Storm in the East - Round 4

[Tripps]

OK this is a great introduction to what IMHO is the root of when people say "X should have spotted Y" and declare the game broken.  Yes, LOS on a hex board is a yes no question.  Can unit X see unit Y.  We all played those games with perfect spotting where LOS = is it spotted = LOF. 

So the vast majority of us have played those games where there was no real FOW (yes I know fake counters, etc.  but come on you have to admit it was not really FOW).  And the only question was can unit X see where unit Y is.  I am not aware of any game that added "but does X actually notice Y".  And that is the big difference here.  BFC is trying to model the chaos of the battle field.  They are trying to model that soldiers get are not perfect people, that they are looking one way when something important is happening in the other direction, that they get tunnel vision due to stress, that they duck when you wish they would not.  They are trying to model the morale factors that cause people to perform less well and how that interacts with their training level.

So in the hex game above LOS = is it spotted = LOF.  In CM LOS <> is it spotted <> LOF.  LOS is just the first step.  The game figures out what places a unit can actually see then they get some kind of chance to spot the enemy that is in the location they can see.  With all the soft factors that model the imperfect human, the concealment of where the enemy is, etc. etc.  All of which I have read Steve say on the BFC boards.  I may try to find some of his posts but honestly this has taken a while to craft and I need to get to work so who knows when I'll get a chance.

All of which means, that if you expect that everyone of your units that can see an enemy will notice the enemy you will be very sad and frustrated.  Again not trying to be mean or cruel I am just trying to get this idea across. Some of us have totally out of whack expectations of what soldiers can process on a battle field.

So, having said all that I do realize (and so does BFC BTW) that not everything is perfect and there can be bugs.  Those - how the hell does X not see Y when Y is big and sitting in the open are hard to take.  The thing is sometimes people in real life miss important things they "should" see and BFC is trying to model that.

Our choice is to roll with it or go back to a simpler time :)

Cat - I agree with this, and I get your point, really I do, I always have - its not that I dont understand what they are trying to do, more I think they havnt quite got it right yet