Quote:
Originally Posted by Cosloy
The playable escorts project will hopefully be a great addition, even for those that like to play solo. I understand it's a project by a separate developer so it gets blurry when making suggestions.
I like your idea of being able to hop between escorts as a player, as long as the player has control over which ship they're commanding. Receiving a radio report of a contact and speeding over to help sounds exciting as well. I agree the uboat players should not know whether an escort is AI or human. Keeping things unpredictable makes everything more immersive.
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Cheers, I think the escort-players being able to move between ships will really help. Otherwise you could spend a full game doing nothing at all but standard sweeps if you happen to be the wrong side of the convoy..
The other idea I've been playing with is a role as "convoy commander" for a player. He'd be able to change the convoy course and/or speed, up to so many degrees and so many knots as a pre-set manoeuvre for all ships, if one is hit, or to manually order it. In the event a hit has caused the ships to alter course, then the manual slot would be lost for that period.
Additionally the convoy commander could order a proportion of the escort ships to particular areas relative to the convoy to increase the chance of an asdic contact - provided his intuition is correct! At all times, the desired area of each escort, be it AI or Human controlled would be shewn on the map, and AI escorts if out of position, would always move back to that position, using an algorithm to route other than through it. This would add a tactical dimension to the game. For the convoy commander, every ship he detaches to attack a detected u-boat will open up gaps in, or contract the screen, so it'll be a fine judgement.
I would also suggest that the results of every game played be recorded in terms of torpedoes fired, from how many boats, the maximum u-boats in play, the number of crew, the tonnage sunk and period of daylight etc etc. These figures could be used to define a win/lose point, so that if the escorts prevent a particular tonnage being sunk in a particular period, with so many crew (etc) then the escorts win that game, if the tonnage is sunk, then the U-boat crews win... Individual U-boat players who have "mastered" the game, could choose to apply a handicap, requiring a greater tonnage than that calculated as the win/lose point, in order to keep the game a challenge.