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I would like to make some suggestions on A/I Movement that would greatly increase game play and take the tedious task of moving reinforcements or scattered units easier. This would help two things. Allow the player to focus more on movement and combat at the front lines and greatly speed up game play thus making the larger scenarios much more playable.

Deferred movement.

As it stands right now this feature is useless unless you are playing a game that is in the dessert or has wide open plains, because the A/I here is simply terrible. If fixed this could be a wonderful feature to move units. What I would like to see is the ability to click on a unit assign it a location. Choose road movement only and it would assign one of those great arrows. The organization would then proceed to that location using the fastest route possible while maintain road movement. This would be great in a scenario where you need to bring reinforcements up or in a game like France 40 to help bring units together at a certain location. The best part is that it takes a boring tedious task off your hands and speeds it up. Now all you need to do is concentrate on the front and checking in to see where your reinforcements are along that road. Press the F8 button and shazam they are on there way.

Next is immediate A/I orders

Don’t get me wrong I love this feature, but it can still be tedious and should be updated. When the chain breaks do to disruption or air strikes etc… the chain is broken and you have to go back to the same tedious labor extensive task of moving each unit one at a time. This some how needs to be fixed to speed up game play in larger scenarios.

I would love to see these suggestion taken seriously as it would greatly increase the playability of the larger campaigns.

Me, too.

well by the looks of it no one else cares. As long as no one else cares it will stay statues qou. I have bought just about every game HPS has put out. I believe in them, but this unwillingness to not fix or tweak the A/I some to make larger campaigns more playable may lose me as a customer, because I don't have the time anymore.

Titan Wrote:well by the looks of it no one else cares. As long as no one else cares it will stay statues qou. I have bought just about every game HPS has put out. I believe in them, but this unwillingness to not fix or tweak the A/I some to make larger campaigns more playable may lose me as a customer, because I don't have the time anymore.

I think most people like the idea of the increasing the ability of the AI to automatically move rear area troops sensibly, but I suspect it is really not that high on peoples priorities. I personally look at it as just part of the game, it doesn't bother me having to do it, it's just one of those things which have to be done.

What I would really like is to be able to click where I want an individual unit to go and have it move there by the cheapest movement cost route.

Like Campaign Series does.

Surely, since John Tiller presumably did the coding for both, that pathfinding code can be incorporated?

Having to move every single unit every single hex is incredibly tedious. Or am I just missing an obvious solution?

I think you are talking about two different things and mixing them

McIvan Wrote:What I would really like is to be able to click where I want an individual unit to go and have it move there by the cheapest movement cost route.

Like Campaign Series does.

...and like Panzer Campaigns can do too - select the single unit and drop and drag.

Quote:Surely, since John Tiller presumably did the coding for both, that pathfinding code can be incorporated?

Having to move every single unit every single hex is incredibly tedious. Or am I just missing an obvious solution?

And this is where you jump from one unit to many. But John took a run at this and I think the issue is in Single unit mode, you have a SINGLE unit selected. What John did was use the Division as the Org and as long as the Org was not broken by other formations the formation moved along together until the chain was broken. We called it Divisional Movement and released it with France 40.

Unfortunately this was not an acceptable solution to Titan as was related to all in a different thread.

Glenn

No, actually, I have learned the hard way to not trust the AI to move individual units by the drag-and-drop method. I will only do it when their route is not critical.

But just try to move a unit in that manner when there is a minefield on the only clear terrain between the unit and the destination. It's kaboom-time every time. You've got to walk that unit (and all that follow it) hex by hex around the obstacle.

That's only one example.

In the end, when it really matters, I'll take my units one-by-one moving hex-by-hex.

And AI division movement has its own quirks. It's now routine for me to check on a division after deferred division movement, to find those inevitable battalions that have not moved.

PC is a great game series, don't get me wrong. But please don't extol the virtues of its AI movement.

I will say this and I have not had time to respond to Glenn on this, but I received a personal e-mail from Glenn on this subject and I was amazed and how serious they take this issue. We are listened to and they do try to accomadate if possible and it looks like changing the A/I is more difficult than I or any of us thought. Ill let glenn alaborate on anything else as I do not know what I can or cannot say about it since it was in a personal e-mail and not posted on the board.

Gleen,

I have seen the same behavior with units being dragged and dropped moving through KNOWN minefields. The additional MP expenditure stops them or at least slows the unit considerably. Maybe if John could check the drag and drop algorithm for calculating the shortest route to see if the the movement calculation takes into account the change (I think it was an update shortly after Kursk43 was released) that caused minefields to consume 1/3 of a unit's MP per factor of minefield density in addition to the hex terrain. Maybe then the drag and drop would avoid minefields that are visible at the start of a turn as high MP hexes.

Dog Soldier

Titan,

I would abandon AI movement in favor of divisional movement for reinforcements. The divisional movement works well. Yeah, it can be a little frustrating when the chain is broke by an air interdiction attack, but when in rail or travel mode along a good road it can be very fast.

Dog Soldier