WHAT DID TOE'S BRING TO B.E.?

There have been several discussions in the Barracks about the introduction of TOE's...mostly the how's and why's of it. DOC takes a crack at explaining why they were implemented and how they change the game.

I'll help out those who weren't around and don't know what the difference means to the code and the game that lives on that code.

Before ToE's, spawn lists were tied to military facilities, the AB, the AF and the NB. Each had their own and it was not in any way a part of a brigade, or what that brigade experienced in battle.

Every one of our towns had what you see as the brigade spawn list at each military facility, it was a facility spawn list and all a brigade did was unlock it by moving into town. So in effect, you got a fresh "spawn list" by moving into a fresh town. With 650 towns with 1, 2, 3 or 4 AB's in them you can see how this was a "never run out of anything" deal in effect. Attrition would never be persistent and thus never addressed by managing supply of replacement equipment like we do today. Equipment would be lost locally in a battle at one town but every town had a full spawn list waiting to be unlocked.

Nothing belonged to a brigade equipment wise. The army was always en empty shell waiting to be filled from a towns spawn list which you "turned on" by moving to a new town.

ToE's brought 2 things.

1: It meant that equipment was time persistent and relied on battle attrition versus resupply, this meant virtual armies more than "spawn lists"

2: All your equipment now belonged to the military formation that owned it and so moved around the territory of the battlefield with it's army/air force/navy owner.

So now you actually move your equipment around with your army, air force or navy. Before this phase of the game came into being, all you did was move from town to town unlocking a new spawn list that had not been used or attritted, which is the definition of "instant army".

At an even earlier time in the games history, we didn't even have brigades on the map that you could see and move around (the flags on the map thing) and coupled with no attrition, it was like two sides pointing a fire hose at each other, waiting to see who could grab the last flag first while they hosed each other down at full throttle without pause.

There were almost no battle dynamics at all.