Hubert Cater

Probably for the best translation you would have to rent the Canadian Classic Film "Strange Brew" or just catch an old episode of SCTV. Brings me back Les Hubert

Ok great Hubert

Hi Dragonheart, Sorry to hear about the trouble, Ok looks like you can connect and chat so I don't think it is a problem with your firewalls specifically etc., since you mention that it only happens after you make a move or send a turn, sounds like it might actually be a problem with your TCPIP directory (found in your SC installation folder). Could be the case that it is read-only for some reason and not allowing you to save the TCPIP 'autosave' turn. Either way I would check to see if it is 'read-only' or you could try deleting the TCPIP folder and see if that helps. The game will automatically recreate the folder as needed. Let me know if this helps, Hubert

Hubert

Zappsweden I think in most circumstances and up until v1.07 came out this was definitly the case, but as happens with all software cycles there has to come a point where call it 'for economic survivability', time and efforts must move on to newer projects. At this point I have to balance the severity of the bug versus the newer projects versus whether or not there exist in game workarounds to resolve the issue. Now if I felt and of course if it also existed in the majority opinion that we had a 'show stopper' then I think you know that I would not let that be the case... remember v1.06 was at one time the last patch for SC For brevity I won't post the list of changes made since SC was first released, but feel free to take another look and I thihk we can all agree that from v1.0 - 1.07 there was a lot of work/changes/tweaks/fixes thrown in to not only improve stability but also game play... that whether we like it or not may not always be apparent during initial beta testing. Sometimes it really does take thousands of players to come up with a variety of different strategies before glaring bugs or in game weaknesses show their ugly face. Personally I think the list of beta testers did a fantastic job and keep in mind a voluntary job spending countless hours on a game where their only reward truly was to help make the game better not only for themselves but for everyone else out there. Getting back to the bug in question it is rather unfortunate it was not discovered earlier as it would have been included (no problem) in one of the many patches for SC, but at this point I have to balance the severity versus the several other factors previously discussed. While it could lead to some tricky game play, this one like some of the balance issues can in theory be resolved via house rules or campaign tweaks etc. As mentioned before, if it is at this point an issue that can be dealt with in an alternative manner, than for me I strongly feel my time would be better spent on items like SC2. I understand that not all will agree with this statement but please keep in mind that I am only making it AFTER 7 patches have been released for SC BUT as I mentioned in my original response to this thread, I'll still think about it but definitly no promises. Hope this helps, Hubert

It's unfortunate to hear you guys have probably found another bug, but to be honest I don't think it will really be feasible for me to do much about at this point. I'll think about it but tracking and fixing bugs on a closed game will take some time and believe me it's time that I would much rather spend on SC2. I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way but this could and most likely would take a considerable amount of time.... some background on the process required is to track (re-familiarize myself with the SC1 code, as it's not 100% fresh in my mind anymore as my brain as progressed to SC2), test(internally by me), test (externally via beta testers), then double check there were no new bugs introduced, recompile and repackage which not only includes the Battlefront version but the variety of retail versions out there and in the end you could be looking at anywhere between 2-4 weeks before this would see the light of day. Again, and just being honest, considering I am just a one man shop it's an amount of time I would much rather spend on SC2 to get it done that much sooner. Like most things and probably for most people, having my brain switch tasks is not a good thing as it takes a while to get that inspiration back and well just to get back on track (which is one reason I spent almost a year supporting SC1 after release, as a first game I wanted it to be as close to perfection before moving on). Since engine wise there are some overlap similarities between SC1 and SC2 the least I can do is ensure whatever bugs are still (or continue to be) found in SC1 I will correct these for SC2. Probably not the best answer but regardless I hope this helps, Hubert

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Hi Dragonheart, The sound issue is common for win9x/ME as the system does need a reboot when the game crashes, although not a problem on 2000/XP for some reason. Not sure about your crashes if this is a new issue, you can try sending me your last saved turn before a crash with a description on how to repeat it but at this point it could be anything including something amiss with your system itself. Hubert

I haven't checked through all the formulas but for accuracy I would say most if not all of the formulas are not rounded until the very end, as is done (just checked) for the combat formulas. So to answer your question more specifically, the decimal portion of any of the experience values plugged into the combat forumulas is taken as is (i.e. not chopped off) and the result of the forumula (usually some sort of decimal value) is rounded off at the very end. Hope this helps, Hubert

I'm working on makining the units in SC2 more balanced, well at least with more give and take or plus and minus for each unit type to make things more interesting. Hubert

Iron Ranger I can confirm this, just took a look at it last night. IIRC Rockets (at the time of original beta testing) were found to be too much of a "super" weapon at the higher research and experience levels so a few special rules were added to balance them out, reduced effectiveness over long range and the combat defence adjustment you've noticed. My apologies for missing this in the manual Hubert

So many thoughts here I may have lost track of all the questions. For operated units it is as Terif described, I don't keep track of these units in any special way so my guess is that perhaps you operated a unit into a low supply, or lack of HQ, or simply the loss of entrenchment type situation that probably resulted in higher losses. If there was anything else more specific, just ask again and I'll try and answer them. Hubert

Oh, ok. Good to hear it wasn't SC, but sorry to hear about the troubles with the PC. Hubert

Got word this week from Narayan that he has finished his latest version of the Cold War campaigns. If you haven't taken a look it might be an interesting alternative to the existing campaigns and does include some Nato vs. Warsaw Pact graphic Mods :cool: He also hosts a few other campaigns/mods at his site which can be found here: http://www.peachmountain.com/5star/SC_StrategyGuide.asp There is also a really nice German site with a newly dedicated SC section that also hosts various campaigns and mods that can be found here: http://www.panzerliga.de I've also edited the FAQ section to reflect these updates, enjoy! Hubert

Hi Reid, Unfortunately, there are a few systems out there that don't seem to like SC for some reason. It has not been an issue that I can repeat on any of my systems I'm running so it's very difficult to track down and identify. Either way if you could try to download all the latest patches and let me know what kind of game you were playing, whether it was AI or a specific kind of multiplayer that might help me narrow it down. Hubert

I'm not about to enter into the debate of who, what, where, when, why and how of cheating, but... Just wanted to let everyone know that I had some contact with Homre Plin late last week and we discussed some of the possibilities of cheating which I will try and address for SC2. Keep in mind, there will never be a failsafe system to prevent cheating (otherwise there would not be a cottage industry of game editing/hack programs etc. out there) but with a couple of tricks I have in mind (I won't say exactly what to for obvious reasons ), it should make it that much less transparent and a considerable effort to "cheat" in the future. Hope this helps, Hubert

Edwin P. Good points on FoW, and this area will see some changes as well, especially for human vs. ai play Ok back to work for me! Hubert

Great points here Zapp, I would say that most of this is covered although some of it in a different way than you would expect (not all)... but more on that when the time comes as nothing is still 100% final just yet For the SC2 forum, I would say that it is still a little early for that and my guess would be that when we are in final Beta then you could expect to see it up and running similar to the process used for the CM series. Hubert

Jersey John & Shaka Interesting ideas for sure, let me think about them Hubert [ October 27, 2003, 09:08 AM: Message edited by: Hubert Cater ]

Curry Thanks for the feedback. I thought about including all the homeland defence units in the game but I envisioned too many potential problems with this so several compromises were made. For starters, while there were US air forces at home, some of their makeup and use throughout the war differed greatly from those used in either the Pacific or European Theaters. For example while the 1st Air Force was mainly concerned with air defence in the Northeast Air District, 2nd and 3rd Air Force served mostly to train bomber crew and all other air crew types respectively. 4th Air Force did also serve as air defence but in the Southwest Air District, and 11th Air Force served in defence of Alaska so I would naturally exclude them as part of the Pacific side of operations and out of the scope of SCET. The 6th Air Force served in defence of the Panama Canal but again my guess would be that its size and makeup would be radically different then its European or Pacific counterparts. On the ground side of things the US did have the 2nd and 4th armies that never went overseas, and while I don't have much data on them offhand I will assume their duties were broken up in terms of serving to defend both coasts, so in reality we are talking about 1 extra army that could be theoretically sent to the ET. So why not include all of the above in the game? Well, the US starting units do include the homeland defence units comprised of 1st Air Force and the 2nd and 4th armies (although one probably served on the west coast and IIRC neither was available in December 41) and the 1st and 3rd armies which did exist at the start of the war although also they did not arrive in England until ’43, and ’44 respectively. So I felt that the US as implemented in SC, does begin with a balanced amount of home defence and combat ready units, but to include the rest would result in, I felt, the potential disproportionate use of US units in the ET. i.e., what do most US players do with these available units now, basically send them all to the ET theatre for the fight right?, while the US homeland is left empty Again, if the makeup, strengths and purposes of the remaining US air fleets at home were more like their US counterparts serving in Europe then perhaps this would make for a plausible what-if, i.e. what if the US had sent these similar units to Europe, what then sort of thing? then perhaps I could be more sympathetic to the cause of increased US MPP or starting units but I took the liberty during the design to exclude them for mostly the reasons stated above. Another consideration is that while countries like the USSR were concerned with attack and defence all on a single front and pretty much throwing everything militarily capable in there, the US was concerned with combat on 3 fronts, the ET, the PT, and it’s homeland defence. Would it have been realistic for the US to send everything they had to the ET and leave the homeland defence bare? Maybe, maybe not, but unlike the USSR, or Germany which as you said did have manpower and equipment shortages, the USA IMO was not fighting a similar “total war” or a war of “ultimate survival/destruction” as some of these countries were. Question could be, politically at home, what would it have been like if FDR fought a total war, and is it realistically possible that this could have happened? FYI, this is not the only case where I took such liberties, while this may be a surprise to some, the USSR in June of 1941 had probably the largest submarine arm of any country at approximately 220 subs. Are these reflected in the game, not at all actually. While some sort of representation could have been included for the large amount of USSR subs, I felt that it would not be appropriate to the “feel” of the game as much of the sub fleet was either obsolete, differently trained, and simply not used in the way the u-boats were. Lastly, while the idea of invading the US I agree is a little bit of a stretch, the main idea here with having the US on the board was an attempt to have a simulation of transporting troops to England or North Africa or whatever, coupled with portions of the convoys that also travelled across the Atlantic, i.e. to give both the Axis and the Allied player something interesting to do in the Atlantic. Again I will agree with most criticisms that this has many flaws and is in general probably the weakest part of the game, but the good news is that I have taken many considerations to address these issues for future incarnations/versions of SC. Hubert

Jersey John Thanks for the feedback, and not to worry most of what you described has been carefully looked at and I suspect you will like the changes as far as they actually fit within the context of SC2... since I am not at liberty to say what that is just yet Edwin P. I can say that at least the AI will be on the same level as SC1 with the hope for some improvements, but if I spend too much time on the AI and the game is not released for a long time everyone will know whose request to blame Hubert

I think Shaka has nailed it on the head here. To be honest, one of the main reasons I have not usually participated in discussions relating to certain specifics of the design in SC, especially the various economies and military capabilities of each country involved is because it really does come down to a "belief" or "individual perception" about the relative strengths of the nations involved and in the end each one being highly debatable within it's historical context. It has been interesting to see and watch the various debates over the last year and a half, but... perhaps it is time for me to actually sit down at the keyboard and "defend" or better yet "explain" my design and/or design decisions so that everyone can have a better idea of what I was actually thinking when making SC. In the beginning... back in '99 when I was thinking what sort of game I wanted SC to be, I pretty much went with a basic economic system as represented by the MPP, i.e. so many resources will represent your military industrial capability. Keep in mind that since SC was going to be my first game I didn't want to get to far over my head (I wanted to design something that I would actually finish) and I wanted to keep the design as simple as possible. "Why overcomplicate things when general abstactions will do?", was the primary thinking at that time. I also decided to only have the current participants in the war as "Active", i.e. countries like the US and USSR would be off the board until they either entered the war or were declared war upon. Thinking back, perhaps this was not the best decision since it did create a few complications as we now know, various gambits against majors, and the difficulty in correctly modeling a country's industrial war preparedness as well as what should the relative strength of the military be once it enters the war etc. Now with perhaps a better understanding of the limitations of the design I will start with the topic of choice here, i.e. the US, in explaining part of the overall design philosophy for SC. We all know the US produced a ton of stuff during the war, and that it's industrial output, militarily, domestically etc. mushroomed rather quickly from 41-45, but in making the final decision as to what an appropriate per turn MPP value should be I had to factor in more than just the industrial numbers to have a proper reflection of what “I” felt this WWII sim should be. While I realize not everyone may be happy with this part, yes, I as the designer unfortunately , have the liberty to push the design in a certain direction, whether it satisfies my "beliefs" of WWII or it's to satisfy my idea of playability, or my idea of what makes a game fun . Getting back to the design, for the most part, I attempted to gauge for all countries their total major military units (i.e. armies, tank groups, air fleets etc.) that participated in the European Theater during WWII and the required MPP for the duration of the game to get them there, not withstanding other costs incurred during the game, i.e. reinforcement, operation, transportation etc. For a quick (and really an overly simplistic) idea as to why perhaps the US/Germany/USSR MPP numbers vary so greatly take a look at the following numbers of units in the European Theater: USA - 6 armies (1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 15th (formed in Jan '45)) - 4 air fleets (8th, 9th, 12th, 15th) Germany - ~20 armies (25 total existed but some were renamed and/or reformed) - 7 air fleets USSR - 43 Fronts (Army Groups) with ~50+ armies - 18 air armies While these numbers may be a surprise to some, an even bigger surprise might be that some will say by looking at these numbers the Soviets need a huge amount of MPP (bigger than what they already have) to produce this sort of output by game's end, but this would not be an accurate reflection either. Why? Well, while the Soviet numbers may seem initially impressive, what really made up a Soviet army, or air army? How many men were in these armies, what type and what numbers of equipment or support equipment made up these armies, were they highly mechanized like the US armies? etc. To answer these questions quickly and more specifically, most historians would argue that what the Soviets called an army was more akin to a corps in terms of size and equipment, but nonetheless they did have a huge number of men and equipment fighting on the eastern front and this does need to be reflected for game play and thus part of the reason for a large Soviet MPP. While some may think the US is restricted, the Soviet player will never be able to produce 50+ land and 18+ air armies in SC because I also took the liberty in the design to acknowledge that this would make the Soviets much too powerful on the board especially coupled with what represents an Army or Air Fleet unit in the game. They can still produce fair amount of units but in reality or for a different game , they could have more but either smaller in size, i.e. a Soviet corps could be an army for game play, or an adjustment to Soviet army characteristics, perhaps cheaper and weaker relative to German or US armies etc. In part, this could be viewed as part of the problem with the abstract generalization I used for SC, and in a sense it really does come down to Greens vs. Reds vs. Greys as Shaka has alluded to in a much earlier post. Since there are no country specific attributes, there had to be some liberties taken to reflect game play. While country specific attributes could have been done, in the end it really becomes a numbers game, where you are just pushing the numbers around to satisfy your “feeling” or “belief” of WWII. For example, with specific country characteristics, you could make US units more mobile to reflect higher mechanization, but then you would possibly have to make the units more expensive to reflect the higher costs for more equipment per army. Then you could increase the number of per turn MPP’s for the US since they were able to cover these costs etc., and some might feel better because the US has a higher per turn income, but in the end it really is the same thing since the ratios are the same and the end number of units will be the same. Note, this only reflects income vs. costs and not the end performance of the unit, which would undoubtedly be better. While generic units were used for SC1 to not overcomplicate a simple game, the idea of having country specific units I think is a good one and is under serious consideration for SC2. At least the ability for the player to do so will exist, and I think this should make most people happy… well I hope So getting back to the US, the question remains, if they were producing a ton of stuff, and yes their armies were more qualitatively equipped, more mechanized etc. this still does not account for all material they produced, i.e. why did they not field more armies in Europe, where did all the equipment go? Short answer, some of the equipment stayed at home or went to the pacific or was sent to England or to the USSR in Lend Lease: - US had 11 armies in total during WWII, 2 never went overseas and 3 went to the pacific - US had ~17 Air Fleets (some renamed), 4 served throughout the US throughout the war, 1 served to protect the Carribean and Panama, 1 the Phillipines, 1 in Hawaii, and the rest served throughout the Pacific in various capacities. Again, part of the numbers in SC for the overall incomes takes into account automatic adjustments for the above and/or for lend lease etc. and this might give a better idea as to why the various numbers are the way they are. So again, in setting up the US I had to make a decision to reflect WWII and to balance fun and playability, and while it may not be perfect, I felt it was the best I could come up with at the time with the limitations of the design, i.e. the US start out much stronger militarily than they do historically in Dec 41, but at the end of the war they should be in theory at about the same position. While any of the info I posted above is just as debatable as anyone else’s posts since they reflect my “beliefs” of WWII, the good news is that I am listening and much of this has been addressed in designing SC2. What I am proposing is that there will be much greater editing control in SC2 so that if you are not too crazy about a particular design decision the ability to change some of the details will exist… within certain limitations of course Ok I think that’s a long enough response and hopefully gives a better idea of where I was coming from, but feel free to debate any of the above and I will respond with any further ideas I may of left out. Hubert P.S. and yes I like the emoticon

The exchange rate is at it's highest value in almost 10 years! That put's SC at around $33 CDN. Not bad in my opinion Hubert

Difficult for me to say much without seeing it firsthand. If you can reproduce it and send me a save file with specific instructions on which units to check this that would be great, but either way probably not much will be done since SC is in its final state. Hubert

What is being considered is a BIT check to ensure that the selected campaign exists on each players system. This way a TCP/IP game can only commence if both players have the same campaign, i.e. with exact modifications etc., and this way if it is a modded campaign you have to send it to your opponent first and they can then check the setup in the editor if they wish, thus no surprises. Number 2 is a maybe but number 3 is a serious consideration if all goes right Hubert