Subject: Korsun 44 - bad review not surprising (LONG). Korsun 44's bad review in CGW is discussed in another thread. DIALOG BOXES TO DESPAIR IMO the game suffers terribly from the overlong AI turns and the inability to speed them up by customizing the level of feedback from the combat. My second problem is that it is difficult to keep track of which organization units belong to. I will expand on both points. I am playing a large scenario 0107_01_Kirovograd, by no means the largest, which is about 4 or more times as big. There are hundreds of units to move and attack with each unit can attack 2-4 times per player turn. Units of both sides attack in both player turns. Every time you make an attack you are presented with a small dialog box with the result of the attack. Then the opponents units may fire on the hex you fire from or move to and you get a dialog box for each of these. Attack two or three times more with the same unit and get 1-4 more dialog boxs. Repeat a couple of hundred times and your turn is over. Most of these boxes contain messages like "1 man lost" - yes ONE man. You have 2 choices, either click on each dialog box as it appears and die the death of a thousand clicks or use the so called "Continual Action" option and wait for the dialog box to disappear after a couple of seconds. The problem is that even a couple of seconds is TOO LONG. When the AI does its turn, you either sit through hundreds of these dialog boxs because you desperately want to see what is going on or you go and do something else for the 15-25 minutes it takes on a 800 mHz computer. I have yet to try the game on my usual machine (1.2 mhz) but I believe a large amount of that time is due to the maybe 2-3 second delay on the dialogboxes and it is probably timed so that the extra horsepower won't help. It is incredibly frustrating. It should be possible to tailor these dialogs. Alternatives could be. 1. Flash the results on the status line for a split second while immediately returning control to the player. I believe that performance for printing on the status line is quicker than drawing a seperat dialogbox with buttons. 2. Set the level of information to pause on - e.g. no delay for the usual "1 man lost" but pause on unit disrupted, or broken or only on retreat/eliminated. 3. A timer value in milliseconds for how long the dialogbox be shown. I understand that there is an option to use the ALT button to get the unit to make all possible attacks in one go, but you are still presented with all the dialog boxes so it doesn't gain you much. Not only that most players will probably already be holding the CTRL button to activate firing mode and CTRL-ALT-RIGHTCLICK for hours isn't exactly easy on your tender tendons. There should probably be an option to get the computer AI to use this method too. If the dialogs were fixed it would probably speed up the AI turn considerably at little expense to AI strength. IMO this factor alone is enough to put many WARGAMERS off the game, in spite of the otherwise obvious appeal of the series to those desperate for board-wargames on the computer. Non-wargamers will obviously never get through a single scenario before giving up the game. ORGANIZED CHAOS My second issue is with being able to track the organization of the units. This is not as bad as the previous issue in that it doesn't kill enjoyment in the same way. There are aids to tracking the organization of units, which is necessary to get them to perform optimally. It is possible to get them colored in the same color. It is also possible to have the units of the same organization outlined in red. There is a dialog that shows the unit hierarchy. If you mark an HQ you can shade its command radius. I found however that all this is not enough. The sheer number of units and organizations and the fact that you only see the top unit in a stack can make it extremely difficult to keep track. With so many orgs. the program runs out of colors and you find units from to divisions with CYAN coloring intermingeling. My biggest problem is finding HQ for the units and keeping them in the command radius. Also finding the HQ for the HQ. I am not sure what to suggest here except to say that somehow the highlighting needs improvement, the thin red border is all but invisible, particularly if some units may have been left behind and are not in the immediate vicinity. Perhaps the option to selectively turn off showning your units EXCEPT for the ones belonging to that organization might do it. There is a find unit dialog which I could not always get to work, ie it did not find the unit I was looking for in spite of the unit being there. IIRC som HQ units are named like this "HQ 29th" while others have a word in between the HQ and the number i.e. "HQ Rifle 29th" so searching for HQ 29 will work sometimes but not others. I would like the option to say rightclick a unit and have the choice to "Find HQ". CONCLUSION I liked the V for Victory series and want to like the Panzer Campaign series. I love the style, but it needs to get more user friendly. A scenario takes hours to play through. It is hard enough to justify the time when you are enjoying every second, when you feel that half of that the time is needlessly wasted on dialogboxes justification is impossible. regards Graham Subject: Re: Korsun 44 - bad review not surprising (LONG). Replying to my own post: I have found the following about speeding up the AI which I will try out next time I sit down to play, if it fixes the problem I will be very happy and have little to criticize the game for: Quote: Speeding up the AI Player in any HPS \ John Tiller Game by Glenn Saunders Don't you just hate waiting for the AI to play its side in those bigger John Tiller Games, ones like a Panzer Campaigns CAMPAIGN Scenario, with hundreds of units. Did you know there was a way to speed up the AI Play? The first trick of speeding up the play is to turn the sound off. You normally do this from the Setting Menu, by unchcecking the "Sound Effects" item. Now you won't have to wait for each battle sound to load and play. Did this do it for you or do you still need it faster? If not, try this next set of undocumented Hot Keys. F5 - slower AI F6 - normal AI F7 - faster AI F8 - no AI dialog Keep in mind, that once you get the Processor going at rocket speed, it is often hard to get it to stop, so I would exercise caution on that F8 key. As long as you have the dialog box coming up, then you can always press "Cancel", if you need to get control of the PC again. But once the Dialog is gone, and the game is going at the fastest setting, it is very hard to stop it. Therefore, switching back to the other AI speeds becomes an exercise in shear luck. However, once the game is saved and closed out, then reopened for play it will revert back to the standard AI Play speed. And I understand that these HOT KEYS are standard on all Johns HPS Games. If you find this is not the case, then please left me know. Graham wrote: > Korsun 44's bad review in CGW is discussed in another thread. > > DIALOG BOXES TO DESPAIR > > IMO the game suffers terribly from the overlong AI turns and the > inability to speed them up by customizing the level of feedback from the > combat. My second problem is that it is difficult to keep track of > which organization units belong to. I will expand on both points.