Charles22
Posts: 912
Joined: 5/17/2000 From: Dallas, Texas, USA Status: offline
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I don't know. I seem to run into a variety of AI forces (though I hate to run into a very light force, if mine if medium to slightly heavy [as usual]), though there are some units which they more obviously won't pick, like rocket launchers. I've always been hoping that the wider maps would become available to the campaigns, but on the balance, as is, I still prefer the surprise of being uncertain as to the terrain I'm facing, and I haven't played enough to figure out exactly where the AI will be, particularly since it does move on the defensice occassionally, and what's more, I don't want to know. If I can just keep myself ignorant as to his patterns (other then the obvious en masse charge and even it isn't always after all the objectives at the same time) I can have a ball. I definitely can't imagine placing the enemy's units for him, for it would be sort of silly. I imagine that I would say to myself: Well this is usually my style of attack and this is where caution might leave me, so I will place units here and there. Then when I play agaiinst that force, I have to somehow brainwash myself into trying to forget some of the key elements that would counter my very style. It reminds me of a short film where Stan Laurel is playing tic-tac-toe by himself. He took one side, and then when his imaginary solitary opponent played, he would sort of hide what he was looking at from himself, but still had to look in order to make the opponent's mark.
Actually, though it would make for some really wild dispositions, my brother and I, when we were doing solitary football and stuff, would have the opponent pick plays by going over random words in a book, so that if a draw was card one, the next word in the book would be say five letters, so that the opponent (after you had picked your play) would then pick the play which was five playes beyond the draw play) would pick random plays. To apply such a notion to SPWAW, you could pick random deployment places for platoons, while making the random elements to favor certain areas. If you could somehow section off the deployment areas and correlate that with words in a book, you would have truly unknown dispositions. But ultimately, if you were the one placing the units, you would still have to forget how it was done, but of course it would be a little easier given that it didn't use a whole lot of logic (this could of course work terribly with attacks by the AI). If you could anticipate campaign battles in advance, say ten at a time, you could do those ten, which of course would take quite a while, and then go play the first, probably having forgotten the dispositions of the first by then, since the scheme isn't working on any set idea on how to counter what someone else usually does.
One pattern I have noticed, is that I don't think the AI will ever bombard 'in advance' of where you are. In other words, if I were to form one line on an advance, and kept moving them slightly forward or backward after being spotted, the AI would continually miss every single unit, but trying to incorporate such artillery-avoidance strategy and trying to do battle at the same time is something that would take some tuning.
I have a major question here. Well it's major considering it directly involves a brand new campaign ongoing: Does the German cheaper Beob (the one with size 1) actually have FO ability? I ask because I tried to use it as a spotter and it doesn't chop any time off the artillery from the mortar HTs (the delay was 1.4, the same as with a command PZI, while neither the Beob or PZI was attached to the mortars). I've also noticed this Beob doesn't have a recon unit status, something which I thought would've been necessary for it to be a true FO. Anyone?
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