Weapons and Warfare v1.03 Patch and Demo Released!!!

[Madmatt]

Spring is in the air and today we are pleased to release the all new v1.03 Patch and Demo for Strategic Command 2 Weapons and Warfare.

Featuring AI enhancement, bug fixes and game play balance improvements, the new demo and patch can be found at the links below.

GAME ENGINE CHANGES

- Fixed a unit reinforcement error that caused them to reinforce backwards and even below strength=0

- Fixed a SURRENDER_1 event error that caused countries that surrendered to themselves to also become annexed, and as a result were no longer making purchases, i.e. UK moves to Egypt via SURRENDER_1 event

- Fixed a Transport load error that caused transports to load in disconnected sea zones

- Fixed a Strategic Bomber and Rocket bug that in some cases caused the AI to not target resources with units on top of them and as a result Strategic Bombers now do a much better job spreading out attacks on enemy resources

- Fixed an Air unit retreat error that also fixed a unit placement error for units such as HQ's, Artillery, Anti-Air etc. where each of these units will do a much better job staying out of strike range of enemy units

- Fixed a transport embarkation error during E-Mail replay

- Fixed a Garrison unit replacement bug

- Fixed a set of Transport and Amphibious Transport movement errors that often caused them to continually bump into the same enemy naval unit

- Fixed an animate replay bug

- Fixed a unit mirroring bug

- Enemy units can now capture adjacent ports when there are no friendly units in the immediate vicinity, should help in Crete

- Fixed a reinforcement error

- improved AI naval movement under FoW that will help it to avoid spotted enemy naval units, i.e. improved stealth movement

- Retreating air units will also try and maintain good supply, i.e. in North Africa they should no longer retreat deep into the desert unless no other option exists

- Assignment of existing map Transport units for AMPHIBIOUS scripts now looks to see if they are in the same naval zone, i.e. connected, as the #COASTAL_POSITION

- Assignment of existing map Transport units for TRANSPORT scripts now looks to see if they are in the same naval zone, i.e. connected, as the #GOAL_POSITION

- Assignment of naval units for FLEET scripts now looks to see if they are in the same naval zone, i.e. connected, as the top listed #FRIENDLY_POSITION

- Fixed an AI planning assignment bug where the AI may have generically assigned an OFFENSIVE plan to a similar scripted BUILD_UP_OFFENSIVE plan causing the BUILD_UP_OFFENSIVE plan to be subsequently cancelled

- BUILD_UP_OFFENSIVE plans now properly allocate units (on the first pass) nearest the top #FRIENDLY_POSITION specified in the scripted event

- Tactical and strategic bomber units are now likely to attack a target, despite high initial losses, if they are well supported by friendly air, i.e. this should help mimic human ability to accept initial losses to break through limited enemy air and achieve the desired strikes

- Engineers can no longer Fortify on a Land + Water tile as this prevented naval movement through the tile

EDITOR RELATED CHANGES

- Fixed a Battle for Russia 2D military sprite error

- Fixed an error with Vichy France in the 1940, 1941, 1942 campaigns as it was set to Neutral and not Axis alignment

- Fixed a few Combat Target Table typos in the WaW Expansion Manual

- Fixed a fortification destroy on overrun error for the 1941-1944 campaigns

- Fixed a Hitler Suicide POPUP error

- Removed a Soviet Anti-Air from the Siberian Transfer and added it to the P/Q instead. Increased Soviet Anti-Air builds from 2 to 3

- Reduced German Anti-Air builds from 5 to 3

- Increased Rockets cost from 100 to 200

- Decreased Rocket Land and Naval unit attack values from 1 to 0

- Increased Soviet Artillery builds from 2 to 3

- Added a French surrendered check for some pre-Barbarossa German AI unit bonuses

- Added a French surrendered check for some Axis AI WAR ENTRY events

- Fixed a UNIT script error that did not properly assign a UK bonus unit to Alexandria once the AI went on the OFFENSIVE towards Tobruk

- Added a Swedish Destroyer to the map

- TERRITORY scripts can now be set for countries that do not yet exist such as Vichy France

- Entire subdirectory structure of a campaign including Bitmaps, Interface and Sound directories etc., is now copied over when using "SaveAs"

PREVIOUS SAVE GAME COMPATIBILITY NOTE

Save games created with earlier versions of the game are NOT compatible with v1.03. Please finish your in-progress games before applying this patch.

[ Download the Weapons and Warfare v1.03 Patch here ]

[ Download the v1.03 Weapons and Warfare Demo here ]

Madmatt

[ March 26, 2008, 02:46 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ]

[Lars]

PBEM compatible I assume?

[Hubert Cater]

Lars,

Unfortunately this patch is NOT backwards compatible with saved games from previous versions of Weapons and Warfare.

Hubert

[Lars]

Ok, thanks!

[Hyazinth von Strachwitz]

Well done and thx! Any timeframe for the german version? Or is that in the hands of Kalypso already?

[Terif]

"- Engineers can no longer Fortify on a Land + Water tile as this prevented naval movement through the tile"

This change should be rethought IMO - it may on the first glance be more realistic/historical in order for friendly ships beeing able to move through it, but as it was with fortifying it was always the decision of the fortifying player which way he wanted to go: a good trade off to either fortify it and therefore deny the own ships the moving through or leaving it undefended which had the high risk enemy units would open the entrance and enter the waters behind.

This change has a bad and undesired effect now in Multiplayer games as without fortifications no sea entrance can be realistically defended. This will make it extremely easy for e.g. Allies to flood the Baltic with ships and secure the entire northern part of the map since the Denmark entrances can no longer be fortified by Axis. I.e. Allies can easily remove any defender (if Axis even dares to place some there..) and this is a huge disadvantage for Axis vs only a slight (if at all - since this is debatable) historical accurracy win from this change .

[Sombra]

Thx for still improving the game.

Just some questions?

- regarding the changes to rockets.... Why? At least till now I havent seen the map overflowing with rockets in MP ...it seemed that rockets were not worth the investment anyway, Why even make them less attractive?

- At least from my perspective the game is weighted to the (over) use of "air power". Now even the numbers of not so effective anti air is taken down.... Aehmm why ?

Personnaly I hoped to reduce the impact of air power not the other way round

[ March 27, 2008, 03:52 AM: Message edited by: Sombra ]

[scottsmm]

What I'm going to do is just add those defenses in for Germany since in 1943, and most of 44 they had plenty of AA weapons to use while soviets never really had huge amounts so why So they be able to have just as much as Germany. Also I agree with Terif as it should be up to the player to decide if he wants to sacrifice naval movement for defensive positions.

[arado234]

Sombra I used rockets and what they are great for is to close all Allied(British) ports to any convoy mpps without suffering any type of losses plus when the Allies land you can use them to close the ports in France.They also lower morale.

I also think Terif is right about not being able to fortify(Kiel)port.Why not have it that only friendly ships can pass through friendly fortified sea hexes(dont know if thats possible)?

I like the idea of reducing Germanys A.A. batteries because in reality Allied Air power was absolutely devestating to the Germans.The fact that Allied overall mpp output is no where near accurately set at historical levels,by taking away some of Germanys ability to stop,or atleast slow Allied airpower is limited(which it really was)since its quite costly to keep on repairing losses suffered by high tech. A.A. batteries.

[arado234]

Scottsmm, the Russians produced over 516,000 (more than the rest of the world combined) artillery pieces(includes antitank and anti aircraft guns)Germany produced 159,000 of the same.Russia produced over 20,000 M-1939 37mm anti aircraft guns downing a total of 14,657 Axis planes.Russia produced over 1.5 million machine guns(not including submachine guns)Germany produced 674,000.Russia had a huge tactical anti aircraft defence system.Alot more numerous than Germanys.

Germanys A.A.defence system was much better organised and alot of it was geared to shoot down Allied heavy bombers.Russias was mostly designed to shoot down tactical planes and support ground troops.So in this game Russia should have more tactical A.A. bateries than Germany.

Facts and figures taken form the book:World War II,The Encyclopedia of Facts and Figures

[scottsmm]

ok I believe you but I would much rather be in a ME-262 flying over a Russian AA defense position then being in any allied plane flying over any German AA position. even though Germany lost the war. Question for you how many planes did Germany shoot down in the entire war just wondering. I've heard from a few hundred thousand up to 1.2 million planes.

[arado234]

Total Allied losses:France-892,U.K.-22,010,

Poland-398,Netherlands-81,U.S.A.-18,418(Europe only)USSR-106,652(this also includes aircraft withdrawn from frontline service).

Axis losses:Germany-116,584,Italy-5,272

Finland-536

Total Allied Planes built:633,072

Total Axis planes built:209,013

[Hubert Cater]

Originally posted by Hyazinth von Strachwitz:

Well done and thx! Any timeframe for the german version? Or is that in the hands of Kalypso already?

Kalypso was forwarded the patch early this week so hopefully it will be released soon. As always, a few customer emails their way should help get the ball rolling

Hubert

[Hubert Cater]

Originally posted by Terif:

"- Engineers can no longer Fortify on a Land + Water tile as this prevented naval movement through the tile"

This change should be rethought IMO - it may on the first glance be more realistic/historical in order for friendly ships beeing able to move through it, but as it was with fortifying it was always the decision of the fortifying player which way he wanted to go: a good trade off to either fortify it and therefore deny the own ships the moving through or leaving it undefended which had the high risk enemy units would open the entrance and enter the waters behind.

This change has a bad and undesired effect now in Multiplayer games as without fortifications no sea entrance can be realistically defended. This will make it extremely easy for e.g. Allies to flood the Baltic with ships and secure the entire northern part of the map since the Denmark entrances can no longer be fortified by Axis. I.e. Allies can easily remove any defender (if Axis even dares to place some there..) and this is a huge disadvantage for Axis vs only a slight (if at all - since this is debatable) historical accurracy win from this change .

Hi Terif,

Thanks for your feedback. The background on tis was that it was actually a game bug and should never have been allowed since it had the unintended side effect of not allowing a naval unit to pass through once the tile is fortified. For example the addition of a fortification on a Land + Water tile has (from what I can tell) always been disallowed via the Editor.

The best solution would have been to simply allow a naval unit to pass through this fortified tile but unfortunately this created quite a bit of complication on my end game engine wise. I hope to re-address this down the road when I have more time.

Hubert

[Hubert Cater]

Sombra,

For rockets there were a few strategies being reported that indicated that they were now too powerful and difficult to defend against so the decision was made to implement the changes making them slightly less attractive.

For Air power the overall indication was that it very heavily favoured the Axis in terms of Tactical Bombers becoming too powerful. While only a slight change, by reducing the number of German Anti-Air build to 3 and increasing the Soviet Anti-Air builds by 1, it will ideally force the Axis player to split his anti-air defences with Fighters and as a result possibly have less escort support for his Tactical bombers.

Testing of these changes were quite positive and this was a good thing as it was an easy change to make in improving game balance.

Hope this helps,

Hubert

[arado234]

Hubert I just have to say:GO HABS GO.

[scottsmm]

arado234,

thanks for the fact

[arado234]

Your very welcome Scott

[Hubert Cater]

arado234, I'm actually rooting for them as well (my wife and pretty much her whole family are Habs fans) as the Leafs have been quite disappointing as of late.

I hope the Habs do great things in the playoffs as I believe they have historically managed to win the Cup at least once per decade so this just might be their year

[arado234]

Hubert I hope your right.

[vincere]

Just wanted to say I'm enjoyning the patch, and thanks for your efforts.

[HimAgain]

Hubert,

As a long suffering Leaf fan myself, we can only wish they were as responsive to their fans requests as you are with addressing our concerns.

I salute you.

Angus

[Hubert Cater]

vincere,

Glad you like it... we put a lot of time and effort into it and of course even more sweat into the soon to be released of Patton Drives East. A few surprises there as well

HimAgain,

Thanks

Hubert

[Blashy]

Originally posted by Hubert Cater:

arado234, I'm actually rooting for them as well (my wife and pretty much her whole family are Habs fans) as the Leafs have been quite disappointing as of late.

I hope the Habs do great things in the playoffs as I believe they have historically managed to win the Cup at least once per decade so this just might be their year

One day I will start playing this great game again. If I am not playing SC2 I am basically not playing anything .

Hubert roots for the Habs .

[Hubert Cater]

Only until next year