Hidden Units

[Philippe]

Glenn Saunders mentioned in a thread a while ago that too much visual information about what a unit might be is provided by the unit image of an opposing unit when you first come in contact with it.

I'm sure this has been proposed before, but there are two possible solutions. Neither one is perfect and they're only partial solutions, but I think they may be better than the status quo.

Solution One (quick and dirtly):

When you're in contact with an enemy unit but don't have full information about it, question marks appear in the text panel of the unit ID. The first solution would be to go one step further: when a unit is in a state where you can only see question marks as its identifier, the unit image that is displayed should also be the unknown unit image.

This has the advantage of not requiring any new types of unit images being created, and could piggy-back off of the programming for whatever it is that triggers the question marks in the unit ID field.

What it doesn't do is to allow you to distinguish between generic infantry, guns, and tanks.

Solution Two:

Create three new unknown unit images, one for tanks, one for guns, and one for infantry. These would be separate from the current unknown unit image. It would work the same as in Solution One, but now every tank could be a Tiger and every gun an 88 until fully identified. The old unknown unit image would still be used in exactly the same way as it is now.

The effect would be that you would know the nationality of a unit, it's approximate size, and whether it was a vehicle (which should include motorized infantry in travel mode), a tank, or a gun. But you wouldn't know anything else until you'd been in contact for a while. The same rule that currently causes a unit to become fully identified would cause the image to switch from generic infantry to the unit's real image.

The drawback with Solution Two is that it would require more programming than Solution One. But it would be more realistic.

There are better (in the sense of more realistic) solutions than these, but I doubt that they are practical given the amount of rule writing that would be required.