First impressions, first questions

[David Fisher]

hi,

I've just finished the two tutorials. I'm enjoying the game but I have a couple of queries.

1. In the second tutorial you have reinforcements that airdrop in. At first I started to give these reinforcements their orders as and when they arrived, following the tutorial instructions: 456th Artillery Bn to defend Molenhoek, 320th Arty Bn to defend Malden, and so on. I noticed that units seemed to attach themselves in unexpected ways. I mean that for example an artillery unit would appear to be part of 1.325th Glider Regiment HQ - organically a part of it. Then as other units arrived this would change. Am I right in thinking that a unit that airdrops in automatically treats the highest available unit as its superior, regardless of its organic setup? So that for example if the 325th HQ arrives first, companies and support units that arrive later will all seem to be part of it, until their own formations/superiors arrive? In the end I waited until everything had landed before giving orders, to make sure that units that were meant to be together stayed together. Is this how you should treat units that arrive piecemeal in this way?

2. The real-time aspect. I appreciate that it's not a clickfest -- orders delay plus good tactical AI plus a strong C&C element make sure of that. It's just -- I don't know, I get this uneasy sense as I look at one part of the battlefield that something important is going on somewhere else. That I'm missing something. Eg in tutorial 2 you have two quite separate "fronts": the one in the south around the LZ, and the one in the north around St Anna and you need to keep switching back and forth. It was pretty clear that the troops in the south were never going to be in much danger, but you never know... It was strange to look at the units' log files in that area and see that one of them had actually retreated at one point. Evidently they'd recovered and everything was OK again... but it was odd to think that they'd retreated, recovered and reoccupied their position, and I'd known nothing about it! On the one hand this is a tribute to the tactical AI. On the other hand -- I think I'd like to have known.

Currently you're told if one of your units is routing. I wonder if I wouldn't also like to be told about retreats too. I mean by the time they're routing it's too late! I've been playing a couple of other real time military games, naval ones -- Fleet Command and Harpoon. In Fleet Command you can set your preferences so that for example the game pauses whenever you make a new contact. Would that be overkill for a game like HttR? With contacts constantly fading in and out of view? In Harpoon you can create windows to let you keep an eye on what's going on in some distant part of the map. In tutorial 2, I'd have liked to be able to put the southern area into a window and dragged it up next to the St Anna area -- so I could keep an eye on both of them at the same time.

None of this is a game-killer for me. There's just this vague feeling that even running the game on slowest setting and pausing frequently, my focus is necessarily going to be on one particular area at a time, and I therefore need to pick and choose where that focus will be. I'm curious to know if other players have the same feeling, and if it ever becomes a gameplay issue for them.

cheers

David Fisher

[Arjuna]

David,

Welcome to HTTR.

Re Reinforcements. When these arrive they will first try and find their organic HQ. If it is not on-map they will go up the chain of command and attach themselves to the first superior that is on-map. Often in such cases they attach to the senior HQ or "on-map boss". If their organic boss comes on they will revert to being under its command provided you ( the player ) have not given them a direct order ( in which case they will remain under your direct command ).

Re. Focus. When we initially designed our Airborne Assault engine we had multiple map windows. But after much testing we got rid of this feature. Users generally favoured the single battlemap with stratmap. This is more realistic - RL commanders tend to focus on one sector at a time. You can navigate the battlemap pretty quickly ( using right drag to scroll, mouse pointer to map edge to pan, clicking on an a location in the stratmap to centre the battlemap, dragging the viewable area marquee within the stratmap, mouse wheel to zoom in and out ).

Re. customisable alerts. Good suggestion. I'll add that to the wish list. And it need to be able to be turned off during play as once your forces get heavily engaged you will be flooded with messages. [:)]

[Golf33]

Dave, ideally you could customise reports for each HQ - something to look at for when SOPs get introduced perhaps? Default to current behaviour but allow the user to specify no reports or all reports for that HQ. That way you can muzzle forces that you'll be watching closely, but still get warnings from your security outposts.

Cheers
Steve

[wodin]

ORIGINAL: David Fisher

None of this is a game-killer for me. There's just this vague feeling that even running the game on slowest setting and pausing frequently, my focus is necessarily going to be on one particular area at a time, and I therefore need to pick and choose where that focus will be. I'm curious to know if other players have the same feeling, and if it ever becomes a gameplay issue for them.

cheers

David Fisher

Your comment about reports would be a great Idea.

I bought the game and enjoyed the tutorials. Fllowing what to do in the book. When it came to actually playing the real secanrios I felt swamped dometimes. Reports would ave helped an awfull lot. It did become a gameplay problem for me. I stopped playing it and never went back due to the swamped feeling.

[Golf33]

One thing you could try would be to pause the game every hour or two of game time. Take a good look around the map, get a feel for which areas you are comfortable with and which ones you need to watch more closely. Then when you run the clock again, run it at slow speed and use the Stratmap to check back and forth between your areas of interest.

You can also put units out in screening positions (this works both in offense and defence) and set their Losses to Min. It won't change their behaviour but it will give you a nice early warning that you need to pause again and check out that area.

Cheers
33

[David Fisher]

Thanks for the responses. I like the idea of setting losses to minimum. I guess you could interpret that as saying to a unit, The least thing happens, let me know! In terms of reports in general, as I said, even playing a small-scale scenario like tutorial #2, you could see how being deluged with every single new sighting could be a problem. Plus you would need to determine if you wanted to know about *all* sightings, regardless of reliability...

Anyway -- now I need to step out of tutorial-land and start on some actual scenarios. Regardless of these minor points about the interface, this is one of the most intriguing games I've played in a long time.

cheers

David Fisher

[Arjuna]

One thing to keep in mind is that in RL a commander rarely gets the opportunitry to review detailed reports from every unit. From his appreciation of the situation when he developed the plan he should work out in his own mind where the critical approaches are, what is the ground of tactical importance ( ie that peice of ground which if I hold makes the enemy's position untenable or which if he holds makes my position untenable ). This is the area you should then focus on. However, a good commander also needs to reassess his plan and be alert to significant unexpected developments. As Steve suggests, to give you early warning of these you need to put out pickets or flank guards. Good luck!

[Agema]

Another idea is to take a quick look at the jump map occasionally. Although you can't always see units shooting at you or calling fire down on you, you can normally see the odd dot of an enemy to know some contact exists, so you can keep an eye on events there.

I often end up barely noticing some events - for instance, I once had a German battalion sneak right through my LZ perimeter at night in the Arnhem map, and only spotted it by looking over by chance and noticing a square representing an old contact.

Whilst this can be annoying and disruptive to your plans, I sort of quite like it, as it makes for an intersting test of your capability to respond to adversity. As pointed out above, you can also think of it as the reports not getting through to HQ. At the very least, it's your own fault and a lesson to be remembered. [;)]