So, lets hear form someone who bought it

[Magnus]

Maybe we could add 3D bases to the units, this way they would be easier to see against the terrain if some people have problem with that.

[Sumter]

I find the facing of units to be a bit difficult to discern in the editor, but not when actually playing the game.  I really dislike the idea of adding bases.

Magnus, any chance of getting the wooden forts back?

[Magnus]

I´ll hear with Tim, maybe we could add them again.

[Tim Coakley]

Sumter,
do you mean the wood fort, or the old redoubt (covering half a hex) graphic?

I will have to check my files at home, but I thought we moved the old rebout graphic to the "buildings" file to be used as an alternate graphic for forts.

[Magnus]

Yes we moved the redoubt to the buildings file replacing 4 hexes of wooden forts.

[Sumter]

I don't have the game open at the moment, but as I recall the redoubts now pop up when you click on the wood forts button.

I'm not sure about others who play the game, but I enjoy having access to as many representations of military engineering as possible.

I must say that the new redoubt arrangement both looks good and works effectively.

Thanks for your efforts.

[Tim Coakley]

Sumter...when using the "wood fort" type in the editor, click the hex multiple times. It should cycle through to give the "old redoubt" image.

At work again, so I can not test this...but that was the intent.

Tim

[jackx]

(I only got wooden forts that way, which is why I've updated Reichenberg to hexside-redoubts only)

Regarding the earlier discussion about visual clutter and difficulty discerning units, reducing the number of # per unit helps, particularly when you want to take stock of a complex situation that you haven't seen unfold from the start.

My biggest issue with the interface is with stacks - as the information given on mouse-over is inconsistent, sometimes it's the top unit, sometimes the bottom unit. Not a gamebreaker by far, but it can get annoying when there are many stacked hexes...

For those wanting smaller units, that shouldn't be too hard. I remember mod packs for SMG that doubled/quadrupled/quintupled the # of visible soldiers by having several small soldiers as part of one sprite, the same should work with HnM, provided the basic size of the tgas isn't too restrictive.

Edit: Gave it a try, but the individual images are already so small that cutting their size in half again makes them really blurry and indistinct. :/



Edit2: Played around a bit with the soldier positioning, and came up with what I think is a fairly neat single-rank-line look. Looks sleeker and more elegant IMHO, and while the kneeling front rank was a nice feature, the whole 2x4 block looked way too chubby and blocky to represent a line.

Main problem so far is that the unit will eventually be down to the two command figures when it takes heavy casualties... not sure if some clever numbercrunching with men/figure could be used to prevent this (afaik, setting men/figure too high leads to the game automatically reducing the # of figures).

Anyways, here's what it looks like, I had to borrow Austrian officers and drummers for the Saxons as they lack their own, but for a concept, it should do.

[AlAmos]

Tim,

You're correct about cycling through to get to the fort graphic.

[jackx]

Did some more testing on the forts:

Editing an existing scenario (as I did with Reichenberg) yields only wooden forts - creating a new one lets you place nothing but redoubts using the "wooden fort" option.

Using the "building" option, I'm unable to get forts both editing pre-patch, and creating new scenarios.

[PrinzHenrich]

Quite good. But I would rather see 16 men at the double size hex. Imagine two lines of 6 men with (2x6 =12 with Flagbearer) one battalion gun (13), officer on the horse (14), drummer (15) and NCO (16).

[Rosseau]

Good discussion here. For what it's worth, been playing HPS Punic Wars. Graphics are probably worse than H&M, and gameplay is just boring, or is it me? Does anyone like that game?

[Magnus]

I agree 16 men would be optimal like you have shown PrinzHenrich.

[jackx]

yeah, PH's setup looks nice, however, that'd also require a bit of extra coding, I think. At least I'd want to the gun to be indicative of battalion gun status, and not just a visual gimmick. Command casualties would have to be handled separately as well, I think, or there should be an option to "never display unit with less than x men",  so that a badly mauled unit is neither completely devoid of rank and file, or command.

What I like best about is though is that it effectively means a 4x increase in hex size, and thus will make the armies look a lot less blocky.

[PrinzHenrich]

Of course this mounted officer can be also simple foot officer, so they won't much changes in the machine of the game. This artillery figures is also added as a good looking for rest. Battalionguns should be smaller and with maybe two men ....
I threat all this as a view of posibility of 16 men (less will also avaible) units only as a graphic.

[AlAmos]

With 16 figures per unit, units in smaller actions could be set to a 10:1 ratio with reduced ground scale. Convoy attacks, picket fights, scouting, etc. Could be fun.

al

[jackx]

My concern is with the graphics being functional, i.e. a gun in the unit graphics indicates the presence of battalion gun(s), which can of course be lost during the course of a game, and would thus require the graphics to change at the appropriate time.

It already bugs me a lot that in most stock scenarios, virtually all units involved in combat will have lost their colours by the end of it, due to the way unit graphics are set up and casualties are handled.

An easy fix for this would be adding a "never less than x men on display" option, in addition to the "never more than y" which we currently have. That way, you could start with 16, and regardless of casualties, you could still have an officer, the colours, and 1-2 soldiers left, even when you've had an 800-man battalion reduced to ~100.

[AlAmos]

Jackx

Losing the flag is an easy fix. Make the standard bearer your first figure, since it is the last one lost.

[Magnus]

I think if we could increase the the hexsize by coding, graphics wise we wouldn´t have to increase it since we could still use say 4 hexes for one hex graphically. I would like to see larger batallions, up to 32 or even 64 figures for one batallion including batallion guns, officers, mounted officers, sergeants. I´ll ask Tim if this would be feasible. At least it would look great no doubt about that.
 
Also casualties would look very neat, first volly would have felled say 4-5 units that stands in line. 32 figures minimum for a batallion. What would you guys think about this? Of course this would mean one hex would be 4 old hexes or something like that. The map size would have to be at least doubled, the max map size that is. This would also allow me to increase the scale of the buildings and trees and terrain without much effort. We would have something that looked like Cossacks 2 in scale, well almost if you get my idea.

[Magnus]

Hmm I heard before people suggesting to add new artillery pieces to the game. I think a howitzer would be very neat to add. Anymore kind of artillery you would like to add?