A few reservations re Sandbox Brigade battles

[pcelt]

So far I have been focussing on sandbox British brigade size defence battles (no strength matching).My experiences causes me to raise a few initial queries.

1) On a number of occasions after setting up an infantry brigade defence what appeared as the attacking brigade was a single French artillery unit which could only run when advanced against.It seems to me that in brigade level sandbox set-ups the computer should be programmed to avoid selection of just a single artillery opponent as attacker. No real battle can ensue.

2)On a few occasions after waiting for 2 hours+ no opponent at all appeared.

3) Also on some occasions the map indicated a defence location for me which was situated on the opposite side of the map from the intial position of the defending brigade and this was clearly faulty.

I have also enjoyed some very good sandbox combat encounters against French infantry and cavalry units-- but I hope something can be done in brigade defence sandbox encounters to avoid the issues described and the frustration caused by the problems described above.
Thanks for any observations of similar experiences. And could these issues be checked and eradicated by the team if they are confirmed .

[Jim_NSD]

The issue of unit type matching, especially at the lower levels is on our list of things to work on sooner.

-Jim

[FroBodine]

I hope I don't sound mean here because that is certainly not my intention, but reading quite a few threads that say the same thing, important feature didn't make it into the release and will be added soon, or a bug/balancing issue is on the list of things to fix.

Was this game released too soon?

[Redmarkus5]

IMHO yes, without a doubt. I had exactly the same sandbox experience. The battle was over in a few minutes after the single AI artillery unit fled.

It's all very well that the devs keep posting here 'this is only the 1.0 version', but when did that become an excuse in software development terms? This is a commercial release, not a Beta test and I didn't make a 1.0 payment - I paid for a finished product.

[Pawsy]

Never seen a computer game that was released that hasnt been improved over time.

I happy with the game

[con20or]

I think you are misunderstanding our comments. We like to keep improving and adding to the games and this is what we are referring to when we say it is on our to-do list. We had years of additional patches adding new features for the Gettysburg series and please do not misunderstand that as years of bug fix patches.

Unit choice for sandbox battles is random, it just picks the smallest battle unit. If we made it so infantry was always paired with infantry, that would make people who wanted to play inf v cav or inf v artillery unhappy. The problem is that at such a low battle level you will not always get the unit you want. We plan to release a scenario editor with the SDK. That was not included in the game advertisement, so is one example of the free new feature I referred to.

[jomni]

Even at Corps vs corps level, unit selection was a problem. My corps has no cavalry while the enemy corps is pure cavalry. It led to a slow process of moving forward, form squares, wait for cavalry attack, repeat. Not a lot of casualties and it was inconclusive. Until I continued after game end and charged another cav divison and artillery bettery and lost a lot of men and lost. Wasn't fun.

Maybe best is to choose Army vs Army then pick a level of control as you desire (corps, div, brigade)

[FroBodine]

This is not the only thing I am referring to. There are a couple other threads about features that did not make it into the game, but apparently are in previous games:

- After battle summary report did not make it into the game, but will be in for future updates.

- Something about the courier screen and "move to" commands also didn't make it into the game - http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3879230

So, things add up. I'm sure it doesn't bring down the quality of the game, but they seem like important features to be left out of the initial release.

Anyways, it sounds like I'm complaining, and I don't even own the game yet. But, I really do want it, I think I just need to wait for the improvements to get implemented.

[con20or]

Again, this is a historical limitation, not the engine. Some Corps just do not have cavalry and you are given two corps at random. The traditional British OOB had the majority of cavalry in a single corps. So if you are using that OOB you will not get 2 combined arms forces. We have designed a second OOB, the Br Cav OOB which spreads the British cavalry across the corps for this very purpose.

[con20or]

Some features do not make it over from legacy releases. We have battle casualties listed in the in-game status screen, for each unit as you click on it on the toolbar and also in the town status screen after a campaign battle. But people say they miss the old summary screen so we will work on bringing that back.

For the courier screen, 'move to this location' is still there, plus we still have the 'movement map' which also works with the courier system. We just no longer have the move to this map point and combined movement map in the courier screen. But people miss it so we will work on bringing that back too.

We have a working release - but we always work with the customers after release too and listen to feedback - so these are how you should interpret our replies.

[jomni]

ORIGINAL: con20or

Again, this is a historical limitation, not the engine. Some Corps just do not have cavalry and you are given two corps at random. The traditional British OOB had the majority of cavalry in a single corps. So if you are using that OOB you will not get 2 combined arms forces. We have designed a second OOB, the Br Cav OOB which spreads the British cavalry across the corps for this very purpose.

Thanks. I was wondering what the alternate OOB does.