1914 ADF is rediculous

[Volcano Man]

Is it difficult to change the range of units? Perhaps making the range 3 for field guns would help.

Well, no it is not difficult, but it is not desired either. The field guns firing (even with opportunity fire) out to long range is desired (at least I am happy with the behavior here I mean), because there are many times where the enemy is not attacking but you are keeping him off balance with disruptions. I have had many of my own attacks foiled because long range field gun fire disrupted units that are assembling for the attack. Don't get me wrong though, the 4 or 5 km shots won't cause massive loss of men, but disruptions are a realistic and desired probability.

A couple of points:

Maybe importing the ability to set AI Fire range (ACW, EAW have this, maybe others.)

Turning on MDF in conjunction with ADF does not increase the number of PBEM exchanges or the length of a PBEM game. There is simply phased play with the AI running ADF during the Defensive Fire Phase. (I assume this was known, but it kind of got skipped over in the discussion.)

Now you can argue that phased play does not accurately reflect Blitz warfare, but in 1914 maybe in makes more sense.

Actually, I thought about this during development. The issue is that even by putting a range limiter on ADF, such as in the "AI" drop down menu, we will always have cases where the units fire on things you don't want them to, even at a range of 1, there is no way around it. However, that is not to say that such a limiter would not help. Also, the difference in ACW, EAW and Nappy (if I am not mistaken, correct me if I am wrong please) is that ADF is infinite, it never runs out by MP expense, although it is much weaker than normal fire. This actually might be the answer really: maybe ADF should be infinite but weaker. However, this too has its own problems: large scenarios would take even longer to play as there would be at least twice or three times the amount of ADF going on (maybe more) and those cases where something is adjacent would see very little in the way of effective fire against them (although it would be a higher volume of it).

But the question is, whether or not an ADF range limiter (with the current ADF behavior) would either be global to all units, or set specifically for each and every unit would be useful or a realistic level of control or not. I am not convinced that the user should be able to set fire control for each and every single unit on the map, to me this seems like too much control for this period. But then again, that minutia level of control (and then some) is available with MDF on, so there is no easy answer here. I am not a big fan of MDF myself, and I felt that ADF performs adequately enough because of the reasons I mentioned in great detail in the previous post so I don't see any big emergency here despite the fact that some people have a personal pet peeve with it. However, it would be "nice" if you could set individual fire control settings for each unit IF the unit is not detached from its parent HQ (if the unit was detached then it should be something you cannot control). I might be willing to live with something like that - perhaps I will suggest it in the next title.