Der Panzinator

I have been using your unit counters and love them!!! I did change the German tanks around a little because I wanted cooler looking tanks at the low tech levels. I keep track of the level by the dots. I left the top 3 levels though since it is not too common to see these developed except for late in the game. As I pointed out the GDS_Starfury who has made a cool unit mod as well that the background color for the German units is too light and the flashing turn indicator is difficult to see. The only other thing that comes to mind is the color for the level 1 German fighter is light brown and makes it look more like a British fighter. Not that I confuse them but I always like all the German units to have that great gun-metal gray. Other then that the icons are great!!!

I really like that you cannot stack units. It drives me nuts to have to click through stacks of units. It's much easier to look at the screen and see everything laid out without digging around. Plus it keeps with the simple easy to play nature of this game which is one of it's strongest attributes. I have played a lot of overly complex games once or twice and set them aside to gather dust. I have boxes full of them actually. There are some games that I don't think were ever even played. As much as I love to find a game with historical accuracy I will always prefer a game that is playable and fun. That I believe is the true greatness of this game. And that is what has generated such a large fan base. Things can be added and maybe new maps for the Pacific theater would be nice but the basic design of the game should be kept mostly as is. Just look what happened to Panzer General 3D. Tried to be something it wasn't and flopped as a result. I would say that stacking will introduce too much complexity and require so many additional rules that it will cause the game to lose much of its appeal. That said I would however love to see a totally new game created by the designers of SC that would be more advanced and use things such as stacking and multi-force attacks. But please keep this great little game the way it is. IMHO it is just fine.

Hubert, I was just curious of your impressions of using Eiffel to program this game. Was it easier to use then C++ or Java, and what advantages, if any, were there to using this particular language. I'm interested in toying around with making a territory based game similar to A&A but I'm not sure which language would be best suited to doing this for someone who doesn't have a huge amount of programming experience. Any advice on what would be best? Also I was curious as to how difficult the AI was to program? This is something that many games typically fail at but your's seems to work very well. You must have really put a lot of thought into this aspect of the game. One last thing is how long did it take to write all of the code and how massive is it all? :confused:

Aren't these all things that can be done with the campaign editor??? Except for maybe changing political factors you can change country's starting units and technology using the campaign editor. If you want to give France 30 tanks with +5 Heavy tank research then you can do this. Not that you would want to but the option is there.

GDS_Starfury, Nice mod. I've been changing things around as well including the cities, capitals, and units. One thing I noticed is if you change the background color for the German units to a darker gray its easier to see the flashing movement indicator. With the light color its difficult to see which units are still eligible to move. Are you working on modifiying other graphics for the game as well? You gotta love a game that lets you get in and tweak things around.

Same here too. I played the demo for about a day and bought it. This is truly a game of simplistic genius. Thanks Hubert.

The PBEM option is great! It has the nice feature of replaying the opponents turn when you open the file. It's always nice to know how your units perished. One note to add is that you should probably zip your pbem files before sending them since the files are about 500K. Once zipped they are closer to 100K. This is better if you don't have a high-speed connection. [ December 06, 2002, 01:28 PM: Message edited by: Der Panzinator ]

I do like the idea of attacking the low countries first as the allies. Since this is where Germany must go through on its way to France then a build-up of troops may significantly slow down the German blitz. I'll have to give it a try. Sure would be nice for an early plunder for the allied cause.

The odds indicator is simply to show the possible results of combat. Att-1, Def-3 would mean that the attacker will suffer 1 hit and the defender should suffer 3 hits. This is not always going to turn out exactly this way since random modifiers will slightly change the results. For the most part it is a pretty reliable indicator for combat results though and I use it all the time.

Andre, Guess you must have finally gotten the game in the mail. I don't know about you but it seems like this game will make for an extremely long PBEM or TCP/IP game. I would like to try a PBEM game though. If you want we should discuss on Don's forum so our posts won't be buried so quickly. I'm kinda partial to a 1939 mod made by dgaad. You can get it at the Strategic Command Headquaters.

Here is something interesting to try. Let Germany soften up France but then let an Italian unit take over Paris. This gives Italy all of the French plunder and plus its resources. Once they get all this money they can then purchase some HQ's and tanks to roll over Spain, Portugal, and Vichy France. All this combined with Italy's large navy of 3 Battleships help to make it a significant power close to that of Britain. They can then either move down into the Med and finish off the British forces there and also take Iraq and Turkey. Or they can move out into the Atlantic and harrass allied shipping and possibly threaten Britain with invasion. Always seems like a waste to have Italy stuck with only 115 MPP's per turn. At this level they are almost a worthless ally to Germany.

When playing the computer taking neutral countries is so easy there is no reason not to. For neutrals I am talking about Sweden, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Iraq, and Turkey. Doing this early also helps since some of the countries resources will increase over time. I have played both sides several times and have always been able to take several of the neutrals with no problems. It makes a huge difference for UK to go from making only 140 MPP per turn to 500 MPP per turn.

The main thing with using green units to attack first is only if they are not going to suffer massive losses. If the odds indicator show that only 1 or 2 hits then go ahead and attack to take down entrenchment and to soften up the enemy unit before the big guns come into finish up. This will help the unit gain some experience and make it easier for the experienced units to make a successful kill without having to use a lot of the experienced units to take out an entrenched postion. This would also assume that there has been some softening up with air strikes.

Hubert, First off I must say that this is a great game. I have been totally addicted to it for the last couple of weeks since I purchased it! I think what I like most about it is the fact that it is a very straight forward easy to learn game but it offers many different strategies and surprises. I always hated the stacks of counters in hex-based games so I really appreciated the one unit per space system. This game for me is like mixing Panzer General and Axis & Allies. Two of my all-time favorite games!!! Some strategies that I have discovered that work well against the computer. I haven't played against a human player so much of these strategies probably won't work against a human player. 1) Take over as many neutral countries as possible. This is a treasure trove of extra money and if done early will provide either side to be well supplied in cash for the entire game. (I'll get more into this later.) 2) Always try to keep your units in range of HQ's and the HQ's in range of cities. A unit with low supply and readiness is almost worthless. I believe the range for supply and support is 5 hexes. 3) Get your units up in experience level without suffering huge losses. This can be difficult but the green units should always hit first to get that first level of experience. Let the vets do much of the mop up. 4) Don't let valuable units be left in positions to be surrounded on multiple sides. If you must place a unit in a 3+ exposed space then don't put a valuable high experience unit there. Use a low experience Corp unit. 5) Invest in technology early. If possible make some small investments early in the game for technology. The best one to start with is industrial. If you can get the price of purchases down early then once the other researches start happening you won't have to deal with the higher prices. Also good to start early is anti-tank to get the infantry pumped up. These are just a few things that I just wanted to get started. I'm sure that everyone has more strategies to contribute. This is my first post here so I was hoping to get some solid topics started on the game and it's many different strategic approaches. I have a long list of interesting things that I would like to post but I'll get to those later. I'm sure that many of these things have been posted before but it was too hard to dig through 65 pages of topics so I started a new one.