Anthropoid's Wish List

[Anthropoid]

Just this morning, I've posted a lot of stuff on this forum, either asking questions, lamenting what I perceive to be slight annoyances, or suggesting "wishes" for mods/patches. I thought I'd compile my points into one place, and also perhaps other players could use this same thread, benefiting the Devs, and Modders by putting lots of ideas in one place.

My experience with the game is: one long weekend binge, playing as Germany on easiest difficulty.

So to start off my "wish list," and I recognize a lot of this might be pie-in-the-sky and undoable because of how the code works.

1) Make AT Guns and Inf Guns move a bit faster (20 to 25% faster)? I observed an AT Gun on a road move 1 meter in 10 seconds game time once! [&:]

2) Reduce likelihood that a ATG or IG gets stuck, else create a new message popup: "We're stuck commander!" Getting the generic "Can't move there," and suspecting it is because the unit is stuck or wedged is ambiguous and makes one suspect it is a graphical glitch and not the program doing the highly realistic thing of determining if a unit got stuck.

3) More commands for units:
Hide: tells the unit to find the best cover for each soldier as covertly as possible
Opportunity fire: fire if an enemy unit moves anywhere within the facing of the unit (this would be nice for long-range weapons as well as HMGs. Defend only seems to provoke them to fire if an enemy attacks them! What is the point of setting of kill zones if you have to flit around the map constantly watching out for enemy units moving into them and manually tell your units to take advantage of opportunity fire?
Follow: click on a second unit and tell the first unit to follow it. If it stops so does the 2nd unit. If it engages in combat, so does the second unit. This would be particularly useful for vehicle/infantry combos.

4) A couple different "formations" for units that could be used with any of the "commands" (hide, move, move fast, sneak, opportunity fire, fire, smoke, defend, ambush)
Single-file
Tactical concentration, i.e., "clump" (?)
Spread out
Stay inside structure (would be useful for a mortar crew that you want to fight as an infantry crew even if it is not out of ammo; also useful when you send units along the long axis of a building and some of them 'walk through a wall' and into the yard or street next to the building.

5) Allow movement of individual soldier sprites if you hold down a particular key while left-clicking.

6) Make AT Guns less likely to IMMEDIATELY draw enemy fire and get killed.

7) Make AT gun crews suffer more injuries and death when their gun gets destroyed.

8) Slow down mortar fire rate about 25 to 33% (this I could mod myself, but I might screw it up.

9) Allow certain special orders for individual solders:
Drop weapon
Separate from squad (causing the guy to stay where he is and assume a defensive posture)
Take over _insert squad role_ (e.g., if the gunner on a vehicle gets killed)
Find/scrounge for a weapon/ammo

10) Change it to allow the player to place orders, view/change windows (F5, F6, F7) etc., while paused against the AI.

11) Allow save game during battles and battle group setup windows.

12) Include a "field of fire" tool in the opening battle setup. Basically a little control that, once you turn it on, you can set temporary lines on the map that will show you the dark green-light green-red lines showing degrees of LOS. After you turn on the FOF tool, you can click on any point on the map, setting a start point. You can then drag a line in any direction and it will tell you what the line of sight characteristics for any direction are.

I do not think that this would be 'cheating' because I suspect the AI is very capable of this, and it is quite difficult for a human just looking at one of these maps (that you cannot zoom out by gradations) to estimate fields of fire from prospective enemy positions.

I find that when I lose a battle it is primarily because I have underestimated the vulnerability of a starting position and the AI just happens to have set up his units so that I get hammered within the first 10 seconds of the battle. Having a tool for showing fields of fire would help.

[Southernland]

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid
Having a tool for showing fields of fire would help.

You can test your LOS during the setup phase by ordering a fire command and seing where there green line changes

[Anthropoid]

ORIGINAL: Southern_land

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid
Having a tool for showing fields of fire would help.

You can test your LOS during the setup phase by ordering a fire command and seing where there green line changes

Yeah, that dawned on me that you can move your units around and test fields of fire with your own units. I did that in the last battle I fought and it made a huge difference in properly positioning my stuff to defend Dasburg. Killed all 8 allied armor, 53 of 70 grunts, and all 20 officers! for something like 6 of my leaders, one tank damaged, and maybe 15 grunt casualties.

Yeah, so scratch (12). But a couple others that dawned on me.

13) Have a command that allows you to tell a mortar crew to "fire" without them using mortar rounds even when they still have some. Basically if there were two command for mortar crews "fire" and "fire mortar" (as well as the others).

14) Another formation idea: Two Columns. I bet some of you vets or guys who are tactical experts could suggest other ones. Maybe it is not doable, but it sure would be neat if you could tell them to get into a few different formations which had different tactical effects. I'm guessing that 'teaching' the AI to use such things would be the hardest part.

15) One other movement type: Cautious Move, about half-way between Sneak and Move in speed but about 33% less vulnerable to ambush than Move. Right now it seems there are three modes of movement: crawling, walking carelessly, and running/sprinting (carelessly). Why not walking carefully too?

I really am starting to hate these guys. This is one of those games that should come with a warning label. One of the best games I've ever played by far. Amazing really . . .

And I gotta TEACH tomorrow!!