New Features for COTA

[Mr.Frag]

The only problem with Friendly Fog of War is that you would have to give up command to a certain extent. You can't very well be in a position to detatch and order units directly adn also have FoW. Fow is a subjective thing faced by any commander but it is faced at that level of command specifically. (ie: each level of command has it's own unique level of FoW which in all likelihood is completely different that other levels of command).

To model this, each unit when selected would force a redraw of the world from *it's* perspective only, with no knowledge of anything beyond what it and units directly communicating with it are aware of. That makes for a pretty wild amount of jumping around and would probably eat a lot of CPU horsepower.To keep within the confines of realism, you would have to have some timer that prevents you from changing between commands (perhaps tied to the comms system) so you could not switch to another unit until you raised them on radio. Without something like this, you'd simply jump between HQ's non-stop until you had the perfect picture in your head of where everything was.

Certainly interesting, but it does impose a level of hardcore play that is probably not for everyone. Picture the poor 1st Airborne, if you selected one of them under this kind of system, you would be stuck there, unable to get back to command any other units for the balance of the game pretty much. [X(]

[Crimguy]

Point of Attack 2 has this. I tried POA2 for a bit, and found it intriguing, particularly the inability to know where your troops were at all times. Unfortunately, its mammoth system specs and incredible CTD/freezeup issues (it was an alpha build that was put to market) kept me away.

[CriticalMass]

Friendly Fog of War for cooperative MP play would be desirable. Especially in the large tracts of desert in the North African Campaign...

[JeF]

ORIGINAL: CriticalMass
Friendly Fog of War for cooperative MP play would be desirable.

Agreed : a commander in a coop MP play can only see and control his units. All others, friend or foe, should just be intel reports. Obvious for me, but always useful to remember, just in case Dave has a different view (pun intended) of the things.

[edited because this thread is sufficiently off-track]

JeF.

[Arjuna]

The real limitation here is the data size, RAM and processing load imposed by such a system. To do it properly every unit needs to have it's own databases of friendly and enemy forces, not to mention dynamic map data like crossings. It needs to maintain and access these. For speed reasons this needs to be in RAM. Accessing and maintaining this data would severely increase the processor load. Until hardware increases by many orders of magnitude we certainly could not entertain such a system.

A compromise though could be achieved for Team Play, such that each 'command' ( ie player ) had their own data set. All its AI subordinates would share this data just like they do now.

[barbarossa2]

I was playing HTTR last night and found coordination of assaults from multiple units in multiple directions to be... next to impossible. Orders delay, and unit reorganization, etc. made it so that I could issue the orders in the morning or afternoon, and have some units readied by nightfall, and then they would attack...while others were still organizing, or thinking about organizing.

Don't get me wrong! I LOVE the game. I also know it is a work of art in progress. And I am happy to finance the construction of my Mother of All Wargames over a ten year period with regular $40 to $50 investments.

But I would love to have a "jump off" time, which could be issued in the assault order. As the game is currently designed, the penultimate waypoint in an assault order is the assembly point. I think it should be relatively simple to attach a small text box to this waypoint. If a player clicks on the box, he may enter a time. This would be the time which units would "go". If the units were not formed up by the time the "go" time passed, then they would simply make preparations as usual, and "go" as soon as ready. However, if they had already organized, they would simply wait until the time came.

This way, I could tell different battalions and different brigades to attack at, say 0600 with orders issued at 1800 the previous evening. They would all get and digest their orders, march to the appropriate locations at their own damned lazy speeds, and set up. Then they would wait. And when 0600 hit, they would all swing into action at the same time.

As it is now, units are committed piecemeal, and some are in the thick of things while others are lazily deciding on if they even want to participate.

Seems like a simple fix for this problem. But, I could be WAAAAAY wrong.

Anyone else like this idea? [&:]

Thanks!

[RayWolfe]

This, "coordination of assaults from multiple units in multiple directions", has been discussed many times. I'm certain it's on some list of desirable changes for future address. Problem is ... nobody's seen the list! [;)]
Nevertherless, it's a great idea and many others have asked for it.
Ray

[Arjuna]

barbarossa2,

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes it is on the wish list. Has been for a long time. Won't get done for COTA. We'll see what we can do for BFTB.

[barbarossa2]

Concerning my coordination post above...

It is unfortunate that this will have to wait until BftB. As it is, I have seen and played so many Bulge and Market Garden games from various companies, that I was hoping that I would, for once, have the opportunity to play a little gamed, but fascinating campain for Crete with a relatively realistic game engine.

To me, and to my father (a General's Aide in 1960s Germany, who loves to drop by and give me commands while I am playing...he is also fasinated by this system, but is computer shy) the ability to launch coordinated assaults should have come before the "hyperrealistic" supply system which has graciously been introduced by the excellent, inspired, and damned hard working staff at Panther Games (now my favorite gaming company in the world). It is probably first and foremost a combat simulation, not a logistics simulation. If logistics simulations were so in, the FedEx package tracking program would be a big seller. [:)]

I will now beg and plead...[&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o]

Oh great Panther Games, all inspired and highly creative think tank who are on the cusp of answering all my gaming dreams...

Please, please, please allow us to perform one of the most basic orders a divisional or corps commander has at his disposal...a "launch time" within the framework of CotA or its patches. I understand that CotA must be relased soon. But it would be extremely nice perhaps to have a little surprise for us in the first patch for it. Coordinated launch times are something every commander since Caesar has had.

I am not a programmer and as such could be waaaaay wrong, but allowing us to attach a "wait until launch time XX:XX" to the penultimate waypoint can't be a massive undertaking. [:)] I was hoping to go out and start pushing this game on my friends who were all anxious to start playing, as they had never heard of it. And I told them that I hoped that the few problems in HTTR would be ironed out by CotA and that they could...no, MUST... purchase then. Being able to enter a launch time is certainly a "killer application" and central to the process of making modern war.

However, thanks for the work in progress! I understand if you have to deal with economic realities! I will purchase CotA no matter what your decision, but can't recommend it to my friends until above feature is in place...being wargamers, they will figure this problem out rather quickly, and I want them to have nothing but a good experience with your product.

-Chris

[&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o][&o]

[James Sterrett]

Actually, the logistics sim in COTA is very much combat-oriented. You don't have to worry about scheduling the convoys, loading times, load weight versus load volume, etc amen, that make loggies' hearts go pitter-pat. [;)] Only about keeping a route open for their trucks.

I'd like to have options for "Execute At Time" and "Execute On Order" (the latter to include "execute on (trigger)" and "execute on (condition)" ), too. I also suspect they are quite a coding headache. [:(]

[Mr.Frag]

I'd like to have options for "Execute At Time" and "Execute On Order"

Would be nice, but I'd never use it ... my units spend most of their time in "Retreat Recovery" [:(]

[barbarossa2]

Yes..."Launch on condition" etc., would be tricky coding compared to "wait until such and such a time".

I was also thinking that adding unit coordination may be more complicated than adding a "go time" to the penultimate waypoint. For instance...what if you want to launch your attack from current positions and you only have the endpoint? Then I guess you would have to enter the "go time" on the final (one and only) waypoint on which the thrust is being targeted. So...penultimate may not make as much sense, as the final waypoint. Of course there may be one or two other issues that haven't hit me yet.

Of course there are better, more realistic, and more complicated (and hence flexible) solutions for this than what I proposed to be a quick fix. And I would completely understand how these would have to be developed over the next one or two releases. I was hoping that the idea that I came up with was simple enough for someone to say, "hey, that's simple" and code it in a few minutes. You know..."wait to launch attack until such and such a time". But if it is not, that's just that.

You know, it's easy for us (me) to sit around and pump out wish lists, but Panther is the genius. Their genius lies in their actual execution of their dream, rather than sitting around and pumping out wish lists like me. So, once again hats off...

[barbarossa2]

I was reading through the forums on CotA and I noticed a theme come up a few times and wanted to offer my two cents on how one might be able to solve the "tank crews being used to run around and doing artillery spotting" problem without having an intelligence database for every unit requiring ungodly numbers of calculations by the CPU per second.

This multiple intel database might not solve the problem because even if only one friendly tank crew has discovered an enemy firebase and it were added ONLY to its personal intel database, then the player, acting as corps commander and seeing it on his game map anyway, could call in "area fire" to hit the target. (The only way to circumvent this would be NOT to allow "area fire" based on guesses, but only to allow targetted artillery fire on locations where intel reports which had been relayed through spotting capable units had spotted the enemy). This feels very "forced" and there has to be a better solution.

A better POSSIBLE soltion:
Another option...slightly more complicated...is only to allow players to give orders to units with functioning radios...or units determined to be "in contact" with HQ. If a unit is "in contact" and sharing its position and important events with its HQ regularly, then the player sees the unit on the map and may order it around and EVERY enemy unit that it bumps into as it moves around appears on the map as a viable artillery target.

If the unit is not "in contact" (again, no radio assets, or radio assets destroyed, or too far away for a runner to check in REGULARLY), then the unit cannot be given orders directly, has a question mark placed on the counter (as a last known position...or this is where the brigade commander believes it may be...based on the orders we gave it type of info). In this case, none of the enemy units the "not in contact unit" has bumped into are shown on the player's game map (the map presumably in the HQ of the division/corps commander). Corps commanders (players) can and should only be allowed to give direct orders to units which are "in contact" and which they can reach in this manner.

Or this system could be improved by having actual runners (or jeeps or motorcycles) modelled which would relay information to their formation HQ occassionally. Or even from the corps commander's HQ to units which are "out of contact." It would also model runners sent out from HQs to find out what a unit is up to before it is updated on the player's game map.

These runners wouldn't die or get shot at or check for LOS...this might bog the system down too much. Instead of having counters modelling lone runners moving around, one could make the assumption that someone like this is dispatched every two hours or so from parent HQ formations...or more often...or less often...and that every time one of these periods PLUS travel times PLUS delay and discussion time elapses, the intelligence reports from the non-radio capable unit is added to the HQ map which the player (as corps/division commander) is using to direct his operations. In effect, the out of contact unit sends a message containing the most important data and this is used to update the game map. Of course, the intelligence presented and used for the map may already be hours old!

Or, an AI subroutine could be worked out for "out of contact" and "tank crew unit" type situations...a "this is important, let's send a runner to our HQ" routine, which would send a runner with intel to its HQ at points where it would be felt historically accurate to do so.

Maybe they could die. I don't know.

Units which are "out of contact" would be taken over by the game AI and run for the player with the increasingly excellent AI Panther has provided us with.

I don't think this is too complicated, will add tremendously to the realism. It is designed to solve the problem of lone "artillery spotting incapable units spotting for artillery and reporting enemy positions problem" and provides a more realistic artillery target environment without bogging down the computer.

Indeed, it would allow for a more realistic simulation of the fog of war. I am sure many commanders even in WWII would have sold their mothers to know where even all of THEIR OWN troops were precisely, much less the enemy. It would even allow for situations like, "the lost battalion" from WWI. When a unit that is no longer radio capable gets too far out of command range, it is simply "stolen" by the AI and is given commands by it based on previous commands but also taking new situations into account. Tank crews will head for HQ or desert...not magically come up with the idea to be sent on dangerous behind the lines operations. And even if the player can order them out on crazy recon missions, they won't be able to report back and add what they see to the map on a regular basis.

Only the unit's last known position (or possible position, as estimated by the unit's HQ) is shown and is replaced with a question mark. The Corps commander (player) can only hope that something good will come of it. Why not? It sems to solve a few problems well, and add a lot of realism and FUN. Like...when will they be back? When will they make contact again??? Where the hell are they??? I like that.

Of course, maybe it would be simple enough to have this be an option which players can play with. But they don't have to.

Any way you cut it, "artillery spotting capable" units should be able to more effectively deliver artillery support in certain situations.

Once again...thanks to Panther games for even giving us a game with this much potential which provokes this much thought into how it could be improved on. And I thought serious wargaming was dead.

[&o]

-Chris

[mhailes]

I will now beg and plead...

Oh great Panther Games, all inspired and highly creative think tank who are on the cusp of answering all my gaming dreams...

This has to be the best use of sucking up to get a feature included that I've seen for a long time.

M

P.S. Please let me know if it works [:D]

[MarkShot]

Don't delude yourself ... even joining Dave's little sweatshop of beta testers is not a sure fire guarantee to get your pet features implemented. Although you do get to nag him more effectively!

[Arjuna]

ORIGINAL: MarkShot

Don't delude yourself ... even joining Dave's little sweatshop of beta testers is not a sure fire guarantee to get your pet features implemented. Although you do get to nag him more effectively!

Nagging and pestering I have enough of. What I really need is some angel finance and a long holiday.[;)]

[barbarossa2]

Point well taken Arjuna.

Thanks for the effort with this game! It is well appreciated.

Good luck on the Angel Investor. I need one too. Don't we all?



Chris

[wodin]

How about being informed when a unit loses all its tanks. This is quite important with certain units.

Also if a unit is low on ammo or basics or fuel.

All these messages are ones I could do with.

Another point is if somehow the anti tank and anti inf power of each unit could be simplified somehow. Keep the figures but low,medium,high,very high would be quicker to work out.

Finally an expanded AAR which gives a rundown on the casualties each unit caused. Also a quick one word address on how each unit performed.

[wodin]

ORIGINAL: barbarossa2

I was playing HTTR last night and found coordination of assaults from multiple units in multiple directions to be... next to impossible. Orders delay, and unit reorganization, etc. made it so that I could issue the orders in the morning or afternoon, and have some units readied by nightfall, and then they would attack...while others were still organizing, or thinking about organizing.

Give the attack order to a higher HQ and watch them manage the assault.

Ive witnessed some great attacks with OK timing by doing this. One even split their forces into three attacking formations and attacked from both flanks and the rear. Superb.

[RedMike]

Yes this game engine is very impressive. The more I play it the more amazed I am.