Desechecs

I am enjoying the game and am a fan of all of the SC games. However I have a minor quibble. Amphibious transports in the SCWWI game start out at 3 hexes per turn or 75 miles every game week or more. In reality, they could make that distance in a day. It can take months (in the game) to move units the same distance the Romans or Vikings could travel in a week or two. E.g. traveling from Egypt to the Dardanelles or from the Gulf of Riga to Germany proper or from France to around Rome. It also seems a bit excessive that it costs about 75 percent of the build cost (for corps) and 80 percent of the build cost (for detachments) to embark an amphibious transport. Put another way, it costs something like 1/40th of Great Britain's entire annual war production to put an already existing corps on a ship.

I have two bugs I would like to report. First, playing 1939 World at War, the game ended with me meeting all of the victory conditions (i.e. occupying all of the necessary cities) but instead of a "decisive victory," it returned "stalemate." I checked closely and I don't think I am missing anything. Second, playing Axis of Evil as Axis, Warsaw keeps having Partisans take down the supply level even though when you press "P" it does not show Warsaw as a Partisan center. I have files I could submit.

Vichy units are relocated but I have had axis units in Iceland units and French North Africa disappear as well upon surrender of the mother country. The program appears to treats them differently from units in Vichy territory when France surrender. Why is an interesting question.

Playing the axis against AI, I was unable to invade the canal zone with either amphib units or by land from South America.

ICQ 233-610-424 DRBargus@aol.com Played SC & SC2 AI and PBEM quite a bit. Would like to try a TCP/IP game one of these days.

Since last Friday, my SC2 has been incessantly crashing. I reinstalled the patch. Still, it crashes every other save and every third or fourth turn. My son believes it is probably caused by the automatic Microsoft security patch late last week. Is anybody else experiencing a similar problem.

46, Virginia.

The same happened to me. It should not be possible but I guess it is a function of how the map works.

What are the victory conditions for the D-day, North Africa and Battle of the Bulge scenarios included with the game?

I have some thoughts regarding time controls. Chess may not be the best model for SC time controls. In chess you move one piece per turn and there are, in most games, 45 to 60 turns. SC is more analogous to Go (Baduck or Wei Chei). There are many moves and many pieces. There are a number of different time control systems in Go. Go time controls gave me some ideas, but are not perfect either. Something like this may work in SC. The gamers set three amounts, let us call them A, B and C. They may be set to zero or any positive number. A is a bank of time and B is seconds per unit and C is seconds per turn. Each turn the player will be allotted the sum of B and C. The computer calculates how many units the player has and calculates B. C is a fixed additional amount per turn (to think strategically, purchase units, research, read reports, etc.). The amount of time you would have each turn would be the sum of B and C (it would vary from turn to turn). If you go over your allotted time for a given turn, you start to use up the amount in your time bank. If you use up your entire time bank and for any given turn your turn time allowance, the computer would terminate the turn where you were when time ran out. The time bank can be a lot of time 30 minutes or a small amount of time, it would be up to the players. Managing the time bank would become important just as in Chess. Getting in time trouble (i.e. burning your time bank) would be a strategic mistake. This kind of time control is flexible, but has teeth. You could play blitz SC say 5 seconds per unit, one minute per turn and a 10 minute bank or you could play deliberate SC -- 15 seconds per unit, three minutes per turn and a bank of 30 minutes.