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tangent -> My wish list. (7/13/2003 9:32:32 AM)
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This has been piling up for a while so here goes. My wish list in no particular order:
1) A vector indicating a TF's direction [B]and[/B] speed.
2) The ability to set target class priorities for naval air attack missions. Such priorities would not be absolute but improve the likelihoods of certain ship classes being targeted. Such a prioritizing exists already but it is fixed to carriers first, BBs second, etc. This means that currently experienced players can game the system by putting say a cruiser or BB in a transport group, or by having surface action TF follow a tansport TF in order to attract aircraft away from the transports. This is artificial behavior. I want to be able to prioritize aircraft to attack transports, for example, and occasionally have the AI be able to perform a similar prioritizing.
3) The ability to load and unload landing craft from ship to shore, ala the movie Away All Boats. I am not sending my landing craft across the Pacific! They are supposed to ride on ships to get there and back. If the designers are arguing that carried landing craft used in a ship to shore role are abstracted into the existing beach landing system (and that the landing craft that show up are extras) then the abstraction needs to make the ships carrying the landing craft less vulnerable to shore batteries, perhaps on a progressively less vulnerable basis as time goes by (to reflect more landing craft as time goes by). I don't have a big problem with the idea that the landing craft are abstracted but the abstraction is not working as well as I think it should. Currently troops landed by real landing craft get ashore faster and are apparently less vulnerable in the aggregate than troops landed by abstract "landing craft."
4) An end to to some of the artificial distinctions of when a ship is in port and when it is not. Ports are more of psychological barrier than a real barrier to surface naval and air naval attacks.
a) Air naval attack missions may attack ships in port under some conditions (but torpedoes will be ineffective).
b) Air naval search missions may under the right conditions provide information on ships in port. Ports are not necessarily a cloaking device against standard air searches.
c) Ships that are docked should considered to be inside the port if the port is large enough to have an anchorage (size 3 or larger). It is absurd that docked ships are more exposed to naval surface attack than anchored ships. Indeed anchored ships are in reality more vulnerable because they are closer to the harbor entrance.
d) Shore batteries should be able to protect docked ships as well as ships at anchor from naval surface attack. Again they are further inside the port than anchored ships are. Conversely it should be possible to have naval surface attacks operate against docked or anchored ships (the horror!) but such attacks require that the surface task force commander make the calculation to risk taking fire from any shore batteries that might be protecting the port; because of this calculation he may very well choose to engage only targets outside of the port (or targets inside the port at long range only).
5) Task force interceptions at sea. I know that submarines have been fixed to intercept a TF at any point on the TF's course, but has this been fixed for between ship TFs as well? I don't think so.
6) Allow TFs to target enemy TFs for interception. Incidentally this requires no change in interface design since there is a control for a TF to follow a friendly TF already and if one looks carefully one can sometimes see this same control being used by sub TFs to indicate an enemy TF as a target. Allow the player to use the same interface control to target an enemy TF for interception. Similarly if the AI is reacting toward an enemy TF have the same "follow TF" control indicate what the target was. Targeting a specific enemy TF for interception should not be an absolute however as the AI may be able to override this (even stupidly) and it will depend upon the level of detection gained on the targeted enemy TF.
7) Make the one hex carrier reaction rule (8.23) apply only when a carrier TF is set to react. Note that the documentation on this rule is incomplete; if a carrier TF is set to follow another TF it will not perform a one hex reaction although it has clearly not aborted its mission. If this proposal is not accepted, then improve the documentation so that players know that have only limited control over this special reaction. I had one game end because my opponent did not understand how this rule worked, he set up his carriers to Do Not React, but they reacted one hex anyway exposing his carriers with only limited CAP to my combined carriers (and losing the campaign). He quit the campaign then and there.
8) Allow ships to exit the map by going off of a map edge rather than from a specified port. It is absurd to have a situation where one's ships are trapped against the map edge even though they are closer to Pearl Harbor than Noumea is. The time back to Pearl Harbor or Japan should vary depending upon which map hexes are exited. Some map edges probably should be prohibited as exit points for specific navies. This can be done in two ways without changing the interface:
a) activate the "Return to Pearl Harbor"/"Return to Japan" control on a ship's record whenever a TF's DH is on a valid map edge and have the program remember to exit the ships ordered to leave when they arrive at that DH; or more simply,
b) Whenever a ship is in a valid exit hex during the orders phase, activate the "Return to Pearl Harbor"/"Return to Japan" control on a ship's record and, if it is selected by the player, the ship leaves the map like it does when it is at Truk or Noumea.
9) Make some trails harder to move vehicles and guns on than others, e.g. Kokoda. This is certainly too late for UV but it deserves consideration for WITP.
10) Put in the trail from Port Moresby to Gilli Gilli as shown on the WITP map.
11) I think that it is cool and realistic that army units transported on barges will shoot back against submarines (and I assume that this is true for army units on landing craft but I have not seen it). However, this is not documented anywhere.
12) Signals intelligence indicating the identity of ground units, especially HQs. This can show up in the popup field that appears when one is looking at enemy land units.
13) A saved text file of the current turn's combat phase's scrolling spotting and supplementary combat reports, or the inclusion of this extra data into the existing combatreport.txt file.
14) Different combat phase reports for each side to better reflect the fog of war. I know that this is a long shot.
15) A suppression of extraneous information that is really known only to one side during the Combat Phase. Given that 14) above is unlikely, I am only referring to those things that have no relationship to combat during the phase in question, such as announcing to the enemy that my subs are loading mines.
16) Perhaps there should be an AAA penalty for having more than x core ships (e.g. carriers or battleships) in a TF similar to the AAA penalty for having more than 10 ships providing AAA defense. This may encourage players to disperse their carriers into separate TFs without forcing them to do so. In reality I would think that AAA coverage for a core class ship might very well go down if there are too many core ships in the TF.
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