[SOW] Horse-drawn vehicles
 

Historical accuracy question here - will there be horse-drawn vehicles in the game? Most of the German army, and probably the other armies too, was moved by horse in WW2. Are there legal/political/marketing reasons to prevent the player from shooting at horses?

Probably not!

Only ethics and moral will prevent you.
But this is a flight simulator not a slaughterhouse simulator so let’s hope it’s not possible.

Viking

It's a WW2 air-force flight simulator, and the armies of 1940 used horse-drawn vehicles, and were attacked by aircraft. I don't have any desire to shoot at horses (seagulls, yes, but not horses. Thank you Silent Hunter for that catharsis) but they were there. To my mind, 100% motorised ground forces look odd!

(I wonder, in 2110, when there are flight simulator games made of the great Australian-American war of 2062, will people protest at the historical inclusion of manned aircraft and say the game should only feature armed UAVs that made up about half of each force? :-P )

LOL. O.K. I'll refrain from destroying the enemy's transport when I'm attacking his transport. That's what real pilots did, I'm sure.

As for an answer to the question, I recall seeing horse drawn equipment, in early screen shots, so I'd assume horses to go with them. If PITA has a problem with us shooting artificial Horses they can get......er, a life. (how Oleg deals with it is a matter for speculation)

Horses where slightly used in the early war.
If gore could be added to SoW,I would vote to having first pilots grinded by propellers blade.

Horses were the major method of moving artillery and caissons, especially on the eastern front. In terms of SOW they were still the main mode of transport for civilians in France and Britain in the 1930's.

Historically one of the Luftwaffe's more successful tactics in the Battle of France (learnt during the Spanish Civil War) was to machine gun the long columns of civilian refugees (on foot and with horse drawn carts) to create havoc and block the roads. A road blocked by injured and dieing women, children and animals is a serious hindrance to enemy troop movements.

HOWEVER the official reason given for excluding horses from IL2 when this topic has come up in the past was that allowing the shooting of animals would increase the censorship rating of the game well past M15+ and make marketing difficult. I assume the same applies with SOW.

why not?
in Arma 2 yu can kill wathever you want

I'm not interested in gore, particularly. You'd shoot a horse and it would go from the 'horse walking' or 'horse bolting' or 'horse standing still' animation to the 'horse lying dead' pose. If you deal more than a certain amount of damage, the horse could just disappear, rather than have bits of exploded horse flying everywhere :-P

The game Mount & Blade has horses (and blades) which behave like this, but with hitpoints. There's no gore. If you attack a riderless horse I think it runs away. If its hitpoints are reduced completely, it whinnies and falls over.

Horses were used extensively by the Germans through WW2. A moment's Googling found this article, written March 1946. http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/g...rse/index.html

"Public opinion to the contrary, so great was the dependence of the Nazi Blitzkrieg upon the horse that the numerical strength of German Army horses maintained during the entire war period averaged around 1,100,000. Of the 322 German Army and SS divisions extant in November 1943, only 52 were armored or motorized. Of the November 1944 total of 264 combat divisions, only 42 were armored or motorized. The great bulk of the German combat strength—the old-type infantry divisions—marched into battle on foot, with their weapons and supply trains propelled almost entirely by four-legged horsepower. The light and mountain divisions had an even greater proportion of animals, and the cavalry divisions were naturally mainly dependent on the horse."

Well, I thought I'd heard that we didn't get horse-drawn vehicles in Il-2 for this reason.

Oh now you've done it, expect to hear a reply from madfish (cuddlefish) about the inhuman and cruel treatment of animated animals in a war simulator. Why don't we throw bubble gum at each other instead. You people crying about no nukes, no nukes, or how dare you shoot at that cute furry animal. Why don't we all go play with our Barbies now. For crying out loud this is a war simulator we're talking about or am i mistaken. Aren't there any other flight sims for the faint of heart. Why are flames modelled in this sim, not to mention bullets and bombs. Aren't we afraid of hurting someones feelings. You little girls make me ill. Just thinking out loud, hope i didn't offend anybody.:-)

this would be historically correct...however quadruped animation is the most difficult of all animation to achieve..the time spent creating it might be better spent on other issues. 1 further point the British Army sold all its stock of horses to the Germans in the late 30's thus there was no horse drawn units in the British Army by the time of BoB.