SB: Idea on scenario "replayability"

[Jeff Conner]

Gentlemen

One of the challenges of being a scenario designer is to wring as much as possible out of the system as it exists now. If you use a bit of creativity, you can do much more than you think you can. If you want a game with free deployment, tell a third party where you want to set up your forces and he can create the scenario for you. If you want to choose your own forces, set up a point scale and do so. These are not insurmountable obstacles if you really want to try SB that way. However, I don't really think that the inclusion of either one of these, while it may be kind of cool, is going to sell that many more SB titles. The powers that be have to determine where they are going to spend their limited amount of coding time to get the most return.

If I had any say in what changes I would like to see, it would be to add some kind of flank modifier to fire and assaults that occur through non-adjacent hexsides. Currently, there is no advantage to flanking a unit, while historically this was one of the most common tactics to take a position. During assaults, a defending unit can run around in a circle and combat every assault against it just as effectively as the first. But, I don't have much of a say, and something like this is not likely to be implemented due to the amount of coding it would take and the troubleshooting that would require.

The "X" loads were developed for the WW I title as Ed wanted to show that field guns rarely ran low on ammo and only retreated when their position was threatened. I don't see it being used very often, except for maybe setup machine guns in strong defensive positions. These weapons are very hard to deal with as they kill just as well at the end of the game as they did in the beginning. It should be included when ES is updated next, although I have no idea when that is likely to be.

There is also a mod that Frank Harmon made that adds British and I think French and Italians to ES. I think you can find it at TF Echo 4, at least you used to be able to. It didn't cover everything, but there were a handful of scenarios including one that had British armor and US paratroopers in Nijmegan. I don't have it anymore (that was several computers ago), but hopefully, it is still around. This is another example of what a little creativity can do if you set your mind to it.

Jeff