Flash Gordon

1) Both Japan and Germany had a relatively law-abiding population that pretty much put down their arms when the legal head of the government got on the radio and announced that the war was over. I doubt any recognizable legal ruler of Iran would do the same and even if someone did, I really doubt the Iranians would say, "Well, he said the war is over, I guess it's over," and put down their arms. It's simply not in their culture. 2) This law-abiding nature is why the Japanese and Germans were unlikely to take part in any widespread insurgency; the idea of a taking part in an irregular force fighting an occupation was anathema to them. That's also one of the reasons why they were so brutal when dealing with insurgencies directed against them. To them, insurgencies were ILLEGAL. Again, I doubt that's a trait shared with Iranian culture. 2) Another factor which pretty much kyboshed any idea of a wide-spread insurgency in occupied Germany and Japan was probably the spectre of the Soviet Union. In effect, the Germans and Japanese had the choice between cooperating with the occupation in rebuilding their countries or fighting the occupation forces and probably destabilizing the country enough as to facilitate a possible Soviet invasion; both the Germans and Japanese were frightened of what would happen should the Soviets invade. The Soviet Union is gone, Iraq can no longer invade (since it has problems of its own) so there is no bogeyman presenting a worse alternative to scare the locals into cooperating with an occupation force. 4) There is no precedent in which airpower by itself brought about the capitulation of a modern state. The two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan only just hammered the point home (the point having been established by the US navy and its submarine fleet's decimation of the Japanese merchant marine which pretty much strangled Japan and left it oil-starved). Carpet bombing is not going to do much good except kill a bunch of civilians and make the average Iranian dig in his heals (see bombing of England, RAF night bombing campaign of Germany, the recent Israeli air campaign against the Hezbollah, etc.) and flush a bunch of US tax payer's money down the tubes (bombs are expensive). Air power is only really effective when used to support surface operations. Everything to the contrary is merely propaganda cooked up by air forces because it's in their best interest to maintain independent air forces. The last thing the US air force wants is to be relegated to being an adjunct of the army. Which is why they've been trying to convince anyone who would listen that they could win a war all by themselves ever since WWII.

When I tried to start it, it mentions that a file is missing (MSCOREE.DLL). Is there anywhere where I can get this file? Thanks in advance.

Well, it looks as if the random mode certainly lived up to its name!

Whoa...that could possibly over-complicate SC. The beauty of SC right now is its simplicity. Do we really need to know how many King Tigers, Tigers, Pathers, Pz. Mk. IV's, etc. are in each Panzer Armee?

The AI is good but humans can be VERY unpredictable. I'm playing my first PBEM games right now and my opponent threw me for a loop during the initial turns and I believe I've thrown some curveballs his way and I believe this will have serious repercussions as to the final outcomes of the games.

Anyway - more examples of how this could work. Let's take the production of an army - well, an army needs to have a bunch of guys, have them trained, provide them w/ weapons, etc. Much of the "time cost" will probably just be the training required. So a level 0 army unit could cost: 250 MMP - 4 turns However, say we have a level 5 army unit. Much of that level 5 badass behaviour of this army unit would be due to technological advances in the weapons it has, i.e. automatic rifles (BARs and Sturmgewehrs) as opposed to semi-automatic rifles (M1 Garands) as opposed to bolt-action rifles (Enfield). But training is still probably going to take the same amount of time. So a level 5 army unit might cost 300 MMP (due to increased cost in terms of resources for the better weapons the army gets) but STILL cost 4 turns. Basically, an Army unit would be something that just wouldn't benefit that much from advances in industrial technology since the rate-limiting step would be the training time as opposed to time to manufacture enough weapons to equip them. NOTE: When providing examples, I just numbers that just came to me off the top of my head so they are not necessarily consistent with the numbers I provided in my previous example. ev brings up the good example of "time cost" of units not only being dependent on time needed to manufacture certain weapons but also time needed to train the men. The thing to do is to determine for each unit what the rate limiting step is - if the rate limiting step is the time required to train the men, no advances in industrial technology will lower the "time cost" of building a certain unit as advances in industrial technology will only reduce the amount of time it takes to manufacture THINGS as opposed to training people. How this MMP cost/time cost thing will work in the context of shuffling replacements to a depleted unit is another question altogether.

Uhhh...how much time would it take a fully industrialized nation to build a battleship as compared to a nation where a lot of stuff was still manufactured by individuals and guilds, etc.? I believe the time difference would be outstanding.

Probably better suited for SC2 but here goes. Have everything cost MMP's AND TIME to make. As industrial technology level goes UP, all it does is decrease the amount of time it takes to make something. The number of MMP's it costs stay the same. I rationalize this by thinking of MMP as being raw resources, i.e. iron, coal, etc. and no matter how much better your industry becomes, it's still going to take X amount of iron to make a tank...however, the length of time it would take to build a unit would decrease since industrial technology would be translated as how efficiently your workforce is puttering away in the factories. As an example, at industrial technology level 0, a tank unit would cost: 400 MMP - 6 turns but at industrial technology level 4, a tank unit would cost 400 MP - 2 turns. How's that? Or did someone already suggest this?

I was thinking about replacing it with Beethoven's Eroica - something a little less likely to grate on my jangled nerves.

I spent the weekend laid up in bed with strep throat. I am currently involved in a PBEM game and because I couldn't anything in bed except play SC or read, my opponent and I ended up going through a LOT of turns. Each time I booted up SC, I had to hear that crazy music that goes on. Normally, it never bugged me but maybe it was just hearing it almost a dozen times during the course of the day or maybe it was because of the big ol' sinus headache I had but by the end of the evening, I couldn't bear to hear it anymore. Is there anyway to replace the SC theme song with something less bold and strident? I was thinking of something mournful and melancholy. Has anyone made a music mod? I imagine it's just a matter of replacing a .wav file here and there?

Those 10-year German kids with rusty bolt-action rifles and Panzerfausts are mean, I tell ya! Mean!

Does the AI stick to history? Well, first of all - is it desirable for the AI to stick to history? After all, we all know what happened, don't we? Anyway, the AI does stick to history, more or less. Which might actually be a bad thing. I'm playing two PBEM games concurrently (against the same player, one with me as Axis and the other with me as Allies - to keep things fair) and some of the things that the other HUMAN player has done has sort of thrown me for a loop because I was so used to playing against the AI.

I didn't even realize that there was an opponent finder here - I found out about SC at another forum and my first PBEM games (still going on), are against the gentleman who introduced me to the game. As for why the Free French get two new ships - could it be that they receive some old, de-commissioned ships from the Royal Navy?

DUPLICATE POST

DUPLICATE POST [ November 20, 2002, 11:41 PM: Message edited by: Flash Gordon ]

Why take chance?!?! BRING the Yankee dogs to HEEL, at the point of the bayonet if need be!!!! [ November 20, 2002, 11:41 PM: Message edited by: Flash Gordon ]

The Yankees MUST be brought under the jackbooted heel of the glorious Axis Alliance!

You are probably right. Some of the greatest brains in Europe pre-WWII were Jewish. And Hitler's hatred of Jews led him to discount the atomic bomb, calling the physics required to devise such a device "Jewish science". Had he been willing to exploit and harness the intellect at hand instead of attempting to enslave and exterminate it, who knows what might have happened? Also, the Germans were initially greeted as liberators in many of the Soviet Republics, due to Stalin's repressive anti-nationalist policies. However, native "appreciation" quickly gave way to hatred when the Germans quickly made it obvious that they weren't liberators at all. A less heavy handed policy might have yielded many more anti-Soviet volunteers and manpower for the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS. Instead, it yielded a bunch of pissed of partisans running amuck and wreaking havoc and tying down troops who might have been put to better use at the sharp end. But the primary reason that Hitler lost was because he and the higher ups of the Nazy party never envisioned fighting a long term war so never prepared for one. Once the economies of the USA and the USSR were brought to bear, it was only a matter of time before Germany was crushed between Western Liberal Democracy and Soviet Totalitarianism.

PLEASE do not tell me that the AI in COS cheats. I've been playing it a lot recently. However, if it DOES cheat, it may explain why I've been consistently losing (yeah...that's it...it's cheating). The "can't build units once they are destroyed" thing is my biggest gripe about COS. In one game, through careful use of sea and air power and strategic bombing, I left the Royal Navy a pitiful shell of its former self. Unfortunately, I couldn't capitalize happy development on this because I had no capital ships left to build :-(. Also, the game sometimes won't let you land an amphibious force on a coast line, forcing you to dump that back where you got them from , leaving you with a rather vulnerable transport ship in an area teeming with warships. With that being said, SC2 can become MUCH MORE than SC and COS by taking some of the good features in both games and tightening up how air units work. I really liked the COS feature where you would buy a unit and then have to wait for it to be available. This really cut down on the BANG you got an army, air armada, navy overnight problem that SC currently has. Also, the fact that units would retreat and that units could move before AND after attacks and that over-run attacks were allowed made certain aspects of COS superior to SC. Both games, however, suffered from the one-unit stacking rule, which I think is silly. IMHO, friendly units should be able to move through and stack in hexes containing friendly units, possibly paying a movement penalty to simulate the fact that things might get congested and chaotic due to "traffic" in that hex. Another feature of COS that I liked was the political model - you could use your prestige points to push certain nations to join the Axis or Allies - I MUCH prefer this to the way politics work in SC.

I'm playing COS right now and THAT feature really bugs me - sometimes, the least optimal air unit is the one doing the air strike! Good Lord. The other feature I don't like about COS is the fact that once you buy a unit from the "catalog", if it is completely destroyed, you can't buy any more - created an odd situation in one game where I decimated the Royal Navy but lost most of my ships...and couldn't "buy" anymore despite having resources to do so. As for interceptions - I think it's a simple matter to just have "standing orders" for air units. Just let the the player determine whether a unit is standing down, or if it is available for BARCAP duty. THIS would not undermine the PBEM capability of the game. The other gripe about interceptions, i.e. the losses they take are too high, can be addressed by letting the players set a loss level at which the unit doing the intercepting will RTB, i.e. if it is set at 25%. Just adding a few more options like this can add to the flavour of the game while retaining the PBEM playability that it currently has. Also, when a player launches a strike, he can also specify whether he wants his raid to be escorted or not and which unit he wants to do the escorting.

Both my opponent and I have v1.05. For some reason, I can read the PBEM files he sends me but he can't read MINE. What could be the problem?

Yeah, you got me there. Well, it's NOT as big as the USSR. But it's still darn big. Plus, you have think about maintaining supply lines across the Atlantic. NOT an easy thing to do.

One thing I would like is for players to have more control over what their air units are doing. They should be able to have them stand down and refrain from taking part in any operations due to heavy losses, etc. They should be able to CHOOSE which units to devote to escort, CAP and BARCAP duty. They should be able to specify whether their strategic bombers are attacking the units in a hex or the industrial structure in the hex.

I would like the air portion of the game to have more oomph. I come from a WWII air combat simulation background so you can see where my bias is coming from.

I concur. The current air-battle model used in SC needs to be overhauled. Flash