UsF

Looked very fun, although the pace felt very fast. This was subject to change as far as I understood. Is pausable realtime in the game, meaning I can pause and issue orders with appropriate interface feedback?

Well my statement meant that I did not know about the resupply previously except for what was mentioned in the thread and the idea was meant as a compromise, since running out of supply was a real thing (and still is), but if it makes the AI bad, I wonder if a compromise solution as provided by me is acceptable. I am more a WW2 kind of guy usually or Napoleonic warfare era (though not as in depth as the first one mentioned). That knowledge of the Napoleonic era was mirrored into the Civil war environment. Sorry if there are important differences. I do not want to manage the individual count of ammunition, therefor the abstraction into the suggested supply levels, which puts each regiment into different situations and those can be communicated to the player as an additional icon on the unit marker on the battlefield. And to be frank all the historical knowledge you provided scares me (and makes the post sort of hard to read, sorry). I am not a person that is too keen on recreating historical battles or that studies the actual battles themselves (as in specific situations), I want to fight my own battles in an authentic environment. Therefor I like to create an authentic environment that, by its rules and guidelines, creates battles that could have actually happened back then, while not drowning the player in information or detrimental game mechanics. I enjoy authentic equipment, material and units, but the battles themselves, unlike they had a strategic challenge, I am okay with being whatever. There is an argument made for both and I thought not gimping the AI by providing my solution to the ammo management would be beneficial to the game, while allowing the player to experience the downside of ammunition shortages. If it is against the realism of the game and not good enough, I am sure it will be decided against. I do not want to say your stuff is bad, just that I enjoy something different than you apparently and that is both fine. The game to me looked like an abstraction rather than a simulation, but I haven't played it yet, so I do not know. From what I have gathered, to me it is a game about grand level management, formations and fighting a really good AI on a battlefield where maneuvering and positioning matters. And my statement about the ammo counter of an average of each person carrying, I assume you misunderstood. My idea was that of you selecting a unit of several men and at the unit information area, you would get a number, telling you how many bullets where left on average for the people in that regiment. You wouldn't manage individual bullets for individual people, but you would get a good sense of what a person still has left during the battle. If I wanted to play accurate number games, I can go into the Command Ops series, which does that for every unit and ammo type individually. That is some crazy stuff.

I prefer option 4, because it is clean and gives the user all the information he needs. Option 1 looks better on screenshots and should probably be kept for marketing material and as an option in game. During gameplay, the flags could be misread at a glance. Also option 4 makes it easier to implement potential color blind options, where each nation gets a different shape, rather than a different color. I do like option 4 the most for its simplicity and easy to read information. I like the first one with its sub-information next to the flag, but this could be added to the fourth icon option as well for unit effects, like wounded, low on supply, routing etc. Option 4 is the most simplistic one and I like it, but it is lacking the information about unit type in an easily understandable manner in the beginning. After you learn the shapes, it would make sense to players, but it could take some time getting used to. The country flags give it a historical feel, but I feel it does not benefit the gameplay in any way, besides feeling patriotic about one side. The information is therefor not really necessary in my opinion, at least for a general.

For accesibility, I would prefer an approach of units either being in full supply, limited supply and low supply. This would affect their firerate and therefor combat ability, while giving them the ability to not run out of ammo. The AI would then be able to make a decision regarding the three stances, where out of supply would be really bad for your ranged potential, therefor giving you a higher priority to go into close combat. Full supply would be units having higher than 25-50% of their maximum rounds. Limited supply would be lower than that, but higher than 5% and low supply would be anything below that 5% mark. Full supply would mean high combat effectiveness, sustained fire. Limited supply would indicate the loss of combat effectiveness. As soon as a unit becomes in limited supply, sustained combat will reduce its effectiveness and combat efficiency down to the minimum, which will be being in low supply Low supply would limit the combat effectiveness drastically, reducing firerate. Units survive by scraping together rounds found anywhere. A gradual curve from Limited to low supply, slowly reducing the firerate of the whole rank when in combat, would probably be a nice touch. Making the loss in effectiveness gradual rather than fixed at different points seems a smooth way of handling it. Supply of units should be replenished after taking casualties and not in combat? (the ammo supply of fallen people gets distributed) and maybe specialised things/carts on the battlefield that carry additional rounds to resupply people. I do not know how common battlefield resupply was for small arms, but it was already described in the posts before me. Personally, I wouldn't mind each unit having an average round counter that shows the amount of ammo each person is carrying. This would of course lead to units being able to deplete their whole ammo supply and could stress the AI into making errors more. I think a streamlined approach is enough, since ammo management can become really stressful in larger battles, while not adding much gameplay benefit.

Edit: I currently do not have the time anymore to test so I retract my offer for now. I would also like to put myself up for beta testing. I am mostly a coop and singleplayer gamer when it comes to strategy games, so the great AI really intrigues me. I usually find that in war sim games, but the graphics and atmosphere this tries to deliver, while bringing the difficulty of hard opponents to a broader audience strikes me as a great way to go. Information about me: I am a 30 year old IT specialist for program development, though I do not code right now, I mostly script in Powershell. I use Windows 7 64bit on an Intel i5 2500, 6GB RAM with an Nvidia GTX 570. I have tested several games, most of them recently have come from early access and Kickstarter backed projects. I have also tested a few games for publishers prior to their release (for example one was gameplay and bugtesting in a strategy game, the other was localisation in a grand strategy simulation game). With the recent flood of new games prior to release, one thing has become clear to me and that is if a game does not interest me and I do not feel compelled to improve it, with the amount of early access games, I just switch to other games. So one needs to feel really compelled by a game from the start to continue its testing. I think I would like to betatest by preordering, this way I feel like I have spent something and feel compelled to make it a great product that I want to play. I would of course still be happy to betatest without purchasing it. Hope that wasn't too long winded, but I know finding good testers can be really difficult. Looking forward to line battles and maneuvering strategies in the current generation.