John DiFool the 2nd

Good point on that last post. In RGW, you can "bat" a retreating unit all over the map: I once kept whacking a Russian infantry division along behind my front, for about 5 hexes, until I whacked it back into the Russian line.

IS the early attack on the Balkan minors a good idea? You gain early MPPs + plunder but lose their units (useful mainly for partisans of course) and Russia gets POed. Don't get me wrong I like to see something different whenever I scan these AARs-but it seems like in most games the Axis game plan is the same pretty much.

Good. I disliked how Clash of Steel did this- typically you just pumped in all political points you had to the target and hoped it would join you (typically Spain). Chits as long-term investments makes more sense.

Yeah but if the Allies attack Spain, the Balkan minors won't join either (tho wouldn't such an act by the Allies make it more likely?)

Doesn't sound very micromanagey to me. The poor AI likely would have its leader units blunder into the front lines, and promptly get obliterated, however.

Yeah I understood the bid system, didn't grasp the magnitude of the Allied bonuses tho! I guess this means that the game disagrees with history, which showed that the Germans had several disadvantages, (not including leadership of course), such as in the areas of industry, logistics, and motorization: no frickin' way in heck the Axis could have successfully fought campaigns in (say) Scandinavia, France during an Overlord, Iraq, and Russia all at once. Not to mention Allied/Russian advantages not portrayed. Then again anyone who has played SC1 much already knew that: in a straight up fight between two evenly-matched players it looks like the Allies have absolutely no chance, so duhh... :cool: Howcum France doesn't share in that booty?

How could you afford all those units guys? 8000 MPPs!??!? IIRC the Russians won't reach a total accumulated MPP level that high (from the start of Barbarossa onward) for at least 18 months...

Battle of the Atlantic, definitely.

My hope is that something like this will reduce the "almost perfect plays" that plague SC1. By "almost" I mean strategies which have been refined to the point of cliches now; they may not work all of the the time but they are likely the best choice in any given situation, so what else are you going to do? I mean after the Fall '39 campaign has been played to death in all those tournaments you guys have been running over the last 2 years, by a process akin to natural selection you have weeded out what doesn't work and improved on what does. Put a few variants into the mix and these optimized strategies may backfire badly if the player in question is counting on certain things to happen in a certain order. Having subs and strategic bombing become viable strategies will also help in this regard (I hope). A good early game example might be that Norway variant. Or a good French leader like De Gaulle shows up. Or the Germans get two extra chits in sub tech in Sept. '39: any of these could completely derail these stereotyped strategies.

Now that someone brought up the tech race, what precautions are you guys taking to a) limit the imbalance in the categories, as Seamonkey mentioned, and decrease the effect of luck, where one guy can put 5 chits into something, and get virtually zilch out of it over a 3 year period, while someone else puts in 2 and in those same three years gets up to level 5?

Well, in my case I've noticed that any halftracks that are taken out usually cause the carried unit to vanish. The crew may bail out with 25-50% casualties, but the passengers are SOL it seems. Perhaps this is to reflect that any soldiers which DO survive the attack will have lost most of their equipment bailing out of the burning halftrack. Hence I only bring up the halftracks once I'm sure all enemy AP units have been neutralized.

Some of us are lurking, I've said my piece (mostly regarding the Battle of the Atlantic), so what else is there to say? I do agree that air or sea bombardment should primarily affect readiness %, with a strength point loss here and there, but not be able to kill a unit outright 99.5% of the time.

I just recently got back into this, and I would have sworn someone modified the game so you could run an actual campaign (longer than an operation, with experience being gained and equipment upgrades). I do remember a big debate about this issue and Battlefront's mostly philosophical position against campaigns, so I'm not completely ignorant. Is there such an animal, or did I imagine the whole thing?

Well, I'd much rather move my units around on the map. Abstracting such things introduces as many problems as it solves, as your abstraction often fails to garner the "flavor" of the theatre in question. For example, the Allies, after leaving the Balkans alone for a number of turns, could surprise the Germans by hitting Ploesti hard, and if there's no Luftwaffe units down there (and oil has value for supply as well as MPPs...). With a "box", you lose all those little decisions about where to bomb and where to defend. Plus it's klunky and about as much fun as watching mold grow on a corpse... A "strategic bomber box" simply doesn't give you that kind of operational flexibility-it's strictly a matter of the numbers and the random number generator. Same goes for the other strategic theatre, the Atlantic Ocean.

Won't we get to mod the AI? Or is that not going to be doable on the user-side?

I was hoping that they would separate the ship from the air arm (which in this formulation would be a half-strength air unit)-I don't think that concept made the cut however, tho DD or Panzer can confirm.

Well, it sure is for me Retributar, and IIRC it was said that there would be convoy routes, and that the routes would be player-modifiable, and that surface raiders would be able to do their masters' evil bidding. All real good news for me. :cool:

The Type XXI electroboat would have been a major threat to sea lanes of supply-remember this is essentially the same design that the Russian Kilo uses (no H2O2-that didn't work out too well), and the Allies would have had to have gone on a crash program of sonar innovation (passive) to be able to detect them. Remember that they didn't get into action in our time line until the last month of the war, but Allied bombing probably contributed to the delays. Without that you are probably looking at a 200 boat electrofleet by the end of 1944 at the latest. And 262's would have eaten B-29's for lunch, without the forward air bases in France which allowed Allied piston fighters to loiter over 262 fields and nail them on TO and landing. A June 1944 landing on the continent would have been a disaster for the Allies. Absent the A- bomb alternative, they probably sign an accord with the Germans, albeit reluctantly... In the game tho I wonder...

Empires in Arms may be good for Napoleonic Grand Strategy. I think SC2 will be the be-all and end- all for WWII...

Well, competition would include (if this thread gets locked you can blame me): HoI 2: Well, I didn't care for #1, I know Les hated it-overall I just think there's too much micro- management, and the province movement isn't what many people want in a GS WWII game. [i know I prefer square/hex movement] Grigsby's thing: Has some nice diplomatic options and all but may be too "lite" to interest the grognard... Computer WiF: Vaporware. I know there are plenty of defenders of HoI but I think SC2's combination of playability with depth, reasonable historical accuracy, as well as almost endless moddability will make it the winner.

Perhaps, but instead the counter could represent the command staff that each leader had. Stalin isn't of much use if his command network is porked. Plus you will be protecting that unit at all costs (hustling it away from harm via the Reserve/Redeployment function). Well, I think it is something which hopefully can be modded, as if nothing else it can make for a "Hunt the Evil Leader" kind of game. <shrug>

And if wanted to play a grand strategic game which modeled every single rifle or gun, I'd play a Grigsby design...

By that I mean ways which the game engine and/or scenario limits what a country can or cannot do. I wish to raise the issue of whether each country should more or less have the general sort of default limitations which they had in the real war, and have to deal with or work around them. Take Italy, a prime example. I daresay that in SC1 Italy is capable of reaching heights the Mussolini probably never contemplated in his wildest dreams. Invading North America with a huge fleet out of nowhere? Of course that is a rather extreme example, but the only thing holding back Italy in SC1 is her crappy leaders. But if Germany lets her capture a lot of capitals... My point is: is this desireable? Should Italy have access to resources, technologies, and organizational capabilities which she never really had a realistic shot at? How about Russia or France? Would it be good for gameplay to be lenient in this regard, or would all the improbable goings-on lessen the game's impact and verisimili- tude?

There definitely should be routes from South America and from around South Africa...

I believe my solution was the DoW wouldn't become known to the declared-on player until his turn was almost over: there would be in other words a final phase of a turn after a player had already done everything else with the _active_ powers he controls. Hence, after he hits his "end turn" button, the game engine checks to see if the opposing side made any DoWs, and if so, the declared-upon player would then get a chance to set up the country or countries being attacked in a final, "extra" phase. This would prevent the declared upon player from reacting a turn early with his active forces, say moving them into the beseiged country, which would give him the initiative in the upcoming campaign (a bad, nonsensical thing of course).