Matrix Games Forums

Bought the game this morning and have been messing around with things. So far I love what I’m seeing though the auto-scrolling camera is a pain. I wish it would stay at my chosen zoom level when panning to and from shooter/target instead of panning out to a high zoom level. I find myself getting peeved I have to spend a large portion of every turn zooming back in and trying to get it back to my chosen tilt and zoom levels, very frustrating…

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

We found a bug in the AI setup script list for Nutcracker that causes the AI to set up its units randomly about 12% of the time. That's probably what you're seeing here.

ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns


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.

Basically in the board game the rationale of the Designer was that one attack action does not represent a single round fired but rather the amount of firepower it could put into a target area in a certain time. So each "shot" actually represents quite a few shells being fired.
Since target aquisition, aim time, corrections and stuff like that factors into it, it seems reasonable that they can effectively attack two tanks who are only meters away from one another in just about the same time it would take them to attack just one of them.