Wish List

[augustus]

more provinces

I was also thinking that ports and port cities and some forts should be accessible directly from the sea. As the north, I should be able to reinforce Ft. Pickens and fortress monroe from the sea. Also, it should be possible to capture ports and port cities without having to take an entire land/river province. (if that is possible, just slap me upside the head for not knowing this).

[Tanaka]

Fixed garrisons not random please!

[jscott991]

Just one major request:
 
1. Windowed mode

[ptan54]

More scenarios, like 1862 after Fredericksburg pre-Antietam, 1863 after C'ville before Gettysburg, and even 1864 Petersburg (CSA can only win by hoping for copperhead win in Nov).

Also "What-if" scenarios. What if Britain went to war over the Trent? This particular incident can be handled by the COGEE style event, 95% of the time no war with Britain, 5% of the time the Trent incident leads to war. Other scenarios like what if Lee had won at Antietam / Gettysburg?

[Gil R.]

ORIGINAL: ptan54

More scenarios, like 1862 after Fredericksburg pre-Antietam, 1863 after C'ville before Gettysburg, and even 1864 Petersburg (CSA can only win by hoping for copperhead win in Nov).

Also "What-if" scenarios. What if Britain went to war over the Trent? This particular incident can be handled by the COGEE style event, 95% of the time no war with Britain, 5% of the time the Trent incident leads to war. Other scenarios like what if Lee had won at Antietam / Gettysburg?

lar

More scenarios is a top priority for us, though it might have to wait for a FOF2. We even have a Fredericksburg (= Dec. 1862) scenario that one of our beta-testers put together a while back. The hold-up is that it requires a significant amount of new code to implement later scenarios -- to give a single example, we need to be able to assign upgrades at the start of the scenario, since it makes no sense for armies that have been fighting for more than a year to have no additional training. Unfortunately, there's simply been no time for the programming in question.

[Kielec]

First of all I'd like to comment a bit. I find the different volume and "density" of the volley sounds, along with the sometimes cheezy commander's orders (don't shoot till I tell you!) an excellent feature. The fact that they are linked to the verdict of the Gods of Random makes it just so much more... pleasant to play the detailed combat. I can feel (to an extent) how well the boyz did even before the attack reports windows pop out, or even before the casualties numbers soar up...
 
That being said, I wish the artillery fire sounded DISTINCTIVELY differently from the infantry one, and possibly differently for short distance (cannister) and long distance (solid shot/granades).
 
Also, I wish there would be a different sound when infantry fires with skirmishers deployed, as (if I understand correctly) the firing does not go in volleys then, but rather as a continuous... well - skirmish.

[ptan54]

FOF2 - General's Edition?

[hangarflying]

As I have stated in previous posts, I love this game! My buddies and I are avid miniature war gamers and we feel that this game would be the perfect strategic platform for our miniature games.

I'm wondering how difficult would it be to to adjust the game so that instead of fighting a battle over the computer, you take the OOB from the strategic game, fight the battle with miniatures, and once the battle is over input the casualties into the game?

As part of this, it would be cool to have the game spit out the OOB to reflect the miniature game. Each miniature game represents units in different ways; some games show that each figure represents so many men while others go on a stand by stand basis. For example, the miniature game I play, each stand represents 200 men (or 150 depending on the scale). So in this case, a 2200 man brigade would be an 11 stand brigade in the game we play.

Managing this ratio could be a part of the game set-up. The set-up screen can ask you what ratio you want for miniature battles: 50 men/casting, 200 men/stand, etc. That way, whenever you right-click a territory it shows the number of troops in stands/castings instead of men. Obviously there should be an option to disregard this for those that don't want to use it.

Along with all of this, it would then be nice to be able to print out each OOB to have for reference during the minature battle.

This is a big plate to ask for, and I don't have a clue as to how feasable it would even be to impliment any of it. But it would be cool if it could be done.

Thanks!

James

[jscott991]

Mod Requests
 
1. Ability to mod the brigade surrender chance for Quick and Instant combat.
 
2. Ability to mod the brigade request from governors (this one is a must, if easy to implement, because this become very tedious at the end of the war when the governor of Ohio wants 20 brigades while the fight is in Georgia and Louisiana).

[cesteman]

no kidding! I hate that one!

[moose1999]

Combat reports like in COG:EE.
They are much better excecuted in COG:EE where you can call up the reports at any time and see all assaults up untill that point in the battle.
The way there are handled in FOF, where the report only shows the latest assault and you have to activate it beforehand, makes it less than useful.

So do it the COG:EE way instead - much better! [:)]

[jscott991]

A more major request:
 
1. Break up the difficulty levels to split AI economic from AI combat bonuses.  Plus split off player economic penalties from player combat penalties.  This would make it similar to CoG:EE where you can have a game where the combat is balanced, but the economics favor the AI or vice versa.  Really, and I mean this in all honesty, WCS should include this type of breakdown in all of its games to keep people like me from flooding their forum with these complaints.
 
2. And, obviously, reduce the AI's love of garrisoning Richmond.  The ideal would be to create a moddable variable AICapitalDefensePreference XXX and let people experiment with it however they choose.  I have no idea how possible that is, but I think, based on some files in the data directory, that AI province preferences are set by numeric values in at least CoG (some of the files in the data directory are clearly relics from FoF's CoG origins).

[SlickWilhelm]

Could we please get the Army/Corps/Division containers to be a different color or shape than the units inside of them? That would go a long long way to reducing the confusion about whether that rectangle is a container or a unit. The indentation is NOT enough.

Thanks, great game! I'm playing my very first game and I'm loving it! I haven't taken this much time to read & prepare for a game since I bought Uncommon Valor many years ago.

[Bison36]

I know some of these have been mentioned befored but cann't hurt to be repetative [:)]

1. Windowed Mode
2. Smaller, more numerous provinces. (Although perhaps they should be called counties)
3. Tactical naval battles
4. Longshot Wish: American/Mexican War scenario

[janh]

- reduce the "superaggressivity" of AI at the strategic level, often depleting itself in short time;

- AI also is slow in feeding reserve brigades into the depleted containers in the western theaters, while always completely trying to fill out the containers in the east. It would be better if AI had a decreasing probability with number of brigades in container (1: 100%, 2: 100%, 3: 85%, 4:50, 5: 33%, 6. 5%; 1st artillery on top: 100%, 2nd art: 5%).

- smaller provinces (counties, i.e. at least 6x -- 8x more "areas" per present province (if not even switch to a province independent, continuous movement path); connected in detail with minor and major roads, minor and major rivers, and minor and major railways such that movement of containers takes account of road quality, gaps in mountain ranges, bridges, fords etc.; maybe strategic movement should be division, corps, plus an Army headquarters including baggage train and engineers (no specific Army containers)). With smaller terrain, also a reduction of the game speed to 2 or 3 day turns would be awesome!

- Towns connecting by railways should all have railroad heads, that can be plundered/burned, rendering the railroad unusable until repaired. Similarly, with smaller provinces the railroads to get real trestles and bridges that could be burned, repaired etc.

- Reinforcement from neighboring "provinces" is too fast (instantaneous appearance in DC). And there should be a railroad station in the DC map if reinforcement appear by rail1!

- moddable, separate minimum unit strengths for artillery, infantry, cavalry etc. (incl. routing limits to <250, AI weapon upgrade thresholds etc); i.e. artillery=battalion sized (160-640 men).

- allow TOE of containers more flexible (see brigade filling above): allowed more units per divisions and div per corps and army as well to allow for a real formation "Army of Potomac"; I tuned down max infantry strength to 2500 men, which is way closer to average brigades in the CW; tune weapon, unit and building costs, times, etc to adapt them to the other changes and result in historic equipment and building rates.

- Allow all art to use indirect fire without the upgrade (more realistic), and tune down rifle and carbine ranges to typically 2 fields (200 yards), and max 3 fields for the expensive sharpshooter rifles. This makes battlefields seem bigger, i.e. more maneuvering space and fun. Also AI artillery doesn't get slaughtered so easily if the rifles are weaker and have shorter ranges. In DC AI needs to be tuned to use artillery from longer ranges, and keep it safer in the back, and maybe occasionally concentrate artillery from several containers for an initial bombardment.

- A true supply system including baggage train units in the TOE of a container, and a real supply line from a container to a nearby city or port that should be possible to be severed, and should affect the strategic movement (advance rate) of humans and AI, and should affect supply in DC.

- One more crucial fix I would hope to see would be the promotion system. I have modified the Commanders.txt to get all the famous names already right at the beginning and kind of assign them as brigade commanders. It would be nice to be able to correctly assign them. AI usually get also way more commanders, and then begins filling up all the containers East with dozens of leaders, while the Western armies and divisions barely get a head. Leaders should be limited ideally to the "number of brigades" in the container, plus "one for the container leader" itself (in DC every brigade should be allowed to hold its brigade general, plus a maximum of 1 higher rank officer of each rank). AI should really assign them in the proper way.

- Since AI only uses a 20% random in assigning leaders, it doesn't go through a "learning curve" like Lincoln in the CW: McDowell, McClellan, Pope, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, Meade, Meade&Grant, to give one example. It would be nice if (A) the "uncover general ability" parameter were moddable, and I would tune it down a lot (1% per battle or week or so). I would like AI to take into account only known attributes, duty age and present rank, and not right at the start of 1861 put Grant at the head of AoP because he has the best parameters. He should slowly climb up the ladder one rank by one, and only once AI knows his true strengths, put him into promotion. Maybe one way would be to also allow generals to learn "leadership experience" in battle like units do: say max of +0.25 gain/loss for the "leadership" category per won/lost battle. And have all generals start out with similar values except the ones that in 1861 were really of rank:
0-3: can only be brigade generals
4-6: division capable
7-8: corps
9-10: can be promoted to Army or higher.
Then only allow AI to use this leadership category (plus Cavalry) to assign leaders. That kind of could mimic the duty age and promotions succession in a simple way and probably is a small enough chance to be modded!

- better DC AI for tactical combat, particularly add a function for it to find tactically good terrain to occupy and connect (i.e. give it the capability to form the fishhook line if you give it a map of Gettysburg as input -- i.e. more complex lines != straight front line diagonal across the battlefield, but curved etc.). Tune aggressiveness, make it behave more like civil war generals: lots of idle times for units in battle, an then movement typically as a whole formation (division wise attack, or corps), rather than treating each brigade almost independently.

- nicer, more realistic maps for DC: particularly a road network and cities/villages that could be realistic patterns, and make AI take advantage of those road nets: I.e. advance along roads, and not more cross-country in woods etc. Fight for control of woods and villages, hill etc (identify tactically important terrain features, see above).

EDIT:
- mentioned earlier: an interface to export "orders of battle" with time and terrain information so one could write an import/export filter to other games such as the Scourge of War engine (Norbsoft I think) to fight out battles. It would of course be awesome if the internal detailed combat engine would at some point be replaced with such a 3D engine, including features like "headquarters in the saddle" (player is represented as a general, i.e. first person view and no other overview perspective other than a sketched battlefield map; brigades, divisions, corps can be given separate detailed orders {"... hold Brawners farm at all costs","send reinforcements from neighboring division"...}, i.e. AI generals take over battle control over friendly formations, and AI generals of containers have very distinct habits, aggressiveness etc.

[Drakkon]

In reference to this thread;
&nbsp;
http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=2566082
&nbsp;
I would like to request an option to disable garrisons at the start of a scenario, or at least the option to place them manually.
&nbsp;
Thanx for your attention to this matter.

[Gil R.]

Just posting a link to a thread with some more suggestions, lest I forget where it was: tm.asp?m=2592242

[battleground]

1. A real naval aspect to the game. As of now i have never seen any Confed surface
vessels except blockade runners and there appears no way to see if your blockade if
effective. You never know if you catch one! No raiders to effect Union money/trade.
2. Real River gunboats, ironclad gunboats, rams, and transports. Lets see some fighting
on the rivers. Gunboats should effect supply of enemy forces on the "wrong side" of a
river and should not be destroyed outright when the land forces are pushed back. Some
naval leaders as well. Also guns for the ships. Seperate gun setups for naval forces. it
is horribly expensive to put any guns on ships so why bother? Gunboats and also Naval
craft should be able to support land troops under some circumstances. They do have
quite large guns and a force of them can be decisive.
3. map about 30% larger with some sections broken down into 2-3 subsections such as
alone mountain and transport lines. more effects of slower movement the larger the force
is that is trying to move.
4. More ports on the coasts. There is not one in Florida.
5. Rework the forts rule. any body of troops divsional sized or larger should be able to built
a level one fort very inexpensivly. You read about them all the time in ACW books. dirt banked
forts with alot of abatis and log redoubts. field troops can easily make these and it should take
little cost to do so (Gen Lee said it was good to put troops to work on such to keep em busy).
Its buying the guns for a fort that should cost (and does). Also fort guns cost too much now
for even small ones. pehaps the costs should be adjusted down a bit. Larger forts are a mix
of many forts and entrenchments in an area while level 3 are heavy fortifications often built
around a prewar fort such as Fortress Monroe (which is on the ocean by the way and should
be able to be reinforced without having to invade that entire area)

I am sure i will think of more as i go along.... (LOL!)
I do hope a FoF2 will be done. Although AGEODs game is more detailed this game is much
more fun and easier to play. It is very close to being a great game if only more detail and
work is spent upon it.

[battleground]

Pontoon Bridge Trains that have to be purchased. Can only be attached to Corps or Divisions.
Allow supply across Mississippi and Missouri (which in areas cannot be crossed well by bridges)
otherwise supply is reduced crossing and fighting on other side that is hostile territory. Unit uses
up bridge units depending on river type and this improves crossing as well. In winter/rain the
use of bridge units is doubled to account for bridges washed away. If your bridge unit runs out
of bridge points you are stuck again with lower supply and crossing penalties til supply provides
more bridge points. No combat value but bridge points can be captured from enemy bridge
units if you win a major battle.

[bugwar]

An option to slow down (way down!) the strategic turn replay speed.

When the turn is over, I see units zipping across the map. I have to
replay it several times to figure out what just flew by.

The same goes for the screens at the beginning of the game. Most of the
time I am not able to read the quip before it vanishes.