"It is kind of hard when something has been this way for over 10 years to just come out of the blue and say "this is ridiculous and must be fixed NOW", well, you can get in line behind many other people who have their own pet peeves with these games. ;) This is especially worse when the only perfect solution is right there in front of you: turn on the MDF optional rule."
Who is coming out of the blue? I brought the issue up and got no response so I ratcheted things up, called it "ridiculous" and finally got a reply. And from reading the comments these issues have been around for quite some time. MDF is not a prefect solution. It's quite a struggle to play these 150 turn campaign games. MDF would make it 300 turns and nobody wants to go back to that. The solution is an easy one, but first the problem must be recognized; it is completely unrealistic for a WWI MG section of 30 men to be firing first at enemy movement 1000 yards away to starboard, then switch fields of fire to shoot at enemy movement 1000 yards away to port and not fire at all upon an enemy massed right in front of them. Ditto with artillery: There is no artillery commander ever who will raise the elevation of his guns to engage in long range counter-battery fire when enemy infantry is engaged in a mass assault upon his position. These issues don't matter in PzC because AT guns and other ranged guns are almost less than useless. In WWI campaigns these guns are the basis of the French Army's fire power.
Jonny
"You both make good points, this issue has been around since the start of the PzC series and is no worse in F14 apart from the greater amount of ranged weapons may make it [i]seem worse. I think we have all grown to accept that the ADF will not always do what you want it to and i think because we have got used to "god like" total control over our forces (which no commander really had) we tend to get frustrated at anything that is variable, it is just our human nature."[/i]
I have to disagree with you Commander. It doesn't
seem worse in WWI campaigns, it
is worse. As I've said, ranged guns in PzC are most of the time completely useless except to hold a protected hex until destroyed. In WWI they are the basis of the French Army's firepower and without them the French Army can't do anything except retreat. I'm not asking for godlike control but I know what you mean. This isn't that but rather asking for just a semblance of realism. You must have seen artillery batteries fire away at command units 4 hexes distant while withholding fire against an over-stacked adjacent enemy controlled hex. Why should MG sections, 30 men with 2 guns, fire at enemy activity in every direction except where it matters; right in front of them? What was passable in PzC is absurd in F-14.
If you want to play a large scenario PBEM in a reasonable amount of time then ADF can be a downside, i believe it could be improved but will always be a variable that we cannot control. ;)
From my experience these ADF problems are easy to deal with once there is a consensus there is a problem. I personally witnessed John Tiller make an apparently complicated fix in a matter of days. I'm not against variables, they are an important element in any game system. But watching units behave in an impossibly ahistorical manner must be disturbing to anyone. Fixing a program so that units in ADF withhold fire when the adjacent hex is occupied by the enemy can't be that big a deal. jonny