Anthropoid's ~30 Hours Suggestions and Comments

[Anthropoid]

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.

Ultimate Admiral Age of Sail Gripes

1. Sailing doesn't look that realistic (compared to Nitro Games
old games).

I don't know if you guys ever played their games. It has been a long time since I played them myself. However, my recollection is that the sailing (particularly in the pirates DLC for East India Company) looked more realistic than in this game. It is honestly a fairly minor issue, but you might profit from going back and having a look at those games.

2. Ships turn too fast.

On further reflection, I'm not sure this is really a consistent problem. Sometimes ships seem to take forever to carry out a command, other times they are very quick. I assume this reflects back-end algorithms doing RNG checks for crew/captain skill checks moderated by params like morale, dexterity, etc. However, it DID come across as erratic, or even boring (if you turn it down to very slow and watch a painfully slow order get carried out). One possibility to offset this reaction among new users and to enhance experience for all users would be to provide more feedback to the user about what is happening on those ships. Just 3 to 5 short "canned" phrases that reflect the state of the crew and what they are doing at any given point in time. Perhaps something like: I. Carrying out Orders! (EFF 100%) ["EFF" meaning "efficiency"]; II. Trying to Carry Out Orders (EFF 65%); III. Crew Reorganizing (EFF 45%); IV. Crew Disrupted (EFF 25%); V. Crew Fragmented (EFF 10%); VI. Crew Nearly Broken (EFF <5%).

3. Sails change sail loadout too fast.

Maybe this is necessary for gameplay. I notice the computer opponent has a thing for raising and lower this sails from battle to full, back and forth depending on what orders my ships currently have (e.g., shot chain shot, or whatever). Feels a bit gamey . . .

4. Computer Opponent is too "fidgety".

This kind of relates to the above point, and it applies to both land and sea, but even more so to sea. I get that you needed to write "adaptive" algorithms (which I infer means: check what inputs the user last made and then adjust the computer opponents behavioral parameter values accordingly). That is great. But it is "too sharp." The CO (computer opponent) seems unrealistic perceptive and responsive to user actions. I'd suggest you create a function that rolls an RNG and which is moderated by whatever host of factors are salient (CO crew and leader ratings, nationality, context of the engagement, etc.), so that: really good/confident/well-resourced CO entities will tend to "succeed" this RNG roll, and bad ones will be less like to succeed. Every so often (however many ticks is appropriate for how the algorithm runs), require that the adaptive algorithm get double checked against this "RNG Roll" and if it fails, then the CO doesn't respond to user actions. 

5. The small play area is the most aggravating thing ever.
Totally immersion breaking.

With probably 30 to 40 hours of experience with the game now, I think this is my number one complain. OMG SO ANNOYING. Please, make it bigger. Don't believe them when they say size doesn't matter 😆

6. The need to micro-manage each ship when a fight gets
spread out and disordered is incredibly tedious (same for
land fights really).

Having played more, I can see how this is a somewhat inevitable aspect of the overall design of the game. Nonetheless, the game IS a very micro-managey, tedious thing. The difference between playing on slowest setting pretty much all the time and also using Pause FREQUENTLY, versus playing on slowest setting and never pausing (much less, playing on speed 1 and never pausing) is extraordinary. Again, this would seem to relate primarily to point (4) about that "Adaptive A.I. (sic)." As you and I both know, there is no such thing as "artificial intelligence," even if programmers and game developers love to talk about it, and it has now become a catch phrase for what we are really dealing with Algorithms, or more descriptively Computer Opponents. If you blunt your CO's adaptiveness just a bit with some RNG, maybe even occasionally make them do something really stupid or cowardly or unpredictable, it will produce better and more historical gameplay. As it is, the way the skimisher and small Britsh ground forces harass and harry the player doesn't strike me as very historical and while it does produce more "challenge," the source of that challenge is primarily in the form of the need to micro-manage, i.e., play always on slow, and constantly use Pause.

There are other things you could do to enhance this aspect of UX, like adding in a "Variable Turn Timer" setting on the clock. Add an additional button "Turn Timer" and when you right click it the user can input a value that reflects how long time will run until the game pauses again. Add to that the ability to also set the speed at which time will run during "Turn Mode" and you've added another 50,000 units sold . . . add to that MORE time settings (Super-Slow, Slow, [Turn Mode], Pause, Normal, 2X, 4X, 6X, 8X) . . .more units sold . . .

7. Need a "turn-based" dynamic (advance for 10 seconds or 15
seconds or whatever). With this remapped to space bar playing
the game would be FUN! You'd still have to micro-manage
but by AUTOMATING the stop start somewhat you wouldn't be giving
a big 'ol hello kitty YOU! DUMBASS to your users.

I'm not gonna soften that one because it is good for developers to be reminded of this point: keep your users HAPPY. DO NOT insult them by wasting their time or making them jump through hoops because of interface or not enough functionality to play the game in a more streamlined and efficient manner

8. Need at least one more fast forward setting. Again, it feels
like a "hello kitty YOU!" to users when you make me sit in my chair
watching a timer run down for a minute when it SHOULD be possible
to speed it up and have that pass in 30 seconds.

"Hardcore" is great. Hardcore with half-ass UI/UX is . . . I
cannot find the words for just how HORRIBLE this is. If you want
this game to have mass appeal YOU MUST get up to speed on UI/UX.

Sorry to harsh. Just wanted you to know how I reacted to it. You'll note: the game IS otherwise SO GOOD, that I've continued to endure this tedious low-quality-of-life dynamics in order to savor all the goodness the game has to offer. So the upside of all this: IF you get your UI/UX well-tuned and are CATERING to your users, providing them with every conceivable little control toggle and widget and hotkey that they could hope for (within what is historically plausible and doesn't break game play) then you stand to benefit enormously, because mostly the game is phenomenally good!

9. Wow. Who knew that Horatio Nelson was such a prolific
creator of catchy one-liners. Seriously, no other naval figures
from this age to quote?? I'm actually dubious of the authenticity
of many of these, given they mostly seem to have been something
said while he was dying.

Just a little annoying.

10. Escape key needs to be mapped to Menu/Options by default.
It IS mapped in the battle map interface, but not in the campaign
map Interface.

A minor bit of programming, a massive benefit to user experience.

11. Need to be able to totally skip all the "Next . . . Next . . . Next"
Buttons when playing a mission or scenario. Suggest mapping
"Escape" to this and then set the boolean so it transfers back
to Escape mapping to the Options/Menu panes.

I was somewhat in error on this point, having overlooked the "Skip" button that appears to the left of "Next." Still, it might make sense to map Escape to "Skip" at least for the state when the mission first starts and then reset the bool so Escape goes back to pausing the game and opening the Menu.

12. Tonnage limits and ship count limits on missions!? WHAT!?
Complete bullshit. Combine this with the computer entities that
obviously respond to nearly every mouse click by the user, the
tiny water battle maps, and the stupid way things speed up and 
slow down (gliding then dragging then sliding sideways or backwards)
and the overall "feeling" of combat (esp. water, but even land
to some extent) is not the least bit "realistic." It feels like
an arcade game pretending to be realistic.

I understand the desire to make the game challenging, but there is no clear basis to restrict how many ships or how many tons the player can bring to bear in some of these early missions. If I've got four 7th rate Brigs (40 each) and the limit to the mission is something like 60 or 90, that just feels like bullshit.

13. The way the camera INSISTS on panning around with each click
of "Next" in the mission intros is absolute AGONIZING. Esp when combined
with the restricted zoom levels. Just open up the zoom ALL THE WAY
You already are presenting the player in a god like top down mode
(which is fine) but then you restrict the camera angles!? WTF!? DO
you just HATE your users and want to annoy!? This is NOT how to make
a game "challenging" or "hardcore."

Nothing to add really . . .

14. WHY!? the asymmetric targeting arc!?

There may be some sensible reason for this, but it remains unclear why the targeting arcs (which I assume represent the area of optimum range and effectivenss?) fluctuate so wildly and often exhibit profound asymmetry between port and starboard.

15. Some positive things to say:
Once the user has some basic orientation with the level of control
what to expect and so forth, the campaign as America is VERY WELL
DONE in the sense of providing an excellent balance between realism
playability. It is quite challenging, as it should be, but with some 
wise strategic decisions and some good tactical actions it is possible
to achieve (at least on "Balanced") some excellent outcomes.

As I've played it more, I would redouble this comment. The America Campaign (have not played Brits at all yet) is really, REALLY well structured. If you were to address the UI/UX issues I have, this would be hands down one of the best games ever in this 'genre' (operational and tactical warfare or whatever you want to call it).

16. Seems like it should be possible to send boarders from a merchant
even if one doesn't have a 2nd in command? I saw this actually
work this way once when I played the merchant (lots of marines no guns)
as the 1st ship (flaghip I guess) of a task force for a mission.

Would suggest that any ship be able to send out a boarding party, whether this is a sub-leader or not. Smaller ships like cutters and sloops are already at a disadvantage in this respect because they have such small crews.

17. The ship division functionality seems barebones. Cannot see a way to 
regroup ships once they are separated or to create groups. Also really needs
features like how much space to maintain, different formations (inline abreast,
vs. inline bow-to-stern, etc.), and which speed to maintain.

One of my most recent comments.

18. Ship speed: This has got to be one of the most fiddly annoying aspects of
the whole game. Ship captains who could not regulate their crew such that
they achieve a specific speed to within a fairly narrow margin would be taken
out a shot. Nonetheless, this app allows us only a few pre-cooked settings:
Too fast, not quite fast enough, too slow, way too slow. PLEASE, incorporate
the capacity to regulate a ships speed more precisely, i.e., to match a target's
speed, or to match a division mates speed. It totally makes sense if a lower
quality captain and crew find this more difficult and thus the actual speed
they maintain may vary from the actual order from the user. But given how 
naval battles are implemented, I feel it is ESSENTIAL that the user be given
more precise control over ship speed or this game is going to lose a LOT of 
potentially very engaged users. The ship combat is fascinating and well-done, but also
tedious, annoying and frustrating and the ship speed and barebones division
functionality are a big part of this.

My final comment, written down today just before I managed to lose Old True Love packed to the gills with 1200 marines and crew (even though I had used my 3 brigs to capture a British Brig and then also Diamantina, but Old True Love was just back there loitering all along and finally the 5 or 6 more Brit ships started taking interest in here . . .)

Otherwise Wonderful! game truly inspiring. If playing it
were not so tedious and annoying, I'd call it a masterpiece.

 

[Anthropoid]

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.

Edited January 22, 2020 by Anthropoid

[WilliamTheIII]

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

Sailing doesn't look that realistic (compared to Nitro Games
old games).

Haven't played EIC in a long while but I feel that AOS is fairly realistic.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

I. Carrying out Orders! (EFF 100%) ["EFF" meaning "efficiency"]; II. Trying to Carry Out Orders (EFF 65%); III. Crew Reorganizing (EFF 45%); IV. Crew Disrupted (EFF 25%); V. Crew Fragmented (EFF 10%); VI. Crew Nearly Broken (EFF <5%).

This is displayed through the morale and condition bar. All though not representative of exactly what is going on behind the scenes, it more or less is doing what you describe.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

5. The small play area is the most aggravating thing ever.
Totally immersion breaking.

This would be a fantastic solution to the large size of many of the troop transports that requires insane micro to capture without high losses.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

6. The need to micro-manage each ship when a fight gets
spread out and disordered is incredibly tedious (same for
land fights really)

I would agree with this. In UGCW, it was more than doable to ignore your infantry and heavily micro the support units such as cav and skirms. I find this impossible to do in AOS and I do not trust the ai in the slightest when handling my ships. Unfortunately, I do not really see a good solution to this problem especially when talking about large battles such as Trafalgar.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

Add an additional button "Turn Timer" and when you right click it the user can input a value that reflects how long time will run until the game pauses again.

I don't ever see a case where this would be useful outside of testing or trying to cheese the game. As you mentioned, the heavily micro'd nature of the game requires you to be pausing and playing slow and so higher speeds would only be useful until you engage the enemy.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

7. Need a "turn-based" dynamic (advance for 10 seconds or 15
seconds or whatever). With this remapped to space bar playing
the game would be FUN! You'd still have to micro-manage
but by AUTOMATING the stop start somewhat you wouldn't be giving
a big 'ol hello kitty YOU! DUMBASS to your users.

I have literally no idea what you are saying here. The game is an rts not a turn based one. And the campaign map is static and doesn't actually reflect the passage of time outside of lore descriptions.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

IF you get your UI/UX well-tuned and are CATERING to your users, providing them with every conceivable little control toggle and widget and hotkey that they could hope for

In my opinion this is not a good design model. Most of these additional buttons will remain unused and unneeded resulting in additional clutter and a steeper learning curve.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

9. Wow. Who knew that Horatio Nelson was such a prolific
creator of catchy one-liners. Seriously, no other naval figures
from this age to quote?? I'm actually dubious of the authenticity
of many of these, given they mostly seem to have been something
said while he was dying.

The devs do need to decide if this is truly a Nelson game or not (at least for the British). The campaign loosely follows his life which makes the abundance of his quotes (or supposed) logical except when the player decides to play someone other than Nelson. 

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

Tonnage limits and ship count limits on missions!? WHAT!?
Complete bullshit.

This is for balance not because it makes sense. As I have been playing this since they first released it, I can say with certainty that the lower BR is very much a necessity for the game. We were at the point where you would be bringing 3rd Rates to minor engagements and just one shotting 7th rates. This was incredibly broken and not very fun. I would agree that the BR limit on some battles needs to be balanced more however, the system as a whole is an efficient way of handling the situation. Part of this is the way the game has been designed. Scripting is taking a much larger precedence over scaling and the relatively low max scales is a huge limiter. At the moment, capturing the Endy early in the US campaign more or less makes Chapter 2 busy work rather than an enjoyable challenge. For lore purposes, it makes sense that you wouldn't want to devote all your resources to one area especially if it is a minor engagement in case they are needed elsewhere.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

13. The way the camera INSISTS on panning around with each click
of "Next" in the mission intros is absolute AGONIZING. Esp when combined
with the restricted zoom levels. Just open up the zoom ALL THE WAY
You already are presenting the player in a god like top down mode
(which is fine) but then you restrict the camera angles!? WTF!? DO
you just HATE your users and want to annoy!? This is NOT how to make
a game "challenging" or "hardcore."

I'm not sure what you are saying. The prologues to missions have a restricted camera for the purposes of visualizing what is being explained. During the actual battle, the camera is pretty free allowing you to move it any direction of your choosing. The zoom out seems more than adequate for your needs and the zoom in is nice. Though perhaps a further zoom would be fun for the cinematic feel.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

14. WHY!? the asymmetric targeting arc!?

This is due to a number of factors such as wind, angle of the ship, etc. Apparently there is a rather detailed and "realistic" physics simulation ongoing that is affecting the targeting arcs. Although, I have no knowledge of sailing, I like the idea of having ranges and other aspects of the ship dynamically affected by what is going on and what I am doing.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

17. The ship division functionality seems barebones. Cannot see a way to 
regroup ships once they are separated or to create groups. Also really needs
features like how much space to maintain, different formations (inline abreast,
vs. inline bow-to-stern, etc.), and which speed to maintain.

The only way to create a formation is to select multiple ships and create a path for them. The ships will then gather in a line formation and follow it exactly, one after the other. This system is quite limited and you can't even select them by pressing the "1" key for example. I feel like it needs to be greatly expanded with some of the features your state.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

PLEASE, incorporate
the capacity to regulate a ships speed more precisely, i.e., to match a target's
speed, or to match a division mates speed.

Not having a match target speed is incredibly frustrating and adds a ungodly amount of micro to an already very intensive micro game. When in formations, ships will sail at the same speed. Besides this feature of matching speed, I find that the 6 settings work more than adequately and having a scroll bar (or whatever) would be

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

little horizontal bars in association with ships mean

Blue is sail, red is armor strength on both the port and starboard side, and yellow is the hull. 

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

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.

This would be an awesome inclusion for a recon perk in the career tab (if it existed).

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

feels like grapeshot is badly nerfed relative to rifle fire

I find that grape is actually pretty balanced however, rifle fire is not. It is ridiculously overpowered and makes ai troop transports rather strong.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

Some settings for "A.I." mode on ships might be good:

No one in their right mind will us the ai mode  

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

They would consistently get 1.5 to 2 times the kills as me even when I had equivalent or greater number of crew onboard.

This sounds like a bug or perhaps the ship size is being taken into account. Or perhaps the crew of the enemy was exceptionally skilled. Quite difficult to say exactly what is going on here without having a full readout of all the parts in play.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

Grapeshot as it is presently configured feels almost useless, as does the chain-shot really . . . Indeed, even the balls seem fairly ineffective

I'd argue that they are all pretty well balanced in the current stage of the game. It is important to remember that armor will result in a massive penalty to the effectiveness of your ammunition. I have found that it is quite crucial to use manual aim and shell to reduce their armor so grape can become effective. For chain, manual aim is very important as once sails have become damaged, you cannot continue to damage them and must focus your shots somewhere else.

4 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

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

There is a pretty large difference between the two especially when it comes to accuracy and the overall effectiveness of armor. The devs have mentioned that the system will be going into even more depth.

5 hours ago, Anthropoid said:

It is simply a game with bad UI/UX.

I really feel like you need to explain this more. Most of the things you have mentioned seem to be asking for just more buttons for people to mash (at least that is my impression). In my opinion, having a simple, clean, and intuitive system with only the necessary tools to play the game is what makes for good UI/UX. However, I would like a lot more tooltips or at least the ability to add tooltips so I can mod them in.

[Anthropoid]

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.

This is displayed through the morale and condition bar. All though not representative of exactly what is going on behind the scenes, it more or less is doing what you describe.

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. 

I don't ever see a case where this would be useful outside of testing or trying to cheese the game. As you mentioned, the heavily micro'd nature of the game requires you to be pausing and playing slow and so higher speeds would only be useful until you engage the enemy. I have literally no idea what you are saying here. The game is an rts not a turn based one. And the campaign map is static and doesn't actually reflect the passage of time outside of lore descriptions.

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.

I'm not sure what you are saying. The prologues to missions have a restricted camera for the purposes of visualizing what is being explained. During the actual battle, the camera is pretty free allowing you to move it any direction of your choosing. The zoom out seems more than adequate for your needs and the zoom in is nice. Though perhaps a further zoom would be fun for the cinematic feel.

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.

This is due to a number of factors such as wind, angle of the ship, etc. Apparently there is a rather detailed and "realistic" physics simulation ongoing that is affecting the targeting arcs. Although, I have no knowledge of sailing, I like the idea of having ranges and other aspects of the ship dynamically affected by what is going on and what I am doing.

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.

The only way to create a formation is to select multiple ships and create a path for them. The ships will then gather in a line formation and follow it exactly, one after the other. This system is quite limited and you can't even select them by pressing the "1" key for example. I feel like it needs to be greatly expanded with some of the features your state.

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?

Not having a match target speed is incredibly frustrating and adds a ungodly amount of micro to an already very intensive micro game. When in formations, ships will sail at the same speed.

Yep. Glad to hear you agree!

No one in their right mind will us the ai mode

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. 

Edited January 23, 2020 by Anthropoid
fixing quotes

[Anthropoid]

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.