BGForums

Not exactly a unit, but units which would fool air reconasiance into thinking units were there - but actually effectively be dummys and of no strategic importance.

A dummy would fool air survellaince but wouldn't fool ground surveillance when within a certain distance. Additionally dummy units would not be able to move.

Miles

Current game engine would not support this. One of the concessions that was made is that spotting is spotting. there is no seperate air vs ground spotting. Would be seen the same by all. I'm also not sure how realistic this would be. One or two decoys is fine, but decoys up to battalion size? Thats a LOT of decoys...

..Well....The US did use decoys and such i Believe in Desert Storm to pretend they were doing an amphibious assault to trick Saddam?

Yep it was funnily the Iraq invasion which made me think of this. I think dummys were used by both sides.

That said, no biggie, just trying to think of ways to get round effectively an invasion being spotted

Tals

The United States created an entire fake Army for this purpose in WW2 before the D-Day landings, and they even put Patton in command of it. Yet the corps was only composed of inflatable or wooden tanks and vehicles.

I suppose it is actually possible, if you build very weak units. This'll be cheaper for you and the units won't be totally helpless but they'll still be able to divert the enemy's attention away from you stronger units.

Oh... wait... you can see a unit's strength bar, can't you? Crap. Nevermind.

Are strength bars represented in percent or by the actual number? If its percent it wouldnt matter when a person sees the fake units initially they'd ssee them at 100% with the bar at full..heh

It's actually a player default. Hotkey Ctrl-k to change. The default is to show the relative strength. So artillery would always have small bars since they build 12-18 by default. Infantry would often have the largest bars since some battalions include 70 squads. If you hit Ctrl-K, it then represents the unit's strength as relates to the default battalion size. Overstrengthed units get larger bars. A fresh artillery piece and a fresh infantry built to default strength would have the same size bar. As they take damage it shrinks proportionately. This is actually the way I prefer to play the game.