Curious if the "hex" will ever be retired.

[MengCiao]

ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980

ORIGINAL: MengCiao

I think you could coarse-gain the terrain and fine-grain the other
coordinates.

And wouldn't one simple tensor-transformation take care of all
the planetary curvature vector problems? As long as you only use less than 1/2 the sphere?

I think it could be done...ie you could get rid of hexes and still have
a game that would run on a PC. It would have to be a completely different game engine obviously and restructuring everything to take
advantage of the non-hex world would be as much trouble as juggling
the coordinates all the time.

Kind of lost me there, I'm afraid. That takes care of the distance measuring problems and routing (i.e. Great Circle type stuff), but you still have the problem of "normalization" of combat data to deal with. Hexes are great "normalizers" (see the Mandalay example above). At what level of resolution are "stacked" combat units considered to all be in range to engage in ground combat in a coordinated fashion? You still must able to abstract your locations into a single cohesive geo-object to encapsulate or "point to" your combat resolutions, and their associated game object.

Oh it can be done. Look at the HTTR games. One thing that has to happen though is that command structures have to be very "active"
in terms of what determines what happens when in the game.

This can increase the realism while increasing the frustration of players
who haven't been exposed to a certain level of realism in terms of the narrative and/or experience in command and control. Basically the battle
becomes a series of things going wrong all over and if you get behind the curve
only your artillery will save you.

On the other hand...if you get a handle on it...many happy accidents come your way and many a sullen jerry surrenders at the bottom of a little valley when your tanks roll into view. That's in HTTR.

In a naval environment this might just be too horrible. Plenty of times you'd have to watch helplessly as some of your forces did one dumb thing
after another.

The other option would be...you just don't see it. The players map could be very different from the "Reality Map"...and you'd only get full (if garbled) reports from survivors and only the occasional message fragment from the victims. If you had multiple players on a side, the Army player might not even be told by the Navy player just how bad the last disaster was....

Very disturbing. Might be fun though.

[ZOOMIE1980]

ORIGINAL: MengCiao

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag

ORIGINAL: MengCiao



I'm sure we can make a game. What do you want in it that would be
diffferent due to having no hexes?

One thing (judging by HTTR)...you'll be able to zoom in and out.

Another...the AI will have to have hierarchical routines and these will
blend at some level with the ordinary TF and ship routines...as in "I drive
10 miles and check the radar...I see something...what next?"

I guess with no hexes you still need absolute time of some kind.

Yep, if you are getting rid of hexes, you might as well put *time* into the game. Who said it had to be turn based instead of event based ... game runs until event requires input ... you enter the input ... it continues to run ...

Heres where scripting comes into play for the engine ...

You script the conditions and responses that you want the interupts to happen.

TF reaches destination, TF encounters enemy, etc ...

You could script what happens ... if destination = true, unload then return to home port.

if enemy spotted, close range then stop with sighting report. wait for attack or shadow or flee order.

Right...but "Time" in a war game means some way of setting conditions where some other routine can intervene and change things...and this means the AI...but in the case we're describing the "AI" runs everything all the time by default unless there's some human intervention....so you sort of still need something like a turn especially if you're doing PBEM or
head-to-head.

Not really. This is where a client-server architecture comes into play. The AI is running on the invisible server component and the TCPIP clients are displaying the results and capturing human input, passing it to the server component. Only problem you may have is hot-seat using the same computer.

But I still don't know how you model something like the land-mass of China or Australia in such a "hexless" system. What's your lat-long resolution. What "entity" encapsulates the coastline of Australia? A list of lat-long coords?

[Mr.Frag]

Thats why it was always called the good old Mark 20 ... normal ship of the times, based on the mast height, you could see 20 miles with your eyes.

Probably also one of the reasons that naval guns never really got any bigger. Once you got past 20 miles of range, you couldn't spot the fall of shots therefore you couldn't adjust your aim so you were shooting completely blind.

Also another reason why ships engaged each other solo in lines ... with multiple ships shooting at one target, the target had the advantage as it was confusing as to which shooting ship needed to adjust it's aim because they didn't know which firing ship was causing the splashes ... number one reason that Beatie really screwed the pooch at Jutland.

[MengCiao]

ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980

ORIGINAL: MengCiao

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag



Yep, if you are getting rid of hexes, you might as well put *time* into the game. Who said it had to be turn based instead of event based ... game runs until event requires input ... you enter the input ... it continues to run ...

Heres where scripting comes into play for the engine ...

You script the conditions and responses that you want the interupts to happen.

TF reaches destination, TF encounters enemy, etc ...

You could script what happens ... if destination = true, unload then return to home port.

if enemy spotted, close range then stop with sighting report. wait for attack or shadow or flee order.

Right...but "Time" in a war game means some way of setting conditions where some other routine can intervene and change things...and this means the AI...but in the case we're describing the "AI" runs everything all the time by default unless there's some human intervention....so you sort of still need something like a turn especially if you're doing PBEM or
head-to-head.

Not really. This is where a client-server architecture comes into play. The AI is running on the invisible server component and the TCPIP clients are displaying the results and capturing human input, passing it to the server component. Only problem you may have is hot-seat using the same computer.

But I still don't know how you model something like the land-mass of China or Australia in such a "hexless" system. What's your lat-long resolution. What "entity" encapsulates the coastline of Australia? A list of lat-long coords?

I think you'd need a coarser entity to do terrain. In HTTR, for example,
you have to run maps through various path-checking routines and define ambigous things such as bridges and roads.

You might have to have two scales built into the game: One a sort of geopolitical, command structure map where things like countries and coastlines and railraods are defined it would map to a different map with
things like aircraft flights and barrels of figs floating around.

[ZOOMIE1980]

ORIGINAL: MengCiao

ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980

ORIGINAL: MengCiao

I think you could coarse-gain the terrain and fine-grain the other
coordinates.

And wouldn't one simple tensor-transformation take care of all
the planetary curvature vector problems? As long as you only use less than 1/2 the sphere?

I think it could be done...ie you could get rid of hexes and still have
a game that would run on a PC. It would have to be a completely different game engine obviously and restructuring everything to take
advantage of the non-hex world would be as much trouble as juggling
the coordinates all the time.

Kind of lost me there, I'm afraid. That takes care of the distance measuring problems and routing (i.e. Great Circle type stuff), but you still have the problem of "normalization" of combat data to deal with. Hexes are great "normalizers" (see the Mandalay example above). At what level of resolution are "stacked" combat units considered to all be in range to engage in ground combat in a coordinated fashion? You still must able to abstract your locations into a single cohesive geo-object to encapsulate or "point to" your combat resolutions, and their associated game object.

Oh it can be done. Look at the HTTR games. One thing that has to happen though is that command structures have to be very "active"
in terms of what determines what happens when in the game.

This can increase the realism while increasing the frustration of players
who haven't been exposed to a certain level of realism in terms of the narrative and/or experience in command and control. Basically the battle
becomes a series of things going wrong all over and if you get behind the curve
only your artillery will save you.

On the other hand...if you get a handle on it...many happy accidents come your way and many a sullen jerry surrenders at the bottom of a little valley when your tanks roll into view. That's in HTTR.

In a naval environment this might just be too horrible. Plenty of times you'd have to watch helplessly as some of your forces did one dumb thing
after another.

The other option would be...you just don't see it. The players map could be very different from the "Reality Map"...and you'd only get full (if garbled) reports from survivors and only the occasional message fragment from the victims. If you had multiple players on a side, the Army player might not even be told by the Navy player just how bad the last disaster was....

Very disturbing. Might be fun though.

Guess I'm not askig the right question, or the asking the question the wrong way. Using a lat-long, hexless, model, how the system know that a destination is invalid, i.e. I've told my TF to head to the center of Australia or I've just given it a vector and through neglegence, forgotten about it, and it runs into Australia. How does it know to beach itself and stop? In a traditional game, all the Australian hexes are land terrain hexes. How does the system "know" 30.5S, 120.1E is in the middle of a big landmass and thus, invalid as a destination or a course plot? Some "object" has to have knowledge of geo-data that is known to other objects.

[kaleun]

IIRC some ships had colourde dyes in their shell to be able to tell which splash came from which ship (I'd hate to be the one assigned pink[:D])
BTW forgive my ignorance, HTTR?[&:]

[MengCiao]

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag

Thats why it was always called the good old Mark 20 ... normal ship of the times, based on the mast height, you could see 20 miles with your eyes.

Probably also one of the reasons that naval guns never really got any bigger. Once you got past 20 miles of range, you couldn't spot the fall of shots therefore you couldn't adjust your aim so you were shooting completely blind.

Also another reason why ships engaged each other solo in lines ... with multiple ships shooting at one target, the target had the advantage as it was confusing as to which shooting ship needed to adjust it's aim because they didn't know which firing ship was causing the splashes ... number one reason that Beatie really screwed the pooch at Jutland.

I know what you mean. You mean the fire-distribution. Actually Beatie did exactly what he was supposed to do at Jutland: lead the High Seas fleet into a trap where the Grand Fleet could cross their T and blast them.
Two big things went wrong for Beattie: the Brit propellant was excessively prone to catastrophic explosions (that's 2 of his BC down the drain)
and he didn't indoctrinate Evan-Thomas on Battlecruiser Fleet doctrine...
so Evan-Thomas went by the book and almost lost Warspite et ali whilst engaging the High Seas Fleet with his 5th Battle Squadron alone while
waiting for signals from Beattie.

[barbarrossa]

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag

You're talking about a 3D layout where virtually every pixel is a game object. YOu are talking about a tremendous amount of static data for just a terrain map. And most game objects would occupy many map elements greatly complicating computations for terrain impact. I imagine the abstraction one gets with hexes is so useful as to be around a quite a while yet. Even RTS games use hexes or rectangles for location abstractions.

I always chuckled a that ... even Harpoon which used vector based math for *everything* could not deal with the fact the world is not flat. Perhaps your game can be the first eh? [:D]

One of the things that always ticked me off ... naval sighting is completely subject to the curvature of the earth. Radar is subject to the curvature of the earth. Even to this day, one takes a SPY-1 system ... it has a maximum range of about 40 miles and that is the best there is made by man.

Then people complain that two old WW2 ships pass by each other unseen [:D]

Sorry, I'll have to disagree with you on the SPY 1 stuff, Frag. Maybe you mean the illuminators (I don't think they are used on SPY 1B, though. Patriot didn't have an "illuminator" per se either, just another horn in the array.)

Mk 13 Radar, main battery FC on the Iowa BB's in th '80's had a max range of 80,000 yds.

AN/SPG 55B had a maximum tracking range of 300,000 yds. And it was an FC radar that got its start in the '60s. I think the conversion of yards to miles greatly exceeds 40. Doctrine was if we hadn't engaged a target inbound at 40,000 yds we were in deep doo-doo[:)]

I'll wager SPY 1 goes quite a bit farther.

[Mr.Frag]

You'd probably need about 1/100th of a degree resolution. Divide the world up into quads. Standard way of handing the world in GIS systems.

Given any point in space, you quad around it to see what happens to be within it's range of motion/action then resolve for that area. During that action, the rest of the world is completely ignored as it has no possibility of affecting the outcome.

Think like this:

You are in an alley and set upon by a thug ... on the ground within reach is a piece of lead pipe. You can pick it up and use it or you can run away. That defines the area of action and the possibilities. You do not have to compute what the police car around the corner is doing because it is not part of the action. Until you leave the area of action and enter into range of the police car, it plays no part in the results so the computation is (a) you ran away, (b) you die, (c) you picked up the pipe and clubbed the thug or (d) the thug picked up the pipe first leading you to (a) or (b) since (c) was removed as a option.

All you as the command can do is order the police car to look in the alley [;)] (a-d) are outside your control.

[MengCiao]

ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980

ORIGINAL: MengCiao

ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980



Kind of lost me there, I'm afraid. That takes care of the distance measuring problems and routing (i.e. Great Circle type stuff), but you still have the problem of "normalization" of combat data to deal with. Hexes are great "normalizers" (see the Mandalay example above). At what level of resolution are "stacked" combat units considered to all be in range to engage in ground combat in a coordinated fashion? You still must able to abstract your locations into a single cohesive geo-object to encapsulate or "point to" your combat resolutions, and their associated game object.

Oh it can be done. Look at the HTTR games. One thing that has to happen though is that command structures have to be very "active"
in terms of what determines what happens when in the game.

This can increase the realism while increasing the frustration of players
who haven't been exposed to a certain level of realism in terms of the narrative and/or experience in command and control. Basically the battle
becomes a series of things going wrong all over and if you get behind the curve
only your artillery will save you.

On the other hand...if you get a handle on it...many happy accidents come your way and many a sullen jerry surrenders at the bottom of a little valley when your tanks roll into view. That's in HTTR.

In a naval environment this might just be too horrible. Plenty of times you'd have to watch helplessly as some of your forces did one dumb thing
after another.

The other option would be...you just don't see it. The players map could be very different from the "Reality Map"...and you'd only get full (if garbled) reports from survivors and only the occasional message fragment from the victims. If you had multiple players on a side, the Army player might not even be told by the Navy player just how bad the last disaster was....

Very disturbing. Might be fun though.

Guess I'm not askig the right question, or the asking the question the wrong way. Using a lat-long, hexless, model, how the system know that a destination is invalid, i.e. I've told my TF to head to the center of Australia or I've just given it a vector and through neglegence, forgotten about it, and it runs into Australia. How does it know to beach itself and stop? In a traditional game, all the Australian hexes are land terrain hexes. How does the system "know" 30.5S, 120.1E is in the middle of a big landmass and thus, invalid as a destination or a course plot? Some "object" has to have knowledge of geo-data that is known to other objects.

Yes, this is a big problem. HTTR has routines to remove ambiguities from the map, but that's in 30 by 50 km areas. As I noted elsewhere in the thread, you'd need a separate geoplitical map to define lots of stuff like coastlines and islands and so on.

[ZOOMIE1980]

ORIGINAL: MengCiao

ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980

ORIGINAL: MengCiao



Right...but "Time" in a war game means some way of setting conditions where some other routine can intervene and change things...and this means the AI...but in the case we're describing the "AI" runs everything all the time by default unless there's some human intervention....so you sort of still need something like a turn especially if you're doing PBEM or
head-to-head.

Not really. This is where a client-server architecture comes into play. The AI is running on the invisible server component and the TCPIP clients are displaying the results and capturing human input, passing it to the server component. Only problem you may have is hot-seat using the same computer.

But I still don't know how you model something like the land-mass of China or Australia in such a "hexless" system. What's your lat-long resolution. What "entity" encapsulates the coastline of Australia? A list of lat-long coords?

I think you'd need a coarser entity to do terrain. In HTTR, for example,
you have to run maps through various path-checking routines and define ambigous things such as bridges and roads.

You might have to have two scales built into the game: One a sort of geopolitical, command structure map where things like countries and coastlines and railraods are defined it would map to a different map with
things like aircraft flights and barrels of figs floating around.

OK, I think I'm beginning to get an idea of what you are talking about. The "terrain map" in this case, could be quite a wide variety of generic containers, probably a hash-map structure of terrain objects or even a set of nested containers, to be used by pathing/route algoritms to determine validity or something that a vector driven interface could consult from time to time for sanity checks....

[Mr.Frag]

Sorry, I'll have to disagree with you on the SPY 1 stuff, Frag. Maybe you mean the illuminators (I don't think they are used on SPY 1B, though. Patriot didn't have an "illuminator" per se either, just another horn in the array.)

Mk 13 Radar, main battery FC on the Iowa BB's in th '80's had a max range of 80,000 yds.

AN/SPG 55B had a maximum tracking range of 300,000 yds. And it was an FC radar that got its start in the '60s. I think the conversion of yards to miles greatly exceeds 40. I'll wager SPY 1 goes quite a bit farther.

Don't confuse *slant* range with range at sea level.

The SPY system is great at nailing inbound missiles at high altitudes because it can see them. Think it is good to about 150 miles solo without any airborne help.

Against surface targets and cruise missiles the horizon of the earth interferes and dramatically alters it's range abilities.

the Patriot is another good example. Against cruise missiles, it is pretty much as useful as a guy with a rifle. Against high flying balistic missiles, it is much more effective. You will notice they *always* back up a Patriot with a Hawk or Rapier battery to catch them skimmers [;)]

This is one of the reasons that AWACs is generally the *only* active radar system. It flies up high and can see out hundred of miles due to it's altitude. Everyone else remains quiet until there is no point to being quiet.

[MengCiao]

ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980

ORIGINAL: MengCiao

ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980



Not really. This is where a client-server architecture comes into play. The AI is running on the invisible server component and the TCPIP clients are displaying the results and capturing human input, passing it to the server component. Only problem you may have is hot-seat using the same computer.

But I still don't know how you model something like the land-mass of China or Australia in such a "hexless" system. What's your lat-long resolution. What "entity" encapsulates the coastline of Australia? A list of lat-long coords?

I think you'd need a coarser entity to do terrain. In HTTR, for example,
you have to run maps through various path-checking routines and define ambigous things such as bridges and roads.

You might have to have two scales built into the game: One a sort of geopolitical, command structure map where things like countries and coastlines and railraods are defined it would map to a different map with
things like aircraft flights and barrels of figs floating around.

OK, I think I'm beginning to get an idea of what you are talking about. The "terrain map" in this case, could be quite a wide variety of generic containers, probably a hash-map structure of terrain objects or even a set of nested containers, to be used by pathing/route algoritms to determine validity or something that a vector driven interface could consult from time to time for sanity checks....

And a basic question is: what would this give you? Zooming...an AI that could give you a hard time because for example if you constantly signal changes of plan you ought to be giving sigint to the AI and all objects in the game will have to use aspects of the AI system just to decide what to do next since changes of state could happen any time (for example when do subs submerge? When are strikes assembled?)...the finer-grained time gives the AI more advantages I think...judging by playing HTTR....and in a naval context the AI should have even more advantages in a finer-grained system. You will not know the exact range at an exact instant and it will.

[barbarrossa]

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag

Sorry, I'll have to disagree with you on the SPY 1 stuff, Frag. Maybe you mean the illuminators (I don't think they are used on SPY 1B, though. Patriot didn't have an "illuminator" per se either, just another horn in the array.)

Mk 13 Radar, main battery FC on the Iowa BB's in th '80's had a max range of 80,000 yds.

AN/SPG 55B had a maximum tracking range of 300,000 yds. And it was an FC radar that got its start in the '60s. I think the conversion of yards to miles greatly exceeds 40. I'll wager SPY 1 goes quite a bit farther.

Don't confuse *slant* range with range at sea level.

The SPY system is great at nailing inbound missiles at high altitudes because it can see them. Think it is good to about 150 miles solo without any airborne help.

Against surface targets and cruise missiles the horizon of the earth interferes and dramatically alters it's range abilities.

the Patriot is another good example. Against cruise missiles, it is pretty much as useful as a guy with a rifle. Against high flying balistic missiles, it is much more effective. You will notice they *always* back up a Patriot with a Hawk or Rapier battery to catch them skimmers [;)]

This is one of the reasons that AWACs is generally the *only* active radar system. It flies up high and can see out hundred of miles due to it's altitude. Everyone else remains quiet until there is no point to being quiet.

Well, I was a Patriot tech too[:)] there are no Hawk units assigned to us to back us up. No Hawk units at all at FT Bliss (home of ADA), it's not even an MOS anymore. Rapier? Never heard of it, must not be US.

Most ASM's are sea skimmers, why have your best radar so limited against your greatest threat? I don't buy it, because I've done it.[:)]

[ZOOMIE1980]

And AWACS is and Air Search/Control system, not a surface search system. Modern Fleet tactics these days is CAP tries to get the bombers before they release the ALCMs, the F-18's try and take out ships that may launch them before they get to. And your own cruise missle launchers try the same. Get them before they launch. Once launched they use things like Phoenix on the F-14s to shoot the cruise missles down before they reach skimming altitude and close. Once there, things get pretty pointless for the Tomcats and Hornets, they may be able to get one at a time because again, they are back to line-of-sight by now. The picket ship fire control radar systems are still pretty much LOS weapons with limited 30 mile or so ranges against surface skimming cruise missles. They may fire a short range SAM, but usually the best point defense weapon, even today, is the old "wall of lead" provide by Phallanx, coupled with jamming and spoofing....

[ZOOMIE1980]

ORIGINAL: barbarrossa

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag

Sorry, I'll have to disagree with you on the SPY 1 stuff, Frag. Maybe you mean the illuminators (I don't think they are used on SPY 1B, though. Patriot didn't have an "illuminator" per se either, just another horn in the array.)

Mk 13 Radar, main battery FC on the Iowa BB's in th '80's had a max range of 80,000 yds.

AN/SPG 55B had a maximum tracking range of 300,000 yds. And it was an FC radar that got its start in the '60s. I think the conversion of yards to miles greatly exceeds 40. I'll wager SPY 1 goes quite a bit farther.

Don't confuse *slant* range with range at sea level.

The SPY system is great at nailing inbound missiles at high altitudes because it can see them. Think it is good to about 150 miles solo without any airborne help.

Against surface targets and cruise missiles the horizon of the earth interferes and dramatically alters it's range abilities.

the Patriot is another good example. Against cruise missiles, it is pretty much as useful as a guy with a rifle. Against high flying balistic missiles, it is much more effective. You will notice they *always* back up a Patriot with a Hawk or Rapier battery to catch them skimmers [;)]

This is one of the reasons that AWACs is generally the *only* active radar system. It flies up high and can see out hundred of miles due to it's altitude. Everyone else remains quiet until there is no point to being quiet.

Well, I was a Patriot tech too[:)] there are no Hawk units assigned to us to back us up. No Hawk units at all at FT Bliss (home of ADA), it's not even an MOS anymore. Rapier? Never heard of it, must not be US.

Most ASM's are sea skimmers, why have your best radar so limited against your greatest threat? I don't buy it, because I've done it.[:)]

Rapier is a British millimeter wave radar enabled tactical SAM designed for close-in air defense. Patriot is more of a strategic SAM. If anything "backed you up" it was probably a gatlin gun/AAA system like Vulcan or something for "knife-fighting".

Naval SAMs are not really designed to shoot down sea-skimming cruise missles either. Their whole strategy is get the missle launchers BEFORE they have a chance to launch. Failing that, get the missles BEFORE they get down to altitude using SAMs and AMRAAMs and Phoenix's. Failing that, the point defense stuff takes over, basically Phallanx, jamming, and spoofing...

[MengCiao]

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag

You'd probably need about 1/100th of a degree resolution. Divide the world up into quads. Standard way of handing the world in GIS systems.

Given any point in space, you quad around it to see what happens to be within it's range of motion/action then resolve for that area. During that action, the rest of the world is completely ignored as it has no possibility of affecting the outcome.

Think like this:

You are in an alley and set upon by a thug ... on the ground within reach is a piece of lead pipe. You can pick it up and use it or you can run away. That defines the area of action and the possibilities. You do not have to compute what the police car around the corner is doing because it is not part of the action. Until you leave the area of action and enter into range of the police car, it plays no part in the results so the computation is (a) you ran away, (b) you die, (c) you picked up the pipe and clubbed the thug or (d) the thug picked up the pipe first leading you to (a) or (b) since (c) was removed as a option.

All you as the command can do is order the police car to look in the alley [;)] (a-d) are outside your control.

IF this is with reference to why command and control becomes a much
more integral part of a game without hexes...the problem doesn't occur so much at the thug-level of engagement, but at the say, brigade level.
In HTTR, you might have say an infanry brigade dug in to cover a road. OR at least that is what you ordered it to do. Now with space in meters, time passes in seconds and it may be quite some time before the brigade transmits orders (reflecting your order) to its battalions. Now the AI always keeps a reserve/rear area and puts the HQ and the support weapons in it. Notice that this means an AI routine defines a space in the proported rear of the deployment. No hex is involved, but the AI is.
Notice also that time is involved in many ways: it's going to take time to
reposition the support stuff, and time to dig them in.
Then let's suppose an battalion gets its order from brigade: the battalion also sets up a rear area with HQ, support and reserves. Finally, somebody (an infantry company, most likely) heads for what will be the front line...so after maybe an hour or two, somebody starts digging in to defend the road.

Now, no explicit hexes are defined, but there is a hierarchy of regions and activities and the passage of time.

Now, suppose an enemy inf unit comes into view on the road. Your boys stop digging and open fire and the mortar support opens up as well and the enemy generally at least detrucks and starts shooting back.

Anyway...that's my experience of war games without hexes: the AI is there everywhere and its propensities and projects define time and space in the game.

[barbarrossa]

ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980

And AWACS is and Air Search/Control system, not a surface search system. Modern Fleet tactics these days is CAP tries to get the bombers before they release the ALCMs, the F-18's try and take out ships that may launch them before they get to. And your own cruise missle launchers try the same. Get them before they launch. Once launched they use things like Phoenix on the F-14s to shoot the cruise missles down before they reach skimming altitude and close. Once there, things get pretty pointless for the Tomcats and Hornets, they may be able to get one at a time because again, they are back to line-of-sight by now. The picket ship fire control radar systems are still pretty much LOS weapons with limited 30 mile or so ranges against surface skimming cruise missles. They may fire a short range SAM, but usually the best point defense weapon, even today, is the old "wall of lead" provide by Phallanx, coupled with jamming and spoofing....

I'll just have to disagree with you guys and leave it at that. I'm only basing what I'm saying as first hand knowledge.

I've never heard of a/c engaging inbound missles. If you have a link to this information I'd like to see it, because it is a radical departure from what we did 12 to 13 years ago.

Not being mdeihl here[:D]

[Mr.Frag]

ORIGINAL: MengCiao

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag

You'd probably need about 1/100th of a degree resolution. Divide the world up into quads. Standard way of handing the world in GIS systems.

Given any point in space, you quad around it to see what happens to be within it's range of motion/action then resolve for that area. During that action, the rest of the world is completely ignored as it has no possibility of affecting the outcome.

Think like this:

You are in an alley and set upon by a thug ... on the ground within reach is a piece of lead pipe. You can pick it up and use it or you can run away. That defines the area of action and the possibilities. You do not have to compute what the police car around the corner is doing because it is not part of the action. Until you leave the area of action and enter into range of the police car, it plays no part in the results so the computation is (a) you ran away, (b) you die, (c) you picked up the pipe and clubbed the thug or (d) the thug picked up the pipe first leading you to (a) or (b) since (c) was removed as a option.

All you as the command can do is order the police car to look in the alley [;)] (a-d) are outside your control.

IF this is with reference to why command and control becomes a much
more integral part of a game without hexes...the problem doesn't occur so much at the thug-level of engagement, but at the say, brigade level.
In HTTR, you might have say an infanry brigade dug in to cover a road. OR at least that is what you ordered it to do. Now with space in meters, time passes in seconds and it may be quite some time before the brigade transmits orders (reflecting your order) to its battalions. Now the AI always keeps a reserve/rear area and puts the HQ and the support weapons in it. Notice that this means an AI routine defines a space in the proported rear of the deployment. No hex is involved, but the AI is.
Notice also that time is involved in many ways: it's going to take time to
reposition the support stuff, and time to dig them in.
Then let's suppose an battalion gets its order from brigade: the battalion also sets up a rear area with HQ, support and reserves. Finally, somebody (an infantry company, most likely) heads for what will be the front line...so after maybe an hour or two, somebody starts digging in to defend the road.

Now, no explicit hexes are defined, but there is a hierarchy of regions and activities and the passage of time.

Now, suppose an enemy inf unit comes into view on the road. Your boys stop digging and open fire and the mortar support opens up as well and the enemy generally at least detrucks and starts shooting back.

Anyway...that's my experience of war games without hexes: the AI is there everywhere and its propensities and projects define time and space in the game.

Agreed. HTTR/RDOA is quite a leap forward in gaming design. I was quite impressed with it.

What Harpoon II did to naval games, HTTR has done to land games.

Now all we need to to take both systems that both handle what they do best and merge those two methods together into one system.

[barbarrossa]

ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980

ORIGINAL: barbarrossa

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag



Don't confuse *slant* range with range at sea level.

The SPY system is great at nailing inbound missiles at high altitudes because it can see them. Think it is good to about 150 miles solo without any airborne help.

Against surface targets and cruise missiles the horizon of the earth interferes and dramatically alters it's range abilities.

the Patriot is another good example. Against cruise missiles, it is pretty much as useful as a guy with a rifle. Against high flying balistic missiles, it is much more effective. You will notice they *always* back up a Patriot with a Hawk or Rapier battery to catch them skimmers [;)]

This is one of the reasons that AWACs is generally the *only* active radar system. It flies up high and can see out hundred of miles due to it's altitude. Everyone else remains quiet until there is no point to being quiet.

Well, I was a Patriot tech too[:)] there are no Hawk units assigned to us to back us up. No Hawk units at all at FT Bliss (home of ADA), it's not even an MOS anymore. Rapier? Never heard of it, must not be US.

Most ASM's are sea skimmers, why have your best radar so limited against your greatest threat? I don't buy it, because I've done it.[:)]

Rapier is a British millimeter wave radar enabled tactical SAM designed for close-in air defense. Patriot is more of a strategic SAM. If anything "backed you up" it was probably a gatlin gun/AAA system like Vulcan or something for "knife-fighting".

Naval SAMs are not really designed to shoot down sea-skimming cruise missles either. Their whole strategy is get the missle launchers BEFORE they have a chance to launch. Failing that, get the missles BEFORE they get down to altitude using SAMs and AMRAAMs and Phoenix's. Failing that, the point defense stuff takes over, basically Phallanx, jamming, and spoofing...

Vulcan is way obsolete in US Army, there are a few sitting around the museums at Bliss. Maybe you want to say Stinger but that's line-of-sight.

Patriot is medium range, deployed in battalions of 4 batteries on the battlefield. There is nothing save maybe Avenger (stinger) or Bradley Linebacker as backup. But we never worked with them, nor were there any units assigned at Bliss. Just Patriot.

Saying naval SAMS aren't designed or intended to engage incoming ASM's sea-skimming or otherwise is just wrong man.[:)]