Q: So in the Area Capture future, will the 'capture area' be de-linked from specific buildings and become an independent token you can place, say with any structure? So instead of every capture event taking place at known fixed buildings...in the future could they be associated with different buildings in different towns based on the desires of your terrain building program / terrain builder?

GOPHUR: Possibly though not with this terrain. Our strat system is currently very rigid. CP's (towns, choke points) define a node network of supply links. Each CP has several facilities under it and each facility has a capture building with a now obsolete capture object.

Now with a new terrain we would probably still have area based capture mechanisms but we would remove the facilities as buildings paradigm and be would hopefully have the ability to define a capture poitn as a bridge or south of town or an intersection.

Q: A few weeks back we suggested that when jogging the LMG is forced into the "L" position, so that it can't be fired, sort of like in the sprint animation it can't be fired. But while *walking* or *standing* it would remain as it is now. Have you any update on whether it is, indeed, a simple fix to this issue?

DOC: We have a ticket in the system to visit this as a feature but no other progress to report to date. There has been a freeze put on any more changes or additions until we've got 1.31 out live.

Q: An idea about moving brigades: OK as I'm sure you all know brigades can just warp magically from town to town on the HCs command. There is a short timer but it's not that long. There's no way for the enemy to stop this. So to alow the enemy to stop brigade movement and add another dimension to game why not axe movement timers and bring in instanced convoys of trucks that move from the origin to the destination? So if you move a brigade from one town to another a convoy of trucks will appear and drive to that town. When the convoy arrives the brigade moves. If the convoy of trucks is blown up half way there then the movement is cancelled and must start again.

GOPHUR: There are a couple of different things I'd like to comment on with this post. The first is brigade movement and interdiction. We've played over the years with the brigade movement rules and in general i favor having moves and attacks have commitment. That generally means longer timers. You move it there, then it is suck for a while. We do have to balance this counter play with the ability of forces to react to the enemy. What makes a great table top strategic game can easily lead to an online game where the players have few places to fight as the cat and mouse game happens at the strategic level. That discussion alone can take weeks (or years around our office) so I'll leave it at that but suffice it to say that this is exactly why we don;t have direct interdiction methods in play for brigade movement outside of validating that the move to location is valid.

This is the interdiction method we prefer largely because it allows both sides to be involved in the move at both the strategic and tactical level. For a brigade to move it must have a valid link. For a link to be valid both ends of the link must be owned friendly so in essence there are two ways you can prevent the move. You can occupy the outgoing depot where the brigade is located or you can occupy the incoming depot of the destination town. Now we could movve on to talking about the need for AO changes to make this simpler, and we will, just not today.

The convoy of trucks idea would be cool from a design perspective but not so much for this implementation. First, it would be very easy to set up niterdictino and very hard to set up defence as all of your units are disappearing from the defender's spawn list. Fish in a barrel so to speak.

What truck convoys would be awesome at however is giving secondary targets to all players as they run from HQ to Brigade delivering supply, or even better, acting as victory point targets. You'll know when development has started on this as you'll be able to see the froth coming from my mouth even over twitter.

MARTINI: Not in this release. Shadows are the most difficult thing I have had to work on. The more I learn, the less I know. In the future, I would like to see buildings shadowed, but using the current method probably won't work. It may take a whole dev cycle just to work on a solution to shadow the whole scene without killing performance. Working with an antiquated engine only makes it more difficult.

Q: Trains: I know that at some distant time in the future we may get some trains puffing along all the railroad tracks. Is there any chance that we will see this in our lifetime?

RAFTER: A visible supply feature is one of the oldest, not delivered features in the game. We experimented with trains several years ago but at this time there is nothing in the dev pipeline. Will you see trains in your lifetime? How old are you now? :)

http://www.kj-pejsecenter.dk/billeder/Test/WWIIOL_calendar.jpg

 GOPHUR: This has recently come up with our weather discussions. I am very much in favor of having campaign days that we can link to a calendar. It could be used for all sorts of things including squad and command planning to weather forecasts. Yum. No traction yet I'm afraid, mostly because our plates are so full with 1.31 and I'm calling feature freeze as fast as possible.

Q: Nobody has commented on the new church.  In one of the weather photos. I assume this is replacing our current 3d church as it has a nearly identical shape. It looks like it has a much much more detailed interior though the extent of it is hard to tell from the photo. I wonder how many of the 'already-3d-buildings' are also being replaced for this patch. I actually thought the church was one of the better (if also older) ones already so I'm a bit surprised it was redone, but the new one looks better.

DEKARD: I had decided to recreate the church in my own free time over the last several months. Yes, the church had to stay within the same footprint and the the bell tower area is the same height as the previous church. In regards to some of the other older 3d buildings getting redone, I don't think many of them will be redone for 1.31 release although there has been talk of redesigning of some of the older more prominent buildings players use like the spawning depots. Gophur might come back and correct me on that, though.

Q: C-47's fuel guages don't work? Just had a 98 minute mission ferrying paratroopers in the C-47. The fuel guages never moved by just after my last drop, the engines quit and wouldn't re-start or even turn over. No smoke or damage.

GOPHUR: Don't know. I'll have to check. Thanks for the head's up. 98 minutes huh? You sir, are a machine.

Q: Getting hit-on severely by a 30yr old MILF. What to do what to do...? Keep in mind that I work with this woman.

RAFTER: If you are trying to a avoid a workplace romance, I'd begin by giving her an overview of the game's ballistics modeling and RDP cycles. If you are ready to get your freak on, don't wear your Battleground Europe t-shirt to work- I'm pretty sure that will be the green light she's looking for.

Q: Most Navy players, on both sides, can attest to the fact that the majority of ship deaths to aircraft happen from planes approaching with no engines and releasing bombs at extremely low altitude. The common fuses of the period required several hundred, and sometimes over 1,000 feet before they would arm to protect the plane from its own bombs. Are there any plans to implement these fuses in the future? The use of planes without their engines is speculative at best and considered gamey among many. Has there been any consideration made to having it be impossible to toggle the engine above a certain speed (as it currently is with landing gear and canopies)?

GOPHUR: Both are interesting ideas. Sure the silent death is more apt to happen when there is no fear of death and it is certainly easier to get a plane to bomb a destroyer than it is to drive a destroyer for hours to get to target. Both of these, I think are the real issues and would be best solved with having player controlled spawnables for boats and AI gunners on boats but that's not what we're here to talk about and besides those ideas are wishing pretty hard.

We tried times fusing in the past and I don't remember why it didn't work but I recall distinctly that it didn't so we can probably scratch that one because it does not pass the "achievable" test that we have to apply to all features we consider these days. We have a lot less tolerance for boondoggles than we've had in the past. Now the engine toggle might be a good idea to the navy guys but it fails realism pretty hard, but not quite so hard as diving with no engines in the first place. At the end of the day though I don't think we've quite hit on the solution to the problem and that might be because the real problem isn't "silent bombers of death kill ships too often" it might instead be "ships do not have the level of ability to thwart air attacks that they should have". Even that said, it might be easier to hack an answer to the former. We'll keep thinking on it.