Quick question on the Tiller games

[acctingman]

Maybe I'm just too into eye candy, but I just do not like the NATO counter graphic  :-[

[Philippe]

In 2-D or in 3-D?

The Nato graphic is something of a misnomer, because if you go to the war map section of the Library of congress, you'll see that that was pretty much what was getting used in Allied sitreps during WW II (before Nato existed).

There are several features of those old maps which should be ported to wargames that haven't been.  One is the symbol for airborne:  instead of the crossed rifles with a parachute that we all know and love from Avalon Hill days, in WW II the Allied symbol was a downward pointing triangle with the top of the triangle billowing upwards (i.e. the outline of a parachute).  The Germans probably had the best symbols for headquarters, but the Allies used a large flag and flag-pole, with the number of the army written in roman numerals inside the flag. 

I'm also impressed with how much information they managed to convey in black and white when they distinguished between U.S., British/Canadian, and German units by using dotted outlines and diagonal hashmarks.

Those old maps were very clear and easy to read at a glance.  Wargame designers could learn a lot from visiting the national archives.

[Strela]

The new 2-D terrain for Kharkov '43 that you're proposing is very nice.

I'm not sure how it would look, but if you don't use little tanks, guns, and infantry in the 3-D, one thing you might consider playing around with is a Columbia games look:  draw the counters a bit more like Ageod-style  (or GMT-games style) leader counters that stand up vertically from the map rather than lying flat on it like the conventional die-cut counters we know and love.

Part of the problem with the tanks, guns, and infantry in the 3-D is that they were set up to face different directions.  Not sure about this, but if you were to simplify things a bit and only used one larger representative counter for everything in the hex, that might buy you enough spare pixels to produce a better image. The counters might have to be a bit like chess pieces and only face in a single direction (perhaps not as extreme as the counters in Unity of Command).

I will admit to having saved my old Talonsoft disks for the Command series so that I could mine them for unit images.  But I never got past making one or two halftracks because the project was more labor-intensive than one of my Napoleonic mods.

By the way, if you petition John about graphics, what he really needs to add into the game is the ability to change the orientation of the map.  When you play a board wargame you always sit behind the front line.

Thanks Phillipe, as a master modder I always pay close attention to your comments!

I wanted to do exactly as you suggested. Use a single large image to represent a unit in 3D. I did a quick test and found that 33 pixels is just not enough to see it. I might go back and try a few more different things.

As far as the standup to replace the counter, possibly, but I don't know how a stack would look. The cool thing with your idea though is that clicking the hex cycles through the counters so this might be a real option. I'll again go and tinker....

The map orientation is usually locked to north as the maps in many cases were expected to be joined together in the future. That has happened in some cases and having some maps flipped negates that.

David

[Warhorse]

The other problem with the 3D view is that the options of graphics are very generic, ie not like Campaign Series, where most units have their own bmp 3d sprite. As the vehicle graphic guy for Matrix/Slitherine, I very much understand why one would NOT want to implement that feature, there are thousands of 3D vehicle graphics I'm working on just for Vietnam!! So probably, since this is an operational game anyhow, a generic tank wouldn't be out of line? I haven't messed with the 3D sprites at all in PzC aside from coloring the Axis grey, and Allied olive in one of the mods.

[panzerde]

I'm also impressed with how much information they managed to convey in black and white when they distinguished between U.S., British/Canadian, and German units by using dotted outlines and diagonal hashmarks.

Those old maps were very clear and easy to read at a glance.  Wargame designers could learn a lot from visiting the national archives.

So very much this. For the scale of PzC and above, it has always made more sense to me for the interface to be map-like and avoid Panzer General-ish 3D unit representations. That works (I guess) for a more "light" game, but the more complicated the game gets, the more I think you need a simpler, information dense representation. The JTS games get close to this, and the addition of the filters and overlays we're starting to see from the work WDS is doing is really helping. I'm not at all in favor of gratuitous 3D though. Makes a lot of sense in a tactical game, and I'm all for it in Graviteam Tactics, Combat Mission, or something like Ultimate General Civil War. It even works in the JTS Napoleonic and ACW games, where the 3D representation are troop formations. Campaign Series? You betcha.


But once you're at an operational scale, I'm a big fan of maps and 2D. And while I think Philippe's idea for making the JTS 3D view more like AGEOD's counters is a good one, I really would love to see it go the other way, with AGEOD giving me a 2D view more in keeping with the JTS 2D views. I'd love for AGEOD games to look like a Kriegsspiel.