Timskorn

I'm also not in favor of this. Originally I was, but I'd rather not see the exact convoy lines directly on the map. If it was a more complex system maybe, but the way convoys work now I'd rather keep it the way it is. It's really not that bad. Most of the time you can get your subs in the general location and if you haven't hit the lane yet, check the convoy map and make an adjustment.

Late October, 1941. German units are slicing deep into Russia as fast as they can go. Two German Armies bypass Leningrad and throw themselves at Russia defenders near the Valdai mountains. Rag tag Soviet partisans try to disrupt them from behind and manage to nearly destroy one. So Jon seems to be full throttle in Russia, trying to capture Russian cities off guard but his units are scattered. I haven't seen his air yet so I'm sure this is simply his advanced force trying to lure me out of hiding. Vichy France is betrayed! The horrors! Italian troops capture Algiers and Marseilles is about to fall. Franco lamely opposes the move and the US shoots up to 85%. Churchill enjoys his peaceful island.

No, not yet. I'll upload it as a new file when I feel it's ready. Still need a lot of testing done on it.

Even losers can fire back at people. When your life is in danger from bullets flying around you and you live, I'd say that's experience. If you dive bomb and strafe live targets, its honing pilot experience, even if the losers aren't shooting back effectively.

That's what we love to hear!

Well, you can get 2 air units if you move the one from Egypt to the UK. Not entirely sure how you'd get even one additional fighter without sacrificing research and reinforcing damaged units.

Jon launches Barbarossa, as well as DoW's on Iraq and Yugo in late Aug, 1941. US gets another jump in readiness, now in the 70's. Nothing much happened from my last update to this one. Jon tried getting a cruiser back from Western France to N. Germany through the channel, but was stopped by a French BB. Subsequent turn the UK sent it to the bottom. The Bismark still sits in the port of Brest, protected with laser beams apparently. Unless Jon has implemented a massive ship-building program, his bite at sea is gone. Churchill complains to FDR that they're not sending enough over, and that he has "Plenty of men and armor, but not enough ships to transport them!" So the brave soldiers of the UK remain landlocked, watching the war through occassional news reels. Jon is showing IW2, AT1, MT2, HT1 and L3 jets. It remains to be seen how much Jon has in the Middle-East. So far I've seen about 5 units, 2 German (1 Army, 1 Armor) and the rest minor or Italian. With the Mech.2 Jon's Corps have exceptional range on them, tearing across Russia in a single bound. Stalin, obsessed with recon of the Polish front, left a brave Soviet AF there which was immediately crushed at the outset of war. Jon dinged a couple Corps in Kiev and Odessa, but I op-moved them out. The one in Kiev managed to surprise one of his Corps, knocking 4 points off. Not too many units were visible on the front, but with mech 2 he could have easily kept them out of range and move them in quickly. Russia has had exceptional luck in research, and is looking forward to using them on inferior German units. Finally, the real war has begun!

How many patches were there for SC? I remember the end version was very different from the 'out of the box' one.

Edwin, good stuff! I was just thinking about this topic recently. These things go a long way in enhancing the feel of the game. Take a few things out of SC2, such as HQ names and historical events, and it'll just feel like a generic strategy game. Another feature that I'd love to see are Newspaper reports. A simpler version, or maybe for Patch 5 or SC3, a more dynamic version. Basic: Major events only, with a general headline. Whenever a Capital is captured, country surrendered, General killed, etc. This could also be used for the script events that happen. Instead of a generic, "UK Garrison Iceland" or "Pro-Axis Coup in Iraq", we could get a headline with corresponding picture. These could also display major leanings of minor countries towards majors from diplo actions, like if Axis sway Spain or Sweden, etc. Advanced: This would include the above, but also involve an algorythm to detect major battles, stagnated lines, etc. Say over a period of 15 turns there was fighting around Stalingrad, then the Germans are finally pushed away from it. The headline could say something about a Russian victory at Stalingrad, x # of men lost (based on units destroyed, or even better # of times units were reinforced within a 3-4 tile radius from the city). It could also report devastating losses, such as a certain country losing over x # of units in a single turn. Report the launch of an invasion, such as Husky, Torch, D-Day, Barbarossa, etc and the subsequent failure/successes of those. Anyway, these kinds of things may seem like polish (which they are compared to pure gameplay stuff), but they can go a long way to making a game like this feel more like a more authentic representation of WW2.

It is, that's all HC's department.

I'm not doing anything in particular. It's possible my research/production scripts are allowing more MPP's leftover for the AI to do it, but at the same time I wouldn't say they are upgrading as fast as a human player would.

Normal Dude: Not sure what you mean by upgrading faster. You mean produce units that were upgraded?

The latest version of my Allied AI Mod is now available at www.cmmods.com! It's under the same location as the old file, but it has been replaced with the new one. Simply download it and unzip the contents into your Campaigns folder. You MUST be using patch 1.02 for the campaign to work. Enjoy getting dominated. [ June 22, 2006, 11:14 PM: Message edited by: Timskorn ]

One way is to add more purchase scripts, and focus their purchases on specific units for short periods of time. Say between May and June 1941, give 100% chance for Axis to buy an HQ. This way you can directly control when they buy HQ's, then turn off the % chance to buy them for the rest of the purchase scripts. Then you may want to add another one later on just in case. Ideally it'd be nice to have more control over when and what units the AI purchases. I like the random system we have now, as it still allows for a lot of customization and keeps things randomized a bit, but it'd be nice to say, "Germany build 1 HQ if it has less than 3" and have this true during certain time periods that you specify. Of course it would have to count the # of HQ's on the map, and ones in production, otherwise it'd keep trying to build an HQ if there were only 2 on the map. Anyway, I think if you fool around and take some time with the purchase scripts you can get pretty consistent with the AI purchases that you want.

You're right, games like that and even Command HQ are "true" B&P. For a casual gamer SC2 would not be a B&P, there is too much involved to be considered that. For those of us who are used to a lot more info and complexity, I can consider this a B&P game. To me a game like Risk is a water and crackers game.

Back in action! Except there isn't much action yet. Early 1941. The Luftwaffe and Italian AF did some runs on my AF around England, and then JJR sent in the Bismark in an attempt to finish it off. A lone battleship in the channel and winter arrived to help keep his air down, so I sent most of my fleet in for the kill and was rocked. Bismark dropped to 6, but my navy took a hellish beating. Bad move on my part. In the Middle-East Rambo finishes off the lone NZ Corp. left there and is now completely unhindered in securing the rest of the ME. UK bomber remains in Malta, weathering repeated attacks by the Italian navy and German AF. For the most part this game has been a series of skirmishes, with only the Battle of the Atlantic and France seeing a lot of combat. Looking forward to the war in Russia.

I used to play a game called Command HQ back in the early 90's. The AI stunk, but it gave my dad a good challenge, and you could play over modem (which we did a lot). To me it was the epitome of a B&P wargame. It was simple in design but it really gave me a sense of commanding the entire war, and it had just enough detail to it to allow strategy in attacking and defending. On top of all that it managed to be somewhat real-time, but slow enough to allow you to properly plan and attack. I love B&P games. SC2 is great because of that very reason.

I considered posting about that, but on second thought these forums aren't THAT active (ie, topics being pushed to the 2nd page in half a day), so having the AAR's on this page helps with that. It's also something a lot of people enjoy reading it seems, and it's nice to know your AAR is on the general page for all to read. If the only people checking out the AAR are the ones involved in the game we might as well just keep it to e-mail.

I'd love to finish, but I patched, so I'll be looking into making a 2nd copy on my machine in a couple days.

Well, in an abstract sense you could do it by placing more oil wells on the map and/or making their MPP value much greater than anything else. The problem with this is that games would begin to rely on taking and controlling these resources as a primary means to victory. Just look at the Caucusus already. As far as implementing oil directly into transportation and movement, that'd be a little more difficult to do I think.

M 27, Beantown USA.

I've been on vacation, and also not sure if we're going to continue the old game at this point. We'd need 2 different copies installed on the system.

MY EYES!!

It depends on what you want to have as the "activator" for increasing France and UK's readiness. # of German units around tiles x,y and z, whenever Germany DoW's another country, etc. The scripts are already available for other countries, you'd just have to change Country_ID and the Activation stuff for most of them. Russia, for example, already has activation scripts for when there are too few or too little German troops at the border. You could just copy that script and then change a couple things to reference France instead of Russia, and the Siegfried Line instead of the border of Russia/Germany.

No, not at all! Cool to see it used. I designed a multiplayer RTS scenario a couple years ago that a bunch of people used to make another version, and a couple of them even made it better and fixed some old issues. Some others made it worse but in the end it's all about supporting the game and the community, and the more cool mods that are out the better for all of us!