coralsaw wrote:Hello!
Love the game so far, I'm sure it's going to be a great series. Here's my major quibble with the system though, FWIW.
The scale of the map is 3KM per hex, yet I'm able to stack 4 regiments in one hex. This is one huge density, which most likely is not historical. I do understand that in reality there would be at least 1 regiment in reserve, but still the density seems awfully high. Am I off here?
Especially for those people that are interested in organisational aspects of WW2 warfare and in playing realistically in general, I would very much also prefer if both the AI and the player could optionally disallow stacking units from different divisions, since this was not common practice by far. An exception would be independent Tank brigades, AT support units etc. Could this be done in a patch or taken into consideration for the next game in the series?
I'd appreciate a comment from the designers, if at all possible. I'd love to see the system improved and I believe my suggestion would qualify as such.
/coralsaw
There are a number of fundamental questions in this, and your other thread, but I'll try to address them all.
Firstly, the AI. It has its hands full at the moment more or less coping with divisional integrity requirements. If you stop units from different divisions from stacking, or tie artillery units to specific formations, then it won't cope. It's the sort of thing that doesn't seem so hard at the start of a battle, but which can go to pieces after only a few turns, especially against sneaky human players.
Part of the problem is that we have been playing hex based games so long that we see and think in discrete hex based elements. Where we see a unit in a hex, we should instead think that the most important part of that unit was somewhere in the vicinity of a piece of ground that is represented in abstract by the hex.
As for the human players, we could impose any restriction that we wished. Displaying it intelligently though, is another matter. At the moment, if you select a unit its immediately clear where you can move to (and this is one of the real strengths of our interface). If you can't get somewhere it's because you don't have the MPs.
Now you would have differentiate between hexes you can get to, and those that you can reach, but aren't allowed to, and then those that you can't reach at all. All of a sudden, the simplicity is gone.
As it stands, divisional integrity is a powerful incentive to keep the regiments of a division in close contact. In the next game, divisional integrity will be variable by formation, so tactically poor units, like Russian Infantry divisions, will have stay very close to get the bonus.
This feature caused a lot of intra-company argument, and was only agreed to after we came up with a way to display divisional integrity on the map.
Gregor
