ORIGINAL: Peter Fisla
[Posted this on the grogheads forum, sharing it here with you]
It's easy to say that interface could be improved, yes it could of course; if you look at other tactical wargames like say Squad Battles, Pz Command it's easy to overlook the fact that these games only have few units (and the personnel within those units shirt, the unit itself never breaks down into sub units), weapons in a hex. In Tigers on the Hunt, like in ASL; you can have 6 Half-Squads + 6 support weapons, 4 Leaders + 4 support weapons and a Vehicle = 21 objects, never mind the fact that you can also have un-possesed support weapons + ordnance in the same hex, that's just one side. When you have Close Combat segment, the other side can have as well many units and weapons so you can possibly end up with 45+ objects all in the same hex. I can't think of any easy to use control, that would allow you to see all the objects in any meaningful way - without using a grid or tree control. The game code needs to account for all the objects you can have in a hex...otherwise the game will crash. Also in terms of the way interface works to move a unit or to fire with a unit/weapon.
There is a lot of game functionality validation going on behind the interface when the user selects an object and the game provides information to the user what can be done with that selected object (unit/weapon). So the game provides feedback to the user right away, rather then allowing the user to pre-select whole bunch of stuff and only provide message to the user once the user clicks on something on the map to resolve the action.
There is a reason why ASL was never converted to computer, the system is too complex/too expensive from development perspective to port it over properly to computer and for what 5000 copies sold ? I was crazy enough to be inspired by ASL to write my own game. Thinking about how long it took me to get it done now, I'm not sure I would have started it 10 years ago.
Respectfully disagree - right clicking on a stack would mitigate some of the fiddly-ness when selecting units. And ASL could never be converted into a computer game because of SSR's - not mechanics. Heck, Combat Mission is a fine game and adheres to much of the ASL ruleset and it was developed 20 years ago.
Hopefully, your game will have a deep campaign game, because I think that lack of a campaign will really kill a tactical game nowadays.
