Now, for your reading pleasure

[Larry Reese]

The latest installment of.... (drum roll) LR's bitching about the limitations of the game engine. Todays topic: SPOTTING. Now, I know the engine was originally designed for smaller maps where this will rarely come into play, but I think it's kind of silly that a unit, no matter how well hidden, becomes almost automatically spotted if it is within the LOS of a large enough number of enemy units. You can have a single platoon of infantry, hidden in dense forest, on a steep hillside, 4000 meters away, doing nothing, not moving an inch, firing no weapons, neither shooting fireworks nor having a rock concert, yet they are almost universally spotted when a sea of enemy units moving across the valley floor miraculously spots them, as though all those units are made up of the model for Eagle Eye GI Joe (yes, the 12 inch tall ones, not the jerk off dildo made in Japan 3 inch bull sheisse).

Without dissecting this thing, it seems to me that every enemy unit gets a fresh "roll" at spotting a friendly unit. In most cases, fine. But in scenarios with huge sight lines and long visual distances and large numbers of units, this yields ludicrous results. Not to mention the fact that a unit not on what it perceives to be the "front line" is generally far less wary than those out front. Infantry and other units in the third echelon, in my opinion, should get significant penalties to spotting.

Of course, we could chalk it all up to something like land-based Huff-Duff, and say they're spotting the radio usage of the unit while it is calling in artillery, etc..., but that does not take into account the fact that they could be using only land lines.

In short, I think this needs to be rectified. But then, this would still be behind my number one peev - the abyssmal artillery system. But I digress.

Be good people,

LR