Color Issues

I will start this off by saying I am one of the folks with color perception issues. I entirely understand the frustration with some color combinations. I drove a "charge" in the forums to document all the various indirect fire templates so folks would have a reference they could use when playing.

The biggest issue missed by all of this complaint about color choices is historical accuracy. Yes, this is a game about Hollywood action, but the background and details try to be at least reasonably accurate.

Why did DPG choose the colors they did for a platoon? Because those are the platoon's colors. You can blame the military for their choices.

It would have been great if the light-dark-light pattern had been reversed between the generic US markers and the generic German markers, to make them more easily identifiable for folks who cannot perceive the green of the US stripes, but beyond that sort of thing, the colors are defined by the units and the armies. Some different unit selection might have helped, at least for the more "baseline" core box troops, but I must admit I have not studied the various platoons enough to make a real call on that. But for something like the 82nd Airborne you cannot so easily fudge the selection to get a better color mix.

Errata

It is easy to say "I cannot believe how many errors there were", but stop and think about how many different parts there are in just the core box. I have posted more times than I care to remember on the whole problem with human perception and the fact that the visual system will "fill in" what it expects to see more times than you are aware of — that is why Magicians have a career. They play with human perception all the time to make their illusions work.

Let me see if I can address it this way: Every punchboard for Carentan, St. Mere Eglise and Pegasus Bridge were not only gone over by 5 different people in DPG's offices, but were then POSTED on the forums for everyone to go over so all the folks complaining about errata had an opportunity to spot the errors and report them before the plates ever went to print. And there were STILL errors in the final version. I am not talking "well we did not know that unit was supposed to have that ability" sort of errors, I am talking "that character has inverted color stripes that don't match the army" or "2 of the same type of unit had errors while the rest did not" sort of errors. Stuff that should have been caught. But human perception is a pain sometimes.

Heroes of Stalingrad shows the commitment of both DPG (and fans!) to ensure the product is right, that set came out with very few errors. Things have improved a lot. Special shout-out to the German speakers who have corrected some of the issues with German language mistakes.

So, I will cheerfully invite any critic of the error rate to take their own shot at going over the plates when they are published for review. I hope that interest in perfection will benefit us all. I know I will be pitching in myself, as I did with HoS, to try and ensure things don't get past.

The V1 core box has a total of 427 various counters and 10 errata (7 on the original core punchboard errata, 3 in the second errata set). I will leave you to do the math on the real error rate. That that is only doing it at the counter level, not the number of icons and combat values on each counter.