Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: rhinobones

First of all you do not have a historical counterpart. Secondly, this statement needs to be qualified, i.e. “According to Ben Turner . . . makes them fun“

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Also, if you open your eyes a bit, there are things other than historical accuracy to make the gaming experience enjoyable, i.e. “fun.”

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There appears to be little understanding or appreciation that others have an equal opinion to what constitutes a “good” scenario.

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I bet that any scenario Ben Turner designed under these conditions would not be screwed up.

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I bet that any scenario Ben Turner designed under these conditions would not contain units with crap ratings.

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Secondly, who really cares whether you learn anything from a scenario? Is it not impossible for you just to enjoy a good match?

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ORIGINAL: golden delicious

I am outrageously biased, and TOAW helps to cure me of some of that.

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ORIGINAL: lok

I, too am biased...and so is everyone else including Norm who defined the orginal ratings for the weapons database. We are relying on his numbers in our scenario design.

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I personally enjoy looking up TOE's OOB's etc and building an army the "TOAW way".
At the same time, there are times I wish I had a lot of variables/ratings to adjust than what is presently available in TOAW. I can see the advantage of having a large number of fully adjustable (not just boolean flags) variables/ratings for each unit so I can micromanage every unit design to death.

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and some way of adding or editing weapons

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ORIGINAL: golden delicious

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ORIGINAL: lok

I, too am biased...and so is everyone else including Norm who defined the orginal ratings for the weapons database. We are relying on his numbers in our scenario design.

Right. However, it's harder to be biased about the penetrative power of a 6 pounder shell than it is about the fighting ability of 7th Armoured Division.

Building the game up from the level of equipment removes a layer of subjectivity from scenario design. There are many layers left over- but it's an improvement on the alternative.

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I personally enjoy looking up TOE's OOB's etc and building an army the "TOAW way".
At the same time, there are times I wish I had a lot of variables/ratings to adjust than what is presently available in TOAW. I can see the advantage of having a large number of fully adjustable (not just boolean flags) variables/ratings for each unit so I can micromanage every unit design to death.

I agree completely. Everything should be placed completely under the designer's control. The existing settings would just be defaults.

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and some way of adding or editing weapons

We have this already with the BioEd. I'd like to see it integrated into the scenario editor and made more flexible, though.

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ORIGINAL: golden delicious

Well, if it's not a historical scenario, you can cut out the 'historical' part. But accuracy is still important. How would "War of the Ring" be if the elves were crappy and Hobbits were the best troops?

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ORIGINAL: JAMiAM

One quick comment, aimed at nobody in particular, but when designers start designing scenarios based on how the game does work, as opposed to how they think it should work, then a lot of the complaints about "exploiting the engine" will vanish. For example, the dreaded, and oft-maligned "supply drain attack". If designers were to make their units start at 33% readiness, 1% supply, as a normal state, and adjust the supply stockpile rates, movement biases, and attrition divider settings accordingly, you will see that preparatory attacks will have substantially less effect. There is no golden rule that states that unit supply states must be <<<<<....this....>>>> big, or that. Some scenarios will play out better with high supply rates, and prep attacks, others will not. Design for effect, instead of some one to one relationship with some imagined "reality". At the end of the day, the operational focus of the game dictates that the primary gauge of whether one side or the other has won or lost is reflected in where the lines of counters stand on a virtual map, and how much "strength" each side has lost. Designers should keep that in the front of their minds, much more than whether 9th Bicycle Battalion had 6 25mm AT guns, or 12.



Edited for one focus too many

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If designers were to make their units start at 33% readiness, 1% supply, as a normal state, and adjust the supply stockpile rates, movement biases, and attrition divider settings accordingly, you will see that preparatory attacks will have substantially less effect.

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when designers start designing scenarios based on how the game does work, as opposed to how they think it should work, then a lot of the complaints about "exploiting the engine" will vanish.

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ORIGINAL: Hellen

I think there is a disconnect between wanting historically perfectly accurate depictions of say, the 7-pound shell versus a horse-drawn wagon on an individual combat basis, versus the operational vagaries of what might have happened in any given situation taking into account the entire battlefield.

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You guys start from a faulty premise, that all players have a certain knowledge level. That level includes stuff like finding and downloading scenarios or simplying understanding game mechanics. I believe that is not the case. If you want to expand the community, you must reach out to a younger crowd who may have absolutely no idea how to play TOAW.

You want to expand the community, design and include a tutorial. You want to expand the community, rate scenarios by level of difficulty and double the quantity of scenarios included in the game. You want to expand the community, stop acting like freeking "experts" and stop with the threads bashing TOAW.

Any young casual gamer will look at this thread and say "quark this, I ain't buying a game that complicated."

Personally I believe you are doing a disservice to the game and it is highly probable that you are turning off a lot of young people who have never experienced TOAW right off. Well done.

You may now continue with your rather innane conversation.

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ORIGINAL: Pippin

One thing that used to bug me, is you could not scroll the map with the arrow keys. What a waste of usefull keys. Was a real pain on 640x monitors.

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ORIGINAL: Jeremy Mac Donald

When it comes to introducing new young gamers to the hobby one wants to do somthing like This

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ORIGINAL: Pippin

One gui issue that frustrated the hell out of me, was someone's smart idea to make some units do an automatic bombard and movement into an enemy hex when you right click on an enemy unit to plan an attack....

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... actually, probably your objection is that sometimes you don't want to overrun the enemy unit for whatever reason.

Nelson stood on deck and observed as the last of the Spanish fleets sank below the waves…

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ORIGINAL: golden delicious
This is what we call Retreat-before-combat. It's like manna from heaven. If you take it away I will kill you myself.

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ORIGINAL: Pippin

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... actually, probably your objection is that sometimes you don't want to overrun the enemy unit for whatever reason.

That is god damn right! Many times I plan an attack, poof the enemy retreats, and my hq or something important ends up moving right into the midst of the entire enemy forces, just waiting to get obliterated on the next round.... This is nonsense, and I don't know why they bothered to implement such a useless feature.

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ORIGINAL: DanNeely
I could ask why you were using an HQ for a direct attack in the first place, but you can plan an attack with zero risk of an initial overrun if any unit capable of bombardment is within range. Use that unit to open the attack planning dialog instead of the ground unit next to it. I use this regularly when I only want to make a limited attack.

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I could ask why you were using an HQ for a direct attack in the first place

Nelson stood on deck and observed as the last of the Spanish fleets sank below the waves…

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ORIGINAL: Pippin

If they went through the hassle of setting up the attacks this way, why not add another routine so I don't have to run into this problem of selecting weak units in my stacks and sub-dividing units etc, to prevent this from happening.

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ORIGINAL: Pippin

Another thing that bugged me, was splitting and re=combining units gave a permanent decrease in efficiency. Shouldn't this penalty be removed after a while? I don't realisticaly see how the penalty for a combination of units back to its original parent should stay permanent. God help the smart general who makes it a habbit to split down forces into smaller units time to time.