Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: nukkxx

Well, minimizing human losses is the top priority in all modern conflicts. This is for obvious political reasons.

That's generally not true. What is generally true is that limiting civilian casualties is a top priority for one side in the conflict. The side where the fighting is actually taking place. In other words, it's a high priority for West German's and not a priority at all to the Soviets.

Good Hunting

MR

A LOS tool that allows you to click on one hex, click on the second hex and see a line between the two telling you the distance and whether the LOS is clear. I know you can see what can be seen from a hex by clicking on it, but it's a bit cumbersome the way it is.

ORIGINAL: Mad Russian

ORIGINAL: nukkxx

Well, minimizing human losses is the top priority in all modern conflicts. This is for obvious political reasons.

That's generally not true. What is generally true is that limiting civilian casualties is a top priority for one side in the conflict. The side where the fighting is actually taking place. In other words, it's a high priority for West German's and not a priority at all to the Soviets.

Good Hunting

MR

Yes but I was not talking about civilian losses but military personal. ie. Soldiers.

Initial message >>

Would be nice to have a detailed reports on man killed not only vehicles. Tanks personal, infantry, etc. Ideally, minimizing human losses should even be part of score system.

Maybe you can create an unit called "civilians" and use it in special units... i remember in a Tiller title the use of "straggles" units for Berezina scen. They could be like motorized infantry but with or less mobility or with a higher value to block an hex.

Is possible made action stop when an unit suffer casualties (or suffer a delay etc etc) and only continue if you click??? i refer to an option to stop action when something is noticed over the map and only continue when you left click, this permit use fast action for movements.

Other thing is made the autoscroll to action more soft, now it hurts when map jump so rough.

nukxx..WW3 would have been a war where soldier casualties would always be expected to be extremely high..it's not a War where it would be a huge issue at home..now Civilian casualties of course is different. Also the fear of Soldier casualties is a relatively new thing..not something that was a concern during the eighties.

Or even desert storm's planning phase...at least one battalion commander informed his battalion that 8/10 of them were expected to be ineffective by the end of the first 3 days of the planned attack. Which seems high, but apparently even the staff planners were laying in 15-20% casualty rates as likely. The "preserve the troops at all costs" phenomenon is a result of Western nations proving they could win near bloodless victories against inferior regular forces, increasing public expectations of troop preservation. This has been combined with the need to minimize the political impact of casualties over long low intensity conflicts.

However, for campaigns like WWIII, preserving combat power is important - individual human lives are much less so.

I would have to agree with the requests for mixed orders/programmable waypoints. I think of it as being able to queue orders to a unit, with possible delays in between.

This could become complicated enough that you may want to add another tab to the TOC for purpose of managing all of your units planned orders. Perhaps this would make coordinating unit actions easier.

ORIGINAL: wodin

nukxx..WW3 would have been a war where soldier casualties would always be expected to be extremely high..it's not a War where it would be a huge issue at home..now Civilian casualties of course is different. Also the fear of Soldier casualties is a relatively new thing..not something that was a concern during the eighties.

You are talking about this WP v NATO conflict in Germany (what you call WW3) and maybe it would have been lethal for military personal. I don't know, nobody knows in fact ... Look at the Soviet Union vs Afghanistan conflict. It was not very lethal for Russians. 15.000 military deads vs. 1.000.000 civilians.

But the game can (and I hope will) also be used for other modern actual or hypothetical conflicts and the trend now is to limit military losses (they have drones and they even developing robots). Look at the war in Iraq: couple of thousand dead soldiers and hundreds of thousand dead civilians. This is the reality of modern conflicts. Not an hypothetical scenario.

So what I said is that it would be great if the game could reflect this (sad) reality.

Anyway so far we don't know how many dead soldiers we have and I think it would be great to have this statistic in the final score card. Same for civilians.

Obviously in another theater this should be an issue..I mentioned it and civilian casualties further up. In this game though the public would be far more worried about a Nuclear attack than soldiers being killed.

While on the Reinforcements Tab, instead of reporting the arrival time related to the start of the scenario, I wish I could read the arrival time rtelated to the current time.
I mean, if a unit is arriving in 60 minutes i want to read T+60 and not T+158 or whatever...

I really don't know when thermal invertion is in effect,
I can tell you when sun rises and set here in my country, but I'm not sure about germany in July, so it's just a matter of guessing.
I think you it could be useful adding this important info close to the clock.

It's not a matter of guessing. The game tells you when sunrise and sunset are in affect. When there is fog and rain as well.

Good Hunting.

MR

The "game" date and time knows the location of the battle pretty close at least and knows when it is dusk and dawn. The inversion effects are only active in those time frames. Dawn is an hour before sunrise (daytime in game terms) and dusk is the hour after daytime. The battlefield info panel already says and shows those game states.



Hope that helps.

Ah, sorry. i didn't notice it.
I will take a closer look.

It would be nice if units would automatically attempt to path around known minefields.

--During setup, the ability to setup entire units (companies, BNs) with a single click.

They do to a point..usually they are cleared by the first unit to hit them, but other units will avoid that hex until cleared if they have time to respond...just like they reroute around obstacles and chemicals and nuke radiation.

ORIGINAL: dholedays

It would be nice if units would automatically attempt to path around known minefields.

Things don't go always this way Odin.
I have seen one entire battalion orderly marching in a minefield and losing about 25% of his effectives.

ORIGINAL: Radagy

Things don't go always this way Odin.
I have seen one entire battalion orderly marching in a minefield and losing about 25% of his effectives.

So have I. Battlefield communications is a fickle beast. It's hard to get your orders and share information. There is just so much time out there.

One answer to that is a convoy order. That would stop the entire column from simply continuing to drive forward no matter what the lead unit in the column runs into. That's on the Wish List.

Good Hunting.

MR

A minor wish:

ATGM weaknesses and aborts. Wire guided missiles specifically come to mind.

Right now you can fire a missile with a flight path over 2km of woods 1x elevation, down a km of city streets and out several km beyond, and over major rivers. All of these would have a significant chance of the wire snapping/shorting and a missile abort.

Flight time modeling. Not so much in tracking hex to hex per se, but in allowing the gunner to be suppressed/killed after launch and before impact on long flight times. Especially for infantry carried ATGMs. Also, for keyhole firing (deep within the woods, city, etc) longer flight time increases the odds the target will move out of the keyhole and the gunner will not be able to track it.

Obviously all this would be abstracted, but it'd be nice to force realistic engagement considerations on ATGMs.