Team Play in TAO3?

[Duncan Maggs]

Over in the Blitz Wargame Club, the TAO2 players are just starting a team game (2 US v 2 German). The program has not made it easy to do. The e-mail games cannot be saved mid-turn, so a player can't move one German army and forward the file to his team mate to move another army.

A face to face game is being used as this allows mid-turn saves. However the save game file is not given the name that a player gives the game on the occasion of first saving it. For example if I name the game Last_Blitz0911 the program will save it as game01.sav or ..02.sav etc. This makes it more difficult for players to pass on the file to others in the same team game. You have to make sure player 2 doesn't have a game01.sav in existence or else it will be overwritten.

Can the designers at this late stage of development incorporate features in TAO3 that make team play easier? For example add an e-mail team game option that retains the automatic save but enables up to four player names to be added in at the set-up stage (in order of play - Ger1, Ger2, US1, US2) so that they will each be able to receive the game file in sequence without the above complications.