Advantage system seems too artificial ?

[Marshal Lannes]

Does anybody actually use the advantage system. I only push the slider two or at best three spaces to the left or right. Just to make things a bit easier for the A.I. but it kind of defeats the purpose if your opponents army is already hampered with poor moral and quality. I know that I have artificially enhanced my opponent so in real terms - it kind of feels phoney. Would it not be better to allow the system to give a small or huge advantage to the A.I. opponent every so often which would not be universal and add a bit of unpredictability to fire and meleee outcomes. Maybe a poor unit could hold off a better unit making the odd outcome difficult to predict. I am sure that there were times when individual firefights or melees were one-sided but still were won through good leadership and heroism. The key here is to make the A.I. less transparent and more unpredictable making a sure thing a bit more of a challenge. War is not a game or precise science..........surely.. ?????

 

[rahamy]

The advantage bar only increases the loss results, so if you slide the bar in the AI's favor you will suffer more losses from its fire, etc.

While your comments sound good, the praticality of make detailed enhancements like that to an AI is daunting. The time on the programmers part, and in turn expense, to make it happen would be huge. And still, after hundreds of hours of programming and testing time spent people would still complain about the AI's performance. So realistically I don't see any major enhancements taking place.

 

[Marshal Lannes]

I suppose so- but constructive criticism never hurts. Which brings me nicely to a game enhancenent which should only take two lines of coding and HPS should consider. The cross-hair cursoris too small and indistinct. It should be 3 times thicker amd of a white colour. I am assuning that the majority of people have an optical mouse and these have the habit of flying across the screen which basically means that it takes annoying extra seconds to find and position the bugger. It becomes especially indistinct if you have the contour hexes on or you have been playing and looking at small detail for hours on end or are moving large numbers of troops around around. Also buildings on fire after bombardment would be a nice touch.