Slitherine

Hey there,

thanks to OOB changing its format to "free trial available", I had the pleasure to play the first two tutorial missions so far. The games is really intriguing, since it isn't overcomplicated but allows to basically implement the whole of WW2 in an adequate fashion. That's a great accomplishment! Also, graphics

Now, I find the game is still complex enough that learning it takes more than five minutes. While the tutorial is okay at explaining most things, there is a wealth of options available, and especially a huge assortment of troops. What I am sorely missing is some sort of unit lexicon/index/library/overview explaining what each unit does. For example, the game talks about "interceptor" or "carrier-based" aircraft, that would function differently than a "dogfighter" or "ground-based" craft. So far, so good, but how do I find out? At present, it's not easy to get an overview of what a unit does and what special skills it has. Some things are spread out, and some things are not visible at all, or so I believe.

I think the game would greatly profit from a compendium where you can click on any unit and see a concise overview of its properties. If you want to keep it a little more "fog of war", restrict the overview to your own side's units and those you have already fought. Even though the interface is already very well-made and slick for a game with such depth, I believe many players could profit a lot from an ingame resource that tells them what sort of plane a Dauntless is or that howitzers have transports available to improve their speed (okay, some of those could be part of loading tips or tutorial messages, but redundancy isn't bad here IMO). Actually, the issue of a missing unit lexicon has been raised in reviews I read as well, so I hope many beginners or semi-pro wargamers could benefit from the addition.

This request has come up before and it's something which would be very useful, but we don't have the resources to handle this right now.

Something simple like a scrollable list of units + all their stats and traits should be doable, but written descriptions - even if very short - would be a huge amount of work. We have recently passed 800 different unit types so that would be 800+ pieces of texts in every language the game supports (now and in the future).

Hopefully we can look into this when the higher priority stuff is out of the way, ideally with some support from the community.

Thanks for your fast reply! I imagined it might have come up before, but I couldn't find anything via forum search.

I understand that text would be a lot of work for that many units. I could offer translation to German, in any case The descriptions shouldn't be too huge, in my opinion, but give an idea of what the unit does in one or two sentences. Alternatively, a "Strength and Weaknesses" section would probably suffice, or a system of descriptive keywords such as "assault", "carrier-based" or "mobile".

I think a scrollable list with stats and traits would be a good start, though, to help identify what stuff you and your opponent have.

Meanwhile, although not as convenient as an in-game reference, there are a number of fine Internet sources of WW2 unit information. Here are three "off the top of my browser":

Lists of World War II military equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ ... _equipment

The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/Table_Of_Contents.htm

World War II Database http://ww2db.com/index.php