ATG: Wishlist thread

[Jabod]

Shouldn't there be a pink button to exit the page on the Setvar page of the events editor?

Every other page has one, so this looks like an oversight. Those pink buttons are useful if you just want to inspect the page, without changing any variables on it.

[Lomaster]

A hotkey to toggle hex grid ON/OFF would save a lot of unnecessary mouse clicks.

[GaryChildress]

I REALLY, REALLY hope there will be an ATG 2. And in ATG 2 I would like to see a reworked naval aspect to the game, maybe something along the lines of how War in the Pacific handles naval warfare. Where ships have various thicknesses of armor and guns have to penetrate that thickness in order to be effective. And then, of course, there would be a "ship design" editor in the game just like the tank designer only a little more detailed.

I also think it would help realism if Engineering Points were erased whenever your engineers move. Otherwise, it seems kind of odd that your engineers can swoop down on a hex and suddenly build a massive fort in one turn. I think it would be more realistic if engineers had to sit stationary on a hex until they accumulate enough EP to build something.

I still think ATG is one of the greatest (if not THE greatest), most versatile, most innovative wargames of all time. You can play random scenarios or you can play pre-designed scenarios that recreate historic wars and such. It's also a modders paradise because of the flexibility of the editor, although, the learning curve of using the editor is a bit steep, it's not impossible to learn.

[CSO_Talorgan]

ORIGINAL: GaryChildress

the learning curve of using the editor is a bit steep

Better documentation would reduce this

[Kuokkanen]

I got the game just recently, so this may come bit late. Still may be of reference for updating Shadow Empire or future games.

1. Stack movement! When # of counters gets bigger, it becomes more of a chore to move them one by one. I want to move multiple units at once, that is multiple units in a given hex. In the games I have played, Sid Meier's Civilization IV does it best.

2. Cut down the trees. I want my engineers to chop down the trees, thus effectively transforming forest/jungle hex into plains hex. I understand it has been done in reality in order to have clear lines of fire. Civ4 game has it, and it has been very useful. Workers clean up the squares, enemy unit comes to the now open terrain, and my stack charges from forest hill. Why shouldn't ATG have this feature?

[edit]
3. Move To command. In case player want to move unit(s) further than they can reach in a given turn, those units would continue their movement through multiple turns without further input from the player.

[SnowLeopardX]

[Just posted this in the Phoenix wishlist thread, seems relevant to post here as well]

Hi All, I appreciate the opportunity to provide input on the development of new levels of AT. I have probably played over 1,000 hours of the game. I love the game and am thankful that people are putting time into updating it.

Some suggestions:

My number one request: for love of all that is Good and Holy, please make it so GROUND UNITS CAN'T RETREAT FROM AIR ATTACK WHILE THE AIR UNITS STILL HAVE ATTACK/ACTION POINTS. This is my least favorite and most frustrating aspect of the game.

Here is what I am seeking to avoid: enemy has single rifle unit six hexes away from a town/airbase with a large stack of my bombers. I transfer a single bomber into an empty unit, and do an air attack. During combat, the enemy rifle retreats within two attack turns. The bomber returns to base with four action/attack points left, but, there isn't an enemy unit with four hexes and I don't want to re-base the bombers, so the action points are wasted. I transfer this bomber to a "done" unit. I transfer another fresh single bomber to the empty unit, to again attack the enemy single rifle. Again, the enemy retreats after only one or two attack/action points are complete. I keep doing this until one bomber finally destroys the single enemy. Sometimes, this takes five or six transfer-attack-transfer sequences, all to destroy one single rifle unit with zero readiness. I have wasted hours of my life doing this and it makes me want to stop playing.

The proposal - if all ground units in a hex have either retreated (or been destroyed), but air units still have attack/action points, combat begins again, air attack on the previously retreated units. This seems realistic to me - I don't think in real life combat pilots with fuel and ammunition remaining say, "Looks like those troops down there are wounded and in disarray - time to leave them alone to regroup, and for me to return to base".

Other suggestions:

My way of playing is to set up a maximum-sized random ATWW2 game with nine AI++ opponents and as many cities as possible, and then play the 100 hours plus it takes to clear the board.

* With such long games, it would be nice to have the option to toggle battle animations off, and just show final results of each battle.

* As much as I like the textured green fields of ATG (so most of the planet doesn't look like an empty desert Arrakis like it does in ATWW2) and the improved AI, I only play ATWW2 and don't play ATG games because I find city nationalities so frustrating. I get that nationalities make sense in a historical scenario, but it would be nice to turn them off (i.e. all city populations are "universals") for a random game.

* The unitary "supply" of ATWW2 is all the logistical abstraction that I want to deal with, without adding in oil and ore also. Might be good to have an option to choose to skip oil and ore and only use singular "supply" if desired, at the beginning of random game creation.

So those are my main four crucial and strong requests: 1. if air units still have attack/action points left and all enemy ground units they are attacking have been destroyed or retreated, have combat begin again with the retreated ground units, 2. ability to toggle battle animations off, 3. ability to make all populations universals, and 4. ability to toggle oil/ore off and just use old fashioned "supply".

=====================================

Other requests and suggestions:

* When making a tech upgrade (i.e. "Bazooka 2" to "Bazooka 3"), to be able to upgrade all sub-units at once, rather than having to go to each unit individually

* Infinite vertical scroll option as well as horizontal

* Higher level engineers who can create bridges for up to two hexes wide over ocean/sea (1000 EP, 25 PP, three turns per hex) and make canals for ships to traverse (400 EP, 10 PP, two turns). Higher level engineers also able to clear a forest, drain a swamp, and drill roads through a tall mountain. Make fortress building by higher level engineers only. Maybe level 4 engineers can build villages (1000 EP, 25 PP, three turns) and towns (4000 EP, 60 PP, five turns).

* As others have suggested, level 2+ paratroops that can carry machine guns, bazookas, and mortars

* As much fun as it is to whip units from one side of the planet to another within a single turn, it would probably be more realistic to put some limits to the distance of strategic transport

* In a single human/multiple AI game, have an option that once the human has more than half the military power and/or production capacity, they can have different remaining AI regimes band together into one regime

* A button that has the computer swap around and rearrange production to try to match up cities and HQs as geographically closely with each other as possible. For a huge map, doing this manually can take a lot of time, remembering city names and locations, and scribbling on a pad of paper.

* As others have suggested, the ability to divide an artillery unit's attack action points between more than one hex.

* A visual report that shows a heat map of where on the geographical map heaviest fighting has happened so far (in terms of total attacks made, enemy units weight destroyed, and/or your unit weight destroyed)

Thank you for considering.

[sIg3b]

The AI should be able to do everything that the player can do, including:

• 1. Utilize Carriers
  2. Utilize Paratroopers
  3. Build Forts
  ...and so on.

[ernieschwitz]

We are reading all your suggestions. Realize we are just getting to know the code, still, and that some things may be too difficult for now, but we'll do our best, with those suggestions we find to be what we think we want ATG to be. Just know we make no promises.

[CaptBeefheart]

Glad to see you gents working on this. One thing I'd like to add is I think strategic movement works just fine. I've you have the train capacity, why not move a unit across the map? Also, I don't have the game open, but there's a way to do mass upgrades of say Rifle II to Rifle III. It's on the page that has the HQs if I remember correctly. Of course, having a more obvious way to do it would be an improvement.

The other thing is I tend not to play maps with much water as the AI doesn't use naval capability well. I also don't use paras for the same reason.

Cheers,
CB

[Jafele]

Deleted.

[Jafele]

1-Counter-battery fire: Artillery units (HA, LA, IG, Flak) and ships will fire automatically to a target that has moved within range during enemy turn, but only if they haven´t spent any action point before. Flak units that have moved should not be able to fire during enemy turn.

Same rule may also be applied to planes: A fighter must not be able to intercept if it has spend any AP during its turn. In this way no units will be able to double its action points. It´s also a realistic limitation to the IGOYOUGO.

2-Smarter strategic AI: The AI should have the possibility to offer alliance, sue for peace or stop war to any side. AI lack of specific resources or supremacy must count to choose allies or enemies. Nevermore in a random way.

3-Resources connected: To get resources, oil and raw mines should be connected to any city by road. Enemy units in the road will block the traffic.

[GaryChildress]

Four new features I'd like to see in ATG Phoenix update:

1. Self-propelled artillery with advantages such as the ability to shoot and then scoot afterwards to a new location after bombarding.

2. Ability to designate certain subformations as "marine" in which they receive some sort of universal bonus when invading enemy territory from transport ships. The advantage would be gauged by terrain type the unit is landing on. Perhaps Rangers could even be given a slightly improved bonus when invading mountain or hill territory (a la pointe du hoc).

3. The ability for at least up to 3 types of road to be constructed by engineers. For example: railroad, paved road, and possibly an improvised dirt road or something. Each road type could then be given different requirements for engineers to build them.

4, The ability to include helicopters in the game (for modern scenarios for example). Helicopters would be able to deploy certain types of non-airborne subformations on any terrain type (except perhaps mountains).

I think these improvements ought to be high on the list because I feel like they each introduce aspects to the game that are currently not represented but that are essential to modern warfare.

[Villiamza]

The ability to put in an order of production in each city or factory, for example...
Rifle x 10
Armoured Car x 2
Staff x 10

When the totals have been produced for each type this closes the order & production ceases.

Just my thoughts.

[Khanti]

Stupid question: where is key or hotkey to "find next idle unit?"

[Khanti]

To Vic:
In all your games algorithm allows for such "kills".
I wish to see "retreat" if odds are completely insane.
95 vs. 4354 can not be treated like kill

[ernieschwitz]

Stupid question: where is key or hotkey to "find next idle unit?"

No such exists.

[Khanti]

No such exists.

Still.
Because of it I put this post in wishlist

[Khanti]

Please remove code that enables AI to use artillery as assault formation, not as bombardment.
Artillery is too expensive and too good in bombarding to be used as assaulter. At least I never use artillery that way.

[Ormand]

I presume that this in using the "vanilla", or say, the Phoenix masterfile. And thus, these artillery units have an artillery range of 2. It is a little surprising to see this type of attack. Mostly, I see artillery stay back, but maybe you penetrated a line, and it felt that it needed to attack you.

At any rate, a complication arises with modders who are looking to make the subformations a bit more realistic. In that the hexes are actually quite large, and an artillery range of 2 is unrealistic. More like 1 for most cases. For example, in my Four Seasons mod, a hex is 16 miles across. No artillery other than battleships have a range close to 2 hexes. Instead, I set things up for units to be mostly Division sized, and thus, artillery mostly is embedded in the units. Being something like a support unit. To make this work, infantry guns and artillery have slightly different features, otherwise you would use one and not the other. Also, arty is more expensive. Note that when arty attacks, rather than bombards, it moves like any other unit and is not frozen in place. Now, you might say, well keep the range at 1 hex, and use them as artillery. There are two problems with this. The first, which I can fix in the code is that the AI doesn't like a range of 1 hex, and prefers to use them as combat units. The second is that by making an arty unit for each division, the number of units goes up by a lot, which makes things a bit of a mess and can lead to density of units in the back that hamper exploitation.

But mostly, since this game is kind of a sandbox, I am not inclined to completely for arty into a specific pattern of use. That said, I can look at why the AI wants to use arty this way.

[GaryChildress]

I'm not sure what all will be included in the next update, however, I'm thinking that it would be cool to increase the number of randomly playable nations POSSIBLE. I'm NOT suggesting increasing the possible number of opponents that can be generated in the game any higher than 14, just the ability to increase the number of countries that would be available for random draw to occupy whatever number of spaces for how many opponents we want.

The reason I ask is that I'd like to create a mod that didn't use regimes but rather had a large pool of potential countries it could randomly draw as opponents. So 14 would be the limit of opponents we could have in a game, however, the number of potential people groups would be maybe 20 or so. I'm thinking it would be cool to create a random game mod where I can include 20 countries or so with their own unique historical flags and unique unit graphics.

It seems like it would be cool to add more commonwealth countries like Australia, and Canada, and other minor combatants such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Iran, Thailand, Brazil, etc. etc. etc. I've got flags for them and 4 Seasons has a lot of countries in its database that could be included in the possible random selection.

However, if such a thing can't be incorporated into the new ATG betas, then no worries, It's not a big deal. I can survive without it.