Anthropoid

Both games are excellent, but I found that Dreadnoughts could not at present keep my interest because of no campaign.

Except player skirmishers shatter if they stub their toes on a tree root! 😆 No seriously: the way some (well many) of the land battles are set up is obnoxious and the skirmishers are just part of the problem; Or to be more accurate, "battles lean toward being more obnoxious than challenging." Testers and developers can ignore this at their peril or they can take the complaint seriously and consider why it is perceived by many as being "more obnoxious than challenging" by some, and how that ratio might be shifted more toward the "challenging but not in an obnoxious way." My two cents on why and how: (i) battles have been scripted to maximize difficulty, even to the extent that realism, historicity and plausibility are swept under the rug. (ii) UI does not afford enough features to minimize the "heavily micro-manage" nature of game play; and probably the most salient (iii) it seems pretty clear that computer opponents operate by a different set of parameters than player entities. As an example of number (iii): I'v played mostly as Yanks, but last night played for a bit as Brits. I was surprised to see that, much the same asymmetrical effects in volleys seems to take place. I had a small ship (I forget if this was the first or second battle), that was cruising near an enemy merchant trying to force it to surrender. Merchant had maybe 130 onboard, my ship maybe 90. I was strafing her with grapeshot. They were Spanish I was British. I watched the result of the damage popup icons for a full five volleys of my grapeshot and their periodic rifle fire: I. British Grape causes 1 casualty; Spanish rifles cause 2 casualties II. British Grape causes 0 casualties; Spanish rifles cause 3 casualties III. British Grape unable to fire, apparently out of arc; Spanish rifles cause 1 casualty IV. British Grape causes 1 casualty; Spanish rifles cause 2 casualties V. British Grape causes 1 casualty; Spanish rifles cause 2 casualties This is on "Easy/Easy." I cannot imagine what the game is like on "Normal/Normal." Anyway, anyone can confirm such observations for themselves just with a notepad. There is no such thing as "Artificial Intelligence," so it is perfectly reasonable that the algorithms we can accurately refer to as "Computer Opponents" in PC games "cheat." In games like this, they pretty much HAVE TO cheat in order to present any challenge to players, and useability and user satisfaction depend on presenting the population of users with a decent range of challenge options, ranging from what is rightfully a population median "Easy" to an "Intermediate" and a "Difficult." The trick though is: HIDING the cheating CO so that the illusion of "A.I." is achieved. Not an easy trick to pull off, and even when it is pulled off no one actually believes there is a HAL 9000 inside there trying to foil the human and save the mission.

Agree, it is an exceptional game and looking forward to being along for the ride as it grows up to meet all its potential!

If you can still get your hands on it, Roma Surrectum mod for Rome Total War was fantastic.

Wow. How are your save files so incredibly small. I guess it is just the params for the players junk and stage in the campaign, and all the data for the content lives in the install. Pretty cool. So I played that second instance of Wounded Game, but I was nearly bankrupt (Yarmouth really seemed to be some meager rewards, although I did have like 43 prestige requisitioning HMS Lenox took -40 of that . . .) so I only had one 5th Rate and one 6th Rate to try to do that one and kinda slacked off on micro-ing it, so I got defeated, and no idea what happens if you win it.

I have this same situation: finished Yarmouth with a win, and now I got a second "Wounded Game" battle icon on the main map screen. I have a save file if you need it. Such a great game. Cannot wait for you guys to finish it up!

Can confirm I was able to capture and repair Margaret.

I just now won Yarmouth. This on Easy/Easy, though I don't know if it would necessarily affect that battle. I had one 5th Rate, two 6th Rate and two large unarmed merchants (originally Old True Love and Margaret). Crew was maxed out on all the gun ships, and about 295 crew on both merchants. Also, the merchants both had 3 companies of 225+ marines. I set the 5th Rate and one 6th Rate as the main force, and the second 6th Rate as the last Reinforcement. The two merchants were in the second wave of reinforcements. First thing I did it capture the small lead Brit ship with my main force. I have not been using Manual Aim and by focusing my fire on the foremast that seemed to concentrate it sufficiently. Didn't actually do that much mast damage but caused them to surrender faster maybe. By this time HMS Lenox (the big 500 crew monster) was getting close so I fled back toward the reinforcement. What ensued next was controlled chaos, and some combination of good tactics and luck. I managed to capture a second small ship, but sent both the captures toward map edge. Meanwhile the marine ships were pursuing HMS Lenox intent on boarding and already had her crew down to like 350 just from rifle fire. Not sure this is good balance when a ship without cannon but with like 700 marine and ~300 crew on board can do that much personnel damage just with rifles. Might be, I'm not sure. The rest of my ships arrived at the scene of the pell-mell between my small captured ship, the marine ships and HMS Lenox. Lenox got a lucky hit on one of the captures and blew it up. Then I baited it with the other sacrifice in order to get it close enough to the two marine ships for them to board it, by now down below 300 crew on the Lenox. Two marine ships boarded around the same time and ~1200 plus marines did the trick. After that it was mostly just mop up. Most of my warship were down into the 110 crew range so I didn't want to board Minerva with them and I was waiting for the one marin ship that still had 600 ish crew to arrive to board Minerva but it was taking forever and the Minerva was doing a good bit of damage to my warship so I just unleashed on them with grape shot then boarded her with two warships depleted to 90-ish crew. Done.

Totally agree. The Red Coats move around like Elite Viet Cong infiltrators zipped up on betel nut. Surrendered units somehow magically getting all their arms and ammunition back and becoming full strength units in the enemies rear end is ridiculous. Cannon do move pretty quick. The lack of any firm overall formations between companies is pretty inaccurate, particularly for the Red Coats.

Yep; that is it. However, keep in mind, With less than 24 guns in the 4-6 Lb ballpark, and only mediocre crew/captain chain shot is likely to take LONG time to fully immobilize them. I haven't experimented much with manual aim though, and that may help a lot. I'm wistful for Sid Meier's Pirates days when I could rip a merchants sails to shreds in only a dozen or so volleys instead of the 80+ volleys and they are still making 5 knots that I've experienced with this game so far.

Now you are making me wish I had paid those extra backer bucks so you'd have a Captain Anthropoid in your historic game 😆

1. Surrendering. I like the idea of having to manage prisoners. However, I also agree that the present system is lacking somewhat. I think it is hard to judge just based on Bunker Hill, as the dynamic of that battle is much more frenetic and desperate than most of the other ones I've played. That said, I DO agree that the way British troops love to loiter in rear areas is not realistic at all. They behave like guerrillas, not like rigid formal infantry. Add to this the tendency for Brit units to flee towards the Yank rear, and you get a very strange dynamic for Bunker Hill. This isn't so much true with other battles, but what is true from other battles is that: even once a Brit unit has been repelled and badly mauled, they just keep coming back for more and they keep roaming around all over the place (like guerrillas). Once you figure this out and distribute your forces accordingly, i.e., in as much of an overall formation as possible to produce reciprocal assistance between small, medium and large companies (and including constant guarding of flanks and rear by at least SOME small companies), then mostly the erratic, unpredictable, and IMHO unrealistic behavior of the red coats becomes mostly just an annoyance and a test of how well you can read the battlefield and anticipate what will come next (as well as how much micro-management endurance you have). So in sum: if possible make the Brits less guerrilla like more RED COAT LIKE. Also, more functionality associated with prisoner management MIGHT be nice? Now here comes the real clinch: as someone said above, if an enemy formation surrenders, they are NOT going to be allowed to keep their arms or weapons. Perhaps some or even many might retain a small knife if it could be concealed, but they are going to be forced to lay down their shoulder fired weapons, swords, bayonets and pouches. Most likely these would be partly dropped at the spot where the surrender occurred, and partly dropped in a central location specified by the commanders of the companies to whom the surrender was given. In any event, shortly after surrendering, the guys who did NOT surrender are going to do everything in their power to put as much separation between the prisoners and any means of doing violence as possible. Depending on circumstances, this process could take a few minutes, but effectively this units capacity to ever pose a serious threat again should be pretty damn minimal and depend almost completely on regaining access to a handy stash of weapons and ammo. In this sense the game is utterly immersion breaking. Units surrender and then if you don't properly micro-manage them they can get "re-activated" by a nearby enemy unit, and suddenly as if by magic they have their weapons back and are back to full efficacy. NOT GOOD design. IMO, the point of representing POW Management in game like this should be multiple fold: (a) encourage battle field disposition and tactics which leads to both historical (or at least leads to avoiding "NOT Historical") behavior by the player; (b) put some incentive on taking and keeping prisoners (not executing them); (c) force decisions on the trade offs involved in battlefield management of prisoners. Given how the game is setup here is, IMHO, the ideal way this would manifest: When a unit surrenders the game pauses and a popup window occurs. In this popup window, the information for the units involved will be outlined (the game will need to decide in every instance which unit has surrendered, and which unit it has "surrendered to," most likely this will be the unit which was inflicting casualties to the unit at the time of surrender, or the one which has caused the most casualties to the unit so far, or the largest one which is in area of effect). The window would thus say something like "4 Lb Crew has SURRENDERED! to Hitchens. How do you wish to proceed?" Next would be some choices: (i) Slaughter them, this of course would result in additional volleys of damage from any unit presently firing on the POWs, until such time as the surrendered unit either shattered, or fled; (ii) Order them to drop their weapons and ammo where they stand, this would result in the surrendered units being reduced to the least potential threat (meaning that if they get recaptured they are basically disarmed and have paper-thin morale), but it would result in a lower amount of booty at the end of the battle. (iii) Order them to honorably move behind our lines and thence disarm in a gentlemanly fashion. Choosing number (iii) would then close the popup window, but game would still be paused and the surrendered unit would be flash glowing. The player could then give the unit an order to move to a location and begin disarming. Disarming will take some time, and during that time the unit poses a serious threat, even to some extent posing a threat without friendly units coming to their aid. Once the timer for disarming has played out (in the event that choice iii is taken) then another popup will occur (and this same popup will occur immediately in the case of the player choosing surrender option (ii)). This popup will ask the player to allocate guards to the POWs. A list of all intact units which are eligible will come up and the player will have the opportunity to pull personnel from any or all of them to form a "Guards" unit. This guards unit will then move to wherever prisoners are being placed on the map and automatically "attach" to the POW unit to guard it. I am not aware what ratio of guards to POWs is advisable but that may be known from history. The risk that a POW unit be "freed" from captivity if they have been played under guard should now be pretty damn low, and basically necessitate that the guard unit be defeated by a rescuer. The other thing that could be tweaked or changed is: to define a holding area (or multiple maybe). Prisoners would move there and guards would guard there. Right now the way POWs can be moved anywhere on the map (and even told to Run!) is not realistic. I had an instance on the Chelsea battle where I had flanked around to the northeast and came down from the northeast on the 2nd objective. I had captured a couple and sent them off to the far northeast coast. I happened to observe some wandering small Brit units getting VERY close to one of these so I set him to run and had him run as far as possible toward the southwest corner of the map. I watched it for a few minutes, two or three companies of 20 to 40 red coats right on the heels of their captured buddies chasing them across the map. Very unrealistic. 2) Time compression: totally agree 3) Shatter levels: again, I'm not sure Bunker Hill is the best indicator of overall balance. I do think Bunker Hill needs some tweaking, as it just tends to play out in a seemingly unrealistic pell mell, and the use of the two capture the flag sites creates the capacity to game the battle for victory even when the actual disposition of forces at the end does not sensibly = Yanks "won." Just happening to have non-routed units standing at those flags as the timer runs out, even though the Brits are deep into the rear area and seriously outnumber and outgun the Yanks doesn't sensible = victory, but you can win it that way. 4) Fields of fire and friendly fire. I generally find that simply placing cannon a bit behind my lines is fine as long as they are not shoot on totally flat ground. The situation I find it matters is moving units to flank enemies, but even there it is not too bad. The one area where I think the game could be a bit more helpful to players is allowing the positioning and movement markers to persist during a "diagram mode" or something like that. 5) Fortifications: I agree that having some that are destructible is great . . . BUT . . . there are some which SHOULD BE destructible but are not. For example, the buildings that the arty unit at the coastal battery at Nassau is hiding behind. They look like just regular buildings but are seemingly impervious to 4 Lb cannon fire. 6) Not sure 7) Agree, that the tonnage and ship count limits are annoying. At least enlarge them a bit.

I have solely been playing as Yanks for about 40 or so hours. All of my play is with both Navy and Army on "Easy" during the character generation sequence. I did not take the time to read through every post in this thread yet. Here are my observations on "balance" for the American position: 1. If the intent is to be completely historical, the balance is probably _OVERALL_ just about right, or maybe even a bit too easy. Based on my read of the American Revolution, it was not by any means probably that the Rebellion would succeed at the outset. I am not an historian, and with only two books and a few sundry sources under my belt (and all of those from years past, so memory has got a bit fuzzy) I don't mean to suggest that I'm an expert. With that said, my take is: if not for brilliant leadership on the American side (at multiple levels of organization), insane leadership on the Brit side (at least at the top levels, and to some extent at intermediate levels, though I think that at the theater levels and below command was quite good), and some degree of luck, the revolution would have failed. With all that said, if the goal of the game design is to strive toward historicity as much as possible without breaking game play value, then even on Easiest settings, the Yank Campaign should be pretty damn hard. Medium should be about twice as hard as the Brit Medium and Hard or higher basically impossible. 2. I'm only into 1776, so I certainly don't have it all figured out. But the trick to doing well with the American position seems to be to capture good enemy ships and turn them into your own, and then once better ships come along sell them. Right now I have three warships (One 5th Rate which the Admiralty allocated to me in early 1776, which honestly doesn't seem very "realistic," but ah well), and two 6th rates (USS Virginia which was allocated, and USS Maine which was captured). In addition to those I had probably captured about 5 to 7 additional Brit warships added them to fleet and then sold them. I did this because the game doesn't exactly put any incentive on having "more ships" so much as having "enough ships" and certainly "better ships." Also there is a need to have marines, and that requires money and prestige. Vengeance and Earlston were sold pretty early once I had captured one of the larger transports, I think it was Old True Love (I renamed it USMC Fidelis), which has a capacity of 1200, i.e., it can hold around three companies of 300 marines plus a decent size crew (~190?). The other one is one I renamed USMC Valiant, and I think it was originally Margaret (from Wounded Game). It also holds 1200. With somewhere in the ballpark of 1100 marines Battle in the Rice Fields wasn't terribly taxing, though losses were still higher than I would've liked. The game definitely doesn't offer a great deal of "here is the easy way" options to the maps . . . 3. What I do is, preview all of my mission options. See what they need and allow in terms of ships/troops/tonnage. I generally try to do the ones which are "older" (meaning the date associated with the Mission) and will wait to spend my resources until I figure out which mission I'm doing next. Then I blow my wad to set up my forces for that next mission (often necessitating sacrifices like selling ships or arms I would prefer to keep), and then try to minimize losses (also a theme in my career point allocation: MINIMIZE LOSSES in order to cope with austerity). Wait till the last mission in a stage, hope that I've got enough resources left over to be able to do one or two maybe even three PoIs as I go for the last mission. 4. Accepting "Defeat," and/or skipping a mission altogether might make good sense from time to time. I suffered "Defeat" from Naval Blockade even though I considered it a Draw and was happy with the outcome (losses/damage not too bad, and I captured a 6th Rate). I also skipped "Nantucket" altogether. However I won Bunker Hill, First Contact, Old True Love, Chelsea, Norfolk, Wounded Prey, Nassau and Rice Fields, so it evens out. I'd call this basic design EXCEPTIONAL. It is uncommon that a game can manage to impose sufficient challenge that a player wins some and loses some; what is much more common is totally one-sided outcomes one way or the other. 5. Now with all that said: I'm not sure if some of the things need to be balanced better. Shortage of arms seems to be pretty intense and rewards for missions seem fairly meager.

What is the exact sequence to use the fire barrels? Get close and set it on fire; or, get close, grapple, set it on fire, and abandon ship? What happens to the crew? Does the barrel ship need to have guns? I did try this at one point in one of the early Yank missions and it didn't work out like I wanted, though I cannot recall why. I think maybe I took the guns off of it and then selected "board" and before I could tell them to set it on fire they fled or something . . .

A couple more features I think would benefit the game: A. Add a control to specify what route units will take. Lots of ways it could be implemented in terms of where the widget would live . . . could even be a menu open when you right-click + Shift to specify destination, thus not interfering with either the current panel layout nor changing current functionality at all. Users who continue to use right-click to specify destination would not even know the new functionality existed. However, hold down shift while right-click: est voila! a drop down menu. This drop down menu would includes selections like: (i) direct path, i.e., straight line; (ii) fastest route, i.e., unit will stay out of swamps and prefer to use fords or bridges instead of swimming . . . (iii) etc., could be several different options but those two are the most obvious. Of course, depending on how good your logic is for pathfinding, the above might not be a preferred choice. In that case another way would be to add way point functionality. Given you've got functionality for units going to points on the map, then adding waypoint functionality would not involve any substantial change to logic, just basically adding a basic function to respond to the "way point key" (Alt seems to be a common choice among), to activate the additional "clauses," to chain the movement orders. B. Re: the "Mission" versus the "PoIs." It sure would be nice if there was a "summary" window that was provided for missions while user was viewing the grand map and selected the Mission icon. The fact that I have to select "Play," to see what the mission actually involves (is it strictly naval, is it amphibious, is it army, how many ships, how many tons, etc.) is what irks me. Allow me to find out what the mission is about without having to click Play so that I don't waste more of my time clicking Play to view each mission then having to go back to Harbor.

Yeah, what I meant was: merging two ships into a division. But I got that figured now. They just need to be close enough to each other and then you select follower and click on leader.

Hey William, thanks for taking the time to respond in detail. I hope some of my input is of use to the development team. It is a WONDERFUL game; as I said, I cannot remember being this much afflicted with one more turn syndrome for a very long time. True. Even though I do tend to want for "more buttons to mash at," I do acknowledge that there is a point of diminishing returns. Let me try to explain my "Turn Mode" idea more clearly; given you appreciate that the game is heavily micro-managey, I think if I can get you to understand it, you may well also become an advocate for such a feature. So, here is how a game works: Turn-based. There is a "loop" of source code. It starts at a set point and ends at a set point, though it may look very much like a braided stream in between (as a result of the algorithm checking values for true/false or >=/<= types of conditions). As a result of the "braiding," only some of the chunks of code may run on any given turn, but it may be that all the chunks of code run on a given turn. Once a turn finished, the app reaches a point where it is receptive to user input and pauses. user can observe the information the game is providing and interact with user interface to "play." As the user is interacting the app is taking in the information from user inputs and adding them to a data structures (either a heap or a stack) and then when the player hits "Finish Turn," all the information (both new stuff from user inputs in the most recent "turn," and older stuff, or effectively "permanent" stuff) and runs through its loop again.Non-turn-based: identical to turn based, except (a) the game never pauses (unless user tells it to); and (b) any anims or sounds that play only during 'instant replay' of what transpired during a turn are played at any time the corresponding events are occurring. What I'm suggesting is that: in addition to the current time passage settings (slow, pause, normal, fast, very fast), the game would benefit from: (a) additional time passage settings (I think this is almost unquestionable); and also (b) a "Turn Mode." The point of a "Turn Mode" is to alleviate the user irritation from the game being so micro-managey. (a) would comprise something like: (very slow, slow, pause, normal, fast, very fast, really fast, insanely fast) or something along those lines. (b) would comprise something like: (very slow, slow, pause, Turn Mode, normal, fast, very fast, really fast, insanely fast). Now, how would "Turn Mode" actually function? Well when the user hovered cursor over the widget for "Turn Mode" they would see a drop down menu. This drop down menu would be a list of "Times," meaning amount of time to pass during a "Turn." Where "s" means seconds, it could be something like (5s, 10s, 20s, 30s, 60s). Once the user selected one of these values, the game would pause. Once the user told them game to not pause, the game would run at normal speed for the specified number of seconds, then pause again. Effectively this feature would add a certain degree of "automation" to the micro-managey nature of the game. Instead of the user being required to constantly stop-start the game themselves, they could simply: (i) Hover "Turn Mode," (ii) Select a time value for each "turn," (iii) Input their decisions, (iv) Tap Unpause hotkey, causing the game to progress for the specified amount of time and then pausing again. Now the user only has to repeat (iii) & (iv) instead of having to repeatedly pause and unpause the game. Ability to zoom out further, and less "zoom in" whenever you double-click a unit and also whenever the proloque plays. Maybe reduce the amount of zoom in by 20 or 25% and increase the max possible zoom for the battle maps by 50%? Related to that zoom out value, freeing the camera to be able to go past the "play area" boundaries would be nice. At least enough to be able to handle units when there are clustered right on the edge of the playfield without having to go almost fully vertical camera. I expected that this was what was behind the scenes; I'm just not sure it is working as intended. My anecdotal observation is: whichever arc I want/need to be larger is not, and the other one is generally 3x as big! It is almost like the app is doing a check to see which side of my ship is actually facing the enemy and then imposing an RNG nerf bat on the range. I finally figured out how to add ships to formations. Agree it is quite limited. But the basic model of "get ships close enough, then with a follower selected click on a leader to get them to group is good." The one aspect of this design which seems slightly not working right is: the app seems to arbitrarily decide the order of the ships in line. The order should be the order in which the player adds the ships, though it may be that I am doing it wrong and trying to do it like: Norwich leader-> Select Frisch, and click Norwich to make Frisch follower 1 -> Select Bates, and click Frisch to make Bates follower 2 . . . it just occurred to me that maybe the proper way to do it would be to Select Bates, and click Norwich to make Bates follower 2? Yep. Glad to hear you agree! Which says a lot! I was thinking that the "A.I" opponents were pretty good, but now that you've mentioned scripting maybe what I'm seeing is the insights of the designers knowing what scripts will tend to foil a player at least for the early stages of a battle and at least as long as the player stays "inside the box." I noticed that if I go "outside the box" I can achieve disproportionate effects. As one example (now granted this was on "Easy") I was able to get a "Victory" out of Bunker Hill (as Yanks) once by pulling back EVERYTHING to actual Bunker Hill putting all my artillery on that hill (three batteries) and then pummeling them. Despite my best efforts it turned into a total pell-mell for the last 25 or 30 minutes and I was not in any semblance of a "solid" defensive arrangement. However, the British had been pretty badly mangled and dispersed as well. They still had superiority in both numbers, cohesion and firepower for sure . . . but, they guys were all dispersed from chasing my poor sods all over the Commonwealth. So, I was able during the last 5 minutes or so to get enough forces back at the fence and Breed Hill to fend off the redcoats there and get a "win." I thought this revealed a bit of a weakness in the game design, which is very common to "capture the flag" designs in general: arbitrariness of the victory conditions. I don't remember all my details of that battle with enough clarity to offer specific suggestions. But, I think that, long-term it might be worth their time for them to consider more complex victory conditions, such as (for Bunker Hill): (a) define an "exclusion area" which basically fills the whole peninsula back to where the Yanks deploy from and with lobes that extend part way to Breed Hill and up to the Fence. Could be called "Rear Area," or whatever. Define "Draw" as: holds at least one flag AND rear area has <= x value of redcoats (troop count, troop count*[morale+condition/2] or whatever.

Can you do this with ships?

Few typos in that, but I'm not gonna bother fixing it. However, one additional point that occurred to me in reviewing what I posted: Fog of War on the battlefield. I'm still not 100% sure what each of the little horizontal bars in association with ships mean, though I'm pretty confident it it something like (top left to right and down): Sail, Hull Integrity(?), "Armor," Flotation. That is great. A captain and his crew should be able to look at an enemy ship and guess about the value for these variables. One could argue that some of them technically SHOULD be "grayed out" some of the time (e.g., at extreme distance or in smokey situations), but that is pretty minor. One thing that does seem incongruous though, My crew and Captain can discern values for all those variables (as well as the ship's name and number of crew/marines on board) but they apparently cannot tell me the ship class, nor how many guns she carries? ADDIT: Maybe this is just the Computer Opponent getting his advantages, but . . . feels like grapeshot is badly nerfed relative to rifle fire. Combine this with an "A.I." setting for player controlled ships with loves to get up as close as possible and expose the ship to rifle fire and you've got yet another dynamic that adds to the 'tedious, micro-managey mess' feeling. Some settings for "A.I." mode on ships might be good: A. Keep at Maximum Range B. Keep at Effective Range for Ammo C. Keep out of Rifle Range D. Close to Rifle Range E. Close to Point Blank Range I took the effort of putting Kentucky Rifles with several of my ships in the hopes that I could turn this "killer rifleman" thing to my advantage, expecting that the Sea Musket models being used by the British computer opponent wouldn't match my ships rifles. Didn't seem to work that way. They would consistently get 1.5 to 2 times the kills as me even when I had equivalent or greater number of crew onboard. Grapeshot as it is presently configured feels almost useless, as does the chain-shot really . . . Indeed, even the balls seem fairly ineffective, and on top of that, there isn't much noticeable effect from firing at point-blank versus longer ranges. That last bit might just be making an inaccurate anecdotal observation, and you guys presumably have the test harness for your game to run 1000 trials of a test and gather the data to know, but that is how it "feels" to the end user.

First, I want to say: this game is a gem. The word MASTERPIECE comes to mind. The art, look and feel, music, performance, basic game play loop, strategic campaign structure, interaction between game play components (techs, upgrades, character development, units, weapons, etc.) is IMPECCABLE. I haven't been this addicted with "one more turn syndrome," since Civ 3 or Civ 4 days. Utterly fantastic game and I think even if it went on the early access today, it would perform pretty damn well. And I mean all of that quite sincerely. Having said all of that . . . now comes the constructive criticism, and some of this might come off as being a bit harsh. All is conveyed with the intent to be CONSTRUCTIVE, i.e., to offer one user's perspective on what many potential users may experience, and perhaps to help avoid certain pitfalls that could befall the game when it transitions into Early Access. Once I had played the game for 5 or 8 hours I created a text document. I'll paste that in its entirety and quote it. Keep in mind, some of these points (particularly early in the list) MIGHT have reflected my lack of experience with the game, and so the "ACTUAL" problem might not have been what I was alluding to. Nonetheless, I wanted to quote this in the exact form it is in right now, and including potential "errors" I had made in what I perceived to be the source of my bad reaction to the game. I will append additional comments, written at the time of creating this thread, in a different color/format to clarify, elaborate, or correct/qualify things that reflect initial experience. Again, this is meant to be helpful by offering you the insights into the INITIAL reactions of an extremely experienced player (and somewhat experienced developer) of war games. Mostly I think this has to do with UI/UX and in particular with a deficiency in how you conceive of UI/UX. I get the impression you guys like to make "hard core," i.e., challenging games, and that is great. I hope you do great business that way. However, I think one can always strive earnestly for that goal, satisfy the Grog market, AND also do some hand-holding and sign-posting for less patient or less tolerant users and be able to have one's cake and eat it too. An obscure or confusing UI and a UX which is annoying or frustrating primarily because of that deficiency UI is not "a more challenging" or "hardcore" game. It is simply a game with bad UI/UX.

No, what I meant was that the interface would include a "warning" to the player that assigning units to a PoI would commit them for some time and make them unavailable to do missions. Strictly UI/UX matter, not how things progress or game play dynamic. For me, and I think this might be true for many first time users of this game or of Game Labs games in general, the first time I assigned to a PoI, I was just clicking around exploring things. Then I realized those units were "locked in;" I kept clicking and clicking trying to figure out what I could do. Finally had to 'give up' and just click "Next Stage." It is generally a bad idea when you back a user into a corner and give them only one tiny narrow passage of escape, tends to piss people off, and "lore" and "historicity" are often not good excuses to do that! 😊 Never assume that your user(s): 1. Will understand unless you draw them a picture, give them directions in language suitable for a 5 year old and provide diagrams and warning signs. 2. Will not get pissed when you assumed they could figure it out on their own. 3. Will not give your game a bad review on Steam just because of (2), then move on to next game and leave their little turd bomb to impact your bottom line for time immemorial. This game is a masterpiece, and I have great admiration for the folks responsible for it. But like so many games down through the decades, a failure to focus sufficiently on UI/UX is an issue.

Not 100% positive, but I think they may have changed this now? Seems like I had one early campaign (still 1775 or early 1776) PoI that I tackled while I had two missions left. I did one of the missions and then the PoI was done too. It may have been that it actually advanced the calendar but retained the mission from the preceding "stage?"

I'm still early days here; probably only about 30 hours 😆 . . . damn this game is ADDICTIVE. This design almost exactly in my sweet spot for ideal, even though I've spent a good deal of time raging at my screen because of some of the design decisions, some of which are just gaps in UI/UX but others of which are (as play more) done quite intentionally to make the game more of a hardcore "Grog" experience (but more of that later, I'm still trying to beat the America campaign on easy . . .). With that said: I am now seeing some of the issues with technology. Good example: Fusiliers. In my experience, if you do not get that one as a pretty early option you're likely to be hosed on some of the early land combats. Now maybe players who are even more skilled than me can manage some of those early scenarios with militia, but it is certainly going to be more difficult. Given one can "skip phase" maybe I'm making too much of an issue out of the fact that the current design might restrict players to skipping certain early campaign fights. But the fact they are seemingly very random is a bit unrealistic.

Okay, I'll start keeping a list and when I get a handful or more I'll ping ya. One thing that comes to mind immediately though . . . The info panes for ships have a column in a table named "Planking" which seems to be showing "armor" thickness labeled "Thinkness." I think that must have been "Thickness."