Eastern Front WWII DevBlog

[BletchleyGeek]

Cheers, bcgames.

There's another way: which probably St Ruth won't love. Allowing units to break down [:)]

Now I understand what you meant - indeed, there's a lot of friction involved in rotating your combat units. This friction is both part of the mechanics - it actually takes time as in consuming game turns - and also of the meta - how much does the UI help with this. Perhaps having the ability to "filter out" units of other formations could help to navigate the mess.

Or also having the ability to "disband" temporally a unit (and having it reappear say on the Division HQ hex or whereabouts) could help (as the "disbanded" unit is no longer on the map capable of doing something useful).

Or perhaps players need to accept delays in following up attacks to avoid chaos. The latter is also part of the operational puzzle: there are so many roads and so many covered avenues of approach, trying to get several regiments march along the same route isn't going to be pretty.

You already lowered the scale to what I guess is the minimum so you guys don't need to model direct fire weapons... so I don't know. Playtest is indeed the only way to see what works and what doesn't.

With the divisions, the game looks a lot like something halfway between Dean Essig's OCS and BCS. Perhaps the problem with over concentrating combat power could be ameliorated by having "SNAFU" rules too, which would account for the chaos

[bcgames]

Once again, great feedback! Thanks!

We'll need to chew on all this a bit.

Onwards!

[Saint Ruth]

I'll have a look! Not promising anything, but I'll see how much work it is! [8D]

[bcgames]

Today I submitted my final input for the Desert War patch. I think folks are going to like it. The AI is more aggressive and there's a bit of player-requested chrome that makes the game look that much better.

Now, on to the next game--Monty's Front. As the working title implies, this will have something to do with General Montgomery in WWII circa 1944...a connection between MARKET_GARDEN and The Battle for the Schedlt.

But WAIT! What about The Eastern Front game!!?? Well.. It is now The Main Effort for development and it's being designed with the game-after-next in mind. One has to think about that--right now. Monty's Front...

So what's happening with The Eastern Front?

Saint Ruth is looking at the "Unit Breakdown/Build-up" question, and I am finishing the ALPHA versions of the air, land, and naval graphics. In the map department, I've finished the 2500-meter per hex maps (dry, mud, frozen) for the base game, and started to experiment with a 250-meter per hex version of the city of Stalingrad. We'll see where this grows.

Next up, seasonal versions of the ground unit types to match the seasonal maps...

Onwards!

[bcgames]

This week I've been busy updating the game manual for Stalingrad. I've been through the design document a dozen times at least and see we have about 85-90% complete as far as new features/capabilities--Brian has delivered nicely! We've added a few tweaks to the list to get things up to snuff:

* Create Hotkey to toggle airfield/depot ranges on/off
* Create an asset re-use capability for ground and air assets as is done with naval assets.
* Create an AI build/destroy bridge command.
* Create capability to click on unit is OB display to view unit's details.

We'll see how it goes.

Onwards!