Wushuki

I agree that strategic bombing an enemy that neglects air defense should pay off, perhaps even more so than it does now. The issue here though really is that it is so easy to reach Germany's only 2 supply centers from Sweden, regardless of how much air defense you have. If you escort your bombers you barely take any damage to them. In the situation above, Germany had 4 level 5 fighters with maximum long range aircraft upgrades stationed around Berlin and these were not able to even damage the bombers due to the escorts. You would think that you could counteract this by directly attacking the allied bombers with your fighters. However, the fighters could not attack the bombers because the bombers were very far back into Sweden, well beyond the range of the German fighters. The only way for Germany to attack the bombers would be to place their fighters into Denmark. These fighters would then be extremely susceptible to enemy aircraft and ships as you can only place like 2 or 3 units in Denmark, whereas the allies can place a dozen or so in Sweden. The difficulty of countering strategic bombers from Sweden wouldn't be such a problem though if it didn't cause Germany to lose half of its income and supply due to the loss of its only 2 industrial centers.

Thanks for the reply. I guess adding Vienna as Industrial Center would help the situation. It is possible to hit Vienna from Sweden with a strategic bomber while escorting it with a fighter unit also stationed in Sweden, but that does require putting a strategic bomber closer to southern border of Sweden. That bomber would then be exposed to German fighters counterattacking from northern Germany. Bombers attacking Vienna from Sweden can also only be escorted by a fighter stationed in the southernmost square of Sweden and so only a single escort is possible. Munich would be another option. Although Munich can be attacked from Sweden, Norway and England with a strategic bomber with 2 upgrades in long range aircraft, it cannot be escorted by fighters when attacking from any of these locations as it is removed by 8 squares from each of these countries. Either Munich, Vienna or a city like Venice would make it much easier for the Axis to defend against this strategy however. Do I understand correctly that another patch might be made for vanilla? If so, I would also be very happy to see a decision event that gives the Axis the option to split the Soviet Union into a Japanese part and a German part upon surrender. That would greatly reduce the problem of getting Japanese or German units trapped inside their allies territory once the USSR surrenders.

In my current game I captured Sweden with the allies and used some strategic bombers to hit the northern cities of Germany. To my surprise, after bombing Berlin and Koningsberg to less than 5 strength, every German city was treated as if it was disconnected from an industrial center. In the screenshot below the devastation of this strategy becomes obvious: despite the fact that Germany still controls significant territory and could possibly have survived until the end date of 1947, the minor strategic bombing has halved its income and destroyed its supply in both Russia and Europe. Germany has little chance of stopping this, because the bombers can easily be escorted and even upgrading the AA capability of the cities won't stop them from losing those 5 points of strength. If you know this trick it becomes fairly easy to use it every game, because taking Norway and Sweden as the allies is quite easy to do, even very early on in the war. So can this be considered an exploit? And should this be fixed by, for example, making Munich another industrial center, in addition to Koningsberg and Berlin? Or should this be considered fair game and a viable strategy? Note that this was tested in Global Conflict Classic, not in Gold.

Generally speaking this is true, which is why this became the default setting after one of the patches. It is possible however to choose for 1 sided entrenchments if you have a solid entrenched line. This makes it more difficult for the enemy to break through your defensive line as a whole as when he captures a single trench he does not profit from a side entrenchment against your counterattacks.

I'd recommend to get either Global Conflict, or WWI precisely because of what you said: it has the most up to date engine. Several important adjustments were made in Global Conflict that you really do not wish to play without. The adjustment that high tech units do not instantly destroy enemies at the end of the game is important in particular, as it drastically changes the gameplay. This change is also present in the WWI game, as the WWI game was released later than Global Conflict. Some additional revisions were made in the WWI game, although these are not important enough to make Global Conflict outdated. The games before Global Conflict really are kind of outdated now however, so I would not recommend buying these at the moment anymore.

I would very much like to see some changes to the combat system that allow smaller scale combat to end up in victory for the aggressor. Currently a single corps in a city can only be destroyed by bringing a HQ and several units. This causes problems in island warfare and smaller invasions, such as in Norway. Such remote places are extremely expensive to conquer due to the necessity of many units and thus not worth it. If SC3 is going to include the pacific, or will so in future expansions, it important this is thought about from the start.

I am inclined to say that the interception range should be equal to the strike range. Intercepting with fighters is already only marginally effective due to the ease of which cover can be provided with other fighters to completely shield attacking bombers. Due to the low damage of fighters against other fighters, they will generally not be able to slow down bombing at all. If you then also have to position your fighters very close to the front line to protect your units they become easy to destroy with ground units that suddenly break through the front lines. For such marginal fighter effectiveness this additional risk makes investing in fighters even less important. This harms the USSR in particular, which is generally fighting large amounts of tactical bombers, but has few bombers of their own. This means that they do not have to invest in fighters to protect their own bombers, but can at best use their investments in their airforce to slightly delay the enemy bombing. In addition, their front lines are also most prone to breaking and having to retreat. By increasing the interception range they will at least be able to save their fighters every time this happens, making it a slightly more viable strategy to invest in them. About the technology idea, I am not sure if it is important enough to spend MPPs on and slow down your research in other areas. Feel free to disagree though.

I ran my tests in the ww2 campaign included in patch 1.02. I did some additional testing just to be sure, but I keep coming up with some strange numbers. If you wish to try for yourself you can download the savegame I used here. It is a 2 player hotseat game without passwords where I just clicked through the turns. In it I invested 1 chit in 17 different research fields for countries that did not have any intelligence (just in case this has any effect). The numbers I got where the following. I have made all numbers that should not occur if it is 5% with +/- 2.5% bold. At the savegame it is 2 turns after the investment, so for each technology it is at the second number of the row when you load it. Italy IW: 6 12 16 19 HT: 7 14 24 31 NW: 10 20 24 32 AS: 7 12 16 20 ART: 11 16 20 31 AAD: 5 12 18 26 USA IW: 6 13 20 28 HT: 4 12 19 26 AA: 9 16 22 34 HB: 3 8 17 25 NW: 3 8 11 16 LRA: 7 16 21 32 AS: 7 14 17 25 France IW: 7 12 19 24 AA: 7 21 32 46 HB: 4 8 18 28 NW: 5 9 14 22 So as you can see, the largest number I got was 14 at turn 4 for AA with France. If the description in the patch notes is correct than it should never be higher than 8, which shows that there is indeed a problem here.

I think the amount of research points that you get is higher than it should be. The patch notes say the following: However when I tried researching 3 technologies with 0 intelligence and 1 chit invested in it I got the following numbers: 5 18 30 43 58 73 78 91 99 developed 13 18 23 33 36 44 51 58 66 78 83 89 96 developed 14 20 28 34 44 49 55 60 68 76 86 90 99 developed Average turns required: 12,6 (excluding breakthroughs) Min progress: 5 Max progress: 15 So at first sight it seems that the progress varies between 5 and 15 per turn, with 10 as average. This means that the real average of researching technology would be 10 turns, down from 20 turns in the original where you got a 5% chance of researching it per chit. Of course, now you can still achieve breakthroughs, so the actual research time will be even lower. That likely explains why in so many games you end up with very high technology levels very early on. Could you explain in a bit more detail how the new research system is intended to work? Is the research speed reduced on higher tech levels? And how does intelligence affect research speed? Or does it only affect breakthrough chance, like in the earlier games?

I recently noticed that fighters only intercept enemy aircraft in their own vision range, not in their strike range. At least this is how it works in the 1939 campaign. So a fighter with a strike range of 8 and a vision range of 4 will only intercept enemy aircraft in a range of 4. This even happens if the another unit spots the square that is attacked by the enemy aircraft. I never noticed this before and it seems a bit strange. Is this intentional or is this a bug?

It appears that a carrier bug has entered the 1939 campaign. The problem is that the air defense of carriers is not increased with advanced air upgrades. This value is used whenever carriers get intercepted by fighters and when fighters attack carriers. Take a look at the screenshot below as proof. All units (carriers and fighters) have level 3 advanced aircraft here. In the top picture the carrier attacks the unit of aircraft and will be intercepted, resulting in 5 losses for the carrier. In the bottom picture the surrounding aircraft have been removed and the carrier will no longer be intercepted. It will now only take 1 damage, down from 5. The reason for this is that the air defense value of carriers is 0 even when upgraded. When the fighter intercepts the carrier this value is used. This results in the intercepting fighter doing 4 (4-0) damage, whereas it is supposed to be reduced by the tech level of the aircraft carrier. So the correct value the intercepting fighter should do is 1 damage (4-3). Thus the solution is to make the air defense value of aircraft carriers increase with advanced aircraft upgrades. This will make sure that carriers will not be useless against land based fighters later in the game.

Thanks Bill, that manual is very useful and is exactly what I was looking for.

I'd like to thank Hubert and the other people working on this for bringing out such an excellent WW2 campaign for this game and I am very much enjoying it. I especially like the new unit model for tank destroyers. Although I am very satisfied overall and it is very early, there are still 2 minor points that I'd like to post of which I hope that they can be fixed in a possible future patch. In my current game the USSR declared war on Germany as early as February 1941. I understand that this has something to do with failing to take all the correct border positions near the USSR, but it is impossible to see which positions you have to occupy without manually checking the campaign scripts. It would very much help if you receive a notification about which positions you have to man to keep the USSR from perceiving your border as unoccupied. Secondly, the motorization cost for units seems to be a bit steep. The increase in movement speed is relatively small because units already move so fast. Yet, it increases the unit price with 20% per level even for tanks. This makes building and reinforcing the units so much more expensive that it is not worth the investment. Feel free to respond to the above points or to use this topic to respond to the new campaign.

Thanks for posting this AAR. I have to admit that I really wasn't expecting this outcome after the the first few turns. After the unbelievable progress that the Germans made into France I thought the game was practically finished already. When Germany crossed the river near Amiens I did not think that France would've been able to push them back. That would mean that Germany would have to cross only a single more river to get into the unprotected rearland of France. Turns out France did manage to push them back and reestablish a defensive line near Amiens. Amazing.

I am fairly sure this was the case in 1.00 as well. You can however upgrade detachments with motorization.

Can't believe I am the youngest to respond so far: 25.

It is useful to understand the basics of combat, which can be found in the manual. It is not very complicated and it greatly helps you making decisions. Shortly summarized, it works with the following three formulas: Damage received = Damage done attacker - Damage reduction defender Damage done attacker = (Attack value + (experience / 3)) * readiness Damage reduction defender = (Defense bonus (comes from terrain/cities/trenches etc) + (experience / 3) + entrenchment) * readiness The important thing to notice here is that readiness modifies the damage done and the damage reduction in a drastic manner. A unit with 50% readiness will only receive half defense bonuses and deal half as much damage. Thus a unit with low readiness (10%) receives almost no benefit from entrenchment, terrain and experience. If your units get destroyed easily, even when they are entrenched it is likely that you have a readiness problem. You can fix this by in the following manners: Moving units with low morale out of combat for a while until their morale has restored Keeping the strength of your units high Keeping your units in good supply by moving HQs close Having HQs lead the units

The game should not be that hard and on the standard difficulty you can win fairly easily with either side unless you play at a higher difficulty. One of the main contributing factors to winning is the investments you make in technology. Industrial technology gives you a massive income boost each level, which makes the investment back almost instantly. Next, infantry weapons make your entire army much stronger than the enemies. If the difference in infantry weapons is 2 levels, which is easy to achieve against the AI, you can overrun their lines completely unless they have a very high trench warfare, in which case you'll need artillery. So industrial technology and infantry weapons are of the highest priority and you should consider not spending any MPPs until you have 5 chits in industrial technology research. Shell production, intelligence, trench warfare and heavy artillery are also somewhat useful, all other technologies are secondary or useless. If you find the enemy breaking your front line you should make sure that all your units of the front line are entrenched and commanded by a headquarters. You can put these on auto-assist to select the units you want to command. Units that are commanded will rarely drop below 50% readiness and that will ensure that they have a high damage reduction, which will make it very difficult to destroy them. Uncommanded or unentrenched units will die very quickly. Also pick your defensive line carefully behind rivers or on rough terrain.

Apparently you do not receive a national morale bonus when you destroy a seaplane carrier, but you do receive a bonus if you destroy any other naval vessel. I assume that this is not intentional and was overlooked when making the patch?

Not declaring war on Belgium sounds like an interesting cheesy strategy. With such a tiny front it will become impossible for France and England to attack Germany and Russia will be facing massive armies that they can't possibly hold back. Will Belgium not eventually join the entente on their own? Otherwise the central powers get Belgium for free, because France is forced to attack it. This will likely have negative diplomatic consequences for the Entente as well.

Changes look very nice, well done and thanks a lot.

Yes, I believe the manual mentions this. Bill later claimed on this forum that the relationship wasn't very big to not prevent players from counterattacking. How big the exact effect is neither in the manual nor on the forums however.

I see your point that in principle fully upgraded bombers are useful if you use them for strategic bombing. A fully upgraded bomber with 70% readiness would do 45 MPP in damage to an upgraded mine (15 + 12 + 9 + 6 + 3) and take roughly 4 MPP in damage back. Against a city it would be 15 MPP in damage and 4 MPP back. This excludes the industrial percentage of nations. So if a nation would have 200% industrial capacity it could do up to 86 MPP in damage per strike (45*2-4). Note that I assume here the chance of taking a point of damage when attacking a unit with 0 defense is 25%, I am not sure whether this is correct. This is fairly much, although at this point you would have invested 950 MPP in getting your 2 units of bombers (350 for research, 2x 300 for upgraded bombers). That means you would have to get about 12 good strikes against an enemy mine (950 MPP / 86 MPP) to get your investment back. That should, with 2 bombers, be reasonably well possible. So it is true that fully upgraded bombers have the potential to be useful and I agree that increasing the bomber limit could make the investment pay itself back. Of course, this will not happen until late game and it assumes that you have several mines nearby, and the enemy is not actively countering your strategy. Also because there seem to be so many better technology options available I'd still say some additional buff would be needed to make them a better choice. That is my view on the matter though, feel free to decide differently.

I am pretty sure it works, but keep in mind that it only applies to defense bonus, not to entrenchment. So if a unit receives entrenchment from a trench it will still be more difficult to kill him than if he would be standing in the same type of square without a trench.

UFC Addict, the morale loss is calculated when MPP is lost, not when units are lost. Thus, if a piece of artillery of strength 10 loses 5 strength you will lose 150 national morale points. It doesn't matter whether the unit is destroyed or not and so disbanding naval units would not save these national morale points.