Big Al Posted January 30, 2012 Author Share Posted January 30, 2012 Nope doesnt. Nav Warfare, Air Warfare, LR A/C Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaMonkey Posted January 31, 2012 Share Posted January 31, 2012 I see Al, well.........Hubert, Bill, come on guys, we've got three slots for tech upgrades, at least let the campaign designer mix and match what he feels as appropriate. Wouldn't be a terrifically bad idea to have a designer slot, where the scenario maker could name his tech upgrade along with the customized CTVs. How about it out there you scenario crafters, want to customize your tech upgrades?:cool: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted January 31, 2012 Author Share Posted January 31, 2012 I already put that idea in their ears. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaMonkey Posted February 5, 2012 Share Posted February 5, 2012 An inconclusive update Al, from PBEM, Hotseat, and a couple of models I've set up. As of August 16, 1940, Chinese are in dire straits when Japanese push a full ground onslaught, research, naval reinforcement and upgrades largely ignored. You might want to consider Urumchi as a final "alternate capital" as it is unlikely the Japs will ever take the place and will allow the Chinese to re-enter the fray with Allied help. USSR at 44% and have a vast army deployed in multiple echelons without many tech upgrades, but it seems almost hopeless to initiate Barbarossa from an Axis perspective. The one hope is the Axis experience factor, we shall see how this theater unfolds. Everything else seems well done, especially the Battle for France. Thought maybe the Frogs could hold out, they had plenty of assets, as the Reds seem to, but the Blitzkrieg was still unstoppable. Enjoying the scenario immensely, thanks for all your hardwork. Oh yeah, I noticed the experience medals for the CW was the German Cross.:confused: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted February 5, 2012 Author Share Posted February 5, 2012 Cool I will add Urmuchi as an alt. One thing I would like is when you get in the ware with the USA as Japan what happens. I found if I super push China I am not prepared for the USA. I might have to buff the Chinese economy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcaryf1 Posted February 6, 2012 Share Posted February 6, 2012 Hi Big Al Now that I have finished my first SC game I have had a look at your Brute Force scenario although not actually played it yet. I very much like what you have done with creating more space on the map although Midway is still very much oversized. It is a pity that you cannot rename Italy and China as that did initially confuse me - I had forgotten that you wanted Italy as a major. I see that you have preserved the interpretation of standard SC in making DDs have more action points than other ship types. In my view this is not right - DD's were fast but actually short ranged so, for example, German DDs could not make it into the Atlantic and hope to return without refuelling somehow. I am not sure why you have created fictional names for some of your ships - there are plenty of real WW2 warship names. For example Vanguard was not built by 1939 whereas you could have used Valiant which was. You have also chosen to use a lot of Japanese admirals amongst your HQ units where they are not really appropriate, again there are more than enough Japanese generals from which to choose. I guess I might be being a bit picky in pointing this out and it will not bother a lot of people but my own enjoyment of a wargame/simulation comes from my knowledge of what the real people or units actually achieved. I wanted to open it within the editor to see fairly quickly what changes you might have made to combat characteristics, pricing etc as I have spotted some just looking at units. Unfortunately my editor refuses to open the scenario as it says the convoy.txt is missing. I also noted a comment when I loaded the scenario that the campaign.ini file was missing and it will not give me the Victory conditions. I guess this is a mistake I have made in downloading and placing the files? Regards Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted February 6, 2012 Author Share Posted February 6, 2012 Are you in SC2 or SC2 gold? The SC2 version is way behind the gold version of the game. SC2 Gold has 8 major powers. As for the DDs they are more designed to be ASW units not combat units. The fictional names are ships that were designed but never build. Each BB/CV counter = 3 capital ships, each CA counter = 5 cruisers, each DD counter = 50 DD/DE To give you a scope. I believe the planes are on the scale of 400 a/c per counter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcaryf1 Posted February 6, 2012 Share Posted February 6, 2012 Hi Big Al The version I downloaded is called 3.81 and was submitted in Feb 2011 which I assumed would make it the 1.07 version. Certainly I can load it in 1.07 and look at the maps, units etc but I do get the error messages I mentioned. There is a separate repository area for Gold scenarios but that currently seems to be empty. The numbers of equivalent units you quoted to me does not make a lot of sense in an historical context - I am not aware of a single operation in WW2 with the exception of the battles around Leyte where 50 x DD were deployed by any side. Giving a BB unit any sort of ASW capability can only be conceptualised by assuming that the BB unit has integral DD escorts. Scharnhorst and Gneisnau are treated in SC as CAs although they were really BCs (Battle Cruisers) which would leave the historic German Navy with no BB units if the scale for SC is 3 capital ships per unit. The resources consumed in constructing Bismark were equivalent to more than 50 x U-Boats and the scale for subs seems to be 1 for 50 since you start the Italians with 2 x subs and they actually had 115 and the Germans with 1 and they had just over 50. Thus I guess there is an argument that each BB deserves to be represented in the game's scale, however, as I found in my trial game it can be tough to deal with both the RN and the IJN if they have their full complement of BBs. I shall have to think about this a bit more but your really good way of creating a larger map might help to sort out the massing of BBs around the UK which I encountered in my own game. Regards Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted February 7, 2012 Author Share Posted February 7, 2012 The german subs are 1:25. I made them smaller scale and reflect that in their damage vs ASW. They were also physically smaller too, almost 1/2 the size of a USA sub. I felt the 3 capital ships per counter was the right size for the mod. Anymore and the map would be flooded, any less, not as fun. The updated BF mods (39 and 42) are in the GOLD edition automatically when you buy it. As I update so does Hubert. If you want to modify it just "save as" then go from there. You cant modify protected scenarios. I try and design my mods historical to start then modify them for a balance of fun and playability. BF39 and BF42 are wargames based on history, not historical recreations. because with hindsight playing a historically accurate game the Germans and Japanese wouldnt have gotten very far. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcaryf1 Posted February 7, 2012 Share Posted February 7, 2012 Hi Big Al I have been thinking some more about units in SC especially naval ones. It seems to me that the best approach might be to look at the displacements of the actual warships involved. For example Yamato displaced around 70,000 tons whereas Andrea Doria was only around 25,000. Thus you might need 3 Andrea Dorias to make one Yamato but all were regarded as capital ships. Also the largest US warships, the Iowas, were only around 45,000 tons so they too should not be strictly comparable. The IJN deliberately built monster BBs to gain an advantage because they knew the US were limiting themselves to ships which could pass through the Panama Canal. Unfortunately for them the rise of airpower did for the Battleship monster or otherwise. I have not finished with my analysis yet but I am working on an idea that it might be possible to cluster warships into 3 groups one which contains 90,000 tons of shipping, one at 45,000 tons and one at 20,000 tons. The 90k and 45k groups would be rated as BB and CA respectively and should be populated by units that were historically, BBs, BCs and CAs plus an integral DD escort for each to count as their ASW protection. The 20,000 group would be populated by light cruisers and destroyers. Thus Yamato might notionally be herself plus a heavy cruiser plus DDs, whereas 2 x Iowa might be needed or 2 x RN KGVs plus CAs or even 3 x Andrea Doria. The designer could choose to make the Iowas single ship CAs or combined to be a BB - I guess those from the US might be offended if the CA option were taken and anyway the US had plenty of ships so better to group them up whereas the Axis player might prefer the flexibility of Scharnhorst and Gneisnau (really 30,000 ton Battle Cruisers designed to be convertible to 15" guns) being in the CA group. I am also looking at the equivalence of investing in tank units as compared with naval ones. Thus the Yamato BB unit would contain about 90,000 tons of materiel and 4-5,000 crew members whereas a Tank Group is equivalent to about 3 Tank Divisions with 800 or so tanks plus many other vehicles and therefore would have consumed 30 - 35,000 tons of materiel and 40-50,000 men. If you apply a notional cost of 2 MPP to each batch of 1,000 highly trained men and 3 x MPP for each ton of materiel this would result in the tank group being around half the cost of a BB unit. Note a corps consists of about 100,000 not so highly trained men but with some materiel hence their cost is right in this model at about 100 MPP. There is a bit of a problem with tank unit sizes in SC because the standard unit seems to be about 3 Divisions but the Germans did not deploy as many as 3 Panzer Divisions in North Africa until after the Allied landings. Thus there really ought to be a smaller tank unit perhaps one might be a Panzer Corps equivalent to one/two Divisions whereas the Tank Group becomes a Panzer Army with 3 - 4 Divisions. Minor countries such as Rumania could have their Tank units which would be typically smaller than a Tank Corps catered for in their combat stats. I do realise that SC is not meant to be a direct simulation of WW2 but it is an interesting exercise to see how actual units and production could be made to map onto SC units and to try out different Axis strategies. For example how many U-Boats ought to be equivalent to one of my CA units (e.g. Bismark). In terms of materiel/displacement you could have 40 - 50 and in terms of crew numbers it would be about half. Giving costs of a CA of 225 and for a sub unit of 50 subs of about 150. Your use of 25 x subs would mean a cost in my model of 75. However, they did build well over 1,000 of them for WW2 so at that scale you could have over 40 units, historically about half got sunk but that would not necessarily happen in the game and you have a build limit of 7! Regards Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaMonkey Posted February 8, 2012 Share Posted February 8, 2012 Sounds like you've been going over WWII by John Ellis or maybe the Oxford Companion to, whatever the insight, I like your logic Mike. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaMonkey Posted February 8, 2012 Share Posted February 8, 2012 Maybe the mechanized unit that Al has created could fill that void of the panzergruppe versus the panzer army. Whereas the infantry units are upgradeable by IW, and the tank units by HT, the mech corps(panzer grenadier) could have both, allowing either an infantry heavy formation or one with more numerous armor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted February 8, 2012 Author Share Posted February 8, 2012 Remember people this is a wargame for fun, not a historical simulation. If you want perfect historical simulation with screw ups then play Europa. You need a whole garage and about 5-8 years of your life for 1 game. And the ships are just an average in my game no counter is specific. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcaryf1 Posted February 8, 2012 Share Posted February 8, 2012 Hi Big Al Of course the game is for fun but in my case I get more fun the more real it is and the more I learn about it the more real it seems it could potentially be. It is a great game. Hi SeaMonkey I do have John Ellis' book but he does have some errors in the Naval sections (e.g. no Shokaku or Zuikaku in the IJN CVs). I do know more about naval warfare and OOB's in WW2 than, for example, the detailed OOB's for land armies so when I see some obvious errors in the Naval material it worries me whether the the other sections are totally accurate. Regards Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yolo911 Posted February 9, 2012 Share Posted February 9, 2012 Hi, I would like to try your MOD. My only concern is China. Did you reduce it's military Uber-can't-be-stopped to perhaps just ability equal to the the rest of the forces in the game? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted February 9, 2012 Author Share Posted February 9, 2012 China defends just fine but their armies are weakened for attack. In the latest version I gave them more production. I found a determined Japan could KO them out of the war and still be in good shape vs the USA. It should be either or but not both. I wasnt even trying to kill China and I did. I usually test AI vs AI and when I feel they got the bases covered I play test myself as each side vs the AI. I lost my game as allies vs axis AI. I tried a different russian tech build and it cost me the game. Now I am the axis playing. China is on the ropes and I am at war with the US. Im going for taking Hawaii. Germans I think will do well in Russia. Im sitting out the winter and waiting for summer to smash them. In africa I took Egypt just before major reinforcements came for the UK. Might have to bump that up. Mike its really hard to balance history with wargame. You have to fudge a lot of things. I started 100% historical and slowly have shifted to a more balanced game. Its not easy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaMonkey Posted February 16, 2012 Share Posted February 16, 2012 The more I play, the more I appreciate this outstanding campaign. Another thing I noticed, Al, is that you've given a lot of ports supply 8 with adjoining towns/cities that are at 5 supply. You realize that with HQs in proximity of the 8 supply ports the player can get 10 supply? I'm fine with it, but it is a bit different then most of the other designed campaigns. I was wondering what your rationale was for this decision? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted February 16, 2012 Author Share Posted February 16, 2012 Give me some cities you mean. It wasnt intentional. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SeaMonkey Posted February 16, 2012 Share Posted February 16, 2012 I didn't do Vichy in one game, so check out all the French ports(Brest, Cherbourg, etc.), especially in the south. Getting ready to DoW Spain, when I find them, I'll let you know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isnogud Posted February 18, 2012 Share Posted February 18, 2012 Hi, in my latest PBEM game china surrenderd to japan. After this the japanese income suddenly drops to 58. This seems way to low. Also japan should get income from the chinese cities. Is this a bug? Greetings Falk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted February 18, 2012 Author Share Posted February 18, 2012 Cant read the date. If you did conquer china there is a good chance the USA and NEI dropped trade with you. The income problem was a weird issue. I thought it was resolved. Do you have an older version? BTW how is the PBEM game going. I am always looking for feedback on balance human vs human Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isnogud Posted February 18, 2012 Share Posted February 18, 2012 The date is 11.10.1940. I have the version that did come with the gold game. I think China did fall too soon. On the other hand Japan invested everything against China. We'll have to see until USSR and US enters the war. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted February 18, 2012 Author Share Posted February 18, 2012 Cool thanks. I increased China's production in the last mod. There should be 2 mines. \ Im going to be curious when USA enters the war if you will be prepared. You shouldnt be. The choice should be kill china and not be prepared for USA or be reasonable in China and be prepared for USA. That production is weird. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isnogud Posted February 18, 2012 Share Posted February 18, 2012 Cool thanks. I increased China's production in the last mod. There should be 2 mines. \ Im going to be curious when USA enters the war if you will be prepared. You shouldnt be. The choice should be kill china and not be prepared for USA or be reasonable in China and be prepared for USA. That production is weird. Well the USA did now enter the war and I am not prepared. I do not have even enough MPP to repair the ships. The convoy routes show that china should deliver 89MPP but it does not. I will try to get Hong Kong so maybe then the convoy works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted February 19, 2012 Author Share Posted February 19, 2012 Thats so weird. Lemme look through my emails with Hubert Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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