Matrix Games Forums

I played the game a little bit a few years ago but very quickly got frustrated with one bug in particular:

Very often as the attacker I would have my entire turn burned by one attack. Normally you get 10 "impulses" per turn, but for whatever reason the attacking unit would get locked into an attack cycle and use up all ten so that I effectively could not do anything at all for the rest of the turn with ANY of my units, regardless of whether they were involved in that attack or not. Does anyone else have this experience? Has it been fixed?

In version 3.4 the designer can set the max number of rounds burned in an attack. Then there is a probability that the turn will end set by several factors inlcuding the force proficiency. Long story short: in a well designed TOAWIII v3.4 scenario you should only rarely experience the problem you mentioned and it would be 'by design'.

ORIGINAL: ftgcritt2
I played the game a little bit a few years ago but very quickly got frustrated with one bug in particular:

Very often as the attacker I would have my entire turn burned by one attack. Normally you get 10 "impulses" per turn, but for whatever reason the attacking unit would get locked into an attack cycle and use up all ten so that I effectively could not do anything at all for the rest of the turn with ANY of my units, regardless of whether they were involved in that attack or not. Does anyone else have this experience? Has it been fixed?

I've found this problem in most of the older scenarios and it's easily fixed by changing the MaxRoundsPerBattle to 3 instead of the 99
that it is now. If you do change it please change the name of the changed scenario so nobody has to look to see if it's been
changed. Barbarosa '41 had that problem and I modded it for the MRPB and it's changed the gameplay a lot.

I too, found this frustrating, but the comments by governato and larry should help a lot.

You not doubt understand the "Circle of Stars" below the control panel, but it took me a while to catch on. They are a great clue if you inadvertently commit, say, an artillery unit that has already moved to the attack. If any of the stars are silvered out that is a real clue that you have overshot your allocated combat strength for that impulse.

Good luck!

ORIGINAL: governato

In version 3.4 the designer can set the max number of rounds burned in an attack. Then there is a probability that the turn will end set by several factors inlcuding the force proficiency. Long story short: in a well designed TOAWIII v3.4 scenario you should only rarely experience the problem you mentioned and it would be 'by design'.

ftgcritt2's problem is exactly the first issue I was hoping to be addressed in the next patch. See here: http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3846478
I don't think the problem is that the turn of these units, who participated in an unexpected tough battle, will be "burnt" or or because their proficiency check didn't pass. On the contrary I think these are all reasonable settings.
The problem is, that other units, who were not involved in this particular battle at all, also got their rest of turn "burnt", even though some of them may be very far away and under the command of a different general. Can you imagine that the troops in Minsk all stopped moving for 2 weeks because their buddies in Stalingrad had a tough time breaking into the city?
The only way I can imagine to fix this issue is that one battle only affects the units involved and their direct HQs (to the extent majority of the sub-HQs are affected then the next direct HQ should also be affected), and burn all their remaining MPs (turn), but the other units and HQs who are not related to this particular battle should be able to still do whatever they want, as long as they still have MPs.
To be clear, I like the design of the "battle rounds", which are just like "mini turns" that can give you much more room for tactics and maneuver. This is certainly something makes this game more fun than others. So I will not support any idea to remove the battle rounds or reduce the number of rounds. To me that's taking a very unique element of this game away.

The game functions this way because it was designed for modest, Operational level scenarios where this wasn't expected to be an issue. Principally, it was designed around Norm's Korea 50-51

With III, the MRPB feature essentially mitigates the effect, allowing for larger scenarios.

The issue with the solution proposed by X.ray is that one group of units might fight for ten rounds to create a breach, then other units can exploit it. This would clearly be worse than the current situation.

The obvious solution would be to make the hexes where the battle took place impassible for the rest of the turn. This would prevent some strange things from happening as in GG WiTE where it's possible for units to pass through hexes at the same time battles should be taking place.