Today's In Development Update outlines our plans for the introduction of ToEs in our next major update to WWIIOL. Please take a few minutes to read today's update and use this forum for any feedback or questions you might have regarding this feature. I'll try and answer some of your questions in the coming week.

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Dana V. Baldwin
"Gophur"
Senior Producer
Battleground Europe - WWIIOL

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DOC: We aim to please

Reserved for Q&A.

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Dana V. Baldwin
"Gophur"
Senior Producer
Battleground Europe - WWIIOL

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DOC: We aim to please

I have to admit that as a grunt squad commander ToEs are about as exciting as watching paint dry. All that bothers me is can me and my squad spawn in and fight. If not we go where we can. ToEs are for the HC and prehaps those that want to spend time arguing in the forums. So what is in 1.25 for those of us that do the fighting? New render engine? Anti Tank Guns?

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I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King George VI, his heirs and successors and that I will as in duty bound honestly and faithfully defend His Majesty, his heirs and successors in person, crown and dignity against all enemies and will observe and obey all orders of His Majesty, His heirs and successors and of the generals and officers set over me.

i don't know that i can see the same thing CRS sees in this.. i see a lot more resupply missions being necessary (which means boredom for most players) and a lot of brigade OIC's yelling for an AO when there are only a few to go around.

Now what happens when a brigade or division is destroyed? are they able to magically reappear after they're recreated or do they have to move one town at a time back to the front?

i'm also concerned about having to dole out supply to the divisions/brigades too.. at least with a CinC having the control, only one person is to blame for those mistakes.. now it's gonna be several officers receiving the blame from various players that love to use any reason to blame ahc/okw for what they perceive to be mistakes.

another area i'm concerned about is having to check on all the supply levels for each brigade when i log in.. it's not bad enough to log in and try to figure out what's going on, but now i have to take the first 15-30 mins of my gametime to figure out brigade supply levels and positions..

i hope the supply rates are being increased too.. with the amount of resupply that's going to be necessary to sustain all the lonewolves and selfish types that wanna grab a tank over and over and kill our supply.. not to mention griefers.. now a single player can ruin an entire pocket with only wasting a single brigade's supply.. i see a LOT more of this happening.. or at least players complaining about it happening.

a question for ya.. if you move a brigade and division to the same town, can you supply the brigade in that town from the division? i assume not, but that would make resupplying a brigade a lot easier to perform... and if not, why not? if a division had supply in 'real life' in the same town as a brigade, wouldn't it be easy to say that it's now the brigades tank?

can you clarify one thing for me? are you saying by turning off the throttle on depot spawning that if you cap your spawnable in the enemy town that you'll now have full supply there? i certainly hope not.. it's hard enough to get depot guards and if this happens it's gonna mean an entire army can spawn at a depot in a minute like they lived there for the past month or something... seems like an odd thing to do imho.

to put it bluntly, other than having the ability to move brigades wherever a friendly town is, what's in here that's supposed to make this game better? I don't see anything except more resupply, less supply and too much supply at depots... none of which seem very appealing to me.

i'm not tryin to be a pain here, just trying to see the logic..

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333rd British Knights

Question...

Im 6th OIC of 110e. Im by far one of the most active. While my CO's (minus one) are all but never in game. So what does this mean for me? promotion?

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{.036% < 370ppm < .038} i like numbers I R SMART YAY!

If I read it correctly, with these changes a Destroyer brigade (Para brigade) would be able to move to any deepwater port(airfield) using normal brigade movement and not have to request it move on a Friday or Monday?

The immersiveness of an operational-level wargame, to a considerable extent, is determined by the realistic structuring of the forces involved.

Historical TOEs weren't based on someone's whim...they occurred because of constraints, limitations and doctrines.

A game can end up with realistically immersive TOEs either by modeling those constraints, limitations and doctrines, or by directly limiting what the TOEs can be.

Or, of course, it can allow fantasy TOEs, and increase its appeal to fantasy-preferring players while sacrificing some of its realism-preferring players.

In a system that devolves TOE decisions to game-commanders who are tasked only with winning, naturally only winning will be considered in those decisions. Thus gamey but effective TOEs will be the game's future, even though grossly unrealistic because the game can't or doesn't model the relevant real-world constaints.

If these decisions are going to be made by winning-oriented commanders, I don't see any hope for realism unless the commanders' decisions are directly constrained within realistic bounds.

Of course, the details of the plans and procedures aren't announced yet. It'll be interesting to see which way the game goes.

All this sounds REALLY cool, but...
More bells and whistles. Which mean nothing if you can't play the game.
Will we have enough fps to actually play the game?
If fps aren't addressed soon, all the bells and whistles in the world won't keep this game going.

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''Life's tough ... it's even tougher if you're stupid''.John Wayne

My hope for TOEs would be that, for Tier 0 only, each nation would start with a budget and maybe 4 to 6 historically evocative/immersive TOE-templates, each of which has a particular cost to implement. Each nation's HC and/or division commanders then would choose which units will use which template.

It'd be necessary to have some variety, because one template might contain weapons A, B and C but not weapons X and Y, while another one would be the opposite.

IMO, that'd be simple and effective.

Of course, it'd mean no all-sapper Brigades, no all-sniper Brigades, no Brigades with very few infantry but all of specialized types, and no armies with their tanks evenly spread throughout every unit, because those approaches were technically, economically and doctrinally impossible in real life.

Whether those kinds of constraints would be regarded as too damaging to gameplay freedom, I don't know.

At last, ToEs! Oh joy! I can't wait!!

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When a division is "destroyed" when will it be available to be placed back onto the map (right now it goes to training grounds for 6 hours)?

Removing HAAC- can you reconsider as "HAAC" can burn through an infantry spawn list a lot faster than normal in some cases and is thus better controlled by HC Officers.

Do you think giving Armee/Korp/Division more responsability to pick out equipment for their groups is a good idea in light of the complaints people already give about the HCs?

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Kmarkl
3rd Panzergruppe
2PD CO ret.

Bomber Commands and there Future?


how Important of a Role will RDP Bombing play in ToE's and the Supply Goals you have mentioned in your post?


will Paras be Attached to Army Persona's or will they be attached to the Airforce Persona's?


with Reguards to this statement .............

"Routing will remain unchanged. If the location of your Brigade is captured your Brigade will become routed. If you can be moved automatically to a town nearby, meeting the movement rules, then you will do so, other wise your brigade will be destroyed and removed from the map and need to be re-deployed.

Divisions will not be routed. If a Division’s location is captured it is automatically destroyed and removed from the map."

"Divisons are Destroyed", does that mean Gone for Good, or can they be Redeployed on the map like Brigades can?

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JAMMYMAN
Special Events Director/Intermission Coordinator
WWII Online – Battleground Europe
Retired Axis CinC 1 / 13 / 2008

"LIFE is like a 5000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzel Thats All Sky"
"Women Fake Orgasms, Men Fake Relationships"

Would it be possible to let the local (or brigade I guess) commander designate some kind of reserve from the supply list, that can't be spawned until he says so (or whoever takes over from him later)? It could be a small percentage of the supply at the point of reserve. This way not matter what happens a reserve force is available later in the fight (like in real battles). it would give the commander another tool to work with. Plus turning on the reserve could make for interesting end battles which now always result in tanks vs rifleman.

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Andrew
Mac Coder and Performance Irritation Engineer
Part Time Rat Contractor

Actually, this would work better if applied throughout the Brigade's engagement...with all infantry special weapons being metered out in proportion to rifleman usage, as if battalions are being committed one at a time.

Thus there'd be the same occasional availability of guys with sniper rifles and explosive charges at the end of the attrition process as at the beginning.

When you think about it, the burn-up of all the Brigade's special infantry ASAP in any engagement is pretty weird.

Yeah, this might take some rebalancing of how the game works in regard to tanks vs. mostly-infantry units...but perhaps now, with the new tall bushes and all the grousing from the tankers about no sightlines, is an optimal time for that kind of process.

.

This sounds too complicated. The TOE process as explained is very HC-centric and manpower intensive. Since we don't have that many (if any at all) HC on all the time, I am concerned about how this will work (or not work).

I am also concerned about that put this level of decision making power into the hands of a few people will cause massive player dissatisfaction.

Can HC'S have the ability to have a reserve force kept back until released by a vote of 3.
To begin a reserve template could suffice. HC oic votes using a dot reserve command [ 3 hc votes]
Reserve is released same way -dot release.

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Originally Posted by DOC
You cannot teach to a mind made up and of no desire to change.

Supply should be linked to sides population AND server population to avoid having a lot of stuff in ETZ and very few in American Time Zone AND to avoid endless panzerg russes in ETZ. Could this be done?

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WWIIOL Wiki in Spanish
Wikipedia del WWIIOL en Español

I really like the promise for more warlike objectvies and not so much having to hump a table, hopefully.

I think we need more meaningful and diversified ways to succeed.

Bombing visible supply manned by players, capturing different kind of objectives than a table and making strategic bombing more rewarding is all made possible by this.

The game for the grunts shuld also get more rewarding as the impact of the individual performance on the theatermap increase but there must also be stuff to spawn, thats the tricky balance to attrition and playeability as a computergame.

I am exited by the possibilities!

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When in doubt get a bigger gun!

I think our understanding is that Support Brigades will be commanded by Navy or Air Force HC personnel, but will consist of Army forces.

Will player personas within Support Brigades be Army?

Will player opportunities for rank-point-gain within Support Brigades include more defensively-oriented actions?

Will such rank-point-gains be applicable only to Army rank, or will they also somehow affect Navy/Air Force rank?

If no Navy or Air Force HC member is available and an OIC is selected from available players, will that OIC be selected per Army rank, or per Navy/Air Force rank? It would seem that an argument could be made for the latter, if the goal is that the Support Brigade serve the particular defensive needs of the associated Navy/Air Force facility and operations.

Question: i do understand that if you move a brigade to another town, that in the next town, its supply will slowly trickly in.

Ok, but what happens, when the opponent takes your town?

Scenario:
Opponent hits your town with overwhelming forces, caps AB, before all depots.
Your flag is moved to a backtown of you.

So what happens then?
Do we get a firebase up from that backtown, but it wont get supply, since the brigade gets its own supply trickled in very slow, due to being moved? Even if it was a forced move?
So it basically doesnt mean anything, that you have spawneble depots(oh wait those were also removed or do have friendly FB to the town under attack?(there is no supply yet to spawn?)

Ok, next step in almost the same scenario.

Opponent takes the town with overwhelming equipment, moves his flag in, your flag is moved to backtown.
Immediately the opponent starts to attack this back town.
Due to both sides having moved their flags and getting their supply trickled in, the opponent, that was attacking, will win the next town easy.
Remember he had overwhelming numbers, that of course immediately despawned, RTB-ed at their own flag unit? Or they just drive to the next town.

Please gophur can you give us an update what happens in the case, the defender loses a town and is moved to a friendly backtown?
And second: what happens now if the AB is capped, friendly firebase up, friendly depots also left?

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One of the funniest evenings in game when it started, too bad it derailed later: http://forums.battlegroundeurope.com...d.php?t=115224