Evanovic

It would certainly add a strategic meta game to the experience. We all know how important deception is in warfare, and this feature would accommodate it quite well. It may actually be good to follow Total War on this one and introduce a line-of-sight system for units. I don't know if that is complex to code or strenuous to run on the given platforms that this game will be played on, but I reckon it's the most visually pleasing way of getting 'FOW' into the game. I personally don't like the idea of seeing a literal fog covering most of the field and obscuring the awesome graphics and scenery. Line-of-sight is tolerable, so long as units don't just 'pop' into existence after coming over a hill (a fade would be nicer).

Imo, it's important that there should be 1 streamlined experience for the whole player base, as it is prospectively small at the moment. And I especially don't think it's worth dichotomising a player base such a small issue like ammo, something that can surely be solved by a bit of developer decisiveness or even creative ingenuity. If the player base is to be split, it shouldn't be for mitigating the incongruence of some feature, it should be for something more positive, otherwise you're going to find 'unlimited ammo noob' haters and 'ammo hoarder camper' haters on either side of the prospective community.

Ammo could potentially add too much to pet-peeve micromanaging to the game. What made Total War a pain was the sheer amount of APM you had to make to get units to do simple things. Some of this was because of the sheer amount of mundane variables you had to consider when manipulate your unit. Ammo-micro was always one of the most annoying things to come across, especially as it often cluttered your schedule at the worst time, the most frantic parts of the battle. In Ultimate General, considering that it will be played on tablets as well as PC, I wonder whether the nuisance of it will outweigh the potential immersion-gain. The only instance where I would fully support the idea is if it is a really rare occurrence, something that is tied to an unorthodox/high risk strategy. I.e. If you send a brigade on it's own around the back of the enemy army so that it's completely cut off from your own. There should be no irritating ammo-related micromanagement from units in the main battle-line. This then leads me on to say that perhaps supply chains are the way to go. Distance from the 'supply chain' (where the main army spawned, or nearby) should determine whether it gets automatic resupplying or not. Perhaps you can represent the 'strength' of the supply link to a single brigade by a little tracer or arrow behind them, originating from the army spawn location. Or perhaps a less intrusive solution such as merely highlighting the unit in some way as 'cut-off' from the supply chain. Either way, if you're going to have it, don't make ammo a chore, rather make it a limitation on single, crazy unit manoeuvers (like sending 1 brigade half way around the map on its own). - This way you potentially solve 2 problems in one, you give incentive for a player to keep a coherent forum and not rely on nuisance, micro-intensive skirmish-flank tactics (something that the AI will have a hard time dealing with) and you also give due representation to a very real dilemma of ammo-stocks in battle. Look forward to what you come up with.

Finally someone has the guts and vision to attempt this sort of game. I had envisaged this sort of game for ages, an alternative to TW on PCs, and also tablets being largely untapped by historical RTS; CA woefully disappointing with Shogun 2: Battles. CA is good at visually and verbally abstracting what their games are meant to be about, but they continue to fail to really get to the core of the RTS gamer's deep urges. A lot of those shortfalls have been in making the battles engaging on a macro-level; you often felt a very big disconnect between your campaign strategy and how the battle actually played out. In most of their games they've also failed to really get a physics/particle system going that really feels visceral. The motion-capture may look 'realistic' in isolation, but it completely kills the momentum of the melee encounters in their battle and feels ultimately anti-climactic. I want a game that really packs a punch, I want the visual impact of my charge to be seen on screen; for the each fighting stat calculation to be visually represented in each stab and clash in that melee, not obfuscated by 'motion capture'. Even if it's small dots on a screen with a fixed camera zoom, as long as the particle interactions are intuitive and informative, it's going to be a lot more fun than a triple-A budget motion capture battle. AI is largely and perennially accepted as the weakest part of Total War too, and evidently is something you've criticised and addressed a lot in your DarthMods. The problem is CA completely lack innovation or critical thinking in that area. Every year they merely tweak the thought process of a flawed-since-day-one Battle AI. What I don't think they realise is that they're not going to get an AI to feel real if the battles themselves completely lack an obvious motive behind them. An AI which has the same ultimate objective every battle (to kill your whole army) is not going to feel 'real'. Its faction/general/unit traits need to be expressed in its thinking process and the battle-map needs to actively predetermine an AI's approach to a battle. It simply does not work to build one 'chess-player' AI and then drop it into multiple scenarios and expect it to spontaneously give you a challenge and act historically at the same time. The AI needs some scriptedness to get it going on the right track before it begins to 'think for itself'. Looks like you're thinking more deeply than they have in terms of AI, looks promising. This sort of turned into a rant about my Total War bugbears (not that I dislike the games, but I think their potential is vastly underexploited), but it was sparked by the fact that you have noticed and want to address those problems in your own game. I really do hope you make a success of this game in the places that CA has failed, because I am dying to play a TW-style RTS that does not have immersion-burying flaws like TW has. I fear that a lot of people are going to come on this forum and, out of mere enthusiasm, pressure you down a route where they want to see complex and micromanagement intensive features in the game. I urge you to stick to your original vision; focus almost purely on making it intuitive and visceral experience. Subtly does more than complexity for these sorts of games. Good luck! I'll just be following on the forums, contributing with odd suggestions when prompted and would love to participate in a beta at some point, should you need people.