Adam Parker
Posts: 1848
Joined: 4/2/2002
From: Melbourne Australia
Status: offline
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I've only worked my way through half the rules and have been impressed with the dedication in design given to making the "command experience" for the player as realistically frustrating as possible - ie in terms of order delay, execution delay and informational delay etc. The decision to go against the grain of traditional god's-eye wargame design is a good one.
However these efforts IMO have not been fully successful and I feel that play as a result hasn't become all as engrossing, as it could have been.
1. When units take losses on the battlefield, immediate loss information is given to the player regarding both friendly and enemy casualities. When using the show vehicle numbers option for the on-map counters, these are pretty much updated immediately too. So whilst players are handicapped in having orders exectuted without delay etc., and given at times, out-of-date status info in the side-pannels, players will always know where their own units are on the map at all times and the losses they've inflicted/taken with each combat. God's-eye IOW still persists in a manner inconsistent with the what I think are the game's intended aims.
2. I actually agree with past posters in that players really need do nothing to win. As direct combat has been taken completely out of a player's control (the AI always determines who shoots at what and when) there's IMO no real feel of combat command. Sure it was great wiping out NATO in the scenario's I've played - but I didn't need to be in front of the screen for it to happen!
3. The provision for allowing players to set "doctrine" does not really relate to "combat doctrine" at all. The 80's requirement for Soviets to maneuver en masse and pre-plan its artillery missions for example are not provided for. Other than using the limited command point option (which IMO should be mandatory) there appears to be no difference in feel from Soviet to NATO command. "Doctrine" therefore can be a misleading term in this game for those expecting a true 80's command experience.
4. Lastly for the purposes of this post, the AI does as others have previously pointed out, have a tendency to give up its defensive missions and rush the attacker to its deteriment. AI HQ's charge into the fray when their command spans give no reason to do so. This does not include the AI's reported lack of use of helicopters etc., which I believe the 1st patch will soon address.
But for me, it's point 2 that really leaves the least satisfaction.
I love the provision for pre-scenario force placement. For general imporvements I'd like to see movement paths showing where units have moved from during turn execution. I'd like to see combat firing paths showing more easily who is firing at what.
I can't understand that given other series where these simple features can be studied and employed that they haven't been taken on and even refined further in FPG. Whilst to the contrary, almost unbelievable design attention has been given to allow players to finely tweak map scrolling to the millisecond! Inside and outside map boundaries!
In fact, if there was one solid retail suggestion, it would be to set the game up with fast autoscrolling, outside the map on first load. Otherwise the current default settings (ie sluggish scrolling and needing to actually touch the map edge etc) hark back to older game designs and even adopt one of the worst features of titles such as "The Operational Art of War". IOW, always go with the most user-friendly, intuitive, contemporary, fast and logical user-settings as a game's default. Let gamers then slow or hamper things down after - not visa versa.
Despite the map art and graphics, my intial feel in loading FGP up was that I was playing a retro war game of sorts, following mistakes made in designs such as Russo-German War. DOS at its worst. Once I read how to tweak map scrolling to more "modern" levels I calmed a bit. Then point 2 hit me with the other points around it.
I look forward to the first patch to see what in feel has changed. At least FPG does boast stability and relative ease of interface. Managing stacks however, is very cumbersome and confusing. It can be quite hard without some on-counter indication, to tell whether a unit in a stack has already been given an order or whether you've indeed toggled a unit you wish to give orders to. Truly the only way to avoid this confusion at present, would be to toggle unit org ID's on. But why be forced to change toggles when a player is using on-counter vehicle count for example? That's just another couple of unnecessary clicks. From turn to turn in the orders phase, a player already needs to invoke "show all movement paths" repeatedly as between executions, this feature turns itself off.
In summary, an interesting design sitting between others in scale at the individual unit and operational levels. But rather than taking the best of these past design efforts from these other companies, FPG appears to have adopted some of the poorest. These evaluations are each to his/her own of course but IMO there is nothing more tedious than watching combat occur out of a player's control.
This game is not like putting the book Team Yankee into play, where a manic battle field sees a commander's carefully placed overwatch forces panic as a Soviet behemoth looms over the hills into the kill zone, with another threatens encirclement.
In FGP, we just get jerkily moving unit counters plodding, two-stepping, freezing, firing, up-down-side-way'sing, pot-shotting away without rhyme or reason and the human commander really needs do nothing about it.
Btw for those playing with a sub-woofer, artillery sounds like a baseball echoing off a toilet bowl. Machine gun fire - like aluminium foil.
Solution - really the only way I've found to avoid the tedium in total - press "Q", the sounds turn off and the wait of baseball artillery amongst other things is thankfully taken away.
Sorry to report these feelings but there  they are as my 0.02.
Adam.
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Printable Version
Not turning out as I thought - 
RE: Not turning out as I thought - 
. The scrolling and game speed can be changed to a) scroll much smoother and quicker and b) move along at a quicker pace (per your setting preference) more like BiN plays ie: unit movement. After some trial and error, mostly error
, i changed the "per second" this and the "second interval" that to make the game flow/scroll more along the lines i am accustomed to. IMHO, being that the game was designed with "ease of play" in mind, i would have gone with a standard scroll/gameplay "slider" eg: slow-medium-fast etc. To me that was my biggest hurdle in getting into the flow, now the mouse cursor goes where i want it when i expect it and the game plays out at speed more to my liking...ADD
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