I long ago learned that missions will only work reliably in the most simple of circumstances. I'll be a bit more blunt than Antonio; the pathfinding is atrocious. Even slightly difficult terrain throws the entire formation into chaos. I'm not talking Himalayas here; one small knob astride the axis with a tiny impassable area will completely bugger the whole operation.
I know, pathfinding is a fairly difficult problem, requiring a descent into the bowels of graph theory to be done properly. It seems to me a sort of "genetic" algorithm is in use in ATF, where once blocked they just cast about with random paths, hoping something will work. At a minimum, I would cut way down on the new waypoint distance; trying to sidestep a full kilometer blows any chance of keeping up with the rest of the unit, and usually just gets them in more trouble anyway. By "way down", I mean limiting it to 100m or so at the most, but allowing a lot more more "attempts" before giving up. In most terrain that might reasonably be considered for an attack or whatever, only a small adjustment will generally be needed to get around a terrain obstacle. If the terrain is so bad that a small sidestep won't work, it is highly doubtful a large one will either, since it is most likely on the way to the new waypoint the unit will encounter more impassable terrain anyway. The initial sidestep should be random, but the followup sidesteps, if needed, should be in the same direction. Otherwise, units will tend to flounder around in the same general impassable zone.
In the same vein of excessive disorganization is dismounting infantry. The dismount radius is HUGE! Dismounting a platoon ends up with teams scattered all over an entire grid square. You usually have to spend a half hour of game time just collecting them into a coherent formation. In a close attack, half the infantry can end up behind the enemy. I'd expect that sort of disorganization after a parachute drop, but not when unhorsing from an APC. Please, can we cut that radius down to 50m or so?
The other related issue I have is with suppress SOP. Specifically, the radius. I think you should do away with the radius altogether. When they're in suppress mode, I think units should simply suppress any yellow or enemy they can see. If you want to control the target zone, that's what fire arcs and range limits are for. I understand the principle, that a given unit can only obtain a decisive volume of fire over a limited area, but this will naturally happen anyway without artificial measures. If a infantry squad is trying to suppress an entire enemy company all by itself, it won't do a very good job regardless of whether you limit them to an arbitrary circle or not. On the other hand, that circle makes it way more complicated to set up suppressive fire, needs to be constantly updated as the operation progresses and units move around, and frequently results in units just sitting there doing nothing when they have obvious targets to shoot at. And just forget about programming the AI opponent to use suppressive fire on the attack except at well defined, preplanned SBF positions. Hope the scenario designer guessed the exact location of the blue forces, or there won't be any supporting fire!
My three cents.
--- Kevin
) was that I always use missions, and to play without them would add a lot more micromanagment and detract from the "command" aspect that ATF provides.
