Erik Rutins
Posts: 37503
Joined: 3/28/2000
From: Vermont, USA
Status: offline
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By request, here is the change list for v1.10:
Flashpoint Germany
v.1.10
Revised: 1 Mar 2006
New Features:
• Unit orders can now be given in the pre-game setup phase without a command lag time penalty. You can assign assault, move, barrage, etc orders to take effect as soon as the game starts. The assumption is that all the planning has been completed just prior to the scenario start. There is no Staff Order Point cost to giving these orders.
• There is now a gentle Map and Counter resizing option. See the new dialog box found via menu item < Graphics > / Enter Loc and Counter sizes. The intent is to be able to fine tune the sizes of the counters and map squares to what works best for your eyesight and the screen resolution available on your computer. Changes will be saved from game to game.
• When there is a change in weather and / or visibility your staff will now post an explicit notification to you in the middle of the main screen via a standard message dialog.
• The Staff Diary now breaks out the kills and losses grouped by icon type e.g. tanks, HQ, mech inf, SP Arty, etc. on a new grid that can be viewed at any time. Totals of the losses are also provided.
• We wanted to create a simple way to identify all units that are in urgent need of ammo resupply -> if they are out of ammo points then they will be shown in *red* text in the CoC and Staff Diary treeviews. While we are at it, we will also show all HQ units in *bold* text for extra emphasis. (This does not apply to the scenario editor treeviews – the underlying plumbing for those is completely different.)
• In the Staff Diary Chain of Command tree (only) dead units are now shown in *italics* to help the player see the bigger picture at a glance. Units that are completely out of supply are shown in red.
• It was often hard to tell what the ‘posture’ of a unit was at any given moment. We have now added a “@ POSTURE” indicator at the end of the unit strength report in the unit description panel. You will now see descriptions like “10 tank @ EXPOSED” or “4 M1A1 Abrams MBT @ COVERED”. Remember that Fortified is the best, followed by Dug In, Covered, Exposed, and Very Exposed in declining order of protection bonus in combat.
• A small new plus sign has been added to the upper left corner of the unit counters to denote the presence of ‘mixed’ subunit types, e.g. some sort of mixture of tank, mech inf, SP arty, etc icon types. This is an indication that unmarked units are pure units (apart from the necessary HQ vehicles) and marked units are more of a combined arms unit.
• The ‘preview’ toolbar button has been removed to make room for a much larger and more explicit turn resolution button that says “Fight”. There used to be a little stopwatch image on that button but it just was not clear enough – we want the player to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the big important button and what will happen when he presses it!
• The font size of the ‘combat hint messages’ can now be varied between 7 and 14 points. This setting can be edited on the Color Editor dialog screen and is saved from game to game. Thanks to Hank for asking for this one!
• A new ‘Game / Suppress Confirmation Dialogs’ menu item has been added. The effect to is stop telling the player 'Sir, turn resolution is about to commence...'.
• A ‘close’ button has been added to the LAN player ‘chat’ panel at the far right edge to minimize the screen footprint if desired. If the panel is closed and a message arrives then it will pop open automatically and then close after 10 seconds if the player does not start a reply. There is also a horizontal splitter control to shrink or enlarge the viewable part of the chat panel.
• Air strikes against empty target locations will now be called off for lack of targets and the aircraft will not be put at risk to ground fire finishing the strike. The strike aircraft will return to the loiter zone and will be On Call again for another strike mission.
• Mech infantry that is dismounted now shows a “1” movement factor if the counter is drawn with a symbol rather than a silhouette. This makes it more clear when they are embarked and when they are not. Mech infantry will dismount whenever they are not moving or if the come within 500 m of an enemy unit while moving.
• For helicopters to receive emergency resupply they must be within 2 locations of their HQ and not be moving. This is more realistic then letting them resupply in their forward firing positions.
• Automatic counter battery attrition gives 4 times the power to ‘x’ rated (saturation fire) platforms such as the Soviet BM-22 and the NATO MLRS rocket launchers. There is also a 4 times increase for ‘i’ rated armaments such as the MLRS. These two benefits are cumulative in appropriate circumstances.
• In recognition of the special ability of recon units to do their job without becoming a flaming datum, the basic chance of a hit on them by an enemy weapon is hereby cut in half. This acknowledges the special doctrine and training recon troops (typically highly experienced if not elite manpower) enjoy. They are now also allowed to move at normal speed while in stealth mode instead of the normal half speed.
• Recce units given Hold orders used to dig in and change their SOP which allowed enemy closure to 0m and fire at 500. This caused the recce units to sit still and get overrun by enemy units instead of running for the hills. The doctrine override for Hold orders has been waived for recce units now. Their previous doctrine settings will be used unmodified.
• A number of new special codes have been added to the Platforms table:
o 'r2' – 2nd generation reactive armor (Kontact 5 ERA) that would be on the top T-80's in 89. This is the Kontact ERA which is more effective against HEAT and also can break long rod rounds. We give it 80% chance to reduce HEAT 50% and 20% to reduce AP 25%..
o ‘rd’ - ground to air radar for air defence units. This allows full participation in air defence even at night or during inclement weather. Units without radar are cut back in effectiveness at those times now.
o 'w' - Laser Warning Receiver - % chance based on crew skill to reduce the accuracy of laser guided PGMs, ATGM and direct fire by evasive means (smoke / cover / scooting) within the current location.
o ‘qs’ – quick scoot in the sense that there is no setup or tear down when moving from position to position. This particular applies to SP Arty – there is a significant difference between entirely self contained M109 or MLRS versus guns on a chassis (2S5) that require time to prepare for firing and then for moving.
o ‘m’ – mast mounted sights and weaponry. This reduces a chance of a hit on this platform by 75% while the unit is not moving.
• It is now possible to substitute a single cloud graphic instead of a cloud animation for combat hits and misses. Use menu item ‘Game / Use Static Images Instead of Animations’. This setting defaults to True for Win9x machines. The effect is not too bad once you get used to it and the game plays out much faster which is a bonus for those in a hurry to get on with it.
• The game now ends automatically when the losses of either side reach 100%.
Other Changes:
• The combat model has been tweaked from top to bottom with countless small changes to improve vehicle and weapon interactions. Multiple changes have been made to weapon and vehicle characteristics in the database. Artillery, helicopters, mech inf in good defensive terrain, spotting rules, etc have all seen major changes. The cumulative change has been dramatic.
• The pre-game setup phase used to allow unit overstacking. This design decision has been reversed – stacking limits for units and subunits apply in this phase too.
• Reinforcements not yet received were being counted towards the current number of runners. This has been reversed and may lead to sudden death victory if the % number of runners already in the game drops below 20% before the reinforcements are received.
• There is now a special add-in bonus for mast mounted sights when sighting and also an adjustment for the defensive / cover bonus relating to it.
• Spotting – rule change – any unit that fires becomes visible to all enemy units within max visible range with a LOS regardless of their own spotting range limit until the firing unit moves or five minutes elapse from the most recent burst of fire.
• When calling up the Diary screen, the default diary text used to be for the *entire* list of units of the side for the game to date. It has now been changed so that it defaults to just the current unit for that side (for speed reasons) and this makes it *much* easier to use this function to review the unit history so far and therefore much more useful to the player. The entire side can still be selected via the “Show All Diary Entries” button and in that case the delay creating that report still remains.
• Units on Rest and Refit will now say on the Orders tab of the UDP when they will be rested and ready again to rejoin the battle. Look for a new line that says “-> Ready in x mins”.
• LOS cut back a bit so that forest and built up areas are not within usable LOS unless the spotting unit is adjacent to them. There were some unlikely LOS areas showing up and this takes care of them.
• The NATO AI will go through an extra planning cycle whenever an enemy unit is spotted when none at all were spotted before (a ‘first contact’ situation).
• The AI used to lump *all* recon units together into a general purpose screening / probe force. That worked when there were only 1 – 4 recon units per side but now that there are potentially a lot, groups are created instead respecting HQ subordination (if any). In some scenarios there now can be multiple independent potential probing forces. This will give more granularity to the ground recon effort.
• More attention is paid by the AI to out of supply units and scooting them out of danger and then putting them on Rest and Refit orders.
• The AI was aiming for the bulk of the enemy forces in most attacks rather than the most attractive sector from a broader VP perspective. This has now been changed to see if it will do a better job maxing out VPs by game end.
• The AI has been changed to go over to the defense if it has already secured the best VP sector rather than chasing after the rest of the enemy forces in other sectors to defeat them.
• When the AI is in charge and the % of units with waypoints or TRPs falls below 15% of the active on map unit total then it is assumed that a major AI cycle is substantially done and a new one will be initiated. It will no longer wait for an arbitrary fixed amount of time to elapse as before. This should help address the concern that the AI was standing around doing nothing when the situation was ripe to move and gather victory points.
• The ‘spottable range’ function was rewritten so that small units in close terrain cannot be seen from so far away. This should particularly help infantry defending in cities and forests.
• FSCC arty missions will not be called down automatically now unless there are at least 3 target steps (up from 2), and a random chance based on the current electronic warfare intensity rating.
• The FSCC wasn’t canceling pre-existing artillery fire missions when assigning new ones so sometimes arty units were doubling up their combats improperly. Fixed.
Minor Fixes:
• Various irritating PBEM bugs have now been fixed.
• The “S” short cut key to select a stack now toggles the stack off when pressed a second time.
• The map no longer scrolls while a dialog box or menu is showing. Thanks to CommC for pointing that out. Also, it will now scroll when the mouse cursor is hovering over a combat unit.
• When a H2H game ended not all the unspotted surviving units were revealed on the map. Fixed.
• The terrain tell-tale in the bottom right corner of the game screen has ‘river’ and ‘stream’ descriptors added back in again.
• Scenario Editor: Supplying a new root name for a duplicate unit (and subordinates) when appending a new unit from the db did not always do a complete job of getting rid of the old root name. Fixed.
• Scenario Editor: Deleting a unit would delete it and its children, but not its grandchildren. Fixed.
• Scenario Editor NEW: the right click popup menu now lets you delete just the unit selected but not the subordinates, or the unit AND its subordinates.
• Careful testing found a bug that caused certain conventional HE arty barrages to be treated as harassing attacks only. This inadvertently reduced arty effectiveness over the course of a game.
• Fixed: when hosting a LAN game the UDP would usually disappear and not be redrawn, leaving an unhelpful gray box instead.
• The data table FP2 (Platforms) contained a picture of every vehicle. This increased the FP2 file sizes from 115k to about 25 megabytes total and they had to be redistributed in its entirety for every little change. All of the pictures have now been spun off as separate jpg files that are loaded as needed by the Hardware Inspector and do not need to be constantly redownloaded when updates are made. All of these new .jpg files are to be found in the \Data subdirectory.
• From time to time the NATO-style counters would show a *negative* reported number of vehicles for the AI player. The cause has been found and fixed. Also, if the number of spotted steps is 0 then a “?” will now be shown instead of a “0”.
• Sometimes the AI would keep firing every 30 minutes and force a replanning of assaults that would then be replanned before their planning interval was up. Assaults were being replanned as many as four times before they were actually allowed to proceed. Now if a new order is of the same type (eg. Assault and assault) then the time already run will be credited to the new planning time.
• Red ‘line of fire’ game option restored to Windows 98 users. A new way of drawing that line no longer wastes GDI resources.
• Scenario Editor Bug: Identifying a Mission Briefing directory would change the current working directory and cause the scenario to not save properly. The original proper directory is now restored on exit from that dialog and the scenario saves properly again. .
• Arty losses to general counterfire were not being attributed to any particular counterfire unit – this has been rectified so that the new claims killed chart adds up properly.
Additions:
• A handful of additional units have been placed into the game. They include the following: M-60A1, M-60A3, SA-9, SA-13, ZSU-23-4, BMP-1. The NATO and WP CSV files have been cleaned up with these new units and the layout has been revised. This will be visible in the scenario editors.
• We have added an Advanced LOS feature which shows a units LOS in a five color arrangement. You can turn it on and off from the Game menu tab.
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