Improvements you want to WinSPMBT

[Mustang]

The game's great, and it's probably the most realisitc war sim out there. Still, being a video game, it falls short on some of the more important parts of war. In the past, it was hard to cram all this stuff into a game, but I think that the Steel Panthers series can, potentially, be a real battlefield simulation.

The equipment and morale stuff in WinSPMBT is good, IMO, but the game dosen't really represent the chaos of war at all. There needs to be something to represent that. How about there's a preference option that turns on or off the "fog of war". When the option's on, you won't be able to see the exact composition of enemy units, but only a rough estimate of their strength if they're well-hidden. For example, it's happened countless times in history that an attacker has come across a few, well-hidden infantry, been ambushed, and overestimated their size. You might be able to get an exact count of bigger weapons, like tanks, but in real life there's no way that you'd be able to spot every single infantryman firing at you like you do in WinSPMBT.

There also needs to be some kind of fatigue thing. Infantryman can dash 100-200 yards without getting too worn out, but in WinSPMBT it limits you to two hexes/turn for infantry movement. They should allow you to move faster than that, but it wears out your troops quicker. Fatigue reduces morale, effectiveness, speed, etc., and should also accrue when a unit has been in combat for too long. It's really a quite important thing, and I don't think it should have been left out.

Has anyone played the old Steel Panthers III? The "orders" function was a good idea. Each unit gets only so many orders per turn, and they regenerate at a random rate each turn. Orders are spent issuing some commands, like moving, but not the more commonsense commands like firing that a unit does on its own initiative. Not only does this orders function represent the different abilities of your unit commanders ( a less competent commander would be able to get less orders and get less things done), but, most importantly, it represents the Soviet-style lack of initiative in some armies (the Russian units tended to get less orders, representing the fact that a commander won't do anything on his own and has to wait for HQ to tell him exactly what to do).

I hope you don't see this as a complaint, because it's a great game. But it's some good food for thought if you ever want to make the game super-realistic. Factoring in psychological factors and the friction of war are hard to to in a game, but that dosen't mean we can't try.