The AI on the Attack (and food for thought for players too)

[virtuali]

Multi-hex fire groups is difficult to implement from interface and AI perspective, this feature is not in my future scope at the moment.

This is one of the most disappointing news I read on this forum. Multi-hex fire groups are a core feature of the game that inspired ToTH. The "don't stack, but form firegroups" is the most basic tactics one must learn with it.

The whole game has been balanced in years taking into account that, and forcing to stack to increase FP, will unbalance everything in favor of the force that has the more/better leaders ( Germany, usually ), because they can use leader modifiers to balance somewhat the increased risk of damage when receiving fire as a stack. It changes the game entirely.

There's no need for big changes to the UI. A possible way of doing it would be:

- Before resolving a fire attack, the program might check all adjacent friendly units that are still allowed to fire, and display a message box like this:

"Do you want to attack as a fire group with units in hexes XX, YY and ZZ ?"

And all the user would have to do, is to reply YES or NO.

This change would not require ANY change to the UI, except for the added dialog box.

The AI might just use the strategy of always trying for fire groups, if possible, so it will also work as a teaching tool for good tactics. Or, it might use multi-hex fire groups at the highest difficulty settings only, and continue as it is now, at the lowest settings.

[virtuali]

....

[DoubleDeuce]

ORIGINAL: Monkie

As a side question in regards to fire groups, it's been awhile so I have forgotten but does SL or ASL have rules for multi-hex fire groups?

The Q&A stuff I found in some of my old notes indicate that SL does use it and as blackcloud6 posted, so does ASL.

[pzgndr]

ORIGINAL: javafiend
I propose you extend the Tactical Map MouseListener to include ctrl-LMB, and that this mouse gesture will signal the selection
of multiple Firegroups.

The advantage of this approach is that it retains your current UI look-and-feel. It merely provides an extra, optional,
mouse gesture, ctrl-LMB, in the Tactical Map. This does not provide any burden to player's current play style. It can
easily be ignored as a feature if a player desires -- just don't press the ctrl when mousing the Tactical map.

Another approach may be to simply include the incremental benefit of a stack or firegroup with each additional firing. For example, two adjacent squads firing together as a firegroup have a bonus over the two squads firing individually. So why not consider a modest ruleset to account for this stuff and provide an incremental bonus to subsequent units firing on a target and/or some other penalty on the target(s)? The end results may not be exactly correct according to the SL/ASL rules but should provide some improvement for adjacent units firing upon the same target. Just a thought.

[shaddock]

Seeing how some wish for fire groups, I'll put my 2 cents in. One way to achieve this may be to say that - if all adjacent friendly units, fire at the same enemy unit during the same fire phase, all units after the first will get an increasingly larger bonus. There could be a limit to the bonus. As far as stacks go, I think the bonus should apply to the entire stack and not the individual unit.

Example 1: 3 US units adjacent to each other are firing at a German unit. The first US unit fires as normal. The second US units adds +1 bonus to fire power, and the third unit gets a +2 bonus.

Example 2: 4 US units are adjacent to each other: one in hex 1, two in hex 2, and one in hex 3. The unit in the 1st hex fires as normal. The two in hex 2 are added together, and add +1 to the total. The unit in hex 3 adds +2 to its total.

Something like this might be doable, without too much trouble in coding.

btw what language is the game coded in? what IDE/compiler are you using?