Profile of Contrivance

Whether an SBP can retreat or not, and what type it uses (retreat or reverse), is controlled by an extension in the AE for that SBP. So if you're willing to make a tuning pack for this then that'd be the best course of action. I don't think it's possible to change a particular SBP's retreat type via SCAR, but EliwOOd would be the expert on that.

Next update will feature something non-German. As I mentioned before, I use Germans as the Worse Case Scenario because of their unit naming conventions and the sheer number of units to squeeze into a list. American, British, and Soviets were a lot more standardized.

When I put together the mock-up for the last stage of the builder - which is the most fun part of it, since that's where you customize your Battlegroup to have exactly the units you want from the available options - I'll show one from another nation. I'm currently pondering either a Soviet Self-propelled Artillery Regiment (either with the SU-76, SU-85, or ISU-152) or an American Rifle Company to show off all the artillery batteries you can attach to your Battlegroup.

So a bit late on that promised update, but I didn't like how the UI was coming together so redesigned it. Anyways, here's what've got so far.

The following example is for the Germans, and I've been using them as my testbed since they have the most broadest variety of units and some of the longest unit names, so if I can make the Germans fit into the UI, then I can get anything to fit

Ignore the folder tabs at the top of each image. Eventually these will be clickable and allow you to move back and forth through the process. For now they're just placeholders.

As before, open the image in a new tab if you want to see the full-size version of it.




So first you have to choose what branch of the Wehrmacht your Battlegroup is from. Kriegsmarine option is missing in this example, but it will be there eventually once we have skin support and can add a proper Marine-Grenadier skin. In fact quite a few things in the menu aren't available yet, but I'm planning ahead.



So let's say we picked Heer, here's the divisions we have to work with. Your choice of division (or brigade, detachment, etc.) determines the companies that show up in the next step. Otherwise there'd be no room to show every single possible company on a single page.

The symbols are the standard military map symbols (in this case, NATO standard) that are often used in war games. I plan on having a Help button at the bottom which shows a handy reference guide on how to decipher them. They're really not that difficult to understand once you get the basics down, and they'll show up through-out our UI.




And let's say we picked the Panzer Division, which gives us the company choices listed above. There's obviously more units than just those six within a Panzer Division, but these ones were actually used as front-line combat units - and the core unit of your battlegroup has to be a front-line combat unit - and the rest were support units so they play a part later in the process.



And in this case we picked the Panzerspäh-Kompanie, so the last question is what kind of vehicle the company is equipped with. Some companies don't have this step because there's no variants to speak of. Also you can see that only the first three options are available, and the rest are greyed out because we don't yet have the models for them.


The next step after this is to add the support units that will accompany the unit you chose, but still working on that menu. Stay tuned!

extended_sight_radius shows up enemy units on the minimap without actually extending the unit's sight radius. You have to enable the extended sight using a modifier first on the EBP or SBP before it's active.

I suspect search_radius is the radius enemies have to be within before the SBP reacts to them on their own. Try lowering it to less than the unit's sight radius and see if enemies that come within sight (but not within search) are reacted to?

Relic a while back also mentioned that the sight system had a noticeable performance hit, so they kept it simple to avoid slowdowns on slower machines. So this means that entities can only ever have one radius of sight on it. It also means that not every man in a squad has sight, only a couple do and the rest are blind; this one is noticeable when you have a squad of men go around a building, as sometimes the lead man is past the corner but what's there isn't revealed until another man clears the corner.