itkotw2000
Posts: 30
Joined: 8/27/2005
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I have been waiting for a game like this ever since I started playing WiR back in the day. It is nice to see a war game that uses NATO icons and not sprites (sprites of soldiers on the map is the bane of new war games).
I have some of the same dislikes that other people have written about.
UI - not being able to tell which words on a window are actually buttons. This is an easy fix, I am not too worried about it.
AI units seeming to escape from pockets (and I mean 100% closed pockets). For now I am going to switch off FoW and count the encircled divisions before ending my turn, just to see how bad it really is.
Assigning support units is a pain. There needs to be different screen to manually transfer them between HQs. Auto works very well 99% of the time, but I had an extremely hard time getting Karl and Theodore to the siege of Lenninrgad. And despite them being at the siege many turns, I only have seen them being used in one battle each. I would also like to see a way to assign artillery to a unit, just so there would be a high chance of them being used. As I type this post, I had an idea that maybe fortified zones (or a fortified zone-like unit) could be used for the purpose of assigning heavy artillery to a siege. The down side is that by adding a fortified zone to a hex, I would have one less infantry division for an attack. Hmmm, just an idea.
Here are a few minor things that bother me :
1. AI launched a recon flight to an area where I had 11 air bases and a couple HQs, the battle showed that 22 fighters and 523 AA guns engaged 2 recon planes. The battle results = 1 fighter damaged, 0 recon planes damaged. The fighter I lost, I presume, had engine trouble or was hit by friendly AA  . After looking at a lot of recon battles I see that intercepting fighters take more losses than recon planes. Not many losses, sure, but every loss counts. This leads me to a couple of questions -
- If 523 AA guns fire at a couple recon planes, do those guns consume as much ammo as if they shot at a single flight of 12 bombers? If so, it would make me happy if fewer guns engaged small flights of planes (or low threat planes).
- Secondly, if 22 fighters and 523 AA guns can not intercept and shoot down 2 recon planes, why add this function to the game? Why not abstract it ?
It makes me wonder if the battle screen just shows all of the defending units in the area, regardless of whether they actually found and shot at the recon planes or not. Or did those 22 fighters and 523 AA guns actually find and fire at the recon planes, resulting in me losing one fighter? I just dont want my troops wasting ammo, and I do not want to lose extra fighters for a lost cause.
2. In the production screen that shows captured equipment, I think the list should not show eqiupment that the country is never going to be able to use. Examples of equipment I have captured in my latest game that Germany will not be able to use - cavalry tanks, dd tanks, and SP AAMG.
3. Also related to captured equipment, I see that some of the captured equipment pool decreases even though no units are listed to be using that item. Is the game complex enough to take into account conversion of captured equipment (obsolete tanks being up gunned or turned into tank destroyers)?
4. Another captured equipment rant, one of my panzer divisions began using a few captured T-34s, also appearing to take a -50% experience hit for using new equipment (reminds me of WiR, I am fine with the major exp hit), but by the next turn the division had replaced ALL of their medium tanks with T-34s, thus empting the pool. Those 50 T-34's were hard to get, I had to kill 1217 T-34's to capture 58. This worries me that any losses will cause them to switch to yet another type of tank and then take another exp hit. I would have been happier if the division just converted a percentage of their medium tanks to T-34. This could represent them having a company or two of T-34's.
On a side note, when the division upgraded and used my whole pool of captured T-34's, it removed the "T-34" line from the captured equipment screen. I would like to be able to keep tabs on how many I have captured and how many are in units (even though the pool might be zero).
5. General rant about captured equipment - The percent captured seems a little low. I do not know exactly how much equipment was captured and used in WWII, but after looking at some of my in-game numbers, it could be a tad higher. I took a quick sample from my latest game (shown below) and I am thinking the percent captured could be, maybe, 2 points higher. There are a few factors I would be willing to concede - low captured percentage in the first few months representing the German belief that it would be a short campaign; less capturing after battles and retreats but higher in unit shatters and surrenders; a certain percentage ( 50-70% ?) of the captured equipment going through the repair system, causing some the captured equipment to trickle into the regular pool. I also totally support the large apparent exp hit unit take when switching to a captured AFV type (mentioned above).
Examples from my current game (killed/captured/% captured) -
T-34 1217/58/4.7%
T-26 2870/51/1.7%
KV-1 534/14/2.6%
KV-2 184/13/7%
BT-7 3083/78/2.5%
82mm mortar 6223/159/2.5%
Oddly the number make some sense, the light tanks that are easy to destroy have less captured. While the heavier tanks, hard for the germans to kill outright, tend to survive to be captured. The KV-2 crews must have been chickens, they have the highest captured percentage I could find. Stalin would not be pleased...
Wish list -
1. Manual support transfer between HQs, with the ability to lock certain support units to an HQ while leaving some to "float" automatically between HQs.
2. Recon planes able to be shot down easier.
3. Manual vehicle and artillery upgrades and downgrades (including captured equipment) based on general equipment type and pool availability, and a way to lock-out auto upgrades.
< Message edited by itkotw -- 12/26/2010 3:41:29 AM >
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