Movement in own territory, undo, FOW, and anti-cheat functionality

[Beethoven1]

The game does not allow players to undo moves into enemy territory (or next to enemy units where you could gain intelligence) or attacks. The reason for this is obvious and makes sense - undoing those things would violate fog of war.

However, the game DOES allow players to undo moves of the most recently moved unit which has only moved in your own territory, as long as it has not moved into enemy territory, next to enemy units, or attacked. This also makes perfect sense to me - if you have moved a unit but not done those things, then there is no violation of fog of war, and there is no real reason the player should not be able to undo this in a turn based game.


So, here is my question. What is the reasoning (if this functionality was consciously chosen as opposed to being an accident) in the game design for not making it possible to undo the movement of ANY unit (not just the most recently moved unit), as long as it has not done anything to violate fog of war such as making an attack, moving into enemy territory/flipped hexes, or moving next to enemy units to gain intelligence on the identity/CV of enemy units?

I don't see why players should not be able to undo those moves which are purely within the players own territory, regardless of whether it happens to be the most recently moved unit or a unit that was moved earlier in the turn. The effect of making it only possible to undo the most recent move is to make the ORDER in which you move units matter, and sometimes it can matter quite a lot.

If the game were a real time game rather than a turn based game, the player could constantly adjust their front line. But with it being a turn based game, and only being able to undo the most recently moved unit, the player has no ability to make these sorts of minor adjustments that in reality commanders would have made in continuous time all the time.

This "order matters" aspect is problematic with regular unit movement, but it can be especially problematic with movement by rail and SMP, because of the way that SMP movement costs change after you move a unit by rail. At the beginning of a turn, you may check if you have enough SMP to move and unload units to a particular railyard. But as soon as you move a single unit by rail, that instantly CHANGES during the middle of the turn the movement costs for moving a second (and third) unit to the railyard and unloading it. If you want to move two units to e.g. Smolensk, it can be the case that you have enough SMP to move both of them if you move Unit A first and then Unit B second, but NOT if you move (and this can also involve Unit C and Unit D as well).

This is an issue in general, but it is especially an issue for Soviets in the early turns, where getting a good defensive deployment depends on railing in and unloading as many units as possible to key railyards like Smolensk, Velikie Luki, Pskov, etc.


So I would suggest that the "undo" functionality be changed, so that if you click on any unit that has not done any movements that would violate fog of war, clicking the undo button will restore that units position to where it was in the beginning of the turn.

This would be a very good QOL improvement, because it would mean that when you are setting up a defense, if you want to do it properly you don't have to spend an excess amount of time carefully looking at all the MP of all of your units to figure out which units have enough MP to go where. Whereas with the current situation, the player has a choice of either jumping right in and start moving units, in which case it may turn out that after a few moves they realize that they really need to put a unit on one particular hex, but they have already moved the only unit that could go there. Or alternatively, the player can spend a lot of time checking the MP of all their units and where they can move to before moving any units, making the turns take longer for no gameplay gain.

Of course, if you are playing single player or PBEM, you can always reload a previous save (however, that takes a while and is a waste of time relative to being able to undo non-FOW violating moves that should be legitimate to undo). But for server games, you can't, because of the anti-cheat functionality (threatening e-mail) that is meant to prevent players from re-doing things that violate FOW.


Relatedly, an alternative (and more reliable) way to achieve the anti-cheat goal of server games could be to have an "ironman" game option that autosaves just the move and/or battle result immediately after a player makes a hostile move/attack any time that a player does a hex-flipping move or attack. And this would be better, because it could apply as an option to single player games and to PBEM, so that those could have true anti-cheat functionality as well. Many other games have an "ironman" mode/option that does this, so perhaps WITE2 could as well? Personally I would be happy to player either PBEM or server games with that option, but currently I prefer PBEM to server games partly because I like to be able to reload saves from earlier turns, but also partly because I think it is legitimate to reload if the reload is to correct a misclick or for moves in your own territory. Personally I would always rather play against a human opponent than the AI, but I am sure there are also players who would like to play single player with an ironman option.

Another suggestion that would make me a lot happier with playing server games would be if saves could be downloaded from the server for reference, screenshots, and analysis after a turn is complete. It could be set up so that you could download copies of a turn's safe only immediately AFTER (or simultaneously) with clicking the button to submit the completed turn, which would then download a beginning-of-turn save and also an end-of-turn save.

If this were possible, then what I would do when playing server games is submit my turn when I am done with my moves/attacks so that my opponent could start on their turn, and select the option to download the single player beginning of turn/end-of-turn saves. Then I would take screenshots (and in the meantime my opponent could start doing their turn).

But with how it is set up now, on server games, if you are doing an AAR you have to take all your screenshots and write your AAR before submitting a turn, so your opponent can't start on the next turn if you are still working on your AAR. This can make server games take longer than they should and force your opponent to wait, at least if players are doing AARs.



So what do other players think of this?

1) Do you agree with me that it is legitimate to be able to undo non-FOW violating moves, and if so can the undo functionality be changed to better allow that?
2) Is there any prospect of adding an iron-man mode to better fulfill the anti-cheat purpose that players like about server games?
3) Is there any prospect of adding an option to download beginning-of-turn and end-of-turn saves when you submit a turn in server games?

Currently I somewhat prefer PBEM games to server games because of these issues, but if they issues were addressed I would be just as happy to player server games (or PBEM), since both could have the best advantages of each.

[AlbertN]

The AAR business I fully agree with. Or at least to 'view' the online save that you uploaded last without being able to touch it - and without being updated with the enemy turn yet. (But yes it's better to be able to save it)

[Rosencrantus]

1) This sounds pretty neat, but something that will take a lot of resources to do most likely. I don't know how the code works in this game but I'm willing to bet that only one move can be undone is because the game only saves the position of the previous move made. Being able to undo any non FOW violating unit requires for every single unit's position to be accounted for and that may be a lot of work when there are more pressing issues with the game right now.

2) Turns are going to be a lot slower if every move against the enemy the game has to be saved

3) This is probably doable, though if you have the save for offline use then you can easily just perform suicide recon moves with your units to find out where the opponent may place their units next turn/ give you insight that you otherwise wouldn't have if you weren't able to scout without consequences.

[Beethoven1]

ORIGINAL: Rosencrantus

1) This sounds pretty neat, but something that will take a lot of resources to do most likely. I don't know how the code works in this game but I'm willing to bet that only one move can be undone is because the game only saves the position of the previous move made. Being able to undo any non FOW violating unit requires for every single unit's position to be accounted for and that may be a lot of work when there are more pressing issues with the game right now.

2) Turns are going to be a lot slower if every move against the enemy the game has to be saved

In principle it should not require re-saving much data, so it should take just a teeny fraction of a second to update after each move if it were done right. The only data that would need to be updated is the location for each unit ID#, along with the basic stats for the unit such as its TOE, fatigue, etc, along with keeping a record of the unit's position at the start of the turn (which would be in the start of turn save file in any case). The record of updated location/TOE/etc could be perhaps updated into a temporary turn log, and then when the turn is finally ended for real, then everything in the temporary turn log gets written into the regular save. But that is just in theory, in practice it probably depends on how the code is written for the game.

3) This is probably doable, though if you have the save for offline use then you can easily just perform suicide recon moves with your units to find out where the opponent may place their units next turn/ give you insight that you otherwise wouldn't have if you weren't able to scout without consequences.

Good point, maybe all movement points could get set to 0, or probably better yet make it so the MP are still visible, but you just can't actually move any units (or else just can't move them into enemy territory would be even better).