The most frustrating feature of TOAW engine

[Jeremy Mac Donald]

You guys start from a faulty premise, that all players have a certain knowledge level. That level includes stuff like finding and downloading scenarios or simplying understanding game mechanics. I believe that is not the case. If you want to expand the community, you must reach out to a younger crowd who may have absolutely no idea how to play TOAW.

You want to expand the community, design and include a tutorial. You want to expand the community, rate scenarios by level of difficulty and double the quantity of scenarios included in the game. You want to expand the community, stop acting like freeking "experts" and stop with the threads bashing TOAW.

Any young casual gamer will look at this thread and say "quark this, I ain't buying a game that complicated."

Personally I believe you are doing a disservice to the game and it is highly probable that you are turning off a lot of young people who have never experienced TOAW right off. Well done.

You may now continue with your rather innane conversation.

I don't think this game is really likely to ever appeal to the casual beer and pretzels crowd. I suspect its already to complex for that. When it comes to introducing new young gamers to the hobby one wants to do somthing like This

[bluermonkey]

I'd never heard of that game before, it look like a lot of fun actually!

[Pippin]

One thing that used to bug me, is you could not scroll the map with the arrow keys. What a waste of usefull keys. Was a real pain on 640x monitors.

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: Pippin

One thing that used to bug me, is you could not scroll the map with the arrow keys. What a waste of usefull keys. Was a real pain on 640x monitors.

Yeah. Also the scroll speed- especially on the minimap- is kinda slow, which is a killer for huge scenarios. One could do what a lot of other games do and allow the player to switch to a full-screen view of the minimap (which would also be great for grabbing a screenshot of the whole map for planning etc.).

With scrolling, whenever I'm browsing a map site or similar now, I find myself trying to drag the screen like you can in Google Maps.

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: Jeremy Mac Donald

When it comes to introducing new young gamers to the hobby one wants to do somthing like This

Holy crap... that game looks like the ultimate European liberal wet dream "2013: in an emergency vote, the EU approves the sending of peacekeeping forces to the United States...."

Anyway, seems to be in the same vein as all those WWII RTS games that have been released lately.

[Pippin]

One gui issue that frustrated the hell out of me, was someone's smart idea to make some units do an automatic bombard and movement into an enemy hex when you right click on an enemy unit to plan an attack.... ARGGH!@$!@$!#$@$!$

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: Pippin

One gui issue that frustrated the hell out of me, was someone's smart idea to make some units do an automatic bombard and movement into an enemy hex when you right click on an enemy unit to plan an attack....

This is what we call Retreat-before-combat. It's like manna from heaven. If you take it away I will kill you myself.

... actually, probably your objection is that sometimes you don't want to overrun the enemy unit for whatever reason. I can't see any easy design way around this, but for your purpose, if you right click with the weakest unit in the stack first then you can guarantee that this won't happen.

[Pippin]

... actually, probably your objection is that sometimes you don't want to overrun the enemy unit for whatever reason.

That is god damn right! Many times I plan an attack, poof the enemy retreats, and my hq or something important ends up moving right into the midst of the entire enemy forces, just waiting to get obliterated on the next round.... This is nonsense, and I don't know why they bothered to implement such a useless feature.

[JAMiAM]

ORIGINAL: golden delicious
This is what we call Retreat-before-combat. It's like manna from heaven. If you take it away I will kill you myself.

LoL...the original complaint is like buying a Ferrari, and then complaining that it's got a racing engine, instead of a nice fuel efficient diesel.[:D]

To Pippin, managing the RBC's and the entire dynamic that it offers is one of the key features of the game. Like Ben said, if you don't want to RBC the enemy units, then initialize the attack with a very weak unit - even split a unit for the purpose, if necessary. You can always cancel the attack, afterwards. However, once the enemy unit has survived the morale check, then it will stay still for you to attack it the more deliberate way.

[DanNeely]

ORIGINAL: Pippin

... actually, probably your objection is that sometimes you don't want to overrun the enemy unit for whatever reason.

That is god damn right! Many times I plan an attack, poof the enemy retreats, and my hq or something important ends up moving right into the midst of the entire enemy forces, just waiting to get obliterated on the next round.... This is nonsense, and I don't know why they bothered to implement such a useless feature.

I could ask why you were using an HQ for a direct attack in the first place, but you can plan an attack with zero risk of an initial overrun if any unit capable of bombardment is within range. Use that unit to open the attack planning dialog instead of the ground unit next to it. I use this regularly when I only want to make a limited attack.

I completely disagree with your assertion that it's a useless feature. IN high mobility scenarios it's extremly valuable for overrunning broken units. Getting more than 4 or 5 rounds/turn is difficult, which means so is pushing a defender back more than a handful of hexes. In scens with only a dozen movement points/unit this doesn't matter much in ones with two or three dozen mp/for fast units it makes a very large degree of difference in how fast a breakout can occur.

[JAMiAM]

ORIGINAL: DanNeely
I could ask why you were using an HQ for a direct attack in the first place, but you can plan an attack with zero risk of an initial overrun if any unit capable of bombardment is within range. Use that unit to open the attack planning dialog instead of the ground unit next to it. I use this regularly when I only want to make a limited attack.

This technique will work also, as long as the unit is not adjacent, when it does so. Otherwise there is still a possibility that the defender will RBC.

[Pippin]

I could ask why you were using an HQ for a direct attack in the first place

I thought that was obvious??? If I want to smash into an enemy unit, I will use everything available to hit him as hard as I can. Why just use a BB gun when you can bring the shot-gun too.

If they went through the hassle of setting up the attacks this way, why not add another routine so I don't have to run into this problem of selecting weak units in my stacks and sub-dividing units etc, to prevent this from happening. O_o

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: Pippin

If they went through the hassle of setting up the attacks this way, why not add another routine so I don't have to run into this problem of selecting weak units in my stacks and sub-dividing units etc, to prevent this from happening.

The trouble is from a design point of view there's nothing that really comes to mind. What you'd probably want is for the player to have to select a special option if he wants to try for an RBC. That'd be a pain in the arse for the rest of us, though. The best solution I can think of is to have a player option "Never cause Retreat-Before-Combat". You can check or uncheck it as you please throughout the game.

[Pippin]

Another thing that bugged me, was splitting and re=combining units gave a permanent decrease in efficiency. Shouldn't this penalty be removed after a while? I don't realisticaly see how the penalty for a combination of units back to its original parent should stay permanent. God help the smart general who makes it a habbit to split down forces into smaller units time to time.

[JAMiAM]

ORIGINAL: Pippin

Another thing that bugged me, was splitting and re=combining units gave a permanent decrease in efficiency. Shouldn't this penalty be removed after a while? I don't realisticaly see how the penalty for a combination of units back to its original parent should stay permanent. God help the smart general who makes it a habbit to split down forces into smaller units time to time.

That is no longer the case. I'm not sure which patch did away with that feature, but it is not a concern anymore. At least not with Century of Warfare.

[Pippin]

Ok that is a relief. IIRC splitting a unit down gave only 80% efficiency, then recombining gave a 110% so you'd get short-changed. I always liked to split down so I could suround units with a small army, and force them to surrender early.