Units Breakdown

[Larry Reese]

Let's not get started on the abyssmal indirect fire modeling in the CS. This is probably my biggest problem with the system, as you can walk right through a continuous barrage if you time it right.

My observation is this: higher strength points should equate to more vehicles, or men, or artillery tubes, etc..., firing on the particular target. More shells should equal a higher chance of hitting. Same in reverse. If there are more guys trying to hide behind the same number of trees or buildings, it's going to be easier to hit some of them than if there are fewer.

The problem seems to me, to be if the game engine disobeys these rules for smaller units. I've seen games where, for example, a 1 SP unit is given an artificial boost (because it IS weak) and this generally made the game more interesesting until players figured that out and then would send their entire fleets into combat as individual units instead of a fleet, allowing that little arbitrary bump in effectiveness to incredibly whittle down enemy forces much more than an attack of all those individuals combined would have.

The big payoff in CS, is that, except for area fire weapons (read: indirect artillery) 6 1SP units would be more survivable than 1 6SP unit because the enemy would have to fire and get hits at least 6 times before those 6 1SP guys would all be dead, while there would be a chance that two 3SP hits, or 3 2SP hits would kill the single 6SP platoon. Of course, with the area effect weapons, damage would be increased - a single artillery attack on the 6SP unit, while 6 separate attacks on the 1SP units would likely yield more damage.

Even, if everything was linear, and statistiaclly the additional number of fires did not yield an increased number of hits and damage even with fewer firing SPs, you'd have to (in my opinion) build into the system some kind of incentive for keeping the units together (combined units getting some kind of "leadership" or "effectiveness" bonus or something), or you'd have essentially converted the game to a fire team scale instead of platoon scale game.

Anyway, it's late and I'm not thinking straight...

LR