Great game, some small suggestions

[DanH]

Hi all,

I bought COTA yesterday and love it! I've also got HTTR and played it to death. I do have a couple of small suggestions, nothing really major, but I think they would improve it even more.

1) The biggest improvement that I hope gets added with a patch, and probably would be easy enough to implement: If you open up the scenario editor, and open up the list of estabs, you can double click on individual items and get a neat info window for each item, with varying info depending on the piece of equipment. What I would LOVE, is for that info window to be brought into the game, and accessible when you double click on an estab item on the left panel. It would make it so much better to have that info about each item in the game itself... weapons on each vehicle, weapon ranges, vehicle speeds, etc. I don't care that some items don't have a bitmap, its more the info that I'm after.

2) An improved after battle summary screen. Cram as much info into this as you can, as it's a wargame and most wargamers love stats. Some examples would be: clicking on individual units and seeing a breakdown of who inflicted the casualties, and a breakdown of casualites they have inflicted, and what weapons caused them. Some other ideas, would be things like total amounts of different types of ammunition expended (+other types of supply items), and the ability to break that down by unit.

I haven't asked for these features before, because I just wanted to see the game and didn't want to slow you guys down too much. It would be cool to have them in a patch at some stage. I love the new features (especially the resupply), great work.

Cheers,
Dan.

[Dunhill_BKK]

I agree with DanH. I would also like to see the pop-up unit descriptors from the in-game unit menu if possible. It doesnt seem like it would be a huge resource hog or a difficult alteration. It seems like you've already got the item identified, you just have to link a call to the pop-up.

[jungelsj_slith]

2) An improved after battle summary screen. Cram as much info into this as you can, as it's a wargame and most wargamers love stats. Some examples would be: clicking on individual units and seeing a breakdown of who inflicted the casualties, and a breakdown of casualites they have inflicted, and what weapons caused them. Some other ideas, would be things like total amounts of different types of ammunition expended (+other types of supply items), and the ability to break that down by unit.

YES PLEASE. I haven't played COTA yet, but have played HTTR. I have trouble discerning which weapons are doing the damage. It would be VERY interesting to see a breakdown of what killed what - I'm assuming that artillery ends up doing the bulk of it, but beyond that it would be really neat to see that certain companies kill a bunch of tanks with PIATs, etc etc.

[JudgeDredd]

If I could just add a wee thing to this list of possible enhancements.
 
I noticed that the Msg tab is displayed with the most recent event being displayed at the bottom, but the Log event for units being displayed with the most recent event at the top. I have no preference whether the most recent goes to the top or bottom, but I would like to see these information tabs being in the same order, please. [&o]
 
And to reinfocre what the two other posters said, I think it would add to your sense of achievement if you could see more details relating to the outcome of battles. I like seeing what units performed and how (a nice feature in the CM series).
 
Thx

[Tomus]

One suggestion I would really like to make is to have a sort button on the scenario listing. So we could sort via date, or length etc. I personally like to have seen the scenarios arranged in some sort of date order rather than alphabetically as I like playing that fashion.

[Banquet]

It would be nice to see stats for weapons & units in the E&S tab.

I think this it was mentioned at some point in the forums prior to release - but it would have been great to see what losses the unit was inflicting and taking in the log tab.

One other wish list item - in the General Tab you can see the various bars for fatigue, cohesion, etc.  If you hold the mouse over these bars a pop up tells you the percentage figure..  it would be cool if that also had a plus or minus in the display as well - so you could tell at a glance not only what the fatigue level was, but if it was going up or down.

[wodin]

Ive asked for No 2 suggestion awhile ago. I also would love this to be implimented. No 1 suggestion is also a fantastic idea.

[MarkShot]

ORIGINAL: Tomus

One suggestion I would really like to make is to have a sort button on the scenario listing. So we could sort via date, or length etc. I personally like to have seen the scenarios arranged in some sort of date order rather than alphabetically as I like playing that fashion.

Have you tried downloading my spreadsheet with scenario information and sortable?

[MarkShot]

FYI - Dave took the weekend off, but I am sure he will be making notes on all your excellent ideas when he returns.

[GoodGuy]

EDIT bah, posted the same 2 times, dunno how that could happen :p
see below.

[GoodGuy]

ORIGINAL: Tomus

One suggestion I would really like to make is to have a sort button on the scenario listing. So we could sort via date.......

Word! Same thought came to my mind when I was digging for the Crete missions, after I fired up COTA for the first time.

......Talkin' bout scenarios/briefings: The Iraklion briefing displays "May 1940".....it should state May 1941 ! Operation Merkur (Mercury) lasted from 20th of May to 1st of June 1941. Also, Iraklion used to be named Herakleion on Allied maps, and Härakleion on german maps.

Well, minor stuff, but I like things to be correct in wargames, in historic scenarios at least. [:D]

EDIT: Did I mention that I love COTA, though? [:D] Alright, I feel better now .

[Neilster]

Hey Dunhill_BKK...

Show us your map of Tassie!

For the uninitiated, Tasmania is kind of wedge shaped and heavily forested. As a result "Show us your map of Tassie" is an uncouth Australian suggestion directed at young women.

Cheers, Neilster

Edited because I was being too surreal. I'd been staring at a screen for too long.

[Bane_MatrixForum]

So is that where the saying you can't see the trees through the woods comes from? Or something like that...

[Dunhill_BKK]

Actually the profile is a bit out of date. I've been living up in Canberra for almost two years now.

I should invite the Panther folks to one of my beer tastings sometime.

Cheers,

[Neilster]

ORIGINAL: Bane

So is that where the saying you can't see the trees through the woods comes from? Or something like that...

Umm, probably not.

I like your avatar. Bert rocks!

Cheers, Neilster

[Neilster]

ORIGINAL: Dunhill_BKK

Actually the profile is a bit out of date. I've been living up in Canberra for almost two years now.

I should invite the Panther folks to one of my beer tastings sometime.

Cheers,

The North Island! Ah, but once a Taswegian, always a Taswegian. I lived in Newcastle for 6 years when I was in the RAAF but moved back to Tassie to do uni as it's a good campus and I like Hobart. How about those winter mornings in Canberra? And you thought Tasmanian winters were cold. It doesn't half get hot there in summer too. Funky city layout though and lots of cool museums and such, courtesy of the taxpayer.

Beer tastings eh? Your own stuff? I'm a keen home brewer and I heartily recommend it to all the beer lovers out there. It's easy, saves you a fortune and the satisfaction of drinking one's own concoction is amazing. Just keep everything very clean and the fermentation in the 20-26 degree C range and you can't go wrong.

Cheers, Neilster

[goodwoodrw]

Bah, who says home brew is cheap! I bought my wife a home brew kit for christmas, to make cheap beer, however one day one of ours friends brought over some Grolsh and she liked the bottles, those bottles with its own stopper connected to the neck with wire. plus they are around 450ml to a 1/2 litre in size, she likes her beers big[ amongst other things, but we won't go into that ] she wants a stack of them for her home brew, the problem is they twice the price of VB or Melbourne so wheres the saving [:)]

[Llyranor]

Well, if this is the suggestion thread, so here goes.

I haven't technically started playing the game yet (the manual is slightly large, after all), but I'm thoroughly impressed by the new interface options (well, compared to the RDOA demo anyway, but these new features are awesome nevertheless). This should be fun.

One thing I did myself wishing for while playing the RDOA demo was a rewind function. Sometimes when I'd zoom in closer to observe a particular battle/area more in detail, I might end up missing some info that's happening elsewhere in the map. Having a rewind that'd allow me to go back (say, 1 hr?) without, of course, having the ability to change orders/commands would be quite nice in that aspect. I'd understand if this were too much of a resource hog/programming headache/etc, but it'd be a nice feature!

Cheers for a great game!

[Neilster]

ORIGINAL: BASB

Bah, who says home brew is cheap! I bought my wife a home brew kit for christmas, to make cheap beer, however one day one of ours friends brought over some Grolsh and she liked the bottles, those bottles with its own stopper connected to the neck with wire. plus they are around 450ml to a 1/2 litre in size, she likes her beers big[ amongst other things, but we won't go into that ] she wants a stack of them for her home brew, the problem is they twice the price of VB or Melbourne so wheres the saving [:)]

Hahahaha! That's part of the attraction. You can justify buying heaps of beer before you start brewing to get the bottles. Trust me, once you get going, you'll notice the savings. You can make 60 stubbies for less than $14. If you buy concentrate kits in bulk when they're on special, you can spend about as much and use the fancy brewing sugars that enhance taste, head retention and mouth-feel too.

I make long-necks because it makes bottling half as much work. Also, unless you like cloudy beer, and many do, it's better to carefully pour into a jug or glass, leaving the sediment at the bottom.

I recommend Cascade Golden Harvest concentrate BTW. The Coopers ones are good too and I found that even the Coles generic one made a nice drop.

Cheers, Neilster

[Banquet]

ORIGINAL: DanH

1) The biggest improvement that I hope gets added with a patch, and probably would be easy enough to implement: If you open up the scenario editor, and open up the list of estabs, you can double click on individual items and get a neat info window for each item, with varying info depending on the piece of equipment. What I would LOVE, is for that info window to be brought into the game, and accessible when you double click on an estab item on the left panel. It would make it so much better to have that info about each item in the game itself... weapons on each vehicle, weapon ranges, vehicle speeds, etc. I don't care that some items don't have a bitmap, its more the info that I'm after.

I've just been into the scenario editor and was surprised at just how much info is in there for the units. It would really be fantastic to have this available in game. I suspect the lack of icons might be a problem though?

The manual states that the armour values listed in the (ingame) unit stats is simply a totalling of the armour values of all the units. So this could be lots of lightly armoured vehicles or a few heavily armoured ones. Someone with good knowledge of all the equipment used in WWII could probably come to reasonable conclusions about the strength of the units when looking at the intel from the sighted units on the map - but for the rest of us who might not know the intricacies of a Lee Enfied and a Mauser, or a Panzer IV and a Valentine - it would be very helpful to be able to call up this info.

If that isn't do-able - is there a way to import this info into a database or spreadsheet, so it can at least be printed out?