Great game

[Christocipher]

Hello what a great game😀 The detail is amazing and I am really enjoying playing but still getting used to some stuff. So I put a whole lot of questions in here. So how long is a turn, When I play a Scenario as PBEM can I check the other players preferences, When I select between different planes the different exit and entry points dont update, sometimes I get a rough terrain warning sometimes I dont is that meant to be

Can I anyway limit how many of some things there are maybe like some german things that they only had 1 or 2 off. In a game can I put down some sort of marker like a waypoint to remember a place.

[scorpio_rocks]

Hello welcome aboard!
A quick stab at some answers for you:


1. From the Game Guide: "One game move (player 1 turn plus player 2 turn) represents roughly 3 minutes of 'real time'."
2. I don't believe so (but I am no PBEM expert) I don't think it makes any difference to the game as some settings have to be the same.
3.The aircraft entry and exit points are a little "quirky" and could possibly be improved. If you want multiple aircraft arriving on the same turn from different vectors then you will have to be carefull and change entry/exit before plotting each one and remember to change back if "adjusting the target point" later.
4.You get a rough terrain warning when rough overlaps a hill or other terrain that may cause the currently moving vehicle to become stuck - so no warning for "normal" rough, or infantry for example.
5.Limits should be discussed with your opponent. AI shouldnt be choosing the "wild and wacky stuff" due to rarity code (built into radio code in Mobhack)
6.No not currently - I dont think (note the co-ordinate of the grid hex on a piece of paper) - perhaps a good suggestion to make to the developers

[Christocipher]

Hey good answers and good on you for helping me 😀 but sometimes a vehicle gets stuck on rough slope but I don't get the warning some inbuilt randomness maybe. I forget where I plotted the planes entry and exit and when I pick the plane in the artillery page I wanted the entry exit for that plane to show but it's just sort of random

[Mobhack]

1) And in real life - as opposed to a game where you have total and utter command of your counter then its likely more like ten minutes or so. Real soldiers (people) arent little counters to move at lockstep, they will take far more time than some clipboard weilding "time and motion" analyst would scribble on that clipboard. They are scared and cautious so spend more time "hanging about making thier mind up", slip off for a crafty gigarette break, have to take a dump, or get themselves lost and have to retrace thier steps, you know all those "human" things that a Prussian drill instructor or time and motion guy wont take into account.

Radios dont make it much more controllable or faster - the net is full iof "Hello 4, this is 5, say again all after "advance", over.." whereas you as a "player-god" figure simply move your "robot" callsign #5 off to exactly where you desired, unless you misclick on the map of course (i.e. introduce some real human error!).

That is what Clausewitz is speaking about when he talks about the "friction" of war. There are real humans under peril of death involved, not robots, which the counters effectively are.

So - once a game is over, multiply the turns expended by the given value of 3 minutes for the "if it was robots" figure, and by ten(ish) minutes to get the "Clausewitz" time that it more likely would take in a real war to get to the end result with real humans. And maybe triple the time if the scenario had night or poor visibility involved!.

6) I have thought about allowing the player to label hexes, as you can in the scenario editor. It would need some way that the other player cannot read for PBEM. So not as simple as just simply allowing the map text scenario editor function to be reachable inside an ongoing game.

It would be useful for say, labelling a bit of smoke in the enemy back zone that is likely a mortar to deal with later because the guns are busy right now, and in 4 or 5 turns the smoke may have vanished.

[Dion]

I guess random entry and exit points for aircraft strikes is like that because it's a tactical game, not an operational game, and it takes into account pilot initiative, as there is a lot of space to fly over getting to the battle field. There's a lot of randomness at the tactical scale.

[Mobhack]

If you set your entry and exit points then that in and out direction will be used, except as it sets up entry on the target initially selected near the impact point, then it may shift the entry to line up. In other words, the impact point selected has a large part to play - and that gets rolled for if there is no target aquision near there on entry, which can shift the impact as for other arty, and again, the netry sector may then shift so the inwards path can actually point at the selected target hex.

The exit direction can move from the selected, if the above happens. And if the strike plane strafes stuff off the axis of flight, it can decide to fly straight onwards after weapons use. And if it finds nothing and beats up some empty ground - it decides where it wants to leave by.

The air farce is not part of the army, so you influence it but you do not command it.

Generally speaking, I dont bother with strike air - the points are better used on arty etc. If advancing or assaulting then air strikes are useful for spotting defenders though. WW2 air isnt a real tank killer. Modern stuff with long range missiles are a different kettle of fish!.

In an operational level game air would be vital since your airbases can be used to fly off to widely spaced battles, hit his supply nodes, airfields etc. In an SP battle, your arty is always in range.

Air power is an operational and not a tactical tool, but the designers probably put them in because "rule of cool" and end user expectations, see the Mustangs in Saving Private Ryan forex, and the popular perceptions of "cab rank" air "slaughtering" tigers in Normandy.

In reality it was the total destruction of the German supply column trucks and horse wagons that were the air "killer" effect - and that is operational so not this game's focus. Blow up the beans, bullets and fuel and the clockwork mice eventually run down and the troops get peckish and the rifle becomes a spear body for the bayonet.

The A10 therefore wasted weight on a humongous internal cannon, because its true target really was supply columns which a 20mm vulcan can service just fine and weigh less, or have more ammo supply for the same dead weight as the somewhat iffy 30mm AP ammo performance post the T-55 and T-62s. Long range tank plinking with guided missiles did not neet a ton of armour anyway. Yep, me is in the A10 is a silly idea camp! - Sturmovviks were moderately useful at the end of WW2, but not post war.

[Christocipher]

Wow those are really good answers thank you very much for all your time😀
That's very great about all the tactics I don't know much about it but it's good to know now. That clever how the planes work but what I sort mean is in the artillery part there is some entry and exit arrows that you use to plan where the plane goes but in the next turn I pick the plane again then the artillery part has forgotten the arrows I picked first so if I forgot which arrows I picked I can't check which ones they were in the artillery screen

[Mobhack]

In and out directions are taken as what they are currently set to when you plot the strike hex. Set those before you plot the target hex!

The entry and exit sides are a game global value, set to the default on each loading of the game from windows. If you change this then in the same game session, they will remain at the last used pair. Even if you play multiple saved scenarios. But once you exit the game to windows, when you reload they will be re-initialised to the defaults.

So - always check the first time (best any time you plot air reeally - open the in/out display screenlet) you want to plot air, to see what state the global values are currently set to. They don't follow individual save games around - they are game globals, not scenario local data. (Already plotted air strikes have the in and out and target x,y set in the scenarios local save data of course, so plotted strikes do follow any scenario saves and reloads).

[Christocipher]

Thanks for the great reply you sure know a lot about the game😱

Ive been bingeplaying the scenarios and I wont tell you how much fun that was and I tried out the editor you mentioned thats a another really great idea. When I was in the editor I tried to put mines and obstacles in the sea but they dont go even in the shallow water so Im not sure if thats meant to be or I dont know something. Any way something happened then when I was trying to find out if it was me or the game I layed some mines and obstacles on the beach which cost me obstacle points but when I layed tranches on the beach that didnt cost me any obstacle points so I thought maybe I had found a bug because then when I removed the trenches I got more points back. I also saw that some landing craft can spot for artillery and some cant and after a while it is the 0 ones that can spot but I thought that no landing craft had radios I thought they were mostly like water trucks. I was doing all this in the editor in the omaha beach scenario. I dont mean to be critical but the trench thing was funny.

[Mobhack]

1) I am one of the the programmer/developers, so yep, I might just know a thing or two

2) Mines can go in shallow water, maybe dragons teeth as well IIRC, but definately no defences in deep water. (Forget if shallow is only-1, may be -2 level, I dont design scenarios and havent played a beach assault in yonks)

3) landing craft (with radios?) that are 0 units (IIRC) do have the ability to spot. Otherwise, you cannot adjust or call for fire as you boat into land.

That was, again IIRC, one of the problems in the original DOS game that I changed the code for. (If you had say some helos (MBT, late WW2) or I think, warships, they could spot and call for fires in the original SSI DOS games - trying to think back 20+ years there!).

4) Trenches are a bit odd at times. The are part terrain tile and part defence obstacle (they can remove trees etc IIRC in the hex they are plotted into). Stick with using them away from water I would say, they can be useful as anti tank ditches (if you play with breakdowns on)

5) Water has always been a bugbear of the game from the start as to weird things that can happen. We have caught some and likely added new weirds as the years went by. It is the AI that has problems on maps with deeper warter, especially if it is not a properly designed river crossing or beach assault scenario, and especially with regards to path finding navigation.

Little offshore sandbanks may not confuse a human player of a beach assault scenario, but the AI will happly unload onto them, perhaps leaving some units twiddling their thumbs there...

A river crossing that has two rivers might look dead cool to the designer, and a human probably can handle that if he can get his barges alive to the second one, The AI wont as its stock behaviour is soley based on there being precisely one water obstacle - it will happily ferry units to the far bank of river #1, but simply wont have a clue what to do about river #2 (or some inland lake you added "just because" sitting behind river #1)...