happen when an A0 is destoryed? It seems nothing serious and the inferiors would fight as usual.
2. Every single shot would cause dozens of opfire by enemies. It seems impossible during a fierce firefight.
3. Is a tank's response excessively fast? I once tried to sneak attack a tank's rear and then it turned around and shot my infantry who just have moved one hex. It felt like this tank rotated a 180° in a few seconds...

I hope my bad english would be understood by everyone for i don't use it very often- -

1) Losing A0 in a campaign (except a human v human PBEM) ends the campaign at that battle.

Losing A0 in a game is a morale hit. All rallying will be less effective if A0 is dead or in retreat. If A0 is K/O then the "force broken" result is easier to achieve. If your force is broken, then everyone is in panic and rally chances fall dramatically for all.

As it is the communications rear link as well then comms to off-map units will be less reliable.

A0 is therefore not a combat unit - it should "hide with pride" as SSBNs do.

2) Opportunity fire is triggered on all enemy units in range. Some "on the edge" may not fire from shot to shot, however - there is a random element if the to-hit chance is not quite high enough and a skill throw as well. Also - an owner of the full game may have set up some opfire filtering as well.

Some units which have fired > their max shots may generate op-fire shots in excess (based on an experience and morale throw, as well as weapon warhead size). That stops (or at least makes less certain!) the original SP trick of teasing out the main gun shots of a Tiger with lesser units, then driving a T34 up to execute it at 1 hex. Now you cannot be quite sure if the Tiger crew "pulls a rabbit out of the hat" or not.

3) In SP of any flavour, rotation (hull or turret) has nil cost and is always instant.

Since it is not a time-based (physics based) game other than the turns' time slice there really is no way around this. There is no concept of time within a turn (and no way to do so unless say, you split a move into several sub-phases as many tabletop and bored games rules do. SP turns are deliberately unstructured - that makes the game much easier for novices than say ploughing through phases 1 through 12.13.24 of some sort of old-style hex based bored game. Would you like to have to pass your PBEM turn back and forth for 12 or 20 sub-phases, and perhaps additional sub-sub phases ?).

I do have some rough ideas which I may look into implementing some day to ameliorate this, however.

Cheers
Andy