Matrix Games Forums

I finally purchased TOAW III, and, like everyone else, I have been very impressed with the new PO. I have only had a chance to try Korea 50-51 and Cuba 62 (two of my alltime favorite scenarios), but there are two bits of oddness I thought I'd bring up:

1) This is new for TOAW III, as far as I know: Elmer seems to be obsessed with sending aircraft after ships. In both scenarios, he wastes lots of fighters (MiG-15s... definitely NOT a naval strike fighter) going after ships. He just loses tons of fighters, fighters that should have been screening him from my punishing 6%+ interdiction;

2) This is apparently a carry-over from TOAW-COW: Elmer spends a LOT of time shuffling units around along his line. I assume he is trying to balance out his forces before he makes an attack, but he is burning lots of movement points and supplies, and causing massive attritiion, before he ever gets to a movement phase. You can watch him pull a Chinese division out of his front line at one point, drive it 10-12 hexes to a point just 4-5 hexes down the line, then do the same thing somewhere else. I get the impression that the PO does not really weight the cost of movement in its decisions... that could lead to a pretty costly miscalcuation.

That said, Elmer is still giving me a solid run for my money, so these can't be catastrophic issues. Maybe they aren't at all... I am not the best player by far myself...

[:)]

Jon

Both this points have been brought up earlier and programmer Ralph Trickey has posted that he will look into them.

Erik

It would help to have some sort of slow-down when Elmer makes his moves so that it is possible to see what kind of troops he moves. Now it runs too fast.

Hi!

From what I can understand, Elmer not only tries to balance his forces and concentrates at critical road junctions, but also sets up a "defense in depth" by spliting up his forces. That leads to an attrition battle which can be drawn out, but also means Elmer reaches a critical point in which the entire force almost collapses.

Elmer also has a tendancy of abandoning his #1 objective point. From a designing point of view that can be disasterous.

I'm not sure how to address this problem, but perhaps Elmer can be programmed to include other aspects of the game so as to view some objectives as far more critical than others. For example, if the objective is located on a waterway, a mountain pass, a city, a city with an airfield and especially important.. a supply point he will give priority in defending that point. Thus, for example, if, defensive wise, objective 1 is located at a city with an airfield and supply point, he will defend it to the death.

Ray (alias Lava)

Yeah… I notice that also if you place a unit in a hex with a defend order and ignore losses. They tend to move to another hex and dig in. I hope Ralph can fix this in the future.

ORIGINAL: GreenDestiny

Yeah… I notice that also if you place a unit in a hex with a defend order and ignore losses. They tend to move to another hex and dig in. I hope Ralph can fix this in the future.

I think that fundamentally the PO just doesn't care what its current deployment is: only what the optimal deployment would be.