War in the East wishlist

War in the East 2 is already in playtesting, so I doubt that I'm anywhere near on time to push things along.

But as I play War in the East, I'd really like a few things, so here they are:

Visual Supply.

Right now, units will show you how far they are from HQ and railhead. So will HQs. I can pull up supply details for each unit and see how they got their supply last turn - and how much, and when (there are 3 supply phases.) But it's really hard for me to understand that on the big picture. All too often I see people playing out games like, say, this one, where he took Smolensk in July and Moscow by August. Me, I can't replicate that because I've eternally either running my panzers out of supply or I'm deliberately keeping them back to keep them in supply. It's very frustrating to have a unit run out of gas or have minimal fuel, but be, say, 10-20 miles (1-2 hexes) from a unit that got topped off with a lot of fuel. Okay, fine, too far is too far. But I didn't know that when I moved, because it's hard for me to keep track. I'd have moved the out-of-fuel unit back, or maybe not run it so far forward, if I was able to determine ahead of time what the supply situation was. And I can, it's just exceedingly difficult for me to do on a per-turn basis.

I'd love to be able to put a colored overlay on the map - green for hexes within railhead supply, yellow for hexes within truck supply, red for hexes out of supply. Maybe even a four-color model where I could see how many trucks we're talking. That way I can make my decisions based on information I can see and process on a sufficiently broad scale that I can use it. Visual beats charts of numbers.

Combat Detail Displays.

Right now, you can set combat from a brief overview all the way down to individual units firing and their target and range. I'd love to be able to see that after a fight - run through all of the combats quickly, then go back and drill down and see what happened. Just because I don't want to spend a minute or two on each battle doesn't mean I don't care. I'd like to see that when I lost 22 AFVs and took out 75 what AFVs I lost (and how) and what ones I took out (and how.) Don't seal off that information; the game has it, I'd like to see it displayed just on my own terms.

Support Unit Displays.

It's hard for me to keep track of where my various support units are. It would be nice to be able to pull them up on a display and go to them. Being able to group-grab and reassign would be awesome, too.

Actually being able to see what units are in range of what support units would help, too. I assign some to higher HQs because an army group or an army needs them, not just a specific corps . . . but I can't always be sure they're where they need to be to get used. It's a bit annoying. Not a killer, but when you've got a small pool of Luftwaffe anti-air units with 88mm FLAK guns and want to protect an area, I don't always want to give them out down to a division. But I equally hate realizing no one was supported by them because they weren't handed down because of my poor choice of HQ positioning. Again, visual would help.

Better Hotlinking.

I should be able to click on a unit in any given report and go to it, or any given unit and go back to a report.

And within my commander's report for the turn, I do want to be able to click on, say, a unit upgraded from Infantry Division 39 to Infantry Division 42 and see what that means, exactly. And which ones on the map not just on a list that I can't use to find those units.

Better controls of construction units.

Construction units under HQs will get assigned out to rebuild rails. Okay, great, love it.

I don't love when 3-5 units are all working on the same stub rail line that doesn't help me. Or they're busy trying to cross-link all of the rails in Belarus while I'm short on units just a few hexes away to cross-link where it actually matters. And so on. I don't mind some inefficiency if I allow the computer to take over, but I do mind it when I'm not allowed to take over.


Like I said, probably too late for all of that, and I'm not even sure where I'd post it to make sure Matrix Games sees it, but there we go. I'd plunk down $80 for the new game if it did all of that. It's all just stuff that makes it easier for me to play by taking the interface issues out of the way.