Khornish -> My wishes for COGII (1/2/2006 6:59:17 PM)
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Eric, First of all, thank you very much for a great Napoleonic game! It was well worth my money spent, unlike what passes for a "game" by many of the large publishing houses. Secondly, I know you're hard at work fixing the various issues that remain on the bug list with COG and are also working on the next game using the COG engine. So, what I have here is a list of things I'd like you to consider for third game in the series or at least when it is time to update the engine for a COG II. 1 Units based on Brigades, instead of Divisions. 2 Allow for Divisional containers, as well as Corps and Army. Divisional containers can have a maximum of 2 Brigades (+1 brigade with the appropriate upgrade). Why brigades? Well, they were the basic building blocks of the Grand Armee and Napoleon's organizational style. Using brigades will also allow for "larger" battles to have a good grand tactical feel. Right now, it's a few blocks of troops vs a few blocks of troops in a meeting engagement set to start either too darn close together (my closest start to an enemy army has been 4 hexes) or not far enough away for manuever. I understand your reasons behind the way you have COG designed, you wanted to keep the time down on the battles. But, by allowing players to toggle certain options, you'll give us the choice to have even more detailed battles or to go for the current level of detail. 3 Allow for Brigade, Division, Corps, and Army commanders/leaders. Rate each commander with abilities for each level of command. 4 Allow for leader ability to increase or decrease. How about allowing leaders to earn experience for each battle? Each battle won is worth X and each battle lost is worth Y. Or, at the end of a battle, each leader takes a skill check, with a bonus if their side won. Each skill check would have one of three results, success, pass, failed. A success would mean the leader gained ability, a pass means they stay the same, and a fail means they lose ability. You could also tie in leader casualty percentages to their assigned level of command. A brigade commander is going to be more apt to become a casualty than a corps commander, for example. 5 Allow infantry units to "defend" a village or fortress 6 Allow players to set up previous to starting a battle. 7 Allow for light cavalry and cavalry units to determine which player has set up initiative. There's not much of a bonus for defending a village or fortress. It appears too easy to kick the enemy out, casualties are large (hundreds) when fired upon when it should require a charge attack to do large numbers of casualties for a defender. Allowing players a chance to set up, or at least determine orders of march will give us more control over our troops. But, it will also allow us to attempt to avoid the current frustration of being set up too close to an enemy who then gets the first turn and charges our supply or artillery before we can even move to defend it. I've lost several artillery units to a first turn charge because of the random placement rules. I could understand this somewhat if there was a provision for being out scouted and then working to not allow it to happen. Which brings me to the off-battlefield role of cavalry and light cavalry. These units were used to screen your own troop's movements and to scout out the enemy's movements. We all know this, except we're not allowed an opportunity to actually USE this. Having the ability to set up our own battleline, and then being able to use scouting "factors" provided by light cavalry and cavalry units to influence set up and first turn initiative would be a boon to the tactically minded gamer. Having the ability to toggle this on or off will give players the choice over the matter instead of having the choice forced upon them. 8 Keep the provinces for the economic, political, and supply models, but make them "larger" for military purposes. Build provinces out of hexes or better yet or nodal points. Allowing more detailed movement within a province provides players the ability to defend or force a river crossing, defend or force a mountain pass, etc. Right now, it's either easy or hard to move from one province to another depending on the color of the movement arrow. But this only handles province to province movement and has no real bearing on the combat itself. You could take this to an even greater level of detail and place towns, villages, forts, mines, roads, etc., within the provinces and allow players to take or defend these areas. 9 Allow for nations to trade resources from their stockpiles. 10 Allow nations to take resources as payment within surrender terms. 11 In multiplayer games, allow for the option to have a player run an AI's army during a quick or detailed battle. 12 Remove garrisons from detailed battles as well as remove fortresses. 13 Allow for engineer units to be purchased which can then build hasty works and redoubts. 14 Allow players to influence the country that is a protectorate of another major power. We should be able to charm or subsidize a protectorate of another nation instead of having to leave it to an insurrection die roll only. 15 Allow units to be "rested" or "trained" as an option each turn. This would enable them to slowly (!!) increase unit quality or morale to a maximum level allowed. For example, each turn of training increases a unit's morale by .01 to a maximum morale level allowed to 6.00. 16 Allow for "colonies" to be consolidated into named colonies. 17 Allow players to assign units to be sent to named colonies as garrison or assaulting forces, with a structure to the departure and arrival times. 18 Provide a structure for colonial battles to take place. For example, India would become a colony of Britain. Prussia could attempt to take it over, and assign 1 corps of 6 brigades to take it from Britain. Prussian player drops the corps into the INDIA box and it will take 3-6 turns for the troops to arrive. It could be assigned that it would take Prussia 3 victories in a row to kick the British troops out and force a ceasefire resulting in India becoming a colony of Prussia. Prussia losing the first battle would result in their force being captured or returning home. 19 Allow for players to input battle results by hand. This is purely for those of us who also play miniature wargaming. I think COG would be a great way to run a campaign and then fight the battles out in miniature with my local gaming group. This would definately open up a few more minds to purchasing the game amongst the people I know locally. 20 Allow players to play a game of a detailed battle, using the COG battle system. For those of us who just wanna battle and don't have time to play a tcp/ip game. Well, this is just a start. I am sure others have more wishes, probably in another, older, and quite dead thread. I have a number of others, but will post to this later on.
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