## Airborne Assault: Red Devils Over Arnhem

## Change History

### Version 1.1.45 Changes:

#### Additions

- Line Of Sight (LOS) tool
  A new button has been added to the Orders tab, the "LOS" button, click this (or press the "L" key) and the LOS tool is active.
  The cursor becomes a cross hair, click and drag and a line like that displayed below will appear. Keep dragging around the map to check other locations for LOS.
  Light blue represents good visibility, dark blue bad. The visibility is calculated at 100-meter intervals along the line. Where no line appears there is no visibility from the start location to that point. The calculations are done assuming both the sighter and sightee have a unit radius of 150 meters, LOS in game is calculated from forward edge to forward edge. The perpendicular black lines represent the terrain height at each 100-meter point along the line. As you can see from the displayed line the height of the terrain is represented internally to the nearest meter and gently slopes from one contour level to another, it is not just a series of flat pancakes layered one on top of the other at 10 meter intervals. (Once the patch is out, try it at the Airfield; you may be surprised to learn that the whole area is not just a flat billiard table).
  Remember that this is a theoretical LOS; actual unit sighting in the game also takes into account unit deployment states, size, effectiveness etc.
- Threat Line of Sight (TLOS) tool
  A new button has been added to the Orders tab, the "Threats" button, click this (or press the "T" key) and the Threat LOS tool is active.
  Select one of your units and any threats that it can currently see will have a line drawn from your unit to the threat, bright red and they can see the threat very clearly, dark red and its touch and go.
  When determining if a unit should fire at an enemy a couple of factors come into play. Two important ones being how well they can see the enemy and how long its been since the actual sighting. So even though a unit can see a threat it does not automatically follow they will fire at it.
- Realistic Orders Delay
  Each time you start a new game you can now specify how realistically you want orders sending/receiving to be modelled.
  With minimal delay when you give an order the AI processes it almost straight away. While this is great for the human player, it is not very realistic. It takes time for orders to be coded, sent, received, decoded, assessed, new plans drawn up, subordinate orders prepared and then coded and sent to subordinates and so on down the line.
  Typically a Battalion in WW2 would take around 30 to 60 minutes to process orders. And then the Companies would have to process them taking another 20 minutes or so and then the Platoons and so on. Thus even though the Battalion commander may react instantly to a development, such as a new sighting of the enemy on his flank, it may take an hour or two before his companies can redeploy.
  Experienced commanders relied on this effect to achieve tactical "surprise", especially against non-motorised forces, who typically had less radios and took longer to process orders. Better commanders can of course respond more quickly, and distance from subordinate to superior also has an affect on the length of the delay.
  For the first hour a unit is on the map (ie either the first hour of the game or the hour after it arrives as a reinforcement) a unit does not experience any orders delay.
  Making a minor change ( ie any change other than adding a waypoint or changing the task type ) will take effect almost immediately.
  You can now specify how realistic you want it from the current minimal level to "Painfully Realistic". This should put an edge to those multi-player games!
- Orders on the Way
  With the introduction of realistic orders delay you now need some way of seeing which units have not yet responded to new orders that you have sent them.
  Enter the nice magenta background to a units current task, this is the task displayed on a Units icon when you use the F4 key. When the background to the task icon is white the unit is not awaiting orders, when it turns to magenta it is.
  You can now watch your orders proliferate down through your forces.
- Artillery Ammunition levels
  The F10 key now shows the Artillery Ammunition level on the info box of all your Artillery units, other types of units will just be blank. You can also use the view tab to turn this on.
  The lighter the color the more Artillery Ammunition left. When it’s black the unit is out, sorry.
  If a unit normally has 60 rounds and 6 tubes then it's level will be calculated as:
  - 6 tubes & 60 rounds -> each tube has 10 rounds (FULL LOAD)
  - 3 tubes & 30 rounds -> each tube has 10 rounds (FULL LOAD)
  - 3 tubes & 15 rounds -> each tube has 05 rounds (HALF LOAD)
  i.e. The level is calculated using the number of rounds per tube the unit should have.
- Weather Tool Tip
  Hold the cursor over the weather and see the Weather Tool Tip.
- Direct Support Artillery
  You can now direct that all Artillery units attached to a force only provide on-call support for other units of that force.
  When you create a task you will find a new check box "Arty Direct Support Only" on the task data display, click it to turn it on and off.
  You can now stop your Artillery assets from spraying their fire all across the map. Attaching an Artillery unit to a force now means what it says, if you use this option, they are really part of that force.
- Eliminated Unit Markers
  When one of your units, or an enemy unit you have under observation, is destroyed it is replaced on the map by a small cross.
  You can turn these crosses off by using an option on the View tab.
  A Grey cross represents a destroyed Axis unit.
  A Brown cross represents a destroyed Allied unit.
- FOW Lifted at End of Game
  When the End of Game dialog appears all enemy units still on map are revealed and their real stats are available for review.
  In the above picture the British units are all displayed as they actually where at the end of the game, even though they are the enemy.
  You can gloat over the sorry state of the enemy, or kick yourself for not pressing on (as they were worse off than you).
- Player Surrendering
  Now the player gets to surrender as well.
  If you do offer to surrender the result depends on who your playing:
  - Against the AI - The game ends and you lose big time
  - Against a Human opponent - Your opponent gets a message and can either "Accept" your surrender or force you to play on. If they "Accept" your surrender then you again lose big time.
  There is a minor change to the "Game" tab:
  Select the new "Surrender" button and you will be asked if you really want to surrender:
  Really surrender and you will then see the following message:
  Your opponent will see:
  Your opponents Order Tab will now look like this:
  They select the "Accept Surrender" button:
  They accept your surrender and its off to the End Game Dialog and disgrace yet again.
  When the AI now offers to Surrender it works the same way, the new "Surrender" button changes to "Accept Surrender" and you can accept if you want, or continue on and try to wipe them out!
  Note: The game must be running before the Offer or Accpetance can take affect. While the game is paused nothing will appear to happen, and due to network delay it will take a few minutes of game time for things to appear to be happening.
  Because of the change to the Orders Tab the "End" and "Quit" buttons are gone.
  To exit the game you now use the "Leave" button which will display the folowing dialog.
- Ability to Replace a Scenario's Map
  With the release of extra maps the ScenMaker can now allows you to replace a scenario's current map.
  Click the button labeld "Map" in the picture below.
  Select the new map from those listed in the following dialog.
  After changing the Map any existing Side Tasks and on map Units may need to be repositioned.

#### Improvements

- Added two new scnearios, "Capture the Flag Small" and "Capture the Flag Medium".
- Added another two new scenarios, that where originaly released as extra Demo scenarios. "Drive on Loenen" and "Heartbreak Ridge".
- Can now save the game when the connection to Client/Server is lost in a Multiplayer game.
- At the end of a multiplayer game you can continue to review the game even after the other player disconnects.
- Player can now "Surrender", in both Single and Multiplayer games.
- Improved the chances that the AI will offer to surrender when things look hopeless.
- Artillery now takes longer to deploy in Light Woods/Orchard and even longer in Woods.
- Artillery units now try to avoid roads when deploying.
- The AI now tries to establish its long range Artillery in firebases that are not in the front line.
- At all map scales there is now a brown border around the edge of the map, this allows the whole of a unit at the map edge to be visible and selectable.
- Changed re-supply times from Midnight to 3am.
- An offer to surrender is now valid for 1 hour, was 15 minutes.
- The amount of Bombard Firepower reported for a unit has been standardized with the Anti-Personnel firepower of a unit.
- Unit experience etc and Commander values are now displayed as percentage bars not text.
- Units now favor edges of woods, towns etc when deploying.
- Bombarding units less likely to change facing and formation each time they bombard.
- Reduced probability of forces changing facing.
- Route finding could slow the game down if their where enemy near the objective, it now reverses the search direction in these cases which is often faster than searching from the start location to the end location.
- A message is now received when a crossing is blown, if the attempt fails the player whose unit attempted the demolition receives a failure message.
- A message is now displayed on the map when the Game is saved.
- ScenMaker - On the Task data dialog the Frontage/Depth fields have been replaced by a single Radius field.
- ScenMaker - Replaced the Frontage and Depth fields on the Task data window with just a Radius field.
- Installer - will not replace fonts already installed. On some machines the install would fail because of this.

#### Fixes

- Crossing Points where being Primed/Unprimed by nearby Engineers; even when no units where currently tasked with Securing/Denying Crossing points.
- Routing units could get stuck running around in circles if surrounded by the enemy. Now if they can't get away they will stop and just cower where they are.
- Routing units from which some personnel surrendered would lose all but ONE of each type of equipment they currently had.
- When calculating the number of men to surrender it was using a percentage of the remaining personnel, this meant that as units shrank they got harder to kill. Changed to now use a percentage of the personnel a unit should have.
- When culling excess equipment, due to personnel losses, small arms with lowest counts where being culled more than their fair share.
- LOS calculations where too generous at night.
- LOS calculations where not correctly taking into account the weather, for, rain etc.
- LOS calculations where including intervening terrain, even when that terrain was in a valley.
- When giving an Attack order your unit would sometimes fail to develop the attack, it would send a report complaining that it could find no valid route.
- Artillery units would stop and deploy just before reaching location they where ordered too.
- Players On-Call support Artillery units where not always firing.
- When loading a Saved game the unit hierarchy structure was not immediately being built. This meant that Units with orders where not initially highlighted (With the White band at the bottom of the icon) and that the Command Lines did not reflect the players current plan, and thus current chain of command. This also meant that the cursor keys did not work as expected at game start.
- When looking for threats units where looking out a fixed distance, they should have added their unit radius to this distance.
- A unit would decide to change its force formation but its sub-units would fail to pick up the change and the unit would just sit waiting for the sub-units to get into their new position.
- If player quickly changed more than one detail of a task the unit affected would not always respond to all the changes.
- If any sounds where playing when you left current game, but did not quit, they would start playing again when you stated another game.
- Attached units where not remaining attached, give unit in charge a new order and the attached units would be lost.
- You could locate the actual position of the enemy's supreme unit when the AI offered to surrender by hitting the "End" key, as it would center the map on the sender of the offer.
- If the computer AI opponent offered to surrender and you did as directed and clicked on the End button, nothing happened. The End Game dialog should have appeared.
- Changes to Animation code MIGHT have fixed problems with sounds sometimes disappearing.
- Fixed corrupt Quote character appearing in many Unit Histories and Commander Bios.
- The "Al Bde Assault" scenario had an Engineer unit attached to the wrong superior.
- In the Campaign 82nd Single Drop scenario the 3/504th Bn now appears as part of its Regiment instead of part of the 30th Corp.
- The 320th (US) Artillery unit now has some HE ammunition (very helpful).
- Pictures of equipment where not appearing in the ScenMaker unless the users display was set to 16 bits.

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