DevilDog

What the disadvantages for the France first approach in the game would be, I guess we'll have to wait and see. In real life this wasn't even an option. The Wehrmacht wasn't close to being ready to take France on in September '40. They had no invasion plans at all. Their panzer forces hadn't been fully organized yet. Many of the German generals thought Hitler was crazy because they thought that by invading Poland, France would declare war and invade Germany. And then it would all be over. IIRC germany had all of 7 divisions on the western front during the Fall of '40; just a speed bump to the French. But even if Hitler had massed all his available troops against France, they wouldn't have stood a chance of any kind of offensive action, as they were still mobilizing. In fact, in May '41 when the invasion of France did take place, the Germans were still outnumbered by the French and British. But if it is allowed in the game it might be an interesting strategy, or more likely a fun variant set up with the editor (assuming pre-mobilization by the Germans).

Can I place a pre-pre-order?

And when will SC2 be released?

OK, so when can we preorder?

Thanks Hubert - concise and straight forward on what is modible. Moon - If you have additional info concerning Hags actions then I agree with banning him. If it was his intent to steal SC then by all means go after him. All I had to go off of when I made my comments was his original post, and shall we say, the highly "modded" repost that someone at BTS reposted.

I understand where you're coming from Moon and in principle I agree with you. And if Hags came out and said "I stole SC", not only should he be banned, but prosecuted as well. But I don't think that was his intent. While I don't think there has been an over reaction to the situation, I do think there has been an over reaction to the individual in question and his motives. What makes this whole thing fuzzy though is the amount of mod work done on games from Battlefront - with the approval of the game designers. That's what makes CM, Battlefront and will make SC so great - the community. Where is the line drawn? I'm not saying there is no line, nor am I saying that piracy is OK - it's NOT. But what we do need apparently now is instructions in black and white from Battlefront administrators what is appropriate for mods to be done on. What if Hags had modded the German units to be unbeatable instead of the length of the demo. Whould that have been OK? I'm not trying to be arguementative, I just think you need to let everyone know what we are allowed to mod and what is "hands off".

I happened to read Hags original post just before it was removed from the forum, rewritten and reposted. He shouldn't have done what he did, but he wasn't attempting to steal SC. He heaped praises on Hubert and SC and said he couldn't wait to buy it when the full game was released. I think the main difference between him and some of us is that he actually had the technical know-how to modify the length of the demo. Maybe Hags should be thanked for showing how easy it was to modify SC with an off the shelf editor, so that now safety measures may be put in place. This may not be the popular view on this thread, but I think many would agree if they'd seen Hags's original post. And he did apologize. I understand Hubert's concern and outrage, but I think this incident is more a wakeup call to realize piracy CAN happen. I don't think it actually DID happen in this instance though.

Russ and AO, next time you play a game watch your MPP stockpile totals when you get bombed and you will see what I'm talking about.

LC-Whatever you do don't tell Delta about the Alt-Control-Delete command that brings up the squad level combat screen....

What? No progress since my last post? Get a move-on! Hubert needs to be chained to his computer until release of SC.

And Hurry Up!!!!!

OK, I'm begining to worry that SC will be unavailable for my birthday tomorrow.... But I'll keep faith that Hubert will get everything ironed out and that I'll get my copy, even if he has to hand deliver it. Since SC hasn't been released yet I'm sure Hubert has nothing better to do than to adjust the units and add a few features. Everyone feel free to chime in with your suggestions as well. 1. Corps and Armies should be able to build permanent Maginot type fortifications. The way it would work is that the unit must stay stationary for 8 turns after "build fortification" is picked from the pull down tab. On the eighth turn the fortification is created. This should not work in cities. the building unit should not gain fortification levels itself while building; thus requiring an additional eight turns to gain full benefit from the fortification. If seized by the opponent the fort should be destroyed just like existing fortifications at the beginning of the game. While I doubt anyone will actually use this feature I feel it is imperative that it be included. 2. I've noticed that German MP40s are incorrectly modeled. Their range is much too far, and their firepower at close range is too low. Please fix or sumfink! 3. The armor slope on the German Panthers is several degrees too verticle. At the same time you ignore the quality problems the Germans had with armor. It's true that these inacuracies negate each other out in this game, but we demand perfect accuracy! This must be fixed! 4. I don't even know where to start with the American Shermans. Their movement is way too slow and even worse, you modeled their turret turn rate so slow that they might as well be Priests. Get this right! Armor modeling issues have been discussed adnausium when Combat Mission came out. I must go now, but I expect all these changes and more to be in the game, and that SC will be released some time before tomorrow. Get to work!!!

Actually, what I mean by "double loss" is that you lose an equal amount of MPPs from your stockpile when a resource center is bombed. For example; say one of your French towns is bombed and takes 3 MPPs damage. In addition to the 3 MPPs production you lose, you also lose 3 MPPs from your MPP stockpile for a grand total of 6 MPPs lost for that turn. In addition, you gain back 1 MPP production per turn, so if no further bombing takes place: the next turn you lose 2 MPPs in production and the next turn 1 MPP. For a grand total of 9 MPPs lost. That's just an example. Even in the demo I've been hammered a lot worse than that by the AI. I don't know whether the Brits got tech advances or not, but I've had level 8 ports reduced to zero in one turn from several attacks. It adds up. However, while I tend to defend strategic bombing in the game, in most games I've played I prefer to conquer and take resources for myself than to simply destroy them and deny them the other player. So that is a valid point. I just like the fact that the game is designed to allow for different styles of play, even if I myself don't end up following a certain strategy.

Yeah. Try playing at higher difficulty levels and invade Russia. You'll end up losing beaucoup MPPs due to British strategic bombing. And if you pay attention, you actually lose double the MPP value when bombed. 1. You lose the production value from the city or port to the amount of the bomb damage. This damage only comes back at one MPP per turn, so the effects last for a while, and once lowered to zero, it's easy to permanently deny the enemy MPP production from that source simply by bombing it every third turn or so. 2. You also lose the MPP value from your MPP stockpile to the amount of the bomb damage, thus doubling the MPP loss. 3. Advances in bombing tech will substantially increase the amount of damage bombers do, and lower the damage they take.

I'll second that sentiment, Norse. I have to admit the first time I saw SC I thought "you've got to be kidding - this'll never hold a candle to CM. Talk about simplistic...". But then I downloaded the demo, played the first game and was hooked. The scale is just perfect. Hubert is a genius, just plain lucky, or a combination of both to have come up with this. There is enough detail to make each game different and to require a well thought out strategy to win, yet each turn can be played in a short amount of time, allowing fairly rapid e-mail play. Great job, Hubert! Now release it already! [ July 01, 2002, 11:32 PM: Message edited by: DevilDog ]

Held out for entire year at max difficulty and normal experience levels. I disbanded the French air fleet and bought a HQ unit. That was all it took.

The bombers SHOULD NOT take as much damage by the anti-aircraft defenses in the cities. If you read my original post closely, I agree that the damage done to the bombers by fighters is pretty historical.

Taken from their web site: "Features Epic gameplay - Global map with all the nations between 1936-1946 ........ Real Time gameplay set to pause at any time. One minute of gameplay translates to one hour passed in reality. ........ 2 hours of quality musical recordings in MP3 format." They can't be serious. Do they mean that it will take you a whole hour just to play one minute of the game? Or do they mean that if you do nothing but play this game 24-7 that it will take you over 200 days just to play 1939-1945? Either way doesn't sound too enjoyable to me. That and the fact that they only offer a 2 hour music loop means you'll go crazier that the average parent became 30 days after SuperMario was released for Nintindo. Seriously, what does sound good is that they claim to have developed their game around multiplayer - each country can have a different player. Maybe Hubert will have this feature in future offerings of SC. That would make it a six player game if you only implemented this feature for major countries, and it could be set up so you could choose how many players you wanted (i.e. maybe you only want 3 player with one person controlling Axis, one player as western Allies and one as Russia) and which country each gets to play.

OK, I know a lot of people are going to dissagree, but hear me out. It seems every time I invade Russia as the Axis that I get hammered in the west by bombers and fighters. To the point where many of the coastal ports and cities are knocked down to zero. If I station too many fighters to defend then it becomes serious detriment to the war in Russia. Now it's not possible to determine what tech level the British bombers are at, but I assume they didn't have any tech advances. Most of the complaints in this area are worded to request that the bomber power be INCREASED. This is completely backwords considering the time period. However, I think there is some legitimate concern in that the damage to the bombers is too prohibative. Anti-aircraft defenses at the begining of the war should be just as feeble as the bombers. I feel there are several tweeks that could improve strategic bombing: 1. Decrease the amount of MPP damage an UNIMPROVED bomber can do to a city or port. 2. Decrease the amount of damage city defenses can do against bombers. This damage can be increased through tech advances. The damage fighters do to unimproved bombers should remain the same as this was a historical problem for the Allies for several years until the fighter range increased. 3. Fighters should be UNABLE to perform strategic bombing against cities or ports. While fighter attacks had a substantial effect against the Germans in the west (and by the Germans against the Russians in the east), these were tactical in nature. While they affected logistics and transportation within Germany, they had negligable affect on industry compared with strategic bombers. In reality fighters shouldn't be able to affect cities at the level the game is designed at. What these tweeks would do is make someone truely invest full scale in strategic bombing if that is the strategy they want to pursue. While being expensive (due to the need for bomber research, and the purchase of several bomber groups) it would keep the cost from being prohibative. And lastly, the way the game is now, fighters are much more versatile and useful than bombers, as they can double for strategic bombers. Remove the bombing capability of fighters and it would actually increase the strategic options within the game.

Oops, meant Yugoslavia, not Albania. [ June 27, 2002, 09:57 AM: Message edited by: DevilDog ]

Enough cruising the boards Hubert - return to your dungeon and get back to work! You better release SC by Friday or I'm gonna go nuts. The demo always ends just as I'm about to conquer the world...this last time Italy had taken Albania, was about to take Greece, and Russia was about to fall to the Germans....

And I want the ability to zoom down to a FPS! It should be pretty easy - just use the Quake or Unreal engine.

OK, it's 22:58 CST and SC still hasn't been released for sale yet. Those with no faith might even begin to believe that it won't be released on June 22. I can't wait - only one more hour to go!!! [ June 23, 2002, 12:01 AM: Message edited by: DevilDog ]

The answer that Hubert gave in another thread is that the German ability to transport all their troops in a seaborne invasion (just by saving up enough MPPs) is an abstraction representing a prolonged period of building extra invasion barges and landing ships, which they could have done in real life. The way it plays out though is that as soon as you conquere France you have plenty of MPPs for the invasion, so it feels like you threw a fleet of invasion barges together in one week. That's just the price of having the MPP abstraction. Hubert felt it was more important to have a fair range of flexability of options to enable players to "change history". And I agree. And it's really not that difficult for the Brit player to defend the homeland, as long as they don't strip it's defenses. While we may think the German plan to cross the channel in those barges was laughable, that is only because the British took it so seriously as the ultimate threat to their national survival and threw everything into the defense of their homeland. The reason the Germans couldn't successfully invade England had more to do with the local overwhelming superiority of the RN than it had to do with their using barges for invasion craft. The RAF was too busy fighting for it's survival to have had much of an effect on the outcome of Sealion. If the Germans had mounted a night invasion, slightly ofsetting the British overwhelming superiority in naval forces, and managed to capture some supply depots early on (supply of the invasion forces would have been near impossible at best, which may have been the real reason the invasion was scrapped) then it may have succeeded. On a side note, history as we know it has been completely whitewashed by the writers (for the most part) and by us (due to our 20/20 hindsight). Historians are wildly inaccurate on anything beyond dates and events, and even get those wrong at times. The reason for this is they weren't there and don't know what was going on behind the scenes. A leader may make a brilliant decision based on horrible information (brilliant if the information was true) and so lose the battle or war. Many times this doesn't get into the history books, and everyone just pretty much assumes so-and-so was just a total idiot. I just recently read "Crusade in Europe" by Eisenhower and it is incredible how different the war seemed seen through his eyes. For instance he stated that although they only had slight and circumstantial intel that the Germans would attack through the Ardenes in Dec '44, they thought that it would most definitely occur. Under orders from Eisenhower, Bradley positioned all his supply depots back behind the deepest estimated German ability to penitrate the American lines. This then, not bad luck, would explain why the Germans never overan any appreciable Allied supplies, and so failed in their offensive. And Eisenhower stated that he hoped the Germans would attack and come out from behind their defenses, as it would make it that much easier to destroy them. However, other than some strategic planning he didn't say anything to the battlefield commanders, who certainly were suprised by the German offensive. But the point is he foresaw the offensive and took steps to defeat it which eventually had a deciding factor on the battle. But in the numerous books I've read on the subject this is the first mention I've heard of it. And there were a lot of things like that in his book. I recommend it as very good reading. In general, I feel books written by the folks who were actually there are much better than the flood of history books that are writen long after the event by people who weren't there. There are some exceptions I'm sure, and you do have to guard against the desire of some to rewrite their history so as to appear in a better light (like Montgomery). Interestingly enough, while blasting Monty for his revisionism, Ike backs him up by saying that it really WAS the plan to have the Brits attract the bulk of the German forces and thus allow the Americans to break out. However Monty wanted to be the one to break out and really tried, but fell back on the "we weren't supose to break out anyway, so we weren't really trying to" arguement when he failed. Sorry to ramble and get off topic, but hopefully this post amused someone... [ June 22, 2002, 08:48 AM: Message edited by: DevilDog ]

I think the return damage makes sense. Sure land based artillery for the most part (with the exception of German super guns) doesn't come close to the maximum range of ship guns, but to be effective, the ships had to come in relatively close to conduct shore bombardment. Certainly within the range of the artillery that would make up a corps or army - that's a LOT of artillery, and yes, I think it could cause a significant amount of damage if someone was stupid enough to bring their ships in that close to an undamaged infantry unit. I think I've only had one ship sustain damage when I used it for shore bombardment, in about 25 games. The infantry units don't seem to do too well if you soften them up with a few air strikes first, as would be done historically. My vote is to leave it as is.