Thought I'd post a compilation of my ideas that would make SD/Wargame type games a lot easier and "smooth" to play.
Player colours: for some reason, Wargame and apparently Steel Division has only two colours for each team: Blue for your forces, and Green for all other friendly players. Have an option to have individual player colours. Your team mates would be shades of blue, enemies would be shades of red.
Numbered squads: Ground Control numbered your squads, and had a voice alert telling you things like "Unit Lost, Squad 2", "Squad 5 under enemy fire", or "Squad 8 under friendly fire". Would be incredibly useful for your games. I'd take it a step further and categorise units so infantry, tanks, support vehicles, artillery, and command vehicles, for example, get different number prefixes. So your first three infantry squads would be 2-1, 2-2, and 2-3. So I can hear an update saying "5-17 under fire" and know instantly what kind of unit is being threatened.
Also, messages telling you that a unit is lost shold also tell you what happened. For example "M1A1 Sherman tank lost to enemy 88mm cannon".
Movement and fire orders: Ground Control has three fire orders -- free fire, return fire only, and hold fire. It also has Aggressive movement (unit moves to destination no matter what), Defensive movement (unit stops when fired upon), and Hold Position (unit sits still even if ordered to move; useful when you click-and-drag multiple units and don't want to spend time deselecting artillery or command vehicles or whatever).
Quality of life orders: World in Conflict had a command called "Board nearest transport" that you could use on infantry, that saved lots of time because you didn't need to click on transports for each infantry section.
Additionally, "move to nearest cover/concealment" would be hugely useful, so that you wouldn't have to carefullly position your mouse cursor to tell your unit to move into that naaaarrow row of trees. If there are FOBs or supply trucks, a "resupply and return" order would be good to have, too. It'd tell units to fast move to the nearest FOB, resupply, and return to where it got the order.
Allow players to draw arrows and lines on the map: makes communication so much easier. If you're worried about edgy kids drawing penises, just add a filter option that lets you hide specific players' markers, the same way you can mute individual players' audio in most multiplayer games.
Player colours: for some reason, Wargame and apparently Steel Division has only two colours for each team: Blue for your forces, and Green for all other friendly players. Have an option to have individual player colours. Your team mates would be shades of blue, enemies would be shades of red.
Numbered squads: Ground Control numbered your squads, and had a voice alert telling you things like "Unit Lost, Squad 2", "Squad 5 under enemy fire", or "Squad 8 under friendly fire". Would be incredibly useful for your games. I'd take it a step further and categorise units so infantry, tanks, support vehicles, artillery, and command vehicles, for example, get different number prefixes. So your first three infantry squads would be 2-1, 2-2, and 2-3. So I can hear an update saying "5-17 under fire" and know instantly what kind of unit is being threatened.
Also, messages telling you that a unit is lost shold also tell you what happened. For example "M1A1 Sherman tank lost to enemy 88mm cannon".
Movement and fire orders: Ground Control has three fire orders -- free fire, return fire only, and hold fire. It also has Aggressive movement (unit moves to destination no matter what), Defensive movement (unit stops when fired upon), and Hold Position (unit sits still even if ordered to move; useful when you click-and-drag multiple units and don't want to spend time deselecting artillery or command vehicles or whatever).
Quality of life orders: World in Conflict had a command called "Board nearest transport" that you could use on infantry, that saved lots of time because you didn't need to click on transports for each infantry section.
Additionally, "move to nearest cover/concealment" would be hugely useful, so that you wouldn't have to carefullly position your mouse cursor to tell your unit to move into that naaaarrow row of trees. If there are FOBs or supply trucks, a "resupply and return" order would be good to have, too. It'd tell units to fast move to the nearest FOB, resupply, and return to where it got the order.
Allow players to draw arrows and lines on the map: makes communication so much easier. If you're worried about edgy kids drawing penises, just add a filter option that lets you hide specific players' markers, the same way you can mute individual players' audio in most multiplayer games.
?
