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Zebedee -> RE: Petition: Stop Fog-of-War for friendly units when playing vs AI (8/29/2009 4:34:28 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: fbs
So how valuable do you find the combat reports if their results are inaccurate? It may print that your ship had heavy damage, but when you check it it has no damage at all; or your ship was sunk when it wasn't; or the wrong ship was sunk; or you lost 30 aircrafts but you check the squadron and it lost 1 aircraft in fact.
I'm just trying to understand the rationale that you use when reading the combat reports. What I do is to check the actual ships and groups involved one by one, then reload the last turn and compare your air groups one by one, in order to find out how many of my assets I lost.
Thanks!
fbs
First I watch the combat animation. Very useful for spotting what went on precisely. Gives a lot of information which can be translated to altering CAP levels, bombing heights, judging how many escorts are required etc.
Then the combat report pops up which summarises some of the information gleaned from the animations. Is it accurate? No. It's a summary of the combat animation which is also inaccurate for both sides. I'll find out what really happened later - in the case of air units, I'd need to check for ops losses post combat later anyways, for ships I'd want to check on ammo levels too or system damage, so it's hardly adding to my workload. Just giving a bit of tension when I see a CV sunk in the combat report or seeing 20 zeros shot down by Hurricanes etc.
My turn routine is to filter all ships by damage. Newly damaged ships are fairly easily spotted. Investigate any which are sufficiently eye catching (tends to be any ship which has crossed the 10 system damage level or worse) and take action. Check air losses, then filter groups according to air type to spot which are down from previous turn, also I identify units with pilots overly fatigued at this point. For LCU units, I run through the units which were involved in combat to get an idea of disruption and fatigue levels. I'll check every unit in a malarial zone weekly.
This is the same routine as WitP for me. These are things I'd check every turn anyway because not all your air losses will be from combat, not all your ships' damage will be caused by enemy action and not all losses to LCU are a result of enemy activity.
The only inconvenience the combat report adds for me is a slight delay in my desire to know exactly what the results for each combat were precisely. This information might perhaps be of more use if I did not watch the combat animations (of which it is a bastardised summary in any case) but the combat animations reveal differences in skill and equipment quite well enough without this, and in addition some losses relevant to the combat in question won't be tallied by the game until later in the processing of the turn in any case.
In return, the fog of war increases the enjoyability of the game by introducing a tension into a game which now actually has an AI capable of surprising the human player (in a good way now!) strategically, operationally and also tactically. It might be a little thing but I'll take my cheap thrills where I can find them.
Where I would agree with you is that there should be some ingame notification that something has happened (so no mysterious sinkings). Perhaps when such things are absent, this is a bug? Of course, the notification does not need to be exact, but there should be some indication or link (however vague) to be able to spot what has happened. eg I don't need to know that a Catalina has put a torpedo into my xAK while on naval search, but it would be good to know that a ship has either seen a plane in the area or reports being hit by something.
Hope that gives you an insight into why I don't find FoW during combat animations/reports problematic but instead find them an additional factor in my enjoyment of the game. I can appreciate where you guys are coming from, but would ask you to consider that not everyone zips through the combat resolutions at high speed and that a middle way would cater for all of us while your current 'petition' caters only for your way of playing.
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