Decisive Action "wish list"

[Gary]

The only active support/player area for Decisive Action that I am aware of is here. The members tend to be mainly serving or ex forces members. Decisive Action and for that matter most of the other sims supported here are niche market sims. They generally appeal to gamers who are seeking sims that truely mimic military planning with great detail and depth. Hence the reason that if you want to buy HPS or Shrapnel games in the UK you either have to buy them direct from the U.S. or Strategic Plus who are the sole suppliers here in the U.K.

cheers


Gary

[bongotastic]

Just a convenience,

It would be great if UAVs and helo could remember their previous patrol trajectory so we don't have to replot every turn.

[Dr Zaius]

The last time I talked to Jim it seemed unlikely that there would be any additional changes or improvements to the civilian version of DA. The game just didn't generate enough interest to justify his time and effort.

There is a military version of DA which contains some significant changes from the civilian version. However, some of these changes are really only suitable for a training environment and would actually serve to make the game less enjoyable and more work for a single player. At one point Jim was considering porting some of these changes to the civilian version if there was interest in doing so.

I can't speak for Jim, but I would be surprised if there is much official support for DA in the future. My feeling is that he is a little burned out on DA and wants to move on to a more "fun" project.

[bongotastic]

That is fair enough, although too bad.

I found DA as I was gathering ideas to write my own simulator. I want to implements:

1 - some aspects of command and control based on Entropy-based warfare ( http://www.mors.org/publications/pha...00/feature.htm ). This will alsom comes with an enhance modeling of the fog of war for the friendlies, terrain and foes. The overall result would lead to maintain the fastest operational tempo.

2 - unlimited map size and resolution to allow to have large theaters including some high-resolution areas without soaking up the memory in terrain encoding. This can be done using odd tessellation techniques and other newish data structures. This would also allow scaling without problems.

3 - Browsable logs and stats for all units.

4 - More detailed logistic system, but with staff routines to actually take the load off the player. Supply classes, dumps, spoilage and pilfering, medical infrastructure, etc... The player would only have to determine priorities in case of conflict and the rest will follow.

5 - Easy extendability to write custom routines, AI doctrines and staff preparation, new systems using an open-source license and a very convenient programming language: python.

6 - An umpire interface similar to TacOps.


DA may be the closest thing to what I've been looking for in a long time, though. I have a lot of fun playing with it even if I have to plot 6 UAV's paths for 48 turns manually

cheers,

C

[Hub]

Grab and drag or mouse wheel to scroll the map window would be nice to have...

[Redwolf]

Since this is the wish list:

I pretty much can't play this game because I have no capacity to memorize all the little cute icons in the task bar and elsewhere and I can't play often enough.

So every time I come back games like DA and ATF they require me to swap this stuff in manually. Needless to say, this makes me go back to other games that use a less memory intensive interface.

I would like to see a button that converts all the cute icons to text, like TacOps does. Another alternative would be to have every one of the icons with a "backup" in the pull-down menus.

[DrMoloch]

MY wish list for DA? Here are a few items:

1.) Blue command and control and effectiveness of Blue sories is degraded due to Red ASATs and Red's ability to take down GPS satellites.

2.) Nuclear weapons. These would make the game unplayable if used in sufficient numbers, but the EMP effects would be interesting to play around with.

3.) A few extra premade maps for rolling your own scenarios.

4.) Airborne drops and amphibious landings

Dr M