Reinforcement schedule - too accurate?

[jungelsj_slith]

Is the reinforcement schedule a bit unrealistic in that it's very accurate? I understand that realism isn't always the deciding factor for a game feature, but in this case I think it gives a heavy advantage to players over the historic, real life commanders.

Take Arnhem, for example - the British commanders expected reinforcements as soon as a couple days into the engagement - and planned their actions accordingly. We as players, on the other hand, (also with the benefit of hindsight) see exactly when and where reinforcements will be coming - definately not within a couple of days!

What about the German commanders? Ad-hoc reinforcements were being thrown together almost constantly, so it would seem strange that I can see five days into the future (for reinforcements) within a couple of hours of accuracy - positions of arrival, too. That said, I can nearly plan my entire battle five days in advance - something that the real German commanders definately could not do!

Perhaps some reinforcements should be left as a 'surprise'? I may see that I no longer have any reinforcements planned, and then be pleasantly surprised on day three to see the arrival of a new Battlegroup, etc. Other things that could be done - only list planned reinforcements, and give PLANNED arrival dates, not actual arrival dates. Polish drop on day 2, XXX corp arrival on day 3, etc. Add a bit more randomness to it - so that the "historian" types who know all the dates won't have such an advantage over their historic counter-part generals?

Any thoughts?

[Arjuna]

molotov_billy,

True in the historical scenarios reinforcements usually only hava small "window of arrival" - ie from the earliest possible arrival to the latest. In some case it's an exact time. Well after all these are supposed to be "historical" and I'm sure we'd dissappoint a lot of players if we did otherwise. However, in the "what-if" campaigns and scenarios reinforcements often have a very wide "window of arrival" - up to days in some cases. So if this is to your liking, I recommend you try these.

One of aspect of reinforcement arrival that we want to enhance in later games is to provide the scenario designer with the ability to link one reinforcement to another. That would then allow us to set one reinforcement event as the "lead" and then have a series of others following on. So then we could have vanguard of 30th Corps with a wide window of arrival and just link the rest of 30th Corps to this. That would give us alot more scope for the sort of thing you are talking about.

[jungelsj_slith]

You're right, people would be upset if the actual historical times were changed. However, I think what I'm trying to focus on here is that the game gives possibly too much info on their actual arrival times rather than their planned arrival times. True, some people would know the historical times, so it wouldn't matter, but I assume that not everybody knows the historical reinforcement schedule

So as an example - in the Arnhem historical campaign, in the reinforcements window the player would see that the polish drop was on day 2, and XXX corp arrival was on day 3. (Excuse me if those dates are incorrect) HOWEVER, the actual reinforcements would arrive much much later, as they do now. We just wouldnt have perfect information detailing when (and in some cases, where) they would be arriving - after all, the actual commanders on the ground did not know, once the plan went all to hell.

[EricGuitarJames]

One solution would be to go into the scenario editor and create a new version of the 'Historical' campaign with extended windows of arrival. I know when I was playing the 'old' AA, knowing exactly where and more or less when the British reinforcements would be arriving made playing as the Germans somewhat easier than I would have preferred.

[Mr. Personality]

I had thought about the issue of reinforcement schedules myself. In order to add a small element of surprise, I've tried to look only briefly at the reinforcement schedule, and even then I try to look at just the days as opposed to the specific times.

One possibility of preserving the historical uncertainty would be adding yet another user setting at the start of each game. Choosing the highly realistic setting would mean the game giving the player the largest windows of arrival, and perhaps some units would show up even later than the end of their window. At the least realistic setting, the windows would be relatively narrow with all units showing up somewhere during their window.

I share this idea, but I realize that the folks at Panther have no shortage of ideas, just a shortage of time to implement the ones they like!

[Arjuna]

ORIGINAL: Mr. Personality
I share this idea, but I realize that the folks at Panther have no shortage of ideas, just a shortage of time to implement the ones they like!

Too right there! [:)]

[EricGuitarJames]

Thinking about it, wouldn't it be feasible to link reinforcement schedules to the weather? I rarely play with 'historical' weather anyway just to add a bit of randomness. Looking ahead to BFTB and the crucial effect of the weather vis-a-vis Allied air superiority why not link the availability of air strikes too.

[jungelsj_slith]

I share this idea, but I realize that the folks at Panther have no shortage of ideas, just a shortage of time to implement the ones they like!

I realize that, too, but I also realize that these forums would be pretty dead if we didn't discuss ideas

We're actually not discussing any new ideas here, just the modification of a current feature. Just wondering if anyone else has the same thoughts on the issue.

You never know, though.. it's kind of silly to assume that a small team has already come up with every idea under the sun. I'm a developer myself, and once in a while we'll get a great idea from our discussion forums. That, and it's just a fun place to talk about the game and what others think of existing features.

[Golf33]

We get lots of ideas from these forums - we maintain an active wish list here and periodically review it to see what we can bring forward into a game under development.

Regards
33

[Arjuna]

Yes, keep 'em coming guys. All good ideas and constructive discussions are most welcome. We certainly don't pretend to have a monopoly on good ideas.

Re linking arrival to weather. yes that would be good too, but this requires either hard coding in the game app or conditional linking and/or scripts in the ScenMaker. I'm loathe to hard code things like this in the game app. Adding conditional scripting into the SM is on the wish list but unless someone can clone myself and Paul I can't see it getting up just yet. Hey I hear that medical breakthroughs are occuring daily, so you never know! [;)]