System Request changes to John Tiller

These requests as of September 23rd are being considered by John;

John has currently fixed: persistent concealment, artillery firing smoke, company 9platoon) fatigue and expandable dialog boxes.




Helicopter height
]Helicopters can currently shield behind units and neither fire over or be shot at by anti-air and ground units. Potential fix, helicopters are 10 metres above the terrain (and hex type) they are currently above for spotting and fire purposes. For example if the base hex height is 200 metres and it is a forest hex (+10 metres), the helicopter would be deemed to be at 220 metres (200 base + 10 forest +10 helicopter).

Surface to Air missiles
A new unit type – SAM. SAM’s would always use their AA value when they fire (at helicopters and air units) without the requirement to have the indirect fire (IF) flag selected. They could fire at any air unit in its AA range and any helicopter in LOS. A new unit type would mean that the code from MC would not be required (I believe) as was requested in the initial email.

Assign Opportunity Fire
Expand the default firing unit matrix to include recon units. Recons could then use persistent concealment to spot without the fear of prematurely firing and revealing their position. The current unit types are hard vehicles, AT & heavy AA and other firing units.
It would probably make sense to include guided missile (ATGM) in the AT & heavy AA units as their strength is hitting armor at long range.
The play testers are seeing a lot of value in the opportunity fire interface and dependant on resources this could do with further development. For example if ranges could be set for ALL units (or by type) on the map in one pass and then adjusted individually that would help. Visual cues to who has opportunity fire orders would be another. It’s one of those areas that gives the player an ability to control his units quickly and set doctrine and would benefit from a few usability improvements.

Persistent concealment
An adjacent concealed enemy unit should be revealed at the start of the next ‘friendly’ turn (or alternatively when a unit tries to enter the hex). Currently adjacent units that don’t or can’t fire (HQ’s) will remain hidden and can block a hex as it cannot be assaulted, fired or moved through.

Artillery firing smoke
All the play testers (including me!) have inadvertently fired smoke rounds when HE was intended. This is due to making the selection via the alternative fire on the artillery dialog.
We would suggest the cursor change when firing artillery to a graphic that represents the actual type of munitions. So cross hairs (current for HE), smoke cloud for smoke, green cloud for chemicals, a mine symbol for mines and nuke for nuclear. This would appear when using the artillery dialog or when holding down the CTRL key and firing an indirect fire unit. This approach would go a long way to reducing player frustrations.

Company (platoon) Fatigue
Has this been implements across from PzC? If so it should be removed. With lowered fatigue thresholds, stacking modifiers to fire and lower man ‘counts’ in units this is an additional burden. With games a day or less long this should not be in the system.

Show Range
Being a tactical game with more granularity in weapons systems there are divergences between HA/SA/AA ranges. Is there a way to either color code the different munitions ranges or alternatively a hot key for each? Currently the game only shows the longest range.

Expandable Dialog Boxes
We are running into a number of occurrences where the rigid dialog boxes is preventing information to be seen. Below is an example. What would it take to convert these to user adjustable e.g. drag and expand?


Vehicular HQ’s
All ‘HQ’s are men. If we could have vehicular HQ’s we could represent armor and other mechanized companies correctly. These would essentially be vehicles with a command range. They would function like standard HQ’s but not re-spawn (which I believe is disabled in this series anyway). Command range could be designated by the ‘Soft Min’ field and a ‘tick box’ for vehicular HQ. Doing it this way leaves the unit class & unit type untouched so that SA & HA values are in play. Including this allows doctrine to work properly. Soviet armor (WW2 & Modern) would have short command ranges that would force the company to work in close proximity. The Axis & NATO forces less so – losing command vehicles would have a significant impact on a formation, but only the directly attributed units. In its current iteration HQ’s are only at Battalion and above level due to the requirement for them to be men.

Wrecks
The issue we are seeing is how to ensure vehicles and wrecks can’t totally block up a hex while ensuring historical stacking levels. We believe the modifier for DF/IF for over-stacking is great, but there is a further granularity at this level that needs to be handled.

Our suggestion is to have a third stacking limit for vehicles/wrecks.

• Therefore, there would be a road, vehicle & total stacking value. Importantly, wrecks count as a vehicle each. That caps the wrecks at the vehicle limit and there will never be a chance for any more vehicles/wrecks in a hex than the PDT vehicle stacking limit.
• The total limit is counted as per normal with 1 per man & 10 per vehicle/wreck, with vehicles/wrecks not able to exceed the vehicle total.
• The difference between the vehicle and total limit is the incremental infantry that can enter a hex.

To illustrate with an example, let’s use 75 (road), 200(vehicle) & 250(total). Using a value of 75 for road benefit is as per normal. Up to 20 vehicles/wrecks can be in a hex at any time, but combined with infantry cannot exceed 250. If the vehicle/wreck limit is reached then 50 infantry can still enter the hex. This stops a hex from becoming invulnerable due to over-stacked vehicles or wrecks, while reflecting the lesser density of men that can enter a hex full of vehicles or debris.

By having three stacking limits we can tweak all of them and get the desired result – with the ability to tailor it for different games/situations.

Finally, if you want to get really clever you can tie the LOS blocking of a hex full of wrecks to a percentage of the vehicle stacking limit. For example using LOS blocking at 50%, you need 10 (vehicle limit 20 * 50%) wrecks to cause enough smoke to impair vision. Anyway – just thinking out loud.