Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Lobster

Command Ops 2 does an interesting job of WEGO.

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ORIGINAL: Rasputitsa



However, TOAW goes a long way to imposing realistic real world timelines on unit action and movement, which is a big improvement on most other games and I am very grateful that this game is developing further.

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ORIGINAL: Rasputitsa

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ORIGINAL: Lobster

Command Ops 2 does an interesting job of WEGO.

Agreed and I would like to see an Operational/Strategic game working on a similar system. The Eastern Front for example, with a realistic command system, without having to individually move hundreds of counters.

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This is not brainless idleness, it's just that historically no commander ever got to individually place each unit and sub-unit and claim brilliant strategy, just because you get to choose where every unit goes.

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

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ORIGINAL: X.ray

Thanks Bob for your patience. And forgive me being a dumbass - I still couldn't understand, why "No human gets to intervene in the units' movements"? Is it because there are some considerations that make it impractical, or because the game designer wouldn't design it that way? In my simple mind the human can and should get to intervene in the units' movements when certain things happen, e.g. unexpected enemy enounter, original attack plan gets cancelled because enemy is knocked out by other units, etc. And it should not be difficult to achieve - the player turn just needs to automatically pause on the round when such things happen, as if it now pauses on the round when the median battle completes. So simply speaking the player turn will have more stopping conditions than just finishing combats.

OK, I misunderstood what you were proposing. I suppose that would be possible. I would question its practicality. You don't know when or even if such a stoppage will occur, so you have to plot out the entire turn. Then it stops almost immediately and you have to practically start all over again. This would especially seem impractical for WEGO, since each stoppage would require a new email sequence.

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

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ORIGINAL: X.ray

Now here's the question:
If the target unit is not destroyed - i.e. the blocking unit is too weak to block the way - would the BTS be increased the same way as the case above? You didn't mention, but I would assume yes, given the blocking unit would have effectively participated in the combat in this case as well (though not successful).

No. Only if the defender was destroyed because of blocking units. (Be aware this isn't implemented yet, so I'm sort of describing castles in the sky at the moment - but this is how I anticipate it will work).

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

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ORIGINAL: Rasputitsa

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ORIGINAL: Lobster

Command Ops 2 does an interesting job of WEGO.

Agreed and I would like to see an Operational/Strategic game working on a similar system. The Eastern Front for example, with a realistic command system, without having to individually move hundreds of counters.

TOAW IV allows you to hand over control of as many of your formations to the PO as you like - you just set the locations of their objectives. That would be something similar, though not WEGO. Not my cup-of-tea, though.

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This is not brainless idleness, it's just that historically no commander ever got to individually place each unit and sub-unit and claim brilliant strategy, just because you get to choose where every unit goes.

For normal wargaming (like in TOAW), you're not functioning as just the supreme commander. You're functioning as all the sub-commanders, too. A perfectly legitimate paradigm.

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ORIGINAL: X.ray

Correct. This will not work for a real WEGO game, but TOAW is not a WEGO game and this all happens in one player's turn, so administravely it should not really be a big trouble (you have only 10 rounds in total in a turn so max 10 stops, right? ).

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Also it shouldn't be stopping imediately after you hit the button because there should be only two things causing the stop: a. As a result of completed combats, which would lead to stops anyway under the current design; and b. Unexpected encounters due to fog of war or retreated enemy units as a result of combats, i.e. Moving units bump into enemies which they didn't see at the time of receiving movement orders. b is the only thing new.

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And I don't think the player has to start all over again when it stops.

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ORIGINAL: X.ray

This doesn't make sense to me then: If the blocking units presented but enemy units were not destroyed after the combat, there should be two possible outcome: a. The enemy units don't have the strength to breakout from where the blocking units are, so it stayed at current position; or b. The enemy units knocked the blocking units away (or even destroyed them) and sucessfully retreated out of the target hex.

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Let's say the battle happened in round 2 and blocking units arrived in round 8. So the BTS for the target hex remains at round 2 after this battle, based on what you said above, but the enemy units already interacted with something in the future?

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And what would be the BTS value for the hex where the enemy retreat to, and the hex where the blocking units retreat to?

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

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ORIGINAL: X.ray

This doesn't make sense to me then: If the blocking units presented but enemy units were not destroyed after the combat, there should be two possible outcome: a. The enemy units don't have the strength to breakout from where the blocking units are, so it stayed at current position; or b. The enemy units knocked the blocking units away (or even destroyed them) and sucessfully retreated out of the target hex.

There are four possibilities:

1. The defenders hold - they don't have to retreat. This is the only case where they stay in the hex.
2. The defenders are forced to retreat, but can't force any blockers out of the way. They are destroyed.
3. The defenders are forced to retreat, and force a path via an RBC. They survive in another hex.
4. The defenders are destroyed by the attackers - no retreat was incurred.

Only case 2 requires the BTS to incorporate the timestamps of non-participating blocking units.

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Let's say the battle happened in round 2 and blocking units arrived in round 8. So the BTS for the target hex remains at round 2 after this battle, based on what you said above, but the enemy units already interacted with something in the future?

So, you're saying it was case 3 above? The defenders escaped by forcing non-participating friendlies to RBC? Then, yes, the battle happened in round 2, and the retreat happened in round 2. What happened between the blockers and the defenders doesn't matter. In effect, the blockers never got there, or their interaction occurred after the battle.

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

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ORIGINAL: X.ray

Correct. This will not work for a real WEGO game, but TOAW is not a WEGO game and this all happens in one player's turn, so administravely it should not really be a big trouble (you have only 10 rounds in total in a turn so max 10 stops, right? ).

No. It can stop every time an unknown enemy unit is revealed, and that can happen each time a friendly moves one hex - which can be as much as 10x the MPs of the highest MP friendly unit. (See the new "Improved Road Motorized Movement Rate" thingy).

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

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ORIGINAL: X.ray
Also it shouldn't be stopping imediately after you hit the button because there should be only two things causing the stop: a. As a result of completed combats, which would lead to stops anyway under the current design; and b. Unexpected encounters due to fog of war or retreated enemy units as a result of combats, i.e. Moving units bump into enemies which they didn't see at the time of receiving movement orders. b is the only thing new.

Since unknown enemies can be encountered immediately, the stops can happen immediately.

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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay

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ORIGINAL: X.ray
And I don't think the player has to start all over again when it stops.

So long as they don't mind losing. If there is advantage to doing so, everyone will have to do so or be disadvantaged.

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ORIGINAL: X.ray

I would only make it stop at encounter (by "encounter" I mean units actually bump into each other, in adjacent hexes, with the enemy sitting on the path that the friendly units are designated moving through, and neither side is forced to RBC), not at revealing. In the real world troops also won't stop and wait for new orders as soon as they see some enemy soldier shows up on the horizon 20kms away. And often in that case they don't even have much detail of the enemy yet.
As tactical round is the smallest unit of the clock in TOAW, the stop also can only happen at the end of the latest corresponding tactical round. For example, a unit with 100MP bumped into an enemy unit after moving 31MPs, then the clock should stop at the end of round 4, instead of round 3.1, which can't be measured. The friction of a round that is foregone for such particular units during this process, can be considered as C&C delays required to prepare for the new orders.

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And the key is the clocks of all units are running simultaneously under this system, which means all units should show 40% of their MPs consumed at this moment. Of course the other units that didn't encounter an enemy would be able to fully utilize their 40% MPs before the stop. So, no time travel will ever happen

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Well, I forgot you could set the # of tactical rounds in a turn to a very large # (999?). Hmmm.... if a scenario designer is crazy enough to give us 999 rounds to play with in a turn, I guess we will have to be prepared to make good use of it....

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Either way is fine as long as it applies to both players. I do think committed battles shouldn't be allowed to change in any case, as committing a battle requires a great deal of efforts and preparation, and you can't easily cancel or change it just because your brother unit has some troubles on the hiking 200KMs away.

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ORIGINAL: Daniele

In addition, if a defender was prevented from retreating from a combat by non-participating enemy units then the combat’s Battlefield Time Stamp is the greater of the time stamps of the blocking units and the time stamp of the last round of the combat. So, if the combat ended on round five, but there was a blocking unit that prevented the defenders from retreating and it had a time stamp of seven, then the Battlefield Time Stamp would be set to seven (and all participating units would have their time stamps increased to seven). Note that this ends the time-machine effect of blocking units that the game had endured up to this point (This part of the feature is still under development).

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ORIGINAL: Titus
Just tried the new timestamp system, and I'm getting it almost instantly. Old system was never clear to me even in almost ten years, though haven't played long time. Planned combats menu is great help, overall excellent update!

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ORIGINAL: larryfulkerson
Wait until you see the combat results chart. It's fabulous.