Quote:Who is coming out of the blue? I brought the issue up and got no response so I ratcheted things up, called it "ridiculous" and finally got a reply.
Point taken, some might call your actions to illicit a response as a mild form of trolling, maybe I should not have taken the bait. I will keep that in mind in the future.
Anyway, I am not going to debate the issue with you; I said there is room for improvement here, but I play this game every day with others myself and while ADF can improve, it is far from ridiculous. Actually, debating aside, maybe I should make a few more comments to clarify some things:
Quote:These issues don't matter in PzC because AT guns and other ranged guns are almost less than useless.
I am not even sure what "almost less than useless" means in regards to painting it as a prettier picture for PzC, but your argument that the same ADF "issues" are less severe (or, as you said "passable") in PzC is totally invalid. Let's forget about the obvious: the 88mm FLAK gun firing at 4km at a zig zagging armored car before tanks and infantry move in for the kill, this isn't even the most prevalent case. The more prevalent issue is in the case of EVERY single unit, regardless of range, in that someone can sap fire by recognizing that say, the defensive fire unit is less effective against targets of a certain classification (hard / soft). AT gun and tank units can have their defensive fire sapped away by infantry from the latter making all sorts of "noise" and "distractions" to get the unit to fire, then tanks can move in for the kill or combined arms assault. So, ranged fire of > 1 hex is irrelevant, the same issue is just as important with range of 1: the fact that units in ADF *will* fire at things you don't want them to, because, in the example here, they should be saving their hard attack fire for tanks.
A perfect example of this (in stock and _Alt scenarios, it does not matter) is practically any PzC late war German tank which is very effective at hard attack. You want to kill them, so, to do that you need to hit them with tanks. You therefore draw their fire with infantry until they have fired three times, THEN you hit them with your tanks. The same is especially true in MC series with all units. In that series, ATGM units immediately come to mind: draw their fire off with infantry, which is much less severe, then hit them with something else and then assault them with combined arms or move by them easily with tanks. Or, draw their fire with those unimportant hard target recon units, then move in for the kill or bypass with the tanks. Now, flip the whole issue on its head; in MC and PzC, lets say you want to destroy those pesky late war infantry that have a hard attack range of 1. So, you bring in some heavy, high defense hard target units to sap all their fire which will most likely be ineffective, then bring in infantry to do some serious damage to them after they have expended all their MPs. How is any of this any less important than what you describe in F14? It is less important to you, because it does not help your argument given that the behavior that you seem to be totally intolerant of has existed for over 10 years -- you want change NOW, so you have to say that the issue is more prevalent in F14 but, no, it is not.
Furthermore, the reason we, the gaming community (at least I like to consider myself as part of the community), have come to live with the idiosyncrasies of ADF is because who says that it is not an unrealistic tactic to "draw fire" with some units? At least that was a viable tactic when I was in the military (the phrase that we often said: "move out and draw fire" comes to mind), as in, sometimes you had to draw fire for other units. Reconnaissance by fire, tactical diversions, and actions to draw fire so that a unit can be flanked all come to mind. This is at least how I have justified it all in my mind since playing Smolensk back in the late 90s. On the one hand, someone might rightly say that you need to protect these units a little better, because the real damage you do is on YOUR turn, not the enemy's turn, so if the enemy can plan and execute certain movement and actions to negate your effectiveness by sapping their fire, then move in to deal with you on better terms, what is wrong with that? You can do the exact same thing on your turn. If you are relying on defensive fire to do your effective deadly work then you are already in the wrong to begin with. To me the current behavior takes even more unrealistic direct control from the commander and leaves it up the units who, during this time period, made plenty of mistakes. The FWWC series goes out of its way to take unrealistic levels of control away from the commander and induce error as was the case during this period of warfare (ie. fratricide with plotted fire, or, in this case, local level AI units firing at things you don't want them to shoot at). I am perfectly fine with the current ADF behavior for that fact alone.
But that is just it really: we all have our own opinion on what is important and what needs to be addressed -- this is very low on my own personal list of things that need to be improved. If you are totally intolerant of how ADF currently behaves, then you have three choices:
1) Play with MDF on (I didn't say MDF was a "perfect solution" in the sense that it makes it easy or practical to play PBEM games, I am saying that it is the ONLY perfect solution if you want complete control over defensive fire)
2) Email HPS about it with some "solutions" or suggestions on how to improve it in all series
3) Attend Tillercon and bring it up
Option #3 is the best way to get results of changing the system. What more needs to be said?
*edited: typos & clarification*
