Feature requests

[ComradeP]

With all the discussions about what is and what isn't working entirely correctly, it might be a nice idea to talk about some features that are currently either missing from the series after the "port" from PzC or that have never been in a JTS game before, but would be welcome.

There's two main ones I can think of:

1) Place All.

With the large airborne/amphibious landing operations that get dropped/placed by platoon/company, the Place All feature becomes a must have. As much as I'd like to play a scenario like The Longest Day, all the clicking required to get my units on the map is causing some serious unnecessary strain to my wrists that prevent me from playing the scenario as there's just too much clicking involved.

PzC has it, so it would be nice if it could be ported over.

2) Broken down units retain the opportunity fire preference of the larger unit.

[Dog Soldier]

My thoughts are there are further issues to consider in this proposal:

1) Place all
For PzC the reinforcements rarely, (if ever) come under defensive fire when they arrive.
Not so for PzB, especially the airborne or seaborne troops.  These can enter under intense defensive fire.  It might be best not to bother in PzB with this kind of feature due the longer ranges and unlimited defensive fire would not give you the result you are looking for.
Even in the largest scenarios in PzB Kursk or Normandy, I can place all the units arriving in less than a minute using the currently dialog and double clicking my way through it.
That is based on my observations of the game playing ant not on a detailed knowledge how the code would handle it.  If the system were to still place every unit in succession one at a time, all the defensive fire that would result would not save the player any time anyway.
If all the units could be dropped en masse in one placement, would the proper defensive fire opportunities be cheated?

2) Some way to disable defensive artillery fire support for artillery units through the opportunity fire dialog.

Setting the opportunity fire dialog to never should be exactly what is done to have any unit hold fire until it is discovered by the enemy's recon elements or by an assault into the unit's hex.

Just to clarify the situation ComradeP is addressing, is the circled setting in the image below what you are using for a single battery?  First highlight a single unit, then open the opportunity fire dialog to set a fire order for the unit. If you do not select the unit first you will get a very different result.


I ran very extensive tests of the artillery firing functions in Kursk.  David and I worked out all the issues to our satisfaction.  If you set the opportunity fire dialog for the artillery to never, it should not fire in the defensive fire phase and give up its position.
I was satisfied this was working, though my testing was log ago in Kursk and should have carried over to Normandy.  I will take a look at this again.  If you have a game save file where you saw this behavior of the gun firing anyway, send it to Strela and me for review.

Dog Soldier

[ComradeP]

Units in FWWC also come under fire when placed in some of the grand campaign scenarios and as far as I know it doesn't cause problems with opportunity fire as it seems to trigger normally. The Place All feature still places units or groups of units one by one and they can be targeted by opportunity fire.

At the moment, based on how it works in PzC and FWWC, I have no reason to believe it causes issues with unlimited opportunity fire not triggering the same amount of fire as if you would place them yourself.

And yes, I can also place the units in a minute or so, but that requires a lot of clicking, for multiple turns. We have a mechanic to do it in PzC/FWWC, it's not user friendly to have to do it yourself in PB.

The Katyusha units in the north and the mortar stack in the northwest in our 5th of July game were all set to never, yet they still fired. I've seen it happen in other games as well.

Edit: hmm, it seems units reset opportunity fire preferences when split up, as two of those mortar units from the split up 9 mortar unit were suddenly back to L. That might be causing the issue with them, though it wouldn't explain the situation in some of the other games.

[ComradeP]

I can't reproduce the situation at the moment, so it's possible the units either reset their preferences at some point for some reason, or felt they were spotted and thus switched back to "fire whenever possible".

I'll rephrase the feature request to: broken down units retain the opportunity fire preference of the larger unit.

[wiggum]

Playing the Tutorial #2 (Utah) i really dont know what forces will be available to me during the scenario.
While i can open the "Units -> Scheduled" Dialog i only see that countless ships (LCVP) will arrive but i cant see what units they will transport.
The "Strength" and "Show Organization" Dialogs are painful to read and dont help anyway because they include a ton of unnecessary (not present) units.
How are we supposed to know what forces will be available during a scenario, how can i see what units ships and planes will carry ?

Here is my idea for a improved strength dialog:


What do you think ?

[Dog Soldier]

I can't reproduce the situation at the moment, so it's possible the units either reset their preferences at some point for some reason, or felt they were spotted and thus switched back to "fire whenever possible".

I'll rephrase the feature request to: broken down units retain the opportunity fire preference of the larger unit.

Units will lose the opportunity fire settings if spotted and will revert to normal AI control for defensive fire purposes.  This is as intended.  The player does not have a fine control over units engaged in the defensive fire against their opponent.  Such control would render PBEM file exchanges impossible.

The broken down issue and then recombining feature would work as you describe.  The new units resulting from breaking down a larger battery would be considered by the game to new units for the purposes of the opportunity fire dialog.  The same behavior happens IIRC when combining previously broken down elements of the same battery.  The latter case of recombining might be a big problem as the component smaller elements may have completely different opportunity fire orders than each other.  How would the program decide which is the order that carries to the new combined unit?  this is more problematic when one considers the smaller elements usually break down to equal numbers of guns.

I found it not to hard to remember that batteries that any units that break down or recombine require new opportunity fire orders if I want to control them at that fine a level at the time.  It is just a habit I developed to check the OFD In such cases as they do not occur too much during most of my games.  When it does happen that I need to do this, it is all about the same time

I try to move all units which will be out of enemy LOS for the turn as the last actions of a turn which is a courtesy to the other PBEM opponent watching the replay.  Not always possible, but nice when you can do it.

Dog Soldier

[wiggum]

Wait, i thought you can set opportunity fire only global and not for single units (on map counters)...?!

[Dog Soldier]

Wiggum,

I pushed this issue hard when I first started testing Normandy.  Not being able to identify the units in the landing craft until they are deployed on the map was bothering me too.  What the scenario designers told me is this was a "confusion" feature of the landings.  It works as intended.

I did not like it.  At first.  Then I played more with it and came around to their way of thinking.

They did have a point that it is not a game breaker.  You can get your units organized in the water with a lot of right clicking  to see who is in what landing craft (kind of like the memory game with playing cards children play) or you can just rush the landing craft to the nearest beach or shallow water hex, unload them and organize from there.  This is the historical approach.

Organizing in the deep water while loaded on the landing craft is time consuming and can result in extra losses from defensive fire from the beaches.

Organizing after landing feels more historical.  It adds some extra fun to the game to deal with this low level of confusion.  It existed on D-day far more for the historical commanders who did not have all units reporting their status to them as game players have such excellent intelligence about the exact state of their own units in the game.  BTW, IIRC, the scatter of the landing craft for the different beach scenarios was adjusted by the scenario designers to simulate the level of D-day confusion when units landed in the wrong places.
Or I just dreamed that since at some point I was testing so much I was seeing beach landings in my sleep.  

Was it the house cat pouncing on my feet as I slept?

In all the scenarios not having a beach landing, checking the release and reinforcement dialogs as in PzC becomes pretty easy with practice to get a handle on your force allocation for any scenario.

If you really want a detailed force head count, just open a scenario in manual control for both sides.  Then simply click through the turns bringing on all the reinforcements until they are all on the board sorting them out as you go.  Easy to do if one really cannot feel comfortable obtaining that information through the release and reinforcement dialogs during a game.

Dog Soldier

[Dog Soldier]

Wait, i thought you can set opportunity fire only global and not for single units (on map counters)...?!

Ha Ha!
You are now going down the rabbit hole.

Yes, you certainly can set every unit that is in hidden status on any turn to precisely the opportunity fire orders you want.  Those orders will stick until the unit is discovered by enemy recon elements, assaulted, or if you move them somewhere else. 

The first case is recon discovery, which you can never be quite sure has occurred to your hidden units.  This is an intended feature of the game.  Uncertainty in battle.  So pause first before reporting hidden unit bugs.  We got this working exactly the way we like it.  And I mean literally hundreds of man hours trying to find any way to break the hidden unit - opportunity fire combination feature of the PzB series.  We missed the reveals when Kursk came out in the jump map.  But really, when you have as much time spent as we do in testing scenarios over and over, and over, and over, and over....well you get the idea, who on the testing team even looks at the jump map after a while?  BTW, I got through all the Kursk testing without ever using the jump map except in Strela's giant map of the entire southern front which is not a playable scenario anyways.

The third case makes sense as I do not think the program tracks a units opportunity fire setting s once the unit breaks down, combines with other units, or moves position.  Just not coded that way.  In a way that makes things easier as the player knows these actions cancel the opportunity fire orders and just rest them based on the new situation.  The same orders may not apply t all so why keep them?

There are many more layers to this onion (PzB) which really only come out when you play a live opponent in PBEM.  And there are some pretty crafty devils in the community already.  

Very fun indeed to see a green Allied commander go up against a battle hardened veteran Axis player.  Just like what happened historically in Normandy except you are not killing people to learn to command well.  You will live to fight again.  And be wiser for the experience.

Dog Soldier

[wiggum]

Thanks for the answers Dog Soldier, but what is a "hidden status" ?
Can find it in the manual.

Wiggum,

I pushed this issue hard when I first started testing Normandy.  Not being able to identify the units in the landing craft until they are deployed on the map was bothering me too.  What the scenario designers told me is this was a "confusion" feature of the landings.  It works as intended.

Sorry, but calling a lacking and confusing OOB dialog a "confusion feature"...wow...
No offense.

As i have show with my photoshopped example, if someone would put a bit of work into the OOB dialog it could be much better readable and offer more informations to the player that wants to know what units will be at his disposal without getting lost in a confusing small text box.
A "confusion feature" would be if the exact turn and hex would not be shown to the player (or maybe a slightly false one).

They did have a point that it is not a game breaker. You can get your units organized in the water with a lot of right clicking to see who is in what landing craft (kind of like the memory game with playing cards children play) or you can just rush the landing craft to the nearest beach or shallow water hex, unload them and organize from there. This is the historical approach.
Organizing in the deep water while loaded on the landing craft is time consuming and can result in extra losses from defensive fire from the beaches.
Organizing after landing feels more historical. It adds some extra fun to the game to deal with this low level of confusion.

Thats not the point, i just would like to know (at the beginning - Turn#1) what units will be available during the scenario.

Will i have AT guns ?
Will i have tanks ?
Yes ?
How many tanks ?
Will i have to take this bunkers with infantry or do i get combat engineers ?

If you really want a detailed force head count, just open a scenario in manual control for both sides.  Then simply click through the turns bringing on all the reinforcements until they are all on the board sorting them out as you go.  Easy to do if one really cannot feel comfortable obtaining that information through the release and reinforcement dialogs during a game.

Dog Soldier

Yeah, but that totally destroys FOW and is a really crappy workaround.
I vote for a improved OOB dialog.