Slitherine

Here are some thoughts how the spotting system could be enhanced for the better maybe:

Ground units can’t see into and through close terrain anymore, like cities, forests, etc., except when they are adjacent to these terrain types.
This would highly increase ambush chances and penalize rushes. Recon units would be more important than ever. Especially scenarios in jungles, thinking of pacific ones, will be more exciting when you don’t know what will await you two hexes away further into the jungle.
I admit this is a bit tricky, because it would demand a LoS system with directional sight blocking to make it look plausible. Otherwise, you could look around a single forest tile with spotting 3+.

Air units can see enemy air and non-submarine naval units as far as their spotting values goes. Ground units always directly below them and adjacent only if it isn’t closed terrain. Air units can also spot submarines adjacent to them.
This should camouflage ground units a bit from airplanes.

Naval units can spot enemy non-submarine naval and air units normally but ground and submarine units only adjacent to them.
That should solve the near-blindness of capital ships preventing them from spotting too far into interior. That could also make any pacific scenarios more plausible if battleships can spot and fire onto each other many miles away.
Of course, it would look silly again if ships can spot each other around islands if they have huge spotting values. Some kind of ground tile sight blocking would be in order here, similar like for ground units and close terrain, but possibly easier to implement if all ground tiles are treated for naval units like close terrain.

Anyway, altogether it could give terrain maybe a three-dimensional feel without making the game in 3D.

I too would like to see a more terrain-dependent spotting system in future iterations of the series. This has always been my main gripe about the PG/PzC game system. There really should be an advantage to holding the "high ground" more often than is the case here.

Airplanes are the 'highest ground' around. Observation a/c, on too small a scale to be shown in the game, rendered high ground much less important than in former times for reconnaissance purposes. At the scale we are using, ground units(infantry types) would send out patrols(scouts) to observe the surrounding terrain, hence the spotting system. What is true is that armored vehicles(tanks for instance) were much more 'blind' than as portrayed in the game. They depended on other units for spotting at range. Recon units should be much more important than they are in the game. There was a reason the Recon Battalion was Rommel's favorite unit. In my opinion, infantry and recon units are the only units in the game that should have a spotting range of more than one.
But I can live with it as it is.

I currently help myself tweaking the spotting the way I like it as following:
I set the general spotting values for closed compartment vehicles, AA and artillery units to 1, while open one, towed AT guns (and AA in AT mode) and infantry have 2. Recon vehicles, cavalry, Kradschützen and similar all have 3 like before.
Planes all have 1 and naval units like before. I reduced forts and strongpoints from 4 to 3 because it is too close to radar stations. Same spotting like recon units is fine for stationary units.
Radar stations should rather spot air units than ground units but oh well, I can live with a universal spotting radius either.

I’ve played through the whole DLC east line with these values and it worked pretty fine. You and the AI often rumble nicely into ambushes.

I’ve also experimented with camouflage trait, but it is unfortunately still somewhat buggy at moment making adjacent units invisible sometimes. It would still be a pretty way making infantry sneakier and less vulnerable to constant harassment from all kind of units. I’m still undecided if I should add this to towed anti-tank guns too later because they were typically very well camouflaged.
A little issue with camouflaged units is that you always need direct contact to them to use artillery support and such, but I think that’s okay considering that hexes aren’t just a field of a few meters but maybe 3 km and larger, depending on map scale. You can hardly cover such area with one artillery unit.

Maybe I’m also going to try it with spotting 1 for all units. This would also remove the implausibility seeing through close terrain, like cities, hills, forests, etc. Spotting 3 is already very spoiling with recon units. Recon vehicles usually have so many movement points and can move more than twice per turn depending how short you stutter your movement actions, so why not letting them scout more carefully short distances. Pure paranoia!

Was there a true non-motorized infantry-recon unit that the Germans used in WW2?

One way of recognising the concealment ability of well-placed anti tank guns and infantry units that tended to be used best from well hidden fixed positions could be to make very high entrenchment automatically convey camouflage trait. You'd probably neeed to limit it to entrenchment 7 or above (maybe 6) or it would be too powerful. This would be most reasonable for infantry and towed guns.
The other option could be hex-specific camo trait - eg in Stalingrad, Monte Cassino you could have rubble hexes conveying camo trait.
I haven't yet tried modding yet, so can't comment on whether any of these would be practical or not.

The camo trait only works on units so far, but it’s a good idea to give a camo trait to terrain types too. If you add it to terrain like forests and cities, all unit types would benefit from it. Terrain types already support traits like close (infantry attacking CD instead of GD value), river (-4 GD), lowsup (half supply like on all desert terrain types), etc. It shouldn’t be hard to add camo to the list too if the mechanics are already implemented as unit trait.
Then you could save yourself the fuss to give many units a camo trait. I think camo by terrain would be even a better way instead of declaring all infantry and at-gun units as ninjas, no matter if they are on desert plains with no real cover.
And all is optionally of course. It would be only a matter of editing or exchanging the small terrain.pzdat file which would be compatible to more or less all mods with custom units and easily adjustable just in case.

Horst, your idea and reasoning sounds good to me.

How on earth did I miss this subject until now, this is really interesting... I especially like the idea of entrenchment aiding camouflage levels.

I have a little idea of my own.

Maybe spotting could be treated the same as movement? To explain, the movement system subtracts movement ‘points’ from a move value until it reaches zero. If you select a unit able to move, you’ll see a silhouette (white overlay) showing the distribution of movement possible through the various types of terrain. Imagine that this silhouette is how spotting would work. I’m convinced this sort of movement distribution could also work for spotting, with some added rules.

I guess that most normal units would need to spot all their adjacent hexes at all times, so it may be a good idea to ‘default’ spotting to all hexes adjacent to the unit under all circumstances, and beyond that it is calculated with a ‘terrain spotting cost (TSC)’.

For example, a unit has spotting 2. Grass hexes ‘cost’ one spotting each, so you can spot two hexes across such terrain, but a hill might cost two, so you’ll only spot hill hexes next to your unit. If a unit has spotting 3, it could spot along: three grass hexes, or a hill + grass hex, or a single moutain hex. And like with movement points it wouldn’t matter if the grass hex was behind a hill or not, no line of sight rules.

And yes, it would not be the same as a ‘true’ line of sight, but I don’t like such a system for hex games, and the TSC would give roughly comparable results and allow for a lot of tinkering, such as separate terrain values, and the idea of entrenchment helping this system could perhaps also be made to work. Weather could add to the overall spotting cost just as it does now.

Thinking out loud, several other ideas:

Normally a unit would be revealed if the hex can be spotted. But what if there was a separate mechanism for spotting terrain and spotting units, but using the same basic rules? If I want to make the spotting system a bit more fun, why not give units a ‘unit spotting bonus’ (USB, that acronym might need a little work ). Normally this would be zero, no modifications, so that they would be spotted if the hex they are on is revealed.

But a +1 bonus would mean the cost of spotting the unit goes up by one. When on grass, a unit with spotting 2 would need to be next to them to see them. A unit with spotting 3 would see them two hexes away, but not three.

So some units would be harder to spot than others but having a large spotting value will still help in seeing these ‘stealthy’ units much sooner, keeping recon a valuable part of the game. It might even make them far more useful than they are now. It could even help to flesh out the ‘cat-and-mouse’ role recon had during war, that is to stay unnoticed but trying to see everything. Even the much maligned spotting heroes will grow in significance, as they will be a big help to units with low spotting. They could even provide a double bonus, making the unit harder to spot as well (give +1 spot and/or +1 'USB').

And certain levels of entrenchment could give a boost to this ‘USB’, and experienced units could be easily made harder to spot with this system. , and all sort of nifty traits could be employed to make units more ‘special’.

There are also a few things that I’m not sure about:

I don’t know if it will work well with air units: they might need a trait or special modifiers (like a class trait maybe?).

Also, I’m not sure if the terrain should be revealed when an ‘unspotted’ unit is occupying it. Maybe the hex would stay unspotted (covered with fog of war) to give the player a clue that there is something there. Having a spotted (revealed) hex with an ‘invisible’ unit in it (like camo gives us now) is fine for the occasional special trait, but I think it would be to counter-intuitive and frustrating if used on a large scale, for the following reasons:

first, never really being able to trust a hex unless you’re next to it, although this might please some realism-seekers (my counter-argument: ‘reality sucks’). And second, units with high spotting would still be relatively crippled by this feature, making recon less useful than I could be.

By leaving ‘clues’ with the fog of war staying over hexes with unspotted units (terrain hexes that should have been revealed) units with high spotting become much more attractive, because they will be much better to point out ‘suspicious’ hexes without actually revealing what’s in there. Okay, it would look weird having a fully revealed part of the battlefield with a dark blotch somewhere, but for the scale of the game it could work I think, because anything could be hidden there, and there is still room for special traits that are under the current system. And this would also reward skillful players (should that blotch be there?) while preserving some element of surprise and gambling. And it would help the AI perform better, hopefully.

And there is also a funny benefit with the ‘unit spotting bonus’ : negative bonuses! So a big airplane or ship could be spotted from outside normal spotting range, not revealing the terrain hex but just show the unit. This could work very well for planes and very ‘unstealthy’ units I think, so that they are spotted from greater distances than normal.


So, that’s my idea. I probably forgot something, though…

I like this idea. Spotting two hexes up a road (even through mountains) makes more sense that spotting two hexes across mountains with no roads.