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Fog of War or lack of

Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014 5:04 pm
by JFalk68
I picked this game up last week to pass some time by while on vacation, and overall I find the game to be enjoyable. I like the supply system, it's abstracted but having read some novels on the war in North Africa I think it does a good job at portraying units being out of supply and restoring precious tanks to your panzer divisions. I like the unit size as well, and I can live with the Italian divisions being as strong as Panzer regiments because I like to think that the Italians suffered a bit in perfomance when compared to Germans because of organization/tactics and leadership...so it took a larger division size unit to achieve what a combined arms German Panzer/Motz Regt could do. Overall, great job with the game!

However, I have a small niggle. It's the lack of fog of war.

I really don't like being able to see every single enemy unit and their strength and who just entered the board as a reinforcement for them as well. Perhaps in future games using this engine, the strength of the enemy could be hidden or a best guess estimate depending on how good the intelligence is. Commonwealth should have better intel and know more unit strengths and possible locations. Perhaps the map could represent the best known intel and present that as what we see, until a battle is engaged? Maybe you might get intel that a unit is being transfered to the theatre so you would know approximately when a unit was going to show up but you would have to still guess it's strength (80-100%). Rommel certainly didn't have the exact strength
and location of all CW units.

Thanks for reading,
John

Re: Fog of War or lack of

Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2014 1:19 pm
by s_nkarp
Hi John,

Yep, Fog of War is big, from a simulation point of view. Though important to realism, only the hardest-core gamers tend to like it, however: it's hard. Particularly new players have a tough time figuring out what to do.

Anyway, hope to incorporate it in a game in the future.

All the best,
Nick

Re: Fog of War or lack of

Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2014 3:22 pm
by daviddunham
Fog of war tends to conflict with the desire to have undoable actions (which can be pretty important when you play on a mobile device).

It also makes the artificial intelligence a lot trickier, since it has to not only make good moves, but deduce where opponents might be so that it can make good moves.

Re: Fog of War or lack of

Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2014 6:34 pm
by s_snoopy1710
Well you could get around that:

- make FoW an option (Yes/No)
- give the AI full visibility regardless (and be transparent about this)

But yes, FoW would be nice.

My 2 cents.

Snoopy

Re: Fog of War or lack of

Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2014 6:59 pm
by JFalk68
Hi guys,

I understand where you are coming from, and it's definitely trickier to program the AI to deduce reasonable moves with fog of war implemented. You guys have done such a great job ,and the attention to detail and polish in the game is evident, the game borders on a work of art...seemless beauty when playing it.

Lots of things in the game are already abstracted, units strengths are in "pips" and not actual men or tanks and supply is also abstracted, we are not dealing with actual litres of petro but percentages of overall strength and. The game does a great job of conveying what I have read in various books such as Rommel almost always fighting understrength, only have enough fuel to do limited operations. Few precious panzers findings their way to him, mostly being sunk enroute to him.

Is there a way to abstract Fog of War? A way that the AI could handle? After playing this game, I can see that the game was made with lots of passion, so someone on the team must be scratching their head on how to implement Fog of War.

I suppose I can view this game more like chess, where you see you opponent clearly and and counter and plan moves ahead...and chess is a classic game in its own right. Who doesn't like chess!

Re: Fog of War or lack of

Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2014 3:23 pm
by daviddunham
Indeed, the Crisis in Command game system does have a chess-like feel (which is one of the reasons it works so well for Game Center play).

There are times that it can be acceptable, but when the AI plays by different rules than the human, it is often called cheating.

Fog of War or lack of

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2015 6:28 am
by Kavomatovlbat
The fog of war is server controlled IIRC. For new dungeons that do not have a SOE provided map there is no way to add it in since the server simply doesnt keep track of maps that are custom added.