@Silent Otto: It would be very nice if we can improve these areas of AOTD as well, thank you very much for the offer. My hope is that we can all work together on improving the game. As for the awards, I haven't really thought of this yet, but all bitmaps can be extracted and improved. I will try to look into changing the insignias, but I just need a little break as my head is now all numbers and pixels. As for adding more to the game than the existing number of awards, perhaps it is possible by editing .dat files, but I havent gotten into that yet. About political correctness, I fully agree with you. History is history and cannot be changed.
Here's just some food for thought for everyone to think about.
We "could" reshape the promotions and awards altogether, not just the accompanying pictures but the whole basis of award structure throughout the game and perhaps assign some type of point basis for each award? It would be similar to what we already see on the Top Score List, where depending on tonnage sunk, overall mission difficulty, etc. determines the final score; in this case, towards any award or promotion.
Not every U-boat commander received the Knight's Cross and many who received it prior to actually having the lower Iron Cross 2nd & 1st Classes had those awards automatically backdated and entered. (Award rules mandated the member must have both levels of Iron Cross prior to receiving the Knight's Cross.) Still, many received the German Cross in Gold (est. 9/41) for award acts that didn't rate the KC. Others only ended up with the Iron Cross 1st Class as the top and final award. There were other awards as well that were not in the Iron Cross series of awards and didn't affect the KC series whatsoever; such as the GCiG, War Merit Cross, etc.
We could add game criteria based on dates that awards were established and actual criteria (though there were always exceptions to any rule). Promotions were also something established (time in service/rank) but changed somewhat throughout the war and again, exceptions to the rule (Luth case in point!).
It might provide some additional game incentives for continuing on and trying to do better. Getting the Knight's Cross series completed through Diamonds before the June 1940 timeframe just doesn't give the player much to try for IMHO and is just too easy to get.
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