Is the direct control unrealistic?

[MrOrange]

When we're playing this game, we are basically "God".
We enjoy a situation no commander in real life can even dream of: we have stable, 100% reliable communications with every single unit under our control, and our orders are carried on real time with no exceptions.

No misunderstandings, no delays... nothing. Even submarines, can have their course/orders changed anytime, anywhere, whatever is their dept.
During a dogfight you can tell to the single aricraft where it must head, and how to fire.

Don't you find it extremely unrealistic? What Admiral can possibly do something like that?

Submarines operate in a situation of relative freedom: give them a mission, a partol area, ROEs, and up you go. Next call window in 12 hours.
Do you imagine an Admiral, from his command center, picking up the radio and tell to a fighter pilot in the middle of a furball "son, break left, head on the aircraft on your left and shoot three missiles".

For sake of realism, I have some house rules that I apply: for many units I just give them missions, and never interfere with what the units are doing, even if the temptation is extremely high.

Did anyone ever thought about giving some restrictions on this absolute power over units? Something like unreliable communications (maybe in %), rational impossibility to carry on orders, and such?

You can't imagine how frustrating is, to realize that you sent your planes in a SAM trap, and watch heplessly when they're trying to get out of it in one piece.

[Rory Noonan]

All true, but realism does not equal fun. For the game to be enjoyable some compromises need to be made. There are ways to implement what you mentioned as well, I believe thewood1 developed a method to simulate submarine communications for example.

[Dysta]

It is understandable to have a godlike commanding and communicating function for a simulator, military units aren't remote controlled toys that must be controlled manually. They have their own actual/CO to do their pre-planned objectives without the need of direct commanding.

If necessary, you can deliberately make a delay to command your unit that is seems impossible to communicate. It cannot simulate the delay threshold realistically, but you can give yourself a challenge that way.

[MrOrange]

I normally assign missions, and don't interfere with the automatic execution.
For planes, I just reserve the right to abort it completely. I never launch units without a mission, or without knowing to which mission assign them once airborne.
For subs, I just give them orders every 4 hours, but this is an arbitrary time.

Naval units, I control them directly. Ground units, it depends on the situation.

And I try to never, ever, stop the running time (but my cheating soul doesn't allow me all the times [:)]).

That's the closest thing I can think of, to a real situation

ORIGINAL: Dysta

It is understandable to have a godlike commanding and communicating function for a simulator, military units aren't remote controlled toys that must be controlled manually. They have their own CO to do their pre-planned objectives without the need of direct commanding.

If necessary, you can deliberately make a delay to command your unit that is seems impossible to communicate. It cannot simulate the delay threshold restically, but you can give yourself a challenge that way.

[thewood1]

For those who want it, this can be remedied for subs. Make them a different side. Use missions and lua to get periodic updates or comms. You do similar things for ships and even airplanes, but it becomes complex in large scenarios. I have even experimented with delays and you can make it work. If it bothers you enough, you can build it into a scenario.

Also keep in mind a real commander has a staff coordinating orders, support, and logistics. You, in Command, don't. So there is nothing wrong with taking some leeway to balance it out.

[mikmykWS]

We know this but don't do it because a majority of players like driving subs and we have to make the game that's approachable to players who don't understand much about comms limitations and OODA. We do have to sell a game to a wide audience to fund all the neat things you do have. I hope you see that reality can't be the only thing that drives design decisions!

Speaking of. We're going to introduce a feature soon that will allow out of comms subs. We've been working heavily on comms related stuff. Stay tuned! I'm pretty sure this will do what you need.

Thanks

Mike

[BradOrbital]

Ooh, sounds good, interested to see!

[Dysta]

x2, finally the feature from FC is going to be back!

[MrOrange]

Forgive me: it didn't mean to be a free criticism for the sake of it.
The game is great and I love it.
I see that you're interested in customer feedback so much to open a poll, and I thought it could be a suggestion.

I'm kinda happy with the house rules I'm applying.

ORIGINAL: mikmyk

We know this but don't do it because a majority of players like driving subs and we have to make the game that's approachable to players who don't understand much about comms limitations and OODA. We do have to sell a game to a wide audience to fund all the neat things you do have. I hope you see that reality can't be the only thing that drives design decisions!

Speaking of. We're going to introduce a feature soon that will allow out of comms subs. We've been working heavily on comms related stuff. Stay tuned! I'm pretty sure this will do what you need.

Thanks

Mike

[kevinkins]

House rules are a time honored part of war gaming and most long time players use them to some degree. Gamers love to tinker and have been making their own "sand boxes" for years. Command is too new for me to attempt playing a scenario using my own rules. I would rather play scenarios through once at least as the designer intended. The type of game play MrOrange is mentioning may require specific accommodations in scenario design with specifics outlined in the briefings. The play balance of current scenarios might be affected if a player just dove in with their own side rules. That being said, perhaps scenarios can be designed where micro management of certain formations is frowned upon while being impossible to enforce. In another time and with another war game (ground) a entire genre sprang up called "Iron Man" rules.

[thewood1]

"perhaps scenarios can be designed where micro management of certain formations is frowned upon while being impossible to enforce."

Actually it can be enforced quite easily through good scenario design. Its through various sides. You can have an "infinite" number of sides with all different postures and missions. You can use events to permanently or temporarily move units from side to side. That gets done most of what is being talked about.

You can make it as easy as making one formation an allied side that shares info, but can't be accessed, all the way to taking points away for trying to modify a unit's orders. The first being so simple as to not require an events or lua and the second being more complicated with a lot of lua code.

[kevinkins]

Good points. I have been experimenting with those techniques. One thing (if I understand correctly), hard coded sides w/ lua scripts and missions do not allow the player to select the formations to micromanage at the start without using the editor. They need to accept the chain of command as designed or go in and change things. I was thinking in terms of a flexible rules set described via the briefings. Primarily for players who rather not edit scenarios. Players would police themselves based on the briefings.

[De Savage]

It is unrealistic, but like other said it would be boring to have realistic simulator. I would still love better comms, possible delay, jamming comss, etc.

How about you send your fighter to area by manual control. And find out that all comms are jammed and it's impossible to give direct commands. That would be cool.

[thewood1]

Yes you can...just set it up to switch sides once out of comms range on in jamming range. Its not exact, but its all at some level of abstraction anyway.

The short of it is, today, a scenario designer can set all of this up. So anyone who thinks its important enough, can start building scenarios.

I can tell you that I have set up test and personal scenarios using what is basically out of comms scenario building techniques. I hope people realize what they are asking for.

[magi]

ORIGINAL: mikmyk

We know this but don't do it because a majority of players like driving subs and we have to make the game that's approachable to players who don't understand much about comms limitations and OODA. We do have to sell a game to a wide audience to fund all the neat things you do have. I hope you see that reality can't be the only thing that drives design decisions!

Speaking of. We're going to introduce a feature soon that will allow out of comms subs. We've been working heavily on comms related stuff. Stay tuned! I'm pretty sure this will do what you need.

Thanks

Mike

i am very pleased to hear this.... you guys are the tops....

[Dysta]

Let's start from submarine first as mike is doing, see what it need to be adjusted before a full integration of communication to all unit types.

Like I said, many units and pilots are capable to perform pre-planned objectives within the authority. Imagine yourself is the unit's CO, you got to command your fellow with and without supervision. So realistic communication isn't really critical to me.

[Dimitris]

ORIGINAL: MrOrange
Do you imagine an Admiral, from his command center, picking up the radio and tell to a fighter pilot in the middle of a furball "son, break left, head on the aircraft on your left and shoot three missiles".

If you enable "Auto Evasion" at a unit's Doctrine settings, you will notice that when it is in the middle of evading an enemy or a weapon, it will actively ignore any course & speed orders you issue to it.

[AlGrant]

To answer the question "Is the direct control unrealistic?"

YES it is!
But only in the same manner that features like time compression and pause are unrealistic.
And although we have the option to run at 1:1 and never hit pause ..... I'm guessing few ever apply those restrictions to their own game play rules.

[thewood1]

But all that is good and holy, what the immersion! We have to have the immersion! I just knew sooner or later someone would bring that up so I saved them the effort.

[StellarRat]

I've thought about this very topic many times, what you are saying is true. There is way to "fix" it and you probably wouldn't like the results. One way is to run everything you don't have direct control over with an AI. That results in several problems. It could be boring for some players, an AI still isn't as good as a real human, and finally there is a lot of processing overhead if the AI is really good i.e. the game runs slowly. There is also the problem that MANY things should/would go unnoticed so you'd have to implement a very extensive "intelligence" system. Example: Say one of your subs is sunk; how would you know? Eventually you'd find out if it didn't report in at an expected interval, but you still have doubt for a long time.

The other option is a real command structure with "real" humans taking command of all the various assets that are independently controlled. How many people are you willing to assemble to run your war? Even a small scenario could take dozens. And you still have to insert some kind of communication "denial" system into the game to make it realistic.

Bottom line, it could become very cumbersome, un-fun, and impractical except for the most diehard gamers.