Exel

First off, you are speaking purely from SC1 perspective. Please remember that SC2 is a new game, I doubt the combat system would have been copied from SC1 as such. Second, I don't really see a problem. Axis can take LC in one turn with the air power it has in the start, and even with just protective air cover it wont take too long to reach Brussels. The air power is also insignificant when breaking through the French lines, since both the Axis and Allied air forces are quite evenly matched there - Luftwaffe wont achieve such a dominant superiority in the air by then. The aircraft in SC1 only get overpowered when their tech level and quantity on the battlefield increase.

I'd rather have the diplomacy AI react to its assessment about the war situation dynamically than have it based on pre-scripted events. The problem with scripting is that it is always based on specific pre-determined triggers and can never anticipate unexpected events. In other words, scripted events only work if the war should follow its historical course, and any ahistorical developments would produce weird outcomes. That's why I think scripting should only be used with really major events.

Air strikes should cause more damage to the target's combat effectiveness (readiness in SC1 terms) and only a limited amount to its strenght. The strenght loss should be capped so that air units couldn't destroy a ground unit completely, only weaken it. That would generate a lot more realistic air and ground warfare and air units would no longer be the overpowered superunits they are in SC1.

The Americans bombed the Romanian oilfields from Britain and even had fighter escort for their bombers. So it's not unrealistic. What makes it a problem, however, is that aircraft are way too deadly against ground forces. Early war planes didn't have much of a range, and it should take some considerable efforts to develop such long-range aircraft, but it should be possible. Air units do need tweaking from SC1, but range is really not the biggest issue there.

I agree, but in my opinion it shouldn't be done with pre-scripted events but instead with a dynamic diplomacy AI that would assess its situation constantly and act accordingly. That way, with Edwin's examples, if Germany fell Italy wouldn't automatically offer surrender if it felt strong, and USA might consider peace if it saw that it had no chance to defeat the Axis alone.

Ehm. Strategic redeployment is there to simulate units moving on railroads. Why should ships be able to do the same? Ground units don't have to march everywhere, they can use trains, but I don't see how ships could move across an ocean by any other means than sailing over it. Afaik they didn't have aircraft that could carry battleships in WWII.

There should of course be a sub-AI for every nation that would determine how good or bad the war situation is looking from their perspective. I think such a system is required anyway for the diplomacy to work in any sensible manner.

Not if it was winning, but if it was about to collapse, why not? After all, that's what they did irl.

I don't understand why it should be limited to pre-determined nations. Why couldn't you make peace with anyone you want to? Of course it would be much, much more unlikely to get a peace with another major, but it should be possible if the other side is losing enough (or the AI has beaten your ally enough and wants to concentrate on you). It's not like the WW2 was destined to be a total war from the start. It was not until 1943 that the Allied leaders decided that they'd accept nothing but unconditional surrender.

I think this should be done with the diplomacy engine so that you could "negotiate" peace. Because of the limits of the engine it'd probably have to be a simple "white peace" option, but even as such it would be much better than just complete annexation.

Sure if you as the active ally declare war on the USSR before it becomes fully active as an allied combatant. Same for Germany wrt Italy. </font>

Another question that falls under this same topic is whether or not the Allies and the USSR can go to war against each other. It was a very real possibility in reality before Barbarossa and it would be nice to have a chance for it to happen in the game as well. It could create some interesting scenarios. Hubert, what say you?

I think this is a sufficient "bridge model" for SC2. Anything more complicated than that would do more harm than good (though I don't exclude the possibility that you make some wizardous invention to model bridges in an innovative manner ).

I don't know how you could model bridges in the scale of SC or would it be sensible even if you found a way, but the beachhead idea sounds like something to be considered. For example an amphibious invasion could open a temporary supply port to the beach tile for, say, 2 turns. An HQ could prolong the in-supply time for an additional turn or two. One possibility could also be that if you bring in new units to the beach they restart the supply for another 2 turns. That is not entirely realistic of course, but it would make the strategy of pouring in several units from one beachhead more favorable than invading with all of the units at once across the whole coastline. [ February 28, 2005, 04:01 AM: Message edited by: Exel ]

I remember reading that the active neutrals setup their own forces according to their perceived threat images.

Definitely agreed. The prolonged presence of partisans should if anything increase the chance of more partisans appearing. And should the partisans manage to liberate a city the chances of more partisans appearing should dramatically increase.

Well the Russian partisans weren't at first organized or supported in any grand scale. Didn't the Soviet command despise the partisans because they weren't politically correct or whatever? I remember reading about partisan fighters who managed to join the regular army being sent to labour camps. That may have changed at some point when the Red Army command realized the severeness of the war situation, however. But I must say I'm no expert at that area of information, so please correct me if I'm wrong. I'd also like more information about the Soviet partisans if you'd care to tell. What was your altitude and speed? War-time recon flights couldn't fly low and slow because of the threat of being shot down. Spotting from the air can be easy, but it gets increasingly harder when you go higher and faster. Plus the weather has a significant effect on eyeball spotting. There are also a number of other factors included: you can spot movement from a lot further away than you would a still target, how the targets use the terrain to hide and maneuver, are they camouflaged, etc.

I would still like to see Malta to be conquerable by an amphibious invasion. This would of course require special amphibious invasion rules, since the battle would have to be resolved in one turn. But I don't think that would be overly complicated if done properly. It would then also require limited stacking, because you would want to use a place like Malta as an air base but you should also be able to defend it with a ground unit. But again I think that its positive aspects far outweight the negative effects. I say this because it is very hard to destroy a fortified land unit with even combined air and naval power - in SC clearing Malta often required the deployment of almost all of the Axis Mediterranean fleet or alternatively several air fleets. And I'd prefer air and naval units not being able to completely destroy land units anyway - they should only be able to damage them to a certain limit.

Any comments from Hubert?

It'd be great to have air units protect nearby ground units from being spotted by enemy air units. The air cover should not however be 100% reliable, but instead depend on a number of factors such as the levels of protecting and spotting air units (pre-war fighters would not be very effective against jets), weather and of course a little bit of random chance. In any case it is an idea worth considering. As for partisan techs I must say I'm inclined to disagree. Partisans weren't exactly something you prepared for before the war - at best you could do some preparations during the war when the situation looked bad. I don't think any nation had prepared to lose the war in their defence plans. Partisans were more or less spontanious and improvised organizations formed often without any central command structures. So my thoughts are that there should be a varying chance that partisans would occur in any occupied country, perhaps with predetermined country-specific percentages, ie. they are more probable to occur in USSR than France, but possible in both.

I'm not going to argue about the reasons you gave that work against a system where diagonal movement has a different cost than normal movement in the game engine itself, since I obviously don't know how it is built or how it works. But I have to contradict one argument: it is not harder but actually easier to quickly estimate movement/action distances on the map if the movement patterns were more circle-like than squares, at least with my perception. That is in fact the main reason I am for the 3/2 diagonal/straight movement cost system. It just is more natural. Still, the more technical reasons are also important. If the engine works better with an equal-in-all-directions movement system, then so be it, I wont argue about it any further. But I'm going to give one more example to highlight the possibly biggest flaw with the aforementioned system: If movement to all directions has the same cost, diagonal movement becomes very advantageous. In fact so advantageous that moving along the squares makes - in theory - no sense. The longer the distance a unit can move, the more this behaviour is emphasized. With ground units it is not so much of a problem since the movement distances are limited and the fronts are usually cluttered with units. But it is ever more important for air and naval units that often have wide, unblocked operation range. It is perhaps most exploitable in scouting an area, as demonstrated here: If diagonal movement is 1:1 to normal movement, the red and orange paths cost as many APs. But with the straigth red path the ship can only detect the area surrounded with the dashed red line (with 1 tile detection range, 24 new tiles uncovered), whereas with the orange diagonal zig-zag path it could see 12 more tiles. Yes, even though it may not look like it in the picture, it's 50% more area!

I see and understand your point (after all I did use similar reasoning while trying to prove why hexes were superior to tiles ), but the cruder 1,5x cost for diagonal movement system might actually work better than the pythagoran system you had tested. In the example of the lone tank it would cut off the farthest corners from the movement zone (as shown in the picture below with the thin red lines). It is far from perfect, but imho still better than equal movement cost to all directions. The biggest problem with the latter is that diagonal movement is so highly advantageous - you can cover a lot more area with the same movement points by moving diagonally than you would by going straight, as the thick red arrows in the picture illustrate. In any case I trust your good judgement. My only concern is that whatever system ends up in the final product is well thought out to be the most suitable choice.

Seeing the new screenshots in the SC2 FAQ portraying the highlighted movement zones reminded me of the old discussion we had on the "Tiles / Hexes" thread about the subject. Judging from the screenies unit movement costs the same (1 AP) to all directions. The situation and the different alternatives were described and illustrated in this post. Based on that I would highly recommend using a system where diagonal movement costs by default 1,5 AP while moving "normally" to adjacent tiles would cost 1 AP. That way the movement pattern would more closely resemble a circle, ie. de facto movement to all directions would be roughly equal. Hubert, please read the post in question and consider the choices. [ February 20, 2005, 03:23 AM: Message edited by: Exel ]

One more thing: Being able to fight in amphibious invasions would be especially important in cases like Malta, Gibraltar or Crete, where the enemy could otherwise easily block you even with air units. Also in the case of Malta or Gibraltar where there is no escape (for ground units, planes could withdraw if there was friendly territory within their range) the defenders and invaders should fight to the death. That way invading even a one tile isle such as Malta would be possible, but extremely risque.

Will SC2 allow any form of stacking? Personally I am against unlimited stacking where you can place more than one unit of the same type in the same tile, but at the same time I think limited stacking would greatly contribute to the gameplay. Imho you should for example be able to stack one ground unit and one air unit in the same tile, or defend an HQ with one additional ground unit. Transports could also be defended by one other naval unit. One notable case where such limited stacking would be badly needed is Malta. You need an air unit stationed on the isle to cause the "Malta effect", but then without stacking you can't garrison it with a ground unit. So what are your plans for SC2 regarding unit stacking?