Slitherine

So I am playing the first battle of Grand Campaign 44 East and a few turns in all of a sudden three soviet towed anti-air units pop into existence, two of them around the same town, and start blasting away.

I know they could not have moved there because the area had no fog of war, I know they could not have been bought because after double checking I confirmed when the player buys units they can't move or shoot on the turn they were bought...

Thus I can only figured they were spawned by campaign specific scrips which let them come into existence and straight away get to action.

I've never seen the scripts be quite this blatant before though (units ussually seem to be spawned in fog of war areas and way away from the frontlines) and the fact that I lost an over strength core fighter unit to them instantly sent me heading for the "restart mission" button.

At this point I am no longer playing the game, I am "playing" the game, in the sense of acting not out of general good tactics but taking advantage of the AI's quirks and peculiarities. It's never a good sign when I find myself doing that, and I felt as a loyal customer and avid player of this game it would be worth giving some feedback on something that really irked me.

Hello Iwfan53, welcome to the forums! Thanks for the feedback, these units are indeed spawned by a script trigger (when the AI occupies the city hexes these guns are spawned around them). There are other scenarios that have similar scripts, and drawn similar comments, esp. when airplanes appear out of nowhere, and most famously the Wassigny scenario from GC'40 (which features a lot of units 'popping up' behind the frontlines).

ThvN wrote:Hello Iwfan53, welcome to the forums! Thanks for the feedback, these units are indeed spawned by a script trigger (when the AI occupies the city hexes these guns are spawned around them). There are other scenarios that have similar scripts, and drawn similar comments, esp. when airplanes appear out of nowhere, and most famously the Wassigny scenario from GC'40 (which features a lot of units 'popping up' behind the frontlines).

Airplanes I do not mind as much because most of the time there is enough fog of war and the airplanes have such a huge range that it theory it would be entirely possible for them to pop into existence in the fog one turn, then fly into combat the next, it's just that I can physically see them the pop into existence and act that turn which rubs me the wrong way because it is letting the AI do stuff that is just outside the mechanics of the game otherwise.

That or at the very least there might be something in the breifing about the Soviets planning to set up antiaircraft guns as they secured nearby towns, this felt like something that I as a player could not possibly have seen comming and was given no time to react to...

Welcome to the madness!! Try not to let it get to you, the AI and its craziness. The AI always firing artillery last drives me insane!! But what yah gonna do. Far to much in the game I love to let little things spoil it. As for your example, I just write that off as the enemy sneaking untis in and hitting me hard. Sure Fog of war lets us see everything, but really, should we? In a WWII battle you would never see EVERYTHING, so I just put it down to that.

Your point about having something in a the breifing is a good idea though.

In a similar scripting move, the Anzio 1944 west scenario spawns a number of heavy weapons infantry units out of the objective cities. Or at least that's what I think the AI is doing, as I don't believe the infantry could have moved there out of the fog.

I don't have a problem with Wassigny, as the AI appears to be sending the spawned units along roads from offmap (although I have seen a few Wassigny units in places they could never reach in one turn).