Fighters and bombers recon

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by Tarasque

The problem in the game the spoted tank can then be destroyed the next round by your troops on the ground, something is wrong if you ask me, this is too fast and too accurate.
When you have planes you will see everything moving in the open + some hidden troops, if your opponent is using transport planes (10 to 20 )you will see so much more.
Imho the crews are already very buzy with the flak and their primary mission. They can't report accurately. the only exception is the target of a fighter. just follow the bullets and rockets, if the target is not destroyed, finish it.
The spoting task should be for recon planes only.

The game reports spottings globally. There is no list of individual unit's spottings, and in any case even if that happened the player with his "gods eye view" and ability to select all units, could simply build up a composite view in his own mind by simply cycling through each unit and remembering each one's viewpoint.

A unit has one spotted flag - and if set then it is so. (There is a check for LOS at end turn, and spotted units that have no LOS to an enemy do sometimes fall off the plot).

So - if Sgt Smith spots a Tiger a millisecond before it cuts him down (no other friends in LOS) - then the Tiger usually remains spotted, in this game system. Even if Sgt Smith had no radio or any other means of communicating the fact in the seconds before his demise.


There really only was one set of computer wargames that did the restricted information of a commander properly, and those were Dr Turcan's 1980s ones for the Atari (I think there were ports to the PC, and they started on the Sinclair Spectrum?). If you selected the option to "lock" the map view to the CIC, then you could only see what he did, and had to rely on the status reports (if any) that say Ney sent back from Hougomont (with a realistic delay, so the status report that you got may say "assault is going great!" but you can see the troops in rout from your vantage point as Napoleon since the despatch rider was sent off from Marshall Ney an hour before). There were some Napoleonic battles, and some ACW in the series, and the system worked well for the horse and musket era. Simple pseudo-3D terrain with "wooden block" brigades for graphics.

Some screenshots of the game system here - simple, but effective when the viewpoit was locked to the CIC (otherwise you could zooom all over the map and spot things - a cheat you could use in the later 688 attack sub as well !
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari...dino_8790.html


Cheers
Andy