Skirmish Scored Display

[Lightfoot]

Can anyone explain to me what is being displayed on the Skirmish Score and Timer display at the top of the screen when you press the "T" key. What the numbers mean? Does it indicate who is winning and how?

[Leifr]

Tickets left for each team, effectively how many respawns are available.

[dmurray6]

Can anyone explain to me what is being displayed on the Skirmish Score and Timer display at the top of the screen when you press the "T" key. What the numbers mean? Does it indicate who is winning and how?

Yuppers, Leifr addressed the tickets, but let me expand on my understanding a bit.

Tickets (the numbers for each force):
Represent how many respawns (or lives) each team has remaining. If the total numbers per side are not already tailored to represent a similar soldier ratio of the real battle (or what's been determined by the devs to lead to the most fair, yet challenging fight, based on historical accuracy), then I'm sure these numbers will be tinkered with by the dev's over time. For example, if the 500 Confederates that defended the ridge on the west side of Burnside's Bridge took on 12,000 Federals attacking from the east side, then the in-game skirmish numbers might represent this ratio (though mathematically off) by starting the Burnside Bridge skirmish with 250 Union spawn tickets versus 100 Confederate spawn tickets (I'm not sure what the current actual number of each are, this was just an example). The Union gets more tickets because they have the harder task of taking the bridge and the point of contention beyond the bridge and up the ridge. The Confederates get less tickets as they have the advantageous ground and historically had far less soldiers in the battle.

The timer:
Dictates how long the opposing forces have to either defend or capture the "point of contention" until victory can be had.

Point of Contention:
The "point of contention" is represented by the cross-flag icon (this just replaces what you might have been familiar with in Drill Camp as the bayonet training icon, firing range icon, or camp icon). The cross-flags should navigate you on the field of battle, to your final objective (well, after your commanding officer has gathered your men in their desired formation, discussed the skirmish plan to defend or attack, and moved your force into proper position). That's where you want to be when its all over.

Point of Contention Status:
The point of contention status can be observed by the color of the outer ring. You will sometimes see this as a full red circle, full blue circle, or a partial blue or red circle. This status will be full of one color or the other pending who currently has ownership of the point of contention, and whether there are soldiers in the area of contention in order to maintain that status. For example, if we are examining the Sunken Road Skirmish, neither force spawns in the region of the point of contention. So depending on who makes their way to the sunken road first, will begin to take ownership. If that is the Rebels, then you'll begin to see the circle fill with a red strip. Once they have held that region for a long enough period, the entire circle will be red. If the Federals come in and kill all Rebels present and then locate themselves within the point of contention region, the red circle will begin to decrease until empty, once empty, the circle will begin to fill with blue. If the Federals can maintain their presence in the sunken road long enough the entire circle will turn blue and will remain blue until the Rebels come back to retake the point of contention. Historically, the Rebels held the Sunken Road and the Federals should spend most of the battle attacking the road and depleting the Rebel force. I believe that there is a situation where if the point of contention was once held by, lets say, the Federals, but there are no soldiers of either army present, then the blue ring will begin to deplete. Once its depleted, the ring will remain the color tan, representing an empty ring, until one of the army's have soldiers in the area, at which time the ring will begin to fill with that army's color again.

Once the timer has reached 0:00 or one forces tickets have been depleted, the skirmish is over.

Hope that helps. Dev's if I've misled anywhere, please correct my information.

Regards,

[Hinkel]

Thank you very much, Dmurray.
Great description! :)

[dmurray6]

Thank you very much, Dmurray.
Great description! :)

Thanks Hinkel. I once wrote a Users Guide for a network security scan engine that the company I worked for, developed (I was one of the security engineers that helped develop the tool, not a technical writer.). The guide had to navigate the user through establishing a secure Linux build before installing our software (as the seller of security scanning software, you certainly don't want to start with an insecure baseline OS :)). So it was important to try and explain tasks in the simplest terms. I hope I was successful in doing so here.

[A. P. Hill]

Thank you very much, Dmurray.
Great description! :)

He's the man ... ain't he? :)

[Lightfoot]

Thanks, that clarified it quite well.