Norse

Cheers guys, glad you find the advice useful On rivers, I should have included this in the above post, but units on rivers cannot entrench, and units that attack from river hexes only attack at 50% capability (air units excluded). If possible, then try to make good use of the river hexes that are around. Stand behind them and force the axis to attack from the rivers Finland isn't worth it in my opinion. You can only expect a MPP reward of 300, and if you are fighting a guy that is really giving you a hard time, then I advice you try to stay alive instead. You can always round up Finland later. If you play a guy that has no clue at all, or is busy fighting UK or USA, then you could do it Something I heard about that might be useful, is to take Iraq. By taking Iraq, then I hear you can operate units from Sovjet and into Africa - and vice versa. So you can get allied units (Uk, Free French etc) to operate from Africa and into Sovjet, if that is needed. I haven't actually tried this one myself, so no guarentees About the HQ's I get, I tend to get the medium quality ones first. They aren't so expensive as the best ones, so you can get 1 corp in addition. If I can't afford that, then getting a cheap HQ is better than getting none!! The navy, just keep it. You hardly get any MPP from scrapping it, this is my opinion. There are so many uses for your navy, you can bombard the enemy for free, and if the German player sends his Luftwaffe or navy to sink your ships, then some other units (Royal navy or your own troops) get some time off to breathe. Do as you wish though, I don't see the navy making or breaking the defence of Soviet. But everything helps, and I think having the navy around helps alot, even if it just the presence of it. Cheers ~Norse~ [ October 21, 2002, 09:03 PM: Message edited by: Norse ]

Hello boys and girls! I have played quite a number of PBEM games by now, so I have seen a number of useless and a few useful ways to play as the Sovjets. As you all know by now, each game is a unique experience, so drawing up the "perfect" strategy for the Sovjet Union is difficult. This strategy is therefore not an absolute blueprint. Rather it is a general guideline and gives you some insight into how to properly play the Sovjet Union. If you don't like it, don't use it, it is that simple. I can always play the axis side and enjoy yet another victory lol Ok, so be quiet and pay attention to this briefing Here we go. The most important quality to any Sovjet leader, is to know * when he is defending, and when he is attacking. If you mix this up, then you are leapfrogging towards total disaster. When the Sovjet Union joins the war, ALWAYS assume that you are on the defence right away. This counts even if the Axis is launching major offensives in UK or USA and leaves you alone. The Sovjet forces are not ready to attack from the beginning, so play safe and go with your defensive plan, and eventually you will win. By the time Germany turns her attention towards Sovjet (with or without UK/USA still in the game),USSR will be having a really hard time, so it is abselutely critical that you tend to your defences from the very beginning. Remember that your objective at this point is to stay alive, not to defeat the Axis. Got it? Now imagine a line that goes down from Leningrad in the north, thru Smolensk, and down into Rostov. Make any kind of adjustments to this line as you see fit, as this is the main line of defence. This is where you must try to stop the Germans! If you make this line too close to the Polish border, then generally speaking, you will not have time to make your Sovjet military powerful enough, and a good German player can then crush you beyond repair. So be safe, stay alive, and keep the line far enough behind. Loosing a city or two is acceptable, you can always get them back later. First thing first, send all your airunits far behind (Urals seems nice this time of the year). Your fighters are toast against the veteran German airunits right now, so play safe, and send them back to the Urals while you still have them. When the time is right, you can rotate them back to the frontline and put them to good use. Until then, keep them hidden as the secret Sovjet weapon. Secondly, place a corp in every city in front of your defensive line. The units in theese cities will never move, their only mission is to dig in to max entrenchment value (4 in the cities), and defend the cities for as long as possible. Even if they all die, they will buy you 2 or more turns before the Germans reach up to your main defensive line. 2 turns means atleast 800 MPP to add to your defensive line. 3 turns means 1200 MPP and so on. When your foreward garrisons are under attack by the Germans, don't move them, just reinforce them as much as possible and let the Germans waste another turn trying to take your cities. If the Germans decide to move around your garrisons and head towards your main line of defence, then congratulations, you just denied the Germans their weekly income of MPP. By the time the axis reach your defensive line, you should have a line of units that are entrenched to max (2 or 4), that are in full supply, and if you play your cards right, you should have a couple HQ's by now that boost the combat value of your units in the frontline. Make sure that you employ your HQ's right, make sure that they boost the units at the frontline only. Don't waste HQ power on units in the urals etc, be smart or be dead. At the same time, you must try to keep your HQ's alive from axis air-raids. I know theese two things are difficult to combine, but do your best. The fate of the world depends on it. Now you are in for a ride, as the axis units begin to hurl themselves at your defences day and night. Don't panic, and keep it safe. Remember that your ONLY mission at this point is to stay alive, so don't do anything foolish, and the tide will turn soon. For example, if you got a unit in position that is at strenght 6, then don't use it to attack anyone. Just be safe, stay alive, and reinforce the unit. If you need to retreat, then remember the procedure to successfully withdraw: * Entrench cheap foreward units who are only trying to stall the enemy and buy you time * Find a defensive line, and try to get the HQ units to boost the front-line units only, excess units should be rotated further behind (possibly to a 2nd line of defence) * Reinforce your units instead of attacking with them With time, your Sovjet military will grow in size, firepower, and capabilities. By now, you should have: Armies and tank-armies assisting assisting your corp's at the front line, HQ's to boost your frontline units firepower to the tenfolds, and some tech advances to give you the edge. Make a decision wheter you need more time to build a stronger military, wait for more time to research tech advances, or if you want to take to the offensive. If you take to the offensive, then do not repeat worldwar1 and hurl your units at the enemy. That is costy and achives nothing, you would be better off to research more instead then. This is the procedure to successfully counterattack: * Kill the German HQ units first Unless you find an opening, then this is normally done with airpower. So now is a very good time to rotate all your airunits back to the front, and send them en-masse to crush the German spirit! Remember to attach your airunits to HQ to increase their firepower. Also, hopefully you researched some Jet technology, so your fighters actually stand a chance against the German Luftwaffe. If you manage to destroy a German HQ or more, then the axis units run out of supply and their firepower is halved! NOW you can unleash your hordes of glorious Sovjet soldiers! :cool: If you do this right, then every Sovjet unit can have three times the firepower compared to the axis units. Why? Because you are smart, and you got your units attached to HQ's, while the Germans got no more HQ's. The German player keeps "moving" his units to attack you, so he hasn't entrenched his units (well atleast we can hope that he hasn't). The best offensives are the ones who manage to trap German units. So, try to get a breakethru in the enemy lines. Try to exploit this breakethru, and if possible, cut off 2 or 3 enemy units so they cannot be operated back to safety. Now that your offensive have achived it's goal, you can switch back to defensive strategy again. Dig in and soldify your new positions as you prepare for the next round of combat. The German units that you got trapped, are rapidly running out of supply and firepower, so you don't haveto worry about them. Unless you are very unlucky (or just plain silly), the trapped Germans will soon be prisoners in the Gulag. Good luck, the race towards Berlin has begun. I see you there, with a box of cuban cigars :cool: ~Norse~

Greetings Finland! The map size cannot be extended Im afraid. Battleships and cruiser units are not 1 and 1 ship, they are entire fleet's of many ships working together. So, a battleship "fleet" still got anti-sub ships, destroyers, cruisers and so on, thus they don't need any disadvantage against the subs. Not a bad idea though, keep it up. About the sub mode's, Hubert have replied that this is interesting and he is definately thinking about it About Egypt, I agree that something could be done there to make it abit more interesting to fight there. Think about it for awhile longer ~Norse~

lol, you know this game is excellent, when the only thing they rate "bad" about this game, is that they want it to cover the rest of the world I WANT MORE OF SC DAMMIT!! Excellent ~Norse~

Interesting. It should be possible Go to the editor, make a new campaign and make sure you don't active Poland. See if that works ~Norse~

Keep up the good work

You guys are missing the twins, they stand to his sides. The orc himself is a mixture of three guys from the cover. Take a closer look, you find the guys in the 2nd row there to be twins as well. ~Norse~

[ October 18, 2002, 09:30 PM: Message edited by: Norse ]

Dgaad, noone is asking you to agree with EB's opinions. But you are being asked to behave. If you think that what EB writes is poisioning this forum, then you should write an email to the forum administrators about it and let them decide. ~Norse~ [ October 18, 2002, 01:36 AM: Message edited by: Norse ]

There shouldn't be any problems running it on OpenBSD :cool: ~Norse~

Guys, please stop this ranting. EB has his own opinion that Germany was defeated without much help from the west. His opinion cannot really hurt anyone, so let's just leave that be, and discuss his idea's to improve the game instead. Some of the replies in here are disqusting. Some of the replies are not only bothering to attack EB as a person, but the entire Russian people. All this ranting is really bad and already we are seeing people leaving this game and it's community because it's too much. This is nothing but counter-productive. After all this game is a niche product, and we don't want to keep it only to some kind of small "elitist" group of grognards. Perhaps Hubert would move on and use his skills for more rewarding projects then.... Remember that EB is just 1 guy, and trust me, most of the people of the former Sovjet Union are very thankful to the US for the lend-lease. Don't let EB ruin your opinion on Russians in general. They are just other ordinary people who are trying to make a living, and most of them are very nice. So let's discuss the purposal instead. Should SC be a threeplayer game? One player is UK+USA, another is France+USSR, and the third is the Axis. ~Norse~

Slackware!!?! :eek: Oh good grief no wonder it doesn't run well for you!! LOL Sorry, couldn't help myself Alright, Im moving along ~Norse~

If I want to play SC on Linux, what is your issue with that? And no, I am not going to mail you to try and convince you that you must scrap Windows, or bother to listen to your opinions on other operating systems. If you want to use Windows, that is fine. I am merely showing people how this game can be run in other Posix based operating systems, if that is what they want. I thought you had a problem getting it to run at start, until you where saying you're just flaming. Move along... ~Norse~

Why are you trolling Ray?

Yeah, I thought about that too. Then I thought, naaah ~Norse~

Daystorm, it is possible with Eiffel to compile to linux format. Hubert, if I remember correctly now, updated Eiffel along the way to get some new features or so. The result is that, to port SC natively to Linux now will actually require that Hubert goes back in code, and change the things that is not compitable. This is his answer from the top of my head, yeah I have already asked About your experiences with Wine, hehe, yes... haven't we all been down that road. At first, I couldn't even get notepad.exe to work But trust me, SC runs fine You don't even need a real Windows partition to use for .dll's (but if you do, then you should get sound!) Try it and let's see if it works for you too! ~Norse~

Yeah, exactely. Cheers ~Norse~

I don't really think it is a very gamey strategy. The Sovjet Union get MPP even when it is not in war, so once war is declared, the Sovjet Union can afford to buy the historical reserve armies immediately. If the Germans delay an invasion, then Sovjet get's more MPP's as well. A good Sovjet player can manage to defend against the axis juggernaught, atleast if Britain is still in the war. As the axis, I actually prefer to take Sweeden. This might speed things alittle up, but I need as much MPP's as possible from the very beginning, so I can put it into industrial tech. Maybe I loose a turn or two, but the allies cannot take much advantage of that, as long as I keep the initiative. ~Norse~

dgaad, I would like to say, that I in no way underestimate the US contribution to the war. USA was our lifeline. Alright, so how about we get back to the original question at hand? ~Norse~ [ October 16, 2002, 09:10 AM: Message edited by: Norse ]

Welcome to the community m8

If you take control of Paris, the French might still keep fighting for a couple turns. The chances aren't great for this, but they will keep fighting, if you haven't destroyed their military to a certain degree. Destroy more French units and then they surrender. Otherwise, you might be looking at a Free French unit. Historically, some French continued to fight after France had fallen. They were called the Free French. ~Norse~

You can move the French air and land units to allied territory, and when France surrenders, they will fight on as Free French. With the fleet, I think there is something like 15% chance for any naval unit to join the Free French. Notice, that your French units must actually land on Commonwealth territory before France surrenders. If you still got them in their transports, then they surrender when France goes down. Some people have suggested that stalling the Germans alittle, and then massmoving the French to Britain is the way to go in this game. You can have 4 or 5 French armies, a HQ and an airfleet + navy. Also send the corp in Algeir to Gibraltar, and the Corp in Syria to Egypt, that way you got a couple more corp too. ~Norse~ [ October 16, 2002, 04:34 AM: Message edited by: Norse ]

Hello guys! I have successfully installed and played Strategic Command in Linux! To do it, you must install WINE for Linux. This is a win16 and win32 api layer for Linux, so you can run Windows programs. Wine is under constant development, and they are about 80% "there", as they need to code in all the Windows calls and such (of course this work will never end, as Microsoft keeps upgrading their DirectX etc). Anyway, Wine is free, and it works for Unix, Solaris and BSD as well. http://www.winehq.com/about/ This opens alot of flexibility up, as Wine runs SC!! I had perfect speed and visuals when I ran SC in Linux. I had no sound, but copying a .dll from the Windows System folder should fix this. Great, now I definately have no more need to boot Windows (right... I keep telling myself that... ) Alright, cheers! ~Norse~ [ October 16, 2002, 04:19 AM: Message edited by: Norse ]

I disagree I almost revealed my l33t tactics here now nah uh ain't gonna let ya get it that easy ~Norse~

Yeah, that Orc is so cute Did you know that he was an environmentalist? Yes, it is true!