Engineers, Bridges and Suicde....illogical

[Glenn Saunders]

... I suggest that engineers should be able to abandon their bridge much like mechanized infantry can abandon their vehicles and go on foot.

Just a suggestion.

FWIW mechanized infantry DO NOT abandon their vehicles when they go ON FOOT. Their vehicles are deemed to travel on their own to the parent units HQ. And when the the units ON FOOT need them again they just return to the same hex with the HQ and the vehicles are reunited.

So you see, it isn't or wouldn't be the same for Bridges. If the Eng was to Abandon it, presumable in a spot where it was difficult, then the Bridge, unlike the trucks couldn't just drive off to the HQ like the vehicles with Motorized units.

The LOGIC is, that it should take about the same length of time to dismantal a Bridge as it does to build one and in thegame this is controled by the PDT and the Unit quality. There isn't a lot of data to go on with respects to engineers taking down bridges, but we did a fair bit of work in Bulge to ensure the time to build the bridge was pretty accurate erring on the side of making it a touch too fast.

Now if we just allowed players to abandon the bridge than the same eng could move to a new location and build a new bridge even though it lost\abandon its equipment.

The game does not track if a Eng has abandon its bridge or not. And doing so would be a bit of work. Furthermore it would be complicated by the Coys and combined Eng Btls. I am sure this would lead to some rather complex situations occurring.

But nothing is impossible - send it you BTL file showing the situation in progress in the game so it can be rated as how significate the situation is. If you have any reference material citing Engineers abandoning their Bridges, that might help too.

Finally you can bring your suggestion to the Tillercon - Greg Smith is going to be there with us too and he along with Tiller are the founders of this series. If you can make a case - who knows it might happen. But this has been around since Smolensk v1.0 and it was put there because it was logical as well as it prevented players from abandoing equipment that most Eng units would do EVERYTHING THEY COULD to save - something that if allowed would result in gamey ahistorical play.

Glenn