Fabs
Posts: 444
Joined: 6/5/2000
From: London, U.K.
Status: offline
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Great news, ectizen, I'm now hooked on waiting for the mountainizer.
Don, I've done some experiments with the limited capabilities that Rockin'Harry has kindly highlighted and I have been able to master.
LOS can be tricky, but it seems to be a question of playing around with the relative jumps in elevation to get the effect you are looking for.
I can't seem to figure a way to obtain the effect of a regular slope rising at the same rate for several levels.
Another challenge is the effect on movement if one wants to model steeper slopes than those currently available.
Ten meters elevation change in 50 meters is not very steep.
I would advise using mountainous terrain for infantry only scenarios because, as has been pointed out many times by Paul, the armored combat routines don't assume sloping in the calculations, and AFVs would frequently have been unable to negotiate steep terrain.
Providing roads that have cliffs on both sides to stop the vehicles from leaving them is the only exception to get around the steep slopes, but still does not deal with the limitations of the armored combat system, and would not make for a very interesting game.
Having the possibility of using more elevations and steeper terrain would make it easier to faithfully represent scenarios from the Noeway, Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, Balkan, Eastern, South East Asia and Pacific theaters where mountainous or hilly terrain was an important feature of the fighting.
As for Germany invading Switzerland, the geography of the area would have made it a pretty stupid option.
Switzerland was allowing the Allies to use their air space and the Axis to use its Alpine railway routes.
If Hitler had invaded, he would easily have overrun the relatively flat terrain in northern Switzerland, only to find the Swiss retreating into their mountain redoubt, thus shutting off the Alpine routes (the only strategic asset worth fighting for, and that he had access to without firing a shot, just by dint of intimidation) and reversing the roles of the Italian fighting, with the Swiss in a position to exploit the terrain for an economic defense that would have tied down huge numbers of German troops needed elsewhere.
He would, furthermore, have been fighting people of mostly germanic stock who were no strangers at showing two fingers to their more powerful Germanic brethren to the East and to the North, something they had repeatedly demonstrated through a long history.
Hitler had no qualms about rearranging borders if it suited his designs. That he never invaded Switzerland is the best demonstration that, whatever use he had for it, he could get what he wanted without using military force.
During the early years of the war, the Swiss were not about to envite the germans to invade by refusing to accommodate their needs for transit through the Alps.
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, he could never have spared the troops.
I'm afraid he had other, much bigger fish to fry.
[ July 24, 2001: Message edited by: Fabs ]
[ July 24, 2001: Message edited by: Fabs ]
[ July 24, 2001: Message edited by: Fabs ]
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Fabs
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Fred Chalanda's Wavmap and elevations - 
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