Suggestions for improvement

[Larry2017]

Let me preface my comments by saying that playability has to have a role in these games. These are great games but... if, in search of realism, you make the game onerous you aren't doing anybody any favor.


Units moved off the board:
This is not irrelevant. I play campaign games and moving units off the board is sometimes the only way to rescue them for the next scenario. It's a pain having to ignore them as you cycle thru your units. Modifying the Next and Previous buttons to ignore these units can't be that hard.

This is a playability issue.

Visibility:
SP maps are perfect :-) Humm.... maybe not exactly...

If I had a topographical map or if the map had contour lines or some better method of displaying relative height, I might agree that there is no need to provide an aid for determining visibility. But the map is flat and relative height is mostly not visually determinable. Unless you want to run your cursor over every individual hex and look up in the corner of the game window, there's no way to know if that hex 5 hexes away from where you'd like to place your unit has a slight difference in height that's going to block visibility.

Perhaps my idea is overkill but there's got to be a middle ground somewhere short of inspecting every hex with the cursor or moving a unit back and forth to every hex you want to know about. Most scenarios aren't long enough to allow that anyway.

This is a playability issue.

BTW, I don't agree that a unit has to be physically on a hex in order to determine visibility from that hex. Sometimes just being in the general vicinity of a spot of ground can give a general idea of it's visibility.


Abandoned Artillery:
The physical artillery piece should be a target. The gun emplacement can still be destroyed even if the crew is absent, or at least it ought to. Can't tell you how many times I've hit an artillery unit with indirect fire only to have the crew abandon it and disappear. Now I can't destroy the artillery piece and two or three turns later the crew is back and I have to start all over again. I should be able to continue shooting at the artillery piece until I destroy it.

[wulfir]

Originally Posted by Larry2017

Unless you want to run your cursor over every individual hex and look up in the corner of the game window, there's no way to know if that hex 5 hexes away from where you'd like to place your unit has a slight difference in height that's going to block visibility.

I think not knowing 100% before you have troops on the ground is great.

IMHO a human player can make a decent enough estimate just by looking at a game map. If the player should sometimes find upon arriving that what looked like an ideal spot isn't all that ideal because LOS is partially or fully blocked I'm all for it.

If the player has a full info picture at all times of the juiciest spots over the entire map where to deploy for maximum AI spanking they will just roll there and the chance for friction/lost time/taking losses for unclear gain goes down.

I don't see the problem with using scouts to scout the terrain?