Greg McCarty
Posts: 234
Joined: 6/15/2000
From: woodbury,mn,usa
Status: offline
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Panzerjaeger Hortlund:
[B]Is it only me or is this somewhat overlooked in SPWaW? .....
....I cant thank you guys enough for this game, but there is one thing that I miss. Night combat. Lots and lots of important battles took place at night. But this is something that is very hard to simulate.
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I am currently re-designing a night battle
for SPwaw. All the proposals you mentioned would be great to have as tools, but that kind of flexibility would require programming to take these things into account. This means major code changes, followed by debugging, and pehaps a good round of unpredictable game behavior. I guess the question is how, and who, will have the incentive to tie the code into further knots to realize this important but in the broad scheme of things, peripheral improvement? Probably wont happen anytime soon. Why? cost vs benefit. The old diminishing returns rule. But to address your topic:
I've found that the best approach to deal with game limitations is to stretch the most out of the existing tools, and occasionally
fool the game into behaving a little closer
to what we wish to achieve. To sort of do the most we can with what we have. (which aint bad by the way) And to resist the urge
to micromanage a scenario to death on a detail level that gets above, below or beyond battalion/company/platoon scale in an overall management sense. This is difficult to articulate, but what I'm trying to say is that you capture the essence of the night battle by determining maximum likely visibilty given the overall environment --not just a few hundred yards of specific map detail. Remember, in a given scenario, we are going to be fighting over roughly four square miles --or more, depending on map size. So while the visibily in a real situation may vary from place to place, we are forced to round off the corners a bit and reach a level of sight limitation that fudamentally fits the essence of the battle as a whole. So you guage the situation: Are there burning buildings all over, or, no moon with rain and fog at midnight in what is mostly dense forest. Both could be night situaions, but what a great deal of contrast! Even in the modern era, night battles (on any sizeable scale) are usually avoided as a matter of doctrine, but they were often fought as a calculated risk if the judgement was that the situation was worth it, or just plain desperate. Night battles are, by nature, terrifying, wastefull and chaotic. Which is why I chose to reproduce the battle of Caumont, June 12, 1944. -A pitched night battle between elements of the American 1st infantry div, and the Aufklarungs battalion of the 2nd Panzer Div. You'd be amazed at the startling and unpredicatble yet realistic results that can be achieved with as little as visibilty reduction, carefull waypoint selection, and clever use of map features. While there are certainly limitations to what
we can do, I have been fairly pleased with
what the game has allowed me to put together
so far.
Greg.
[This message has been edited by Greg McCarty (edited October 20, 2000).]
_____________________________
Greg.
It is better to die on your feet
than to live on your knees.
--Zapata
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Night fighting - 
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I suppose it would be very difficult to code that.
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Arralen
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