John DiFool the 2nd

Oh, it's available, but I can't get it-keep getting an error. If I wasn't able to DL the 3R mod, I'd check my scriptblocks.

Getting an error trying to DL: "550 CWD failed. "/BF1_00.649.zip": directory not found."

Thanks for the explanation of the design process HC-there are few devs who would even deign to do what you've done in this thread, to come along and justify your design philosophy. My only remaining point on the above quoted issue is that it would be helpful to get a popup at the beginning of the game which outlines all the free units you will get, and when and where. [Devil's Advocate mode] On these gambits and such, which Hubert has attempted to justify-if Terif were still here he'd undoubtedly point out that taking half of the RN out of the Atlantic is an open invitation to a Sealion. We've seen this before (remember the Belgian Gambit? The Egyptian Adventure? Even the Italian Preemption?), and in each case the gambit in question came with big risks. Aside from the Sealion risk, what would really happen if the British did decide to take the Dutch oil pre Dec '41? In addition to the big hit in war entry for the US, they'd likely see a number of their colonies revolt, thus losing a lot of their overseas MPPs. Yeah it might suck for the Japanese, but the Germans would certainly benefit. Why didn't the British do this, once European Holland fell to German invaders? Were they "too nice" to think of it, or did they realize (correctly) that the cost would outweigh the benefit? Churchill's most fervent hope was to get the US fully in the war on his side, and I can't imagine him doing anything to prevent that, thus potentially hosing his country in the process under either a Sealion or a u-boat strangulation. Hell he'd probably see a vote of no-confidence and have his government fall if he did that. I've been on the other side of the "deterministic history" thing before (oddly enough vis a vis the "automatic" Yugoslavian revolt, which I now notice isn't a given, since they came in on the Axis side in my last game). So, when I see stuff like "They use these new free [Australian] units in the Pacific potentially throwing off the balance", well, that's the risk, allowing Rommel to take Egypt, right? Again it would annoy Tojo, but them's the breaks. I guess it gets down to precisely how deterministic you consider history to be-but on numerous occasions things hinged for "want of a nail." I'd just prefer that the players make these sorts of decisions, living with the consequences, rather than have them forced on them. That's why I like panzer's 3R scenario-the variants throw some changeups to the players, forcing them to live with the unexpected. [/DAM] In any event we'll have a chance to see how other design philosophies play out when Al & Nupremal release their babies-I hope they are lurking here and paying attention. Perhaps Hubert's philosophy will be vindicated-perhaps not.

I brought this up in another thread, but it deserves its own. Because multiplayer saved game files can be swapped between the PBEM, hotseat, and TCPIP folders, and subsequently loaded as any of the three types, you can now (and Pacific also has this capability) do true multiplayer (up to 6 separate human players). In a nutshell: 1. You play your team's turn out as hotseat (both modes utilize passwords) 2. The last player saves it as hotseat 3. He then goes into the hotseat folder, moves the file to the email folder 4. He reloads it as an email game (it's all automated depending on which folder it is in) 5. Hits the end turn button 6. Saves it as an email game, sends it to the other side 7. They load it as a hotseat game, rinse, repeat I just confirmed that it works as outlined above. I'm only willing to play one of Al's or Nupremal's scenarios, once the latest beta of either is released, but anybody else can knock themselves out with vanilla if they want (Italy IMHO is a much more interesting country to play than China, and it also evens out the teams to 3 on 3, not 4 on 2). The manual warns that opponent replay only will work for the first reload of a turn (the one from the opponents' email file), so everybody probably should get a copy of the new turn (to talk out strategy as well). You also probably want to make a list of minors with their controlling majors, so your "ally" doesn't end up moving around units which are rightfully yours.

If the British move half of their fleet to Pacific ports pre-Dec '41, I certainly think there could be sufficient penalties to punish such moves (big boost in Spain's readiness towards the Axis, or, by the same token, a reduction in US readiness. Morale hit for the remaining British ships in the Atlantic. Possibilities are endless.). Let the punishment fit the crime; right now, you don't even have that choice at all. Yeah, I can't commit armed robbery because I'm locked up back home with a ball and chain and a straitjacket! Free will-what a concept. Okay, sorry for the snark, couldn't resist. And, while I'm on the subject, I dislike scripted reinforcements because there's no way to know beforehand, short of going into the editor and laboriously searching thru the scripts, to know you are getting unit X on date Y. Regular reinforcements are visible in the (ahem) reinforcement screen-just put everything there, and if a popup message is needed to tell the player why he's getting them, then that can be easily scripted. When I was playing Japan, I didn't know I'd get a crapload of special forces, so I was hurriedly building a bunch of them for my invasions, only to be given a bunch of "free" ones on top of that, such that my hard limit was like -3 after they all showed up. I'll note that tweaking the default scenario was a given at this stage of the game, just like it was for the other editions of the game, so no sweat off of my brow.

Alrighty-the reason I want to wait for Nupremal's or Al's is that they have it as 3 Axis vs. 3 Allies, while Hubert has it as 4 Allied vs. 2 Axis. I would rather play Italy than China (and that's not including my preference for a nice healthy navy to play with). France is a minor in all 3 scenarios. We'd also need rules on strict divisions of minors, since it is not always obvious about who belongs to who. And also a strict nomenclature about naming the files, so we don't pork the pooch by putting a file somewhere that it doesn't belong.

Then again, we have this fine print in the manual (don't recall seeing this in the previous editions): And I forgot that hotseat games have passwords (when I've played "hotseat", it's always been the humans vs. the computer). So yeah it's doable, if I'm reading this correctly. The turn sequence would go: First Axis player (call him Germany) would start a hotseat game, and choose a password. He'd do his thing, then send it to the Japanese player, who would play his turn out, save it as a hotseat, exit to desktop and move the file into the PBEM folder, and THEN reload it as PBEM, and hit the end turn button. It would save again as a PBEM file, and Japan would ship it off to the first Allied player (China say), who would load it as hotseat, choose a password, shuffle his units around, and then send it off to the Russian player, and so on and on. I'd be game for something like that, tho I'll wait until one of the megamods is released. The first guy had better replay the enemy turn so that data's not lost.

In PBEM, no alas-the only time it saves it is after you hit the end turn button. Otherwise, if you do want to try one person per major, you have to play it like regular hotseat, which means no passwords, which means the enemy could cheat and take a look at your units and such. Otherwise we'll have to keep waiting for Hubert to issue a patch so you can save a PBEM turn in progress (I've been waiting for over 4 years now).

The transport thing has always bugged me-I know there must be a rationale, but it escapes me. Even if you assume they are Queen Mary fast, that's still several knots slower than a fleet destroyer.

CVs also have a pretty pathetic strike range (shorter than land-based at least), unless you upgrade the long-range air...

I noticed that CVs are deadly to subs. When I get started on my sub war scenario I'll have to make some tough choices about how exactly to handle carriers.

My WAG is that you'll need all the RAM you can get (fortunately it's cheap right now).

If the US has been invaded on both coasts you're wayyy past the endgame (tho I do on occasion like to inflict such humiliations on the AI, if it has been especially annoying during the game). The word I've gotten in such situation is that the arrows are country-specific in some cases.

My machine should handle it.

Longstanding wish that I'll bring up once again. I'd like to get some of the data out of the hardcoded .exe and into some config files. The #1 aim here would be to have virtually full freedom to modify unit types; using a simple (?) matrix/list of options in a config file, I could modify say the artillery slot into another ship type (e.g. PT boat), with full choice of which techs would apply to which stats. To help the AI you would have several general categories of units (so that it knows what to do with them)-infantry, armor, fighters, bombers, subs, surface ships, anti-sub, CVs. Games like rFactor, Civilization, and Silent Hunter get a lot of mileage out of such schemes, allowing the modders to come up with tons of unique content.

So, Bill, are you going to attempt to make A World At War-in other words expand the A3R motif to encompass the Empire of the Rising Sun as well?

Technical term should be "climate"...

There really needs to be a diplomacy penalty levied against the British every time they interdict the Norwegian shipping lane (before Norway is in the war of course). Of course the cheating little bastards are actually trying to get to my subs, but still... I also am suspicious of the lvl 3 cap on German sub tech. Considering that they start with lvl 1, they can easily reach 3 within the first year or two. My guess is that lvl 5 subs are pretty much unstoppable, so they were nerfed down to 3 for that reason.

Downloading now...

I wish more people would use variants in their scenarios-the main selling point, for me at least, is that we don't have to almost mindlessly adhere to historical paths because we know the Germans, say, won't have much of a surface navy to worry about, or that the French won't have extra AT capability, for example.

I guess the readiness should be taking the hit, not the morale per se, then.

I wrote up precisely what the OP described over here: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=65151&highlight=tech

SC is much more "traditional" than the HoI series, in that it uses good old fashioned counters (or icons) and squares (tho not the hexes of SC1), and not the "zones" of HoI (something which I could not get used to at all). It is also more "grounded" and less liable to give wackily ahistorical results (either the dev is more on top of things or the SC game system is inherently less prone to such things).

Trigger pulled.

Well that's where diplomacy comes into play, which is the real appeal here for me...