Colonial Campaigns Club (CCC)

I have been playing a version of "One Lucky Shot" with Gordon Boggon and have noted one particularily frustrating thing about the EAW engine that I never saw before. The artillery dialog screen shows available targets for your French batteries that it cannot shoot at.

I have never seen this in any other Artillery Dialog for John's games. 1. Has anyone else seen this in your F&IW games?

and

2.Is a patch for this forthcoming?

Example: I select one of the batteries from the Artillery Dialog and I see that it can strick 10 targets. However, five of those are out of the LOS or trajectory of the guns and cannot be shot at. So you have to hunt through each target until you can find one that is ok to shoot at.

The targets highlighted should only be those that you can shoot at.

Another oddity happened in this game. Its the old Routed unit path problem. Gordon's routed British troops routed into the fort. They are now ripe for me to capture them. They routed into the fort as they had enemies to their rear to some extent. Any chance of seeing the Rout path changed in a future patch?

Obviously this happens in the ACW and Napoleonic engines as well.

I believe it only happens with "emplaced" artillery and you can turn them to fire at the target nevertheless.

Dierk hit it right on the head. It's there because "emplaced" artillery is really only ships on land, and a ship in the game can fire in any direction.

As far as a rout path goes, that's an engine change...so I wouldn't count on it. And I've never had it happen in my 100+ games using this engine, so I can't honestly say I'd be pressing John for that one. [;)]

Another thing about the Arty dialog, it shows artillery that can fire INDIRECT, but has no DIRECT target, as greyed out. Select the battery, hold down the ALT key and fire at a target IN RANGE, but not in LOS.

Is this the situation?

It is in every FIW scenario/campaign I have seen.

I will have to check it out closer to see if by turning the unit you can still fire at those targets. Can something be done to unshade the targets that you CANT hit?

How did "Ships on Land" help to model the Emplaced Artillery, Rich? Just curious to hear the design thinking behind it.

It came about through Al's experiments. He found that you could place a ship on land and it could no longer move...which carried into his thought's on emplaced artillery. Since we didn't have anything like that in the series, and there's a lot of forts in these games, I took it to John. He tweaked it a bit and you have the current situation. John has sinced commented that it would have been better to program it from scratch as a new weapon type, but the programming time just isn't there at this point. Maybe in the next title...

Well, I would have been shocked to learn that ships *can* move on land! [:0]

A ship doesn't need to change facing though to fire--emplaced artillery does.

Any chance of giving indirect fire to emplaced artillery in the ACW series - currently only gunboats seem to be capable of this. It would also be useful if Napoleonic howitzers could use indirect fire and perhaps be able to set villages, woods and impregnable chateaux on fire?

"John has sinced commented that it would have been better to program it from scratch as a new weapon type" - Rich H.

That would be great! [:D] My idea was far from perfect. [;)]