Advance to the Sure - defending and.......

[AKCLIMBER]

What about adding a "Level of Patrol" option that would allow the player to choose none, low, medium, high where each option corresponds to a certain percentage of one's force and where the higher the level chosen, the greater one's percentage chance of locating the enemy? Of course, there'd have to be sort of downside to choosing higher levels - perhaps (1) loss of parent unit cohesion and (2) possibility of losing that percentage of your force if the patrols are engaged. I agree tho that modeling engagements between the already abstract patrols and the enemy may be difficult and may add an unwanted level of abstraction. I think I'd be OK with it tho.

Also, have you guys thought about adding an air recon option? Randomly make air recon mission available as per air stirkes? Perhaps the player could choose to direct the plane's flight path or simply designate an area of interest to explore. That said, I've no idea how "real time" WW2 air recon was so the delays between the flights and the observations may be frustaringly long...

Cheers & thanks for a great game!

[260DET]

My suggestions would start with the game reality that with an advancing unit its the entire unit which is involved, for the purpose of the game thats what happens, eg there are no individual scouts who could infiltrate a defensive position. So its seems realistic to say that an entire unit will be spotted before it can reach the defender's forward positions. Question is, how close can it get before realistically being spotted? Consider the type of units involved, the situation and the locality as being relevant to that question. I'll give just one example of each to illustrate.

Unit Type. An infantry unit will spot an advancing enemy before an artillery unit will because normally it will have the resources etc to recce.

Situation. A fresh unit will spot an advancing enemy better than one which has suffered heavy losses.

Locality. A defending unit that has poor LOS to an advancing unit will have more difficulty in spotting it than if the LOS is good. Even at night.

Plus throw in just a bit of chance eg recce vehicle radio stops working and there you go. Basically anything that prevents an entire unit from arriving undetected at the front door will be an improvement, it has to be.

[nicwb]

260DET,

that's all true but don't you also have to factor in things like spotter aircraft? Both the US and Germans made use of these.

[johndoesecond]

Hi all,

I also think the whole visibility/LOS/recon modelling and doctrine is worth being discussed, and is an area of the game which may be improved.


1. For one thing, I think that some level of abstraction is needed, and I believe that it would be in the spirit of the game to implement it by employing the same "BftB uncertainty principle" (i.e. you see the unit icon, you know its footprint which is dynamic, but you don't know where exactly individual sub-coy entities (soldiers and vehicles) are).

So, therefore, my proposal would be: how about having a second footprint for recon and visibility/LOS calculations?

Just as the current footprint, the size (and facing) of that footprint would be dynamic, and could, say, extend (concentrically or facing-wise) bigger the longer units stay in defending position (or just applying entrrenchment levels).

This looks to me viable also in terms of not having to overwhelm the player with additional recon units or options to control and micro-management, and may be done at a reasonable computational costs (which rightly worries Dave).



2. In the same time, it would be very useful to know how exactly these things worked in the real world and doctrine-wise. So, yes, all this is "food for thought" as Dave says, but it's also food for historical research. Does anyone have some idea or references about this?


3. I also like the idea of air recon. Again, to get and model it right, it would be very useful to learn how it worked in the real (frequency, covered areas, time delay from actual spotting to intel being passed to the commanders on the ground, precision, reliability, etc.)


4. Oh, one question for Dave: currently, does the LOS/visibility calculations take into account unit's footprint, or is it simply calculated from the precise spot the unit's icon? Or is it irrelevant, given the 100m fidelity of the underlying map grid?

Thank you for your attention.

[Haiku]

During my career, I learned that when you want a problem solved it's always better to describe to the competent people the actual problem you are facing than to ask them for a specific solution. "Don't come with a solution, but rather with a problem."

So as an annex to my previous post where I was jumping directly to the possible solutions, I guess I need in the first place to describe the problem I'm facing when playing the game:

1) When an enemy unit is spotted on the map, I don't really know why, or more precisely, because of which unit I can see it. Thus I can't really tell when I'm moving my engineer back for some rest, will I still have vision on this enemy artillery next to the village ?

2) When there is no enemy chits in the bunker on other side of the river, I can't tell for sure if it's because I can't see the unit, or because there there is just nobody. I understand (and love) uncertainty in intel, but as in real life, you should be able to tell at some point with some confidence, than there is no one in the bunker. For sure I could (and I do) use the LOS tools, but it's pretty tedious to do. For instance in the following picture, is there enemy unit in the green zones that I'm may not be aware of, or are they "safe" zones ?

3) Ok, with the LOS tool, I know there is a hypothetic LOS from point A to point B. But does it means my HQ unit will be able to see from A to B ?. It may have a much shorter sight range, than only allows him to see halfway.

I don't want precise stuff specially, like a real-time fog of war. But just be able to have a good approximation of what zones I currently "control" or "see" and the zone I just don't know about. If I need to pause the game, and wait for 1 minute, it's fine with me. If I just have static purple "max sight range circles" around my units it's also fine with me. It's still an improvement.

To paraphrase some famous quote: "There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. but there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know". It will be a blast to know in which above category falls the village next to the bridge [:)]

[Haiku]

ORIGINAL: johndoesecond
4. Oh, one question for Dave: currently, does the LOS/visibility calculations take into account unit's footprint, or is it simply calculated from the precise spot the unit's icon? Or is it irrelevant, given the 100m fidelity of the underlying map grid?

I agree I don't know neither, and it's some kind of the root problem for me when evaluating the LOS capability of my army ("Could I be confident there is nobody there?", "Is the zone under sight control?"). I have the impression a LOS tool that could reveal what a unit (instead of a 'map point') actually see will solve a lot to me.

Another question, is the LOS concept reversible ? I mean, If I can see the top of the mountain from this village, does it means that I also can see the village from the top of the mountain ? If so, then it's a huge things for me. It means than when I want to have a unit watching a bridge, instead of clicking quite randomly on the forest hill to check if this position is good enough, I could just do the opposite and click on the bridge, and then choose an highlighted spot, which is much more simple and quicker. And then, LOS combination/overlap (with shift or control), in which you could click on this village and this bridge to see if there is a spot on the map from which you could see both will be paradise to me [8D]

[Arjuna]

RE LOS checks. These are based on the actual footprint of the unit at the time of the check. Three LOS checks are done per unit for each unit sighting it. One goes from clostest edge to clostest edge, another from centre to centre and a third from farthest to farthest edge.

Re reciprocal LOS. No just because you can see X doesn't mean X can see you. For instance you may be able to see a tank unit moving in the open at 2000m but they can't see your infantry dug in on the edge of the wood line 2000m away.

[johndoesecond]

ORIGINAL: Arjuna

RE LOS checks. These are based on the actual footprint of the unit at the time of the check. Three LOS checks are done per unit for each unit sighting it. One goes from clostest edge to clostest edge, another from centre to centre and a third from farthest to farthest edge.

Dave, there is one crucial word in your wording that is not clear: "edge". Is it a point or one whole side of the footprint?

If it is only the point, and if I understand well whay you're saying, then the facing seems to be very important here, since you don't use the left and right flanks (or stripes) of the footprint to determine the visibility. For example, if the left side of the footprint sits on top of a hill (while the rest of it is further downhill), that fact wouldn't be used for seeing thing around (since you use only front, centre and rear point).

Is that so?

Another thing, when you say "Three LOS checks are done per unit for each unit sighting it", does this mean that you already determined in some other way that the unit is sighted by the enemy unit in question? And if that is so, how is that determined then?

Thanks.

[Arjuna]

For LOS checks we take two points and trace a line between them and check along that line at each 100m. When determining LOS between units we trace a line between the unit centres, extend that line past the furthest edge of each unit's occupied area. Where that line interesects the forward and rear edges, we use those points for the nearest and furthest LOS checks. Is that clear?

Each minute each unit checks its LOS with all enemy units. There's a bit of filtering done to exclude units that would be beyond the max visibility range. Also if we have an excellent current report on an enemy unit, then we don't bother doing LOS checks on it from other friendly units if they cannot possibly get a better quality report. The reason for this filtering is to reduce processor load and remember we only have one intel database per side ( not per unit ).

[johndoesecond]

Hi Dave,

Thank you for your reply.

Three things.

1. Yes, I believe I understood it now.

However, that brings about exactly the issue I was talking about.

I've drawn a little scheme so that we can understand each other better.



There are two units whose white footprints you can see on an irregular terrain (the colours more or less respect BftB scheme, so dark brown is high, light brown is intermediate and green is low terrain)

If I got it correctly, to establish if the southern unit can see the northern one, what the Command Ops engine does is to draw the line from center to center (segment BE), then extend that line further to obtain all the other points A, C, D and F which are used to calculate the degree of visibility.

Now, my point is that according to your algorithm, the two units do not "see" each other due to the little hill lying between them. But look at the hilltop G! The southern unit sits on it, and there IS a theoretical LOS between the point G and some area of the northern unit's footprint. So, there actually should be some visibility between the two.

I understand that it's OK that there have to be degrees of abstraction, approximation and randomness, but isn't that too rough?

2. This brings me to my second point. The things I was proposing about a second footprint for recon purposes would I believe work very well if the LOS check between units was done using footprints with the sort of fidelty I am suggesting.

3. Finally, one little last thing. You wrote: "Also if we have an excellent current report on an enemy unit, then we don't bother doing LOS checks on it from other friendly units if they cannot possibly get a better quality report."

Alright for the intel report, that's understandable, but don't you need to know exactly who sees who to determine who can shoot at who?


Sorry for bothering, and thank you for your attention.

Cheers.

[Arjuna]

JD2,

Yes you are correct using that example of yours. It all boils down to fidelity. In theory, we should conduct LOS checks between every 100m grid of the occupied area of the sightor to every 100m grid of the occupied area of the sightee. But with an average company occupying 300 x 300 that would mean 9 LOS checks every minute as opposed to 3. That would slow the game down a bit and I don't think that the added fidelity is worth that at this stage. As harware capabilities improve, then yes we can consider such an approach. But for now I thing the current method is acceptable. It's all a question of tradeoffs.

[johndoesecond]

I agree on getting the tradeoffs right.

BTW, you were too optimistic: if there are 9 100m grids on average per unit, that would, pairwise, be 81 LOS checks per minute!

I'll think a bit more about it, maybe there are ways to optimise it.

... of course, I was asking just to better understand how BftB is designed now, and to suggest possible improvements (with this and with the recon thing) for the future evolution of the series.

Ah, what about my third question?


Thanks again.

[Arjuna]

RE your third question which was concerned with the need for units to have sightings before they can shoot. I should have explained that if a unit is within threat range ( 2 to 3,000m ) then a LOS check is done on it regardless of checks from other units. Each unit maintains a list of visible threats and any unit sighted by it within threat range is added.

[Marshal Villars]

ORIGINAL: Arjuna

Re Better modelling of Defenceive tactics - ie patrolling. We've given serious consideration to this issue. The most realistic method is to allow for recon units of say section/squad strength to be hived off from a unit and move them along a patrol route or setup a static position. However, this was disgarded for performance reasons it could easily double the number of units in a scenario if only half of them were defending and each put out one mobile and one static patrol. An alternative option is to model it abstractly with units on the defence committing a certain percentage of their strength to patrolling. We could then manage the patrol by events with a route calced and say every five minutes doing a detection test from the location along the route that we deem it to be at. However, this still requires a significant amount of processing to generate the routes and to do the LOS checks. A further more abstract option is to simply extend a patrol zone out from the unit and provide a percentage chance of detection against any enemy unit entering that zone. This would be economical from a processing perspective but would be fairly abstract.

I have been thinking about this problem a lot too recently, and think that for now, as an upgrade to BFTB, that you go with your third option:
"Simply extend a patrol zone out from the unit and provide a percentage chance of detection against any enemy units entering that zone. This would be economical from a pocessing perspective but would be fairly abstract".

I think BFTB needs this, as I have woken up in Bastogne as the Americans with German motorized units on my doorstep more than once, wondering how they got through. Your third option is not only simple and is better than nothing, but until you can get a more advanced system in place in a decade as computing power grows, it is also badly needed.

Increase chances of detection of units which make a lot of noise.

Increase chances of detection if on the road or at a cross roads (places most likely to be watched).

Make the effectiveness of the patrol depend on some combination of experience, leader efficiency, staff quality, % of estab, fitness, training, aggro, etc.

Ignore losses to patrols for now.

I highly recommend a super rudimentary patrol system, and then if players don't like its overly abstract nature, provide it as an option. But, understanding the limitations of: a) computing power, b) your programming time, I would be very happy with your "rudimentary" system as it would be better than no system at all. Should be at least an ABSTRACT patrolling system noticing how often mechanized units get close to, around, and even into Bastogne --and even right in behind 4-5 of my units which had formed a tight "U" (I kid you not, a unit of 9 STUGIIIs appeared within 200 to 300 meters)--overnight without anyone having detected this. As I said, time and increased computing power will make better simulations possible in the future. But we need abstract now. [&o]

Yes, your recommendation is "abstract", but it would be less abstract than the system in place now.

Perhaps you can even add a new button, "patrol aggro" and "patrol range" if you want to go one step beyond "abstract" and assume some losses from "overlapping patrols" with enemy units occassionally. However, I would assume that there are no direct losses from combat and these are all resolved as is--except for the new "patrol" interaction. Patrol aggressiveness and range would all have an effect on % chance of spotting enemy units.

[BK6583]

I have a broader question regarding this scenario - is it worth trying as the Germans against the AI? I've never really mastered the art of withdrawal and delay but when I played the Americans straight up, by using nothing but move commands, I went through the Germans like I couldn't believe. Had a complete German surrender by D4. Never conducted even so much as one assault.

[simovitch]

BK6583, I assume you play with realistic orders delay on? Anyway I would say yes give it a go as Germans, it should be a challenge!

btw I don't use assault much either, unless I really have to punch through something and my guys are well rested.

[wodin]

If you don't use assault does that mean your units haven't shaken out into attack formation? If so and it works fine isn't this a problem with the game design? As it makes assaults and all that fancy shaking out into formation pointless....

Or does aggressive moves mean they still move in attack formation....so whats the benefit for assaults? Are they good for the initial attack through entrenched posistions and anything else just use aggressive move?

[simovitch]

wodin, I probably should have said I don't use assault all the time...

Assaulting provides a safer and more effective advance into the combat zone, with less chance of your forces routing or retreating until the task is done. When you are up against the brittle crust of the German Army like in this scenario you can get away with aggro-moving into the fray and let the overwhelming US firepower do its job until the Germans have routed away.

Getting the Germans to surrender by D4 is pretty impressive assuming it was played for the first time, and with realistic orders delay.

[Agema]

There are a few missions I've tried as the Americans which are insanely easy. Both of the Meuse (Peiper Crosses and Mayhem) missions, Greyhound Dash, and this. You've got so much of an advantage in numbers and/or quality, there's just no contest.

[wodin]

I'd say if the missions are easy and it wasn't easy historically something is up...if it was an easy victrry anyway (if there is such a thing) then play from the other side...This game seems to favour the Allies (mainly due to Arty I feel) whereas CotA was more even.