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BletchleyGeek -> RE: First impression anyone? (3/22/2018 9:03:53 PM)
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Hello some first impressions... I woke up at 5.30 AM to make sure I had a moment to go over SlickWilhem's tutorial before going to work and dropping the kid at kinder.
Just to get what I haven't loved out of the way first...
While the graphics/icons can definitely be improved, I think the user interface is very well thought. Somebody has spent THOUSANDS of hours on the old V4V/WAW games and worked out how to optimise its usage. I appreciate its consistency and transparency.
Regarding the visual style I find it a bit jarring. Some modifiers look like directly borrowed from an old SSG game. The unit bar looks like pulled from Tiller's Panzer Campaigns. Those white on black buttons will be great for the visually impaired, but they do tire my (quite healthy, touching wood) eyes. The VCR turn replay buttons look like programmer's art. I do really want a way to see all plotted moves at once, and the movement arrows to be as broad as the ones used to display combats.
Biggest issue at the moment is how to configure properly the JAVA executable to deal with DPI font scaling in a way that I can play this on a Surface without squinting... I am pretty sure it will be totes okay on the desktop though.
Now the awesome... Oh, boy, there's plenty of that.
1/ WEGO: As Wodin says, a difference with Command Ops and Combat Mission is that unit actions and game events do not get presented in a continuous manner (e.g. the engine calculates where each unit needs to be on the next "frame", then displays results all at once). This engine actually shows you the order in which things are resolved... which looks less "realistic" but it is also more transparent.
2/ Dynamic ZOC values: ZOCs aren't binary, but actually are modelling both how hard is to move in the sight of the enemy and how hard is to disengage from it. Well done.
3/ Supply system: quite abstracted but perfectly reasonable and well integrated with combat, movement and ZOCs.
4/ The Editor is a WOW. Adjustable time scale (I would like to have turns shorter than 6 hours, but probably that would break a bit the combat engine), adjustable map scale, ability to load an image underlay to trace maps... and the AI editor. To draw an analogy, and I know very well what I am talking about, the stuff you can potentially do with what Brian and the rest of the team are exposing is on par to what you can do with Command Ops, if it was exposing to players how plans are constructed.
5/ Ground assets are a great idea which doesn't feel gimmicky at all and it is very flexible to account for leadership, electronic warfare, superior command and control and doctrines.
This is an outstanding game! I don't need a campaign... I will send postcards to the doubters from France and Russia!
Note: when reviewing combat results you need to right click so the detailed combat panel is shown. That tripped me over for a while, and somehow I missed it in SlickWilhem's excellent tutorial.
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