Matrix Games Forums

I am curious about how closely Matrix will follow Chris Marinacci's beta. As I have said elsewhere in the forum, I am in favor of preserving the variable scales used in the board game. Also very useful would be a small menu in front of everything else that would allow better organization as well as faster navigation between screens. Also, a pivot-view so that the "board" can be viewed from an angle would enhance the realistic boardgame feeling of it.
I think that Matrix can best use the CM beta for all the game-related bugs that he ran into when coding and fixing it; learn from his experience and anticipate those problems so his effort was not wasted.
Anyone else who has played the Marinacci beta, please give comments and feedback in this thread, as it may assist Matrix to have this kind of analysis gathered together in one thread.
Seven Ages is on the way at last! Maybe Matrix can do that one too, if it is as fantastic as WiF and Empires in Arms...

The biggest struggle for me when playing the beta is that its like looking at the boardgame through a telescope. You can see one part of the War most excellently but the rest of the board is invisible. I remember playing boardgame WiF where everything was visible out of the corner of your eye. A fraction of a swivel of the eyeball could move the vista from North Africa to the Pacific and there was no chance of leaving a cruiser mouldering in port in Sierra Leone because you could see the sucker right there in front of you. CWiF has a whole new set of complex control interfaces required to investigate each front. It used to be so easy to flip through the deployed German cardboard on the map and find (say) all the FTR deployed or to look at all the sea areas and find the deployed German subs.

I'm not being a luddite on all of this... I'm just concerned about the learning/immersion curve for newbies especially if they haven't played cardboard WiF before getting MWiF.


I need to think how to express this better and hopefully give some hints about how it might be solved.

Greyshaft:
I think what we want is the "strategic map" prevalent in Real Time computer games. A small portion of the screen shows you what is going on a large scale while you see in exact detail a small portion of the map.
It would be nice to toggle the size of the strategic map (or corner of the eye view) relative to the magnifying glass (detailed look at every hex).

I, for one, would love a utility that highlights all pieces that were eligible to move in a particular phase (and the ability to hit an arrow key that shifted to the next unmoved unit like a turn based computer game + another to move in the opposite direstion) to avoid mistakes. If I choose a naval with the British, I'd love to have two LS highlighted in South Africa that I missed.

Just my thoughts and opinions.

Greg

Well the beta does have a minimap, but the scale is so extreme that the minimap is almost useless for the purpose of identifying units. I believe that the system can still be developed to overcome this telescope effect, but it requires a careful analysis of the user interface and I daresay a large (but controlled) step away from the slavish conversion of the boardgame into its computer clone.

Much discussion remains

I, for one, would love a utility that highlights all pieces that were eligible to move in a particular phase (and the ability to hit an arrow key that shifted to the next unmoved unit like a turn based computer game + another to move in the opposite direstion) to avoid mistakes. If I choose a naval with the British, I'd love to have two LS highlighted in South Africa that I missed.

Hello,

CWiF had it all.
- Pieces were already highlighted in all phases were they could move. It was also envisionned to highlight all the hexes where they could move, but it wasn't coded yet.
- You could hit the INS / DEL keys to move from available pieces to pieces. During a Naval move, it moved across each movable units. During a Gound Strike, it moved across all the units that could make a ground strike. A LND who had nothing in range to ground strike was not selectable for example.
- You also had a wonderful command in CWiF, allowing you to see a dialog with a list of selected units. The filters to select the units was simply awesome, you could see for example each and every TRS / AMPH that was in port and undisrupted for a given nationality, or for many nationalities.
- The map ws double, even triple, with a strategic / globe map, a main map window and a linked map window. Both map windows could be zoomed (25% - 200%) and filtered as to what they were showing.

All these features, and many others, had the result that I had this feeling of seeing the whole map and even the whole game room (my dusty garage !!!), as if I was really playing the cardboard game, as you said, that "everything was visible out of the corner of your eye".

Cheers !!!!

Patrice

ORIGINAL: Froonp
- You could hit the INS / DEL keys to move from available pieces to pieces. During a Naval move, it moved across each movable units. During a Gound Strike, it moved across all the units that could make a ground strike. A LND who had nothing in range to ground strike was not selectable for example.
- You also had a wonderful command in CWiF, allowing you to see a dialog with a list of selected units. The filters to select the units was simply awesome, you could see for example each and every TRS / AMPH that was in port and undisrupted for a given nationality, or for many nationalities.
- The map ws double, even triple, with a strategic / globe map, a main map window and a linked map window. Both map windows could be zoomed (25% - 200%) and filtered as to what they were showing.

Hi Patrice,
First, thanks for the research work you did on average counter factors that I quoted in one of my posts. You must be getting close to your Masters Degree in WiF by now.[:D]
Second, I had found some of the commands that you mentioned. My concern was the learning/conversion curve for newbies, both in finding/remembering the appropriate Alt-Shift-F3-whatever command in CWiF and also in realigning their user interface expectations. I twiddled with the beta long ago and I've started playing with it again recently (thanks Mzlin!) but it is certainly a much different "WiF" experience than pushing cardboard. For instance, counters that can move are highlighted in lime but if you are Germany in 1943 with a couple of hundred counters on the map, do you really want to cycle through all of them to find the one you want? I was thinking that perhaps MWiF could allow a browse mode which allows you to scroll across the map at the start of the turn and then tag the hexes/counters that are of interest to you... oh yeah... must move those two LS out of Sierra Leone during my naval move. These half dozen hexes/counters would be presented in a dialog box that stays visible all turn and the list would be automatically cleared at the end of the turn.

Just an idea for Roberts notebook [:)]

Just an idea for Roberts notebook

And a good one I think.
There was already a way to put a note on a unit, but the note doesn't show too much.
Having a list of hot spots decided by the player is a good thing !!!

Patrice

(thanks Mzlin! (SP))

No the Thanks go to Patrice.

He is the one who gave us th link to the copy of CWiF v0.7.71

I'm not sold on the new scale for the rest of the world either. China shouldnt be that important IMO, more a side show. Alot of empty hexes !

China is IMHO a way more interesting theatre now with the European Scale.

And after having played a couple of campaigns of CWiF, I did not feel it was advantaging the Chinese or the Japanese, it is tricky and very dangerous to both sides.

Moreover, I "felt" it was much more historical. I'm not an historian concerning China, but it "felt" better for me, better than the '14-'18 feel the Chinese front gives to me in paper WiF FE.

Anyway, I never liked that the limitations of space necessary to play WiF obliged Harry Rowland to design the game with another scale for the Pacific / Asia / Africa / Scandinavia. It oblige to additional rules to manage the scale difference, and gives something that is not satisfactory to me.

For me, having the whole world at the European Scale is one of the main interests in seeing MWiF completed.

Cheers

Patrice