I guess if it automatically zoomed back to where I had it set after panning for the shot it would be ok. But as things stand now it’s simply a pain and adds far too much work for players to have to deal with that has nothing to do with gameplay.
I also ran into my first bug in the Nutcracker scenario. Playing as Germany I saw several Russian units set up in the lake at scenario start as this screenshot shows:
Also I’d like to mention that the AI should never stack its units on setup when it places them. The Germans start this scenario with an 88 and in the first two turns, I smacked two stacked hexes (the one shown and another hex with 3 tanks in it) and virtually wiped out all the observed Russian armor before the Russians had a chance to use them. So as a rule the AI should be prohibited from setting up its units in a stacked situation. The only time I could see a justification for it would be if there was very good underlying terrain and any other hexes around lacked any good defense.
From a gameplay point of view, I find the shoot at every single unit in the hex penalty for stacked hexes doesn’t feel right for this scale. A simple modifier to the attack die making it easier to hit the targeted unit would feel better. As it is now, it simply feels wrong that a single unit gets to shoot every target no matter how many are present for the same AP cost as shooting a single target. I could see a justification for HE hitting all the soft targets in a hex, but AP ammo hitting every armor target feels wrong.
I haven’t seen it happen yet, but I assume if there were both soft and hard targets in a hex then both HE and AP ammo would be applied, and that is even harder to get my head around given how short a single fire action would be time wise.
Finally is there a way to turn off the floating text messages? The bottom panel lists everything that goes on already, and the floating text seems redundant. But even if it weren’t, it floats up so fast I find it impossible to read, so in the end it simply clutters up an otherwise very nice battlefield display.
Jim
