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Check out http://grogheads.com/?p=5109. Jim Sterrett, who was very active during TacOps development, is starting to use FCRS for staff exercises. A v2.04 patch is due out soon and the next game in the series, Flashpoint Campaigns: Southern Storm, will cover the southern part of the West-German front in this ‘what if’ Nato vs. Warsaw Pact conflict.

FYI, TacOps players will probably be very interested in a new game available at Matrix http://www.matrixgames.com/products/471/details/Flashpoint.Campaigns:.Red.Storm, if you haven't already heard of it. A v2.03 patch was just released that fixes a lot of the early growing pains most every new game seems to have these days. Ah, now, if we could only combine all of the best features of TacOps and this game, that would be really cool. Perchance to dream... :cool:

You need to select the tiles for a country and then assign control of them to that country. Then the borders between different countries controlling territory will appear.

flu, I understand about the balance issues. But what do you mean about a surprise attack? Axis can attack USSR at any time of their choosing, and nothing much has changed about that through the SC series. How is SC2 unplayable in your opinion, where SC1 was more playable? I don't get it...

Join the club Rambo. We'll get Hubert to offer an AARP "Smack-Down" discount.

I thought the Strategic Command series AI was already pretty darn good back in 2008 when I wrote an article http://www.wargamer.com/article/2526/Artificial-Intelligence-Part-I:-Using-Strategic-Command-2-AI-to-Play-Advanced-Third-Reich for Wargamer. But the AI just continues to get better and better! And Big AL and the other beta testers keep pushing the envelope to provide a truly formidable computer opponent to prove the naysayers wrong. (Methinks there are just folks that are scared to lose to a dumb machine...)

I think the simplicity can be maintained. The major things that bugged me about SC1 were the economics (USA and USSR production increases weren't modeled well), research (too much, too fast sometimes), and limitations with the AI and event scripting at the time. A lot of that is 'under the hood' so to speak and could be implemented in an SC1 remake without losing that original 'fun factor' that we enjoyed.

There's a big difference between luck (good and bad) and cheating. The +/-1 variability in combat calculations is one of the strengths of the game system that provides replayability. I'd argue to keep this off the table. If cheating is the concern, then there are other things to look at.

I am hopeful that the new SC3 game engine will allow a remake of the SC1 original, with some enhancements based on the latest features but also with a keen eye on keeping the game simple and fun as it was in the beginning. All those new unit types do not have to be used, don't ya know? I enjoyed the heck out of the original game way back when, but deep down it always nagged at me that it was too abstract and failed to capture the historical accuracy essence that a classic WWII game should provide. The SC series has grown and evolved nicely but, as discussed, some of the fun factor has been lost along the way. Also, the community has become greatly fragmented with all the different game versions and forums. Not like the old days. FWIW, I'm pretty happy with my latest Advanced Third Reich mod using the Global Conflict Gold version. I'm not planning to update it again until SC3 and then I'll see what I can do with it. I also have ideas about an Army-level ETO mod, a la A3R-lite, that should be fast and fun.

Latest gossip is that SC3 will be a faithful remake of Hearts of Iron I but with tiles and 3D anime by a new Japanese graphics designer. Should be super cool! :cool: Or, maybe not...

Yeah, check the error file for insights. I would usually save all turns, so that way I could go back to the turn in question and watch exactly what was happening at time of crash. If it's reproducible and you can't figure it out, Hubert can.

The Strategic Command 2 series is simply being extended under a Continuing Resolution. Hopefully Strategic Command 3 will not be affected by a Sequestration. But Hubert's in Canada where the rules are different, so perhaps he will get us through it all one way or another!

A future option that could be considered would be to allow players to purchase partial strength units with a corresponding reduced build time. For example, buy a 2-factor BB with 20% production delay. That would get a unit on the map that could be slowly reinforced over time. Since we usually assume fleets of multiple ships for each individual unit, we can always assume the new unit is being built up around some existing ship(s), as an abstraction. It's a little less plausible for operational-level scenarios that assume individual capital ships. But hey...

Hubert would have to clarify what the code is really doing. It may be that interceptions appear to be at strike range but are in fact calculated based on spotting range, in which case the display for where the air battle occurs may need to be looked at. I'm not sure offhand, but would agree that the reduced spotting range should be used.

Two thoughts. First, modding/adjusting the CTVs can already rebalance things to a large degree. Carrier-based air can be made less effective against land targets, and vice versa, and this is what I did in my A3R mod. Second, there needs to be another unit type slot so you can have two carriers, heavy/fleet carriers and light/escort carriers. That would help a lot; hopefully we'll see some changes along these lines in SC3.

Hang in there!

I know that; I'm the guy who writes the Help file for the editor. But given the supply and cost thresholds, there's still nothing to prevent you from rebuilding 9 factors back to 100% in a single turn if you can afford it. Something more to restrict rebuilds to say 5 factors max/turn or less would prevent unrealistically instant rebuilds of major capital ships/fleets. And again, something to differentiate between major and minor ports to further restrict some rebuilds would be nice. I'm not so sure it's all that important at a grand strategy scale, but if you're creating a custom mod getting into operational level details then this stuff would help.

I tend to agree. Two things could be considered for future programming. Having major and minor ports with different supply/rebuild capabilities would be nice. Also having some rebuild limitations, such as x factors per turn max perhaps to be further customized by unit type, would be nice. But I'd also like to return to my earlier caution about getting too far down into the weeds here. Sometimes simple is good enough, especially for the grand strategy genre.

I've also been reading these posts. I think a big issue is how SC is limited to single unit stacking and doesn't use sea zones. At least for grand strategy scale. There's a lot we can do in customizing the naval units but if you try too hard to create an operational-level naval game then you can easily get bogged down with too many units and you lose a sense of subtlety with the war at sea. I did two things with my Advanced Third Reich mod. First was keeping the naval unit density fairly low but increasing movement ranges. In 3R players simply moved naval units into a Front during quarterly turns and range wasn't an issue, and naval action was resolved once after all friendly and enemy units were committed. Second was making CAG and LB air CTVs different, emphasizing their relative strengths and weaknesses. These seem to have helped, at least for me relative to the generic campaigns. We'll have to wait and see what Hubert has planned for the future to address some of these ideas.

The game engine already adequately covers both WWI and WWII. So porting the existing features into SC3 with hexes and a few more enhancements should be great. I have my doubts about using the game for a NATO-Warsaw Pact WWIII campaign simply because such a conflict would be short lived (weeks, months max) and not exactly something that could take advantage of all the fine Grand Strategy features of the game (research, diplomacy, production, etc.) However, rolling backwards to the Napoleonic Wars has a lot of interesting possibilities...

Hubert has done a fantastic job over the years providing a full function editor that anybody can use, to simply modify any minor aspect of an existing campaign or to create one's own custom game from scratch - including scripting for a challenging computer opponent. :cool:

Time flies when we're having fun!

Good point on transports. Land loop waypoints do work, in fact I use them for several islands to get 'trapped' units back into the game. It's possible to use land loop waypoints in lieu of transports to deploy units from UK to Egypt and/or US to England. Problem is if unit density gets too high and units find themselves on the loop tile, then whoosh! off they go. There's more control using the transport scripting. Interesting idea to raise the transport evasion chances...

No, you set the loop tile as a waypoint in the transport script. The AI is pretty good at doing exactly what you script it to do...

There's a difference between what the generic AI is capable of doing and what specific AI scripting is capable of accomplishing. With enough clever scripting, the computer opponent can be pretty nefarious. I am often surprised by my own scripted AI in my A3R mod campaigns. As for Big Picture, one of the toughest challenges for Allied AI was how many reinforcements to send via naval loop (yes, it can use loops!) from England and even United States to Egypt, and possibly Iraq if necessary, and when depending on Axis advances through Libya and possibly Turkey. The toughest challenge was how to invade North Africa, depending on whether Gibraltar was Allied controlled or not and whether Morocco and/or Algeria were Vichy or Free French (per variant). There's a lot of logical conditions to check to drive the AI into making reasonable choices, the same that would be obvious to a human.