Hi folks! I'm relatively new to the series, still learning. :) Well, my main problem for now is: how am I supposed to keep track of arrivals and reinforcements? The small dialog boxes are of very limited use, especially in large scenarios and full campaigns! :( As the display obviously hasn't been changed in all those years the devs seem to think that it is okay as it is now. So I wonder if I am missing something here?! Am I supposed to make my own spreadsheets for a better overview? Not fun! How do you guys handle this problem?
Tantalos Wrote:Hi folks! I'm relatively new to the series, still learning. :) Well, my main problem for now is: how am I supposed to keep track of arrivals and reinforcements? The small dialog boxes are of very limited use, especially in large scenarios and full campaigns! :( As the display obviously hasn't been changed in all those years the devs seem to think that it is okay as it is now. So I wonder if I am missing something here?! Am I supposed to make my own spreadsheets for a better overview? Not fun! How do you guys handle this problem?
Tantalos:
I sense here you must be an old board gamer who is used to looking at the reinforcements as counters on a card and you are correct that this is not a game feature.
I will let others jump in here but I think players have just gotten used to letting the PC take care of issues that are beyond control. You can look at the reinforcments in the list. And if you click on a line you can see what units arrive and the map will jump to the hex too. But you won't see the actual unit strengths.
Another thing - as the scn developers faces this issue building larger Scn where the units arrive as reinforcements, we had John Tller create a Scn summary feture from the game editor. Just load up the scn in the editor and the Summary is available under the file menu I think - makes a text file that lists reinforcements, AI Orders and a few other pieces of info we felt we needed to have.
....but you won't see the Order-of-Appearance card from your boardgame days - sorry.
Hi Glenn! Thank you for your response! At first and foremost: no, I'm no boardgamer, just a simmer who happened to stumble into wargame business by accident! But I have found a new hobby in the PzC titles!
Your hint about the summary.txt file is very useful, although it's more like a workaround and a cheat. I was refering to the format of the dialog boxes in first place. For example, I have just started the full S41 Exp2 campaign. It's very tedious to figure out what reinforcements will arrive when, because I have to browse through the full list every time again and again. As a result, the only workaround seems to be a custom spreadsheet or something along those lines. It's also the fact that I can't resize the dialog windows, and even worse, that there is no sorting function. I.e. sort by formation, or something. What I was hoping for was an OOB dialog (like "strength"), that shows arrivals and releases within the OOB tree, perhaps with different color or format or whatever. This alone would make my life so much easier.
As I have said, I am relatively new to the series, I'm sorry if I am beating a dead horse here!
Looking at the summary.txt from M41 scenario 1115_05: The Main Even - Operation Typhoon, there are no Reinforcements shown. Only the Releases and AI Orders appear. Doing a couple of random Minsk scenarios shows the same lack of Reinforcements in the summary.
Sgt Barker Wrote:Looking at the summary.txt from M41 scenario 1115_05: The Main Even - Operation Typhoon, there are no Reinforcements shown. Only the Releases and AI Orders appear. Doing a couple of random Minsk scenarios shows the same lack of Reinforcements in the summary.
:conf:
sorry guys - my mistake - only the Releases and AI Orders are in the Summary. I guess I didn't ask for the reinforcements to be included as I've must been ok with the dialog. I must have been just thinking to ask that it be included.
Sgt Barker Wrote:Looking at the summary.txt from M41 scenario 1115_05: The Main Even - Operation Typhoon, there are no Reinforcements shown. Only the Releases and AI Orders appear. Doing a couple of random Minsk scenarios shows the same lack of Reinforcements in the summary.
:conf:
sorry guys - my mistake - only the Releases and AI Orders are in the Summary. I guess I didn't ask for the reinforcements to be included as I've must been ok with the dialog. I must have been just thinking to ask that it be included.
Glenn
There is no easy way to handle reinforcements. As you have noticed some of the dialog boxes takes some getting used to. I found it took me some time to get used to the interface but when you do it is amazingly powerful. Allowing you to handle and track huge army groups with some ease.
Saying that, the reinforcement dialog box is a pain.
In small/mdm scenarios I will through the reinforcements most turns just to keep in mind what is coming. For campaigns, which I prefer, I will generally make notes of divisional level formations arrival dates. I don't track every engineer and mortar rgt coming through but the larger formations I do. That allows me to plan further into the future.
Having reinforcements output to the summary.txt file would certainly be very useful.
Tantalos Wrote:...What I was hoping for was an OOB dialog (like "strength"), that shows arrivals and releases within the OOB tree, perhaps with different color or format or whatever. This alone would make my life so much easier...
That would be nice iIn any game of this kind, honestly. Interface design somewhat lags in almost all operational-level wargames. Even TAOW, which has the best UI I've ever seen in an operational scale game, still makes you hunt for reinforcement arrival hexes. And it doesn't have HPS's lovely jump map and find-hex-by-coordinate features.
Many grand strategic games (I'm thinking of Civ IV, AEGOD's ACW and many of Paradox's games) have detailed "ledgers" that have a variety of spreadsheets full of useful information that let you sort data in various ways. I would dearly like to see this sort of thing in games like PzC or TOAW. But in the meanwhile, you just have to get used to it, and thank God you aren't playing the old SSI games I was playing in highschool. The interface on those things was a bear, let me tell you.
Taking the Smolensk scenario I have mentioned above as an example, I have compiled a list of all arrivals. The info is from the arrival dialog box and the OOB. It's just one single page, but it was quite a bit of work (and possibly riddled with errors), but even now it is much better than before! Now I can obtain some useful information from it! I mean, what are computers good for if I have to do everything by hand? I can only beg the devs to give some of the dialogs an overhaul! Granted, the PzC interface isn't nearly as bad as the WITP interface, which is just one notch above the command prompt, but even they have a bunch of sortable tables!
I created a separate scenario editor a few years ago, that at someone's request here included a printable OOB for just the units in the scenario. It included a unit's location, along with strength info, or if a reinforcement it showed where and when the unit arrived. That might give you what you want, I believe Glenn still has it hosted on his site. It isn't usable for scenario editing anymore, without me fixing it, as changes to the scenario files results in corrupted scenarios, but I think the printable OOB still works okay.
Rick, that's it! That did the trick! Well, it's almost overkill! LOL! 40 pages just for the German OOB in this scenario! There are some quirks because of a missing nations-file, but I was able to copy and paste the OOB into Writer! Thank you very much!
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Not fun! How do you guys handle this problem?
But I have found a new hobby in the PzC titles! 
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