mcaryf1

Hi Hubert I guessed it might be something like that. I should think airships would have raided MS given an opportunity. Mike

I notice that Maritime Aircraft cannot be set to raid convoys. Was this a policy decision or is it just too hard to implement it? Previously I used bombers as maritime recce and it seemed reasonable that they would also be raiders. Regards Mike

I have been researching the Soviet and Axis OOBs for a May 1942 scenario and I wanted to create a unit that represented the typical reserve force that was held at Army Group or Front level at this time. This was usually something like a Corps of infantry plus artillery and anti-tank units to be deployed to bolster a critical attack or plug gaps when on the defensive. Clearly SC does not normally allow interventions in the defensive phase except in the case of artillery. So my "AG Reserve" unit has had to be built using the normal artillery unit. That has worked out OK now that we have two types of artillery. I have effectively given the units the attributes of a corps in terms of defence and attack, beefed up its A/T capability somewhat and given it a strike range of 2 and minimum 3 shells . I do not like the fact that the normal artillery has 100% evasion so I give this one 60% evasion so on average it will take one hit when firing 3 times. It does not become too powerful because artillery type units cannot both move and attack so it can support another unit's attack with a bombardment but cannot itself push through gaps and I think this is about right. The AG Reserve can survive in the front line (the 60% evasion is defensive as well as offensive but then I give armies and corps levels of evasion as well to distinguish them from mere divisions) but is best not deployed there. The Germans had a number of Army Groups (North, Centre, South, A, B etc) - I give them up to 10 to cover the various Western fronts as well. The USSR has a dozen or so, the British have 2 and the US 6. The Japanese get 4 but the Chinese and Italians only have 2 each. Effectively I have AG Reserve units covering a lot of the front lines so I typically get artillery duels plus artillery defensive fire rather similar to the initial attack phase by air deployed by the AI. I am quite pleased with the way this is working at the moment because it seems only right that there should be more artillery intervention in a WW2 scenario. It is certainly true that artillery caused the greatest numbers of military casualties in WW2 and even that great tank exponent Gen Patton declared to the effect that everyone should know that it was the US Artillery that won their land battles for them. I would recommend other modders and even the SC team to try it out. I include the AG Reserve unit image that I use. Regards Mike

Thanks Hubert - is my work around correct? Regards Mike

The weather setting seems to be wrong in AOD for Murmansk in that the port becomes ice bound and the convoys stop in winter. This is incorrect it was an ice free port and this is why it was used despite the poor facilities there and its proximity to Axis air bases. I think the weather zone setting should be weather zone 3 rather than 5. If I am correct, it is easy to change for players who do not want to wait for a patch. Use the editor "map" menu item "weather setting" and change the setting in the port area to 3. This can make a significant difference to the game outcome as the UK convoys will stop when the port is iced up and the USSR will lose a lot of income at a critical point in time. Regards Mike

Further to my thread "size matters", I have been experimenting with giving land units a degree of evasion so that an army will over time suffer less damage than a division when fighting similar units. I am trying armies with 40% evasion, corps with 20% and divisions with none. I was interested to see that even if a unit successfully evades damage it will still sometimes be forced to retreat. I do not know if the developers realised that this would happen but I do actually quite like it as it does offer a good compromise between an attack having no impact or it causing too much damage on larger units. Regards Mike

I have noticed an odd intelligence report which tells me (as Allies) that a Japanese CV has been spotted near UK, However, the actual CV is just South of Japan. I investigated why this should be and the only thing I have come up with is that Japan seems to have the same weather zone (2) as UK which is called UK. Do intelligence reports use weather zones to locate ships that have been spotted? If this is the case, how might I change it as I have not yet tried to learn much about the weather system? Mike

I know that it is possible to export many different characteristics from one scenario to input to other scenarios - this is very useful. However, I am interested to know if it is possible to export data into some file, such as a spreadsheet format, that can then be manipulated by other general purpose software. My purpose is to try to create for myself lists of the various units by country that I can total various ways so I can see how the OOB I have created for the Axis countries compares to that of the Allied countries in different scenarios starting at different points in time. Clearly I can do this by transcribing all the unit build stats by hand so this is just asking if there is a shortcut method. Regards Mike

Hi PowerrGmbH I personally do not have any problem conceptually with units such as divisions having a different meaning with respect to manpower size in each country as I like to be able to use real unit names. Thus a division could be 10k men for the Russians and 20k men for the Americans but if you did this you would need a mechanism for the combat routines to determine how much loss each of the divisions should take when they are attacked. This could be by the game understanding how many fighting men were included in each unit. The combat target value for a US division could be twice that for a Russian division and that determines how much damage it causes when it attacks but you have to have a mechanism to determine how much damage it receives in the combat. The defensive ctv only dictates how much damage it gives to whatever attacked it, it does not, as I understand it, influence how much damage it receives itself. My understanding is that the damage calculation gives an absolute number to be subtracted from the strength and other factors to be taken from the morale etc. There needs to be an additional mechanism that distinguishes a Russian Division from a US one so that the Russian division takes relatively more damage because it was fundamentally a smaller unit - this could be an underlying manpower count. It is a more obvious example if you think about a division being attacked either by an army or by another division - my understanding is that the SC routines would not distinguish between the attacking division and the attacking army and would say that the same defensive damage in terms of absolute strength loss was caused to each of them by the defending division. Regards Mike

Hi Big Al Actually the attack strength is different between a division and a corps so I do not use that as an example as the problem is not so obvious although the effect is still there. The problem in the attack case is that the attacker does the same damage to the unit being attacked regardless of what it is other than it being soft. Thus if it is calculated as doing damage "1" then if the attacked unit was a division the repair cost might be, say, 10 but if it was an army then the repair cost might be some multiple of that. The issue in the other case is that the damage done to an attacking unit by a defender is calculated based on the CTV of the defender without reference to what the attacker unit was other than its type. Thus when you have many different units all conforming to the same type i.e. "soft" then they would all have their damage calculated using the same algorithm irrespective of the fact that one of them might effectively be 5 times the size of the other and therefore the cost to repair is likely to be 5 times greater. A number of other factors come into play in calculating damage such as entrenchment, experience etc so this anomaly is not obvious but if the documentation is correct then it does happen and as you introduce more unit types such as divisions in AOD the anomaly gets worse. Regards Mike

Hi SeaMonkey I suggest a different experiment - set up 10 people throwing tennis balls at two people who can also throw at the 10 people. The rule is that if any person is hit twice they are out of action. How likely is it that the 2 people will be hit twice and both out of action before they succeed in getting any 2 hits let alone 2 on the same person. Clearly a larger force has more troops looking for the enemy so I would reckon they have a better chance of finding where they are - the two forces are meant to be qualitatively equivalent. Regards Mike

Hi Big Al I will use your example and assume that for the Russians your Division unit = 1 real division and your army unit = 5 real divisions. Let us assume that either of these attacks a German division unit and that both the Russian army and division have similar values for morale, readiness, entrenchment etc. My understanding is that the SC routines will calculate the damage caused to the Russian units by the defensive action of the German division in precisely the same way taking no account of the fact that one attacking unit was an army and the other a division as they are both "soft". So let us assume that the damage caused was evaluated at the loss of 1 strength point. In the case of your army unit this would correlate to the loss of 50% of a division (i.e. 10% of the five divisions that make up the army) whereas for the russian division unit the damage is equivalent to 10% of its strength i.e. 10% of 1 division. I do not agree with SeaMonkey's suggestion that a larger attacking unit should be expected to receive more casualties (and certainly not 5 times more) indeed the opposite should be true as the extra resources in the army should help to suppress the enemy force more rapidly. I have based my argument on the paper describing the science of sc which is amongst the extras issued with Gold. It is possible that the combat routines are no longer the same but I have not seen anything which says that is the case. Regards Mike

Hi Karhu Thank you for supporting my argument that the 1939 situation as now represented in AOD after the patch is incorrect even if I was not 100% right about the situation after the Winter War. Regards Mike

Hi Al I am really using the idea of a division as a broad brush example rather than arguing that a division was the same size in all its various national manifestations. I guess you will not disagree with me that for any country an army would be several tyimes the size of a division therefore the damage calculated for armies and for divisions should somehow be different when they fight the same opponent. Regards Mike

I would like to know where it will now be most appropriate to post ideas related to SC3. For the time being I will post the following issue here as it relates to AOD but I would like to see it resolved in SC3. I would like to have a discussion about issues connected with having a number of unit types with similar characteristics except for relative size. In AOD we now have Divisions, Corps and Armies. My understanding of the conflict resolution mechanism in the Strategic Command series is that the damage caused by attackers and defenders is calculated largely by using the attackers characteristics for damage to the defender and the defenders' characteristics for damage to the attacker but based in each case on the opposing unit's type. Thus if an attacker is "soft" the routines will look at the defender's rating for soft defence modify that by strength, readiness, morale etc and calculate damage caused. Let us say that for example the damage caused is 1. Now this will be the same whether the attacker was a division, a corps or an army. Clearly there is something wrong with this if one assumes that a corps is something bigger than a division and an army is bigger than both. I am currently experimenting with ways to handle a division unit actually representing 2 real divs, a corps unit =4 real divs and an army = 8 real divs or 2 real corps. Plainly applying damage of 1 to an army is pretty near the destruction of a whole "real" division whilst if the actual attacker was a division unit then damage of 1 would effectively be .2 of a real division! I am currently addressing this in 2 ways but neither is entirely satisfactory. First I am making repair costs relatively cheaper for larger units. Thus if a corps represents 2 division units then I will make the % to repair the larger unit half that of the smaller one e.g. one might be 8% and the other 4%. This sort of fixes the problem but after the event and does not recognise that the large unit concerned might have been completely destroyed with various tactical consequences. The second approach is to introduce the concept of damage evasion which SC includes as an option for all unit types. In this case the approach can be based on the idea of giving the larger unit twice as much evasion as the smaller unit and over time this will reflect the capability of the larger unit to withstand more damage than the smaller. The difficulty with this evasion based approach is that it has to apply to all land or all sea related combat. Where land includes land based air. This means that I have to evaluate a quite complex set of interactions that adjusts the impact of evasion versus a whole range of potential attacking units. In practice I am currently experimenting with an AOD based scenario which uses a combination of cheaper reinforcement costs for "larger" units and some level of evasion which starts at zero for divisions and works up to around 40% for army sized units. There seem to be some benefits to this approach because it does depress the overall level of casualties and it gives another characteristic to distinguish Special or Elite Forces. I treat SF as equivalent in size to my division units but I give them a degree of evasion which represents quite well the ability of elite units to dish out more damage than they take. However, at the end of the day my two solutions do look somewhat artificial and, since evasion values are not visible to players, somewhat opaque. I would hope that in SC3 if we are to have different sized units this might somehow be recognised in their strength calculations. Thus in determining damage caused or losses taken an army might be recognised as being worth 2 times corps. There is another problem in wargaming when a "large" unit is allowed unrealistically to concentrate all its potential force along one axis but I will leave that discussion to another post and give some of you an opportunity to comment on the problems of relative unit size first. Regards Mike

Subs diving through canals used to happen with the Kiel Canal as well into the Baltic but looking at the positioning of ports there in AOD it probably will not happen for Kiel now. I would think that a port tile could be placed at the Med end of Suez that would make it most unlikely for Suez as well. Clearly submarines should not be able to pass through hostile canals. Straits are however another matter and both German and Italian submarines did pass in and out of the Med via the Straits of Gibraltar. You can make this happen by creating a loop with entrances and exits close by Gib so that whoever owns Gib can attack whatever unit is trying to use the loop. Clearly surface vessels could have attempted to run past Gib but would have been subject to devastating attack, subs at least should have a reasonable chance of getting through unharmed by diving which in the case of Straits is reasonable although it is not for canals. Regards Mike

I notice in 1.01 in response I think to a post you have changed the ownership of tiles in the North of Finland so that the USSR has a border with Norway. Surely this is incorrect until the Winter War event as Finland had access to the sea in the North until she lost out in the Winter War after which USSR took over that territory and after WW2 has actually retained it. The Finns and Germans did recapture the lost territory during Barbarossa. I guess this might be subject to a diplomatic incident if you try to arbitrate as to whether that land belonged to Finland or USSR but strictly speaking in 1939 Finland was in occupation of it so I guess after the Winter war you have a choice to make it belong to Finland but occupied by USSR or annexed by USSR but in Sept 1939 it should not be as it is. Regards Mike

Hi Bill & Hubert Thank you for 1.01. Have you got any tips as to the best way to apply the changes to a scenario that has taken World at War and moved it forward to 1942 and incorporated some map changes? I would like, for example, to include, the new town of Kursk but I have made several other resource changes of my own in terms of fortifications etc. I presume in this situation it will be best to add Kursk myself as that is the lesser task. However, where you have made a number of terrain changes e.g. hills and marshes but I have only made a few then might it be best to import your changes which I guess might nullify mine? Finally if I have made some changes to the tile layer, such as reducing the size of Midway, will that prevent any imports until I change the tiles back to what they were? Regards Mike

The AI in SC has always been far too aggressive with respect to its naval aspects and this impacts the Italians as well as the Germans. It is probably too late for current versions of SC but within the AI routines there really ought to be some concept of navies being strategically on the defensive or offensive. If they are defensive, then their reaction range to threats should be reduced drastically so, for example, naval surface units could be set to stay within range of supporting land based air. This approach would allow the AI to maintain a "fleet in being" which is what the Germans actually did in Norway. I tried to simulate this in my Axis Triumphant 1942 scenario by turning the Tirpitz into a BB belonging to Finland based in Norway with AP movement limited to 2 tiles (this was in SCGC, AOD might need to be 3 or 4 tiles). I also had difficulty with the AI moving the fighter providing air cover to Tirpitz to another theatre so I located an AA unit with range 2 on a headland next to Tirpitz's port - conceptually you can regard an AA unit as being an air defence system with a mixture of guns and short range fighter interceptors . Tirpitz still did not typically last very long under AI control but at least the destruction was not immediate and I set it to have a cheap and quick rebuild if sunk with supply of 8 or more which was a fair representation of reality. Regards Mike

Is it just due to a lack of space on the editor advanced research screen that caused the editor not to be able to adjust anti-tank research increment levels e.g. to 0.5 instead of 1 or are A/T units treated a special way as they have 3 different unit images depending on research level? Regards Mike

Great - I quite enjoy being in the forefront of error detection so long as it is not something slowing up my own development! Regards Mike

Hi Bill By the original AOD I mean the default campaign - I had to do a slight mod to it as none of the countries had AA research. Regards Mike

Hi Bill I tried that but it does the same with the original editor on both my scenario and the original AOD just modded so that one country (Germany) has uprated AA tech. I am pressing ahead with sorting out the various units to be in the right place and with the right IDs for May 1942 so I have plenty to do before I need to uprate port AA values.. Regards Mike

I am getting a crash on the editor when I am trying to add enhanced AA capability to a port resource. I get the message Failed properties (dialogue: on_vertical_scroll_control) and then the editor crashes to desktop when I respond OK. I have tested this with both one of my own heavily modified scenarios and the standard 1939 scenario just changed to give Germany level 1 AA research. Note I am using the amended editor which Hubert sent me to fix the Friendly_Position error although that is not obviously related to this. Regards Mike

Hi Bill I am sorry I was just looking at country parent rather than country occupier. I think that should have fixed it! Regards Mike