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Feedback After A Few Dozen Hours Playing


Carlos Danger

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Love the game. AI is one of the best I’ve ever played with it. Figured I’d post some feedback after several dozen hours playing. I understand budgets are tight and so implementing a lot of what I’m writing about isn’t going to possible, but I figured I’d posit it all anyways.  

 

-         Units don’t provide enough feedback as to what’s affecting their morale. It’d be great if units indicated the reasons why they’re encouraged (e.g. there’s a general nearby or they’re winning a fight) and why they’re demoralized (e.g. under artillery fire or flanked by multiple enemy units).

-         Infantry brigades occasionally seem to demonstrate an unusually high firing range – sometimes a range two or three times greater than normal. Dunno how exactly to replicate.

-         Units occasionally don’t fire even when they are clearly within range and line of site of an enemy unit.

-         Skirmisher and vidette units don’t actually skirmish properly. Sometimes they just hold ground even when being shot at and when they do run back like they’re supposed to, they often don’t reengage the enemy. Would be nice to have more control over this function.

-         Attack orders are not made clear enough. There should be a red arrow or something appearing on the map when a unit is ordered to attack an enemy unit. Right now nothing appears.

-         Artillery units frequently seem to ignore attack orders and just shoot at whatever they want to. Might be caused when the unit they’re ordered to attack temporarily leaves their line-of-sight.

-         When a single sprite enters the range of an enemy unit, the sprite’s entire unit seems to be targeted. This can mean a single sprite accidently wandering into the firing arc of an enemy unit can easily result in over a hundred casualties.

-         The game doesn’t do a very good job of indicating which brigades are subordinated to a particular commander or corps. Players should be able to view a clear command or unit structure.

-         Retreating enemy units will cause casualties to friendly units when they collide with them. This is probably realistic but it’s also incredibly annoying and virtually impossible to prevent.

-         The flashing charge icon looks too similar to the flashing retreat icon.

-         Artillery units brought down to fewer than thirty men frequently just stand around the battlefield. They don’t fire or do anything but it does look kind of strange.

-         Locations with good cover aren’t made clear enough. Obviously trees are good, but it’d be nice if players could access an overlay indicating where there’s high-quality cover.

-         Units standing on top of buildings get their line of sight blocked. I noticed this when I planted a brigade on top of the seminary and discovered that it couldn’t actually see anything in front of it. Units standing in very close proximity to buildings shouldn’t get their line-of-sight blocked like that.  

-         Players need to be able to choose where there units are deployed at the beginning of each stage or day (obviously within reasonable constraints). The semi-random starting positions are a bit annoying. Would be interesting if the deployment areas available were governed by what victory point locations players controlled.  

-         Semi-related note, but I also recently had an artillery unit appear right beside an enemy infantry brigade at the beginning of one of the stages (the stage after the ANV’s 3 Corps appears) and get immediately cut down, which was frustrating.

-         Would be absolutely terrific if the player could actually just give an objective to an AI commander (e.g. have Reynold’s hold Oak Ridge) and have it do a lot of the micromanagement for you.  

-         Players need to be able to issue attack-move orders rather than just move orders.

-         Artillery units are still capable of firing even when engaged in a melee.

-         Would be nice if players could issue engagement rules for their units (e.g. hold fire/hold ground/chase down enemy units entering range).

-         I’m sure you guys would like to do this eventually, but I’d absolutely love a map with three-dimensional terrain. Two-dimension sprites are fine, but I really feel the map needs to be in three dimensions to make issues like line-of-sight and elevation clear to the player.

-         The map’s contour lines need a few more elevation markers.

              

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  • 4 weeks later...

These are excellent points.The artillery-firing issue bugs me a lot - I frequently instruct an arty unit to target an enemy arty unit , but it instead targets an infantry unit close by. But since that doesn't happen all the time, I don't know what the default arty instruction is.

 

I would add my request that in addition to seeing total number of men in a unit, we also see that unit's relative strength vs. other similar units. For example, the Iron Brigade's high morale/training appears to give it greater strength than other units of similar size; the various sharpshooter units, and the Gamble's/Devin's skirmishers, should be rated relatively high in fighting strength (despite their small unit size) due to their being equipped with highly accurate and/or rapid-fire, breech-loading rifles.

 

RE relative-strength for artillery units, shouldn't their being equipped with 12- vs. 6-lb Napoleons, 3" ordnance rifles, or Whitworths have some effect that we should know about (greater relative strength, longer/shorter range, etc)?

 

Another request is one I've seen others ask for: the ability to dismount cavalry units. It would make them a lot more effective in fighting against infantry.

Edited by Americus Wickey
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