quote:

ORIGINAL: Foxendown

At Para. 10.4.1. of the manual it says "In most cases you will be able to choose how many units you wish to affect by an order", but I can't see at the moment how that works. I know how to give orders to individual units and groups, I can set general orders for formations and I'm getting there with the POA system but I don't see a way of for example giving a single order to a whole corps if its units are positioned on more than one hex, or to some units in a stack. The formation orders don't correspond exactly with the unit and group orders so for example there is no formation order to dig in only defend: and if I order the HQ unit in a formation (if there is one) to dig in the rest stay mobile or whatever. If I order the formation to defend, none of the units appear to dig in (or at least no "Ds" appear on the counters). Also I see from the manual that formation orders are only intended to be used to fine-tune the POA so I assume I have to activate that system to make them work-is that right?

As for the POA its a great system but I don't really want to be that hands-off. It's not that the AI makes bad decisions but I want more control, maybe I don't want to move AA to protect artillery for example perhaps I want it to cover my airbase: and sometimes the AI does make strange decisions like moving high level HQs and supply units into the front line.

With the battle planner there is a need IMHO for two buttons: "select all" and "select none", otherwise with every attack I experience a clickfest in the big WW1 scenarios I like especially. But perhaps there are hot keys I've missed.

Finally there are bombardment attacks. With large amounts of artillery I am spending ages making and repeating them. Is there some way I can set up artillery to just keep firing at the same target in a defensive battle? With attacks the battle planner seems to set up automatic artillery support very competently, but as I am interested in defensive battles (e.g. Verdun from the French side) I haven't so far found a way of setting up continuous barrages except by clicking on loads of individual targets over and over.

This is a tough game to learn!