Cheese Panzer

How many spaces are we talking about here? The big complaint with SC1 was the "wall of corps" tactics where you could prevent a landing for for months by blocking the possible invasion sites. The new squares and limited force pools frevent a lot of that, but the instant ampibious invasions appear to have moved the bar too far in the other direction.

Yes, they can. All strategies have to have risks and payoffs. If you don't want to risk the RN guarding the beachses then you leave yourself open to Sealion. If you want to stop it be prepared for massive RN losses. Good games are about making interesting decisions.

Yeah, about 2500 and we threw an entire division + naval support against them. And damn near lost. And the Japanese navy and air force NEVER SHOWED UP. You can't amphib without control of the seas and at least some air supremacy - look at the Falkands. The basic rules of warfare still apply. In SC2 Germany can take the French plunder and put their ENTIRE ARMED FORCES on boats and drop them in England and the RN and the RAF can do nothing - in fact the RAF will die from ground combat before it ever gets a shot. All I hear you proposing the the smae "line the coast with corps" strategy that SC2 was supposed to fix.

Tell that to the guys who stepped into the reef holes at Tarawa. Do you have any idea the kind of preparation and planning need to conduct amphibious warefare? The Allies, with all the advantages of production, air superiority, dedicated planning staffs, control of the seas, and plenty of troops, were only able to mount six major landings (of more than 1 division) in Europe during the entire war. Most of the early American landings in the Pacific were relatively small affairs, a divison or so, which wouldn't even show up in SC2. Even Germany recognized that air superiority was crucial to making an opposed landing - the Battle of Britain wasn't just to reduce MPP's! And even then they had trouble finding enough ships to carry the waves across the Channel. Without air superiority the enemy navy can operate against landing ships - look what happened to the naval landings in Crete - wiped out before they ever got there. Either shorten the range of amphibious assaults or allow ships to prevent invasions in adjacent squares. Having to stay exposed against enemy air and submarine attacks to try and prevent a landing is a better representation than an intercept option for ships which probably isn't going to happen.

You've come to the right shop, F, so pull up a chair and I'll bore you silly with matters nautical. 1) Queued up ship: The game allows forces to be placed in any city or port in overland communication with the home nation's Capitol. This keeps the Germans from having to build everything in Warsaw before marching it into Russia. It's OK for airfleets and armies but yes, it makes for some odd results for ships. If I had to guess I would say it was probably easier to code a general rule than it was to have to code a set of exceptions for each country. 2) The German starting U-boat force was relatively small, 40 or 50, and that includes all the small coastal subs and older boats used for training. Germany sent 21 subs to sea at the start of the war, and when they finally settled in to a regular operating tempo roughly 1/3 of all the boats would be at sea at any one time; of the rest 1/3 were in transit to or from the Atlantic and the other 1/3 were in port preparing for the next sortie. Germany did not start producing the huge numbers we associate with WWII until 1940. 3) I haven't got the game open in front of me, but even allowing that the German ships were twice as good as the Allies, the Germans would have roughly 2 BB and 4 CA (figuring 1 BB or 2 BC/CA, and a light cruiser and some destroyers in each counter). But the Allied fleets would be much larger: Britain started the war with 12 BB (6 counters) plus it had 5 more under construction (2-3 more). Add to that 16 heavy crusiers and battle cruisers (4 counters) and 41 light cruisers (say, 2 more after deducting escorts for the BB's and CA's) plus twenty more under construction (again, 2 more). The carriers are a real problem, as Britain only had 5 fleet carriers plus two more completing in 1940 (and bad ones at that) and two useful light carriers at the start of the war. That means each of those three carrier units is 2-3 ships with less than 100 planes - keep in mind that land air fleet is about 1,000(!). France had 6 old BBs, 2 modern BCs, and 17 assorted cruisers, say roughly 2 BB and 3 CA units. They would get another BB if they survived until late 1940. Italy had 4 old BBs, 7 CAs, and 12 CLs (so 2 BB and 3 CA, plus one more BB complete in 1940). Russia had three old BBs, and 5 cruisers. Russia should really only have one CA in each Sea so I suspect htey were given two for design reasons. They certainly don'ty deserve two based on their historical order of battle. Hope this answers your questions.

Well, not many, but the Germans essentially looted France to prepare for Barbarossa - especially for motor vehicles like tanks, trucks, tractors, and prime movers. It also helped that many of the German minor allies used French equipment and this allowed Germany to send them a lot of things like ammunition, spare parts, and replacement gun tubes without having to replace the with German equipment needed for their own army. Helmets, greatcoats, belts, boots - more stuff goes into your armed forces than just tanks, planes, and ships. Admittedly it isn't very sexy to be worrying about boot wastage when you are planning to conquer Russia, so I think the plunder mechanism is a nice compromise. For what it's worth I don't think it should be based upon remaining troops but on some function of country base MPP's reduced by a percentage for each turn it takes to conquer (2% per turn, perhaps?).

After France was re-entered by the allies, but before any cities, resources, or ports were taken, the reinforcment screen kept trying to place a couple of French corps! They may have been in the production queue before France fell in 1940 (I honestly don't remember). Is this deliberate or is it a possible bug?

Those Finns are such worry warts.

Well, no they aren't: The Baltic states were three different countries (Lativa, Estonia, and Lithuania) and no-one thinks that is a bad idea. And if splitting is a concern then why isn't Luxemburg being represented? I'm not certain adding ports and cities is necessarily a good idea since it throws off a lot balance issues such as supply and MPPs.

8a. AI Allied Tech chits: Played out a game well into 1945 (someone had to invade America!). At the end of the game both the British and the Americans had max levels in IW and AT AND still had 5 research chits each (!) in both techs. That's a total of 2000 MPP's that weren't doing anything for who knows how long.

Are tiles adjacent even across what should be an all-sea or all-land area? 1) Ground troops in England attacked a naval transport in the Dublin(port) in Ireland. 2) Ships in the North Sea are able to attack Kiel across the Danish isthmus.

After all countries have joined the war or been declared upon, the program gives this error when trying to access the Diplomacy screen: FAILED(diplomacy_dialog:setup_dialog) Segmentation Violation

2. Yup, same with the one in Iceland. They are there to represent the long range aircraft the allies commited to combatting the U-Boats. With lots of Long Range tech they can search most of the convoy routes. By keeping them pinned in place it prevents the Allies from getting two free Bombers over Europe.

Yeah, I'm guessing the cut-rate card on the cut-rate computer isn't the best option. Still, this is the first time in many, many years that I've had a non-realtime game exceed the limits of my graphics card! *sigh*

Hubert; Thanks again - I'm glad it's fixed as well. I'm already using the 2-D units so it's not a 3-D/2-D issue. I'm using the 2nd demo build - has there been another one released since then? I've tried using the Fantomas variant sprites but the same problems occur. The first time I got the video to work correctly the Subs and Naval transports were a black square with the number icons showing. SUbsequent runnings of the game have the same units showing problems, only now it is some other icon (air fleets and HQ's so far) shifted to the right and the cut off portion no appearing on the left hand side of the icon.

Yup, that was it. I FINALLY found the right driver (could the support site be any more user unfriendly?). The new driver solved all the problems except for a few graphical glitches with Amphibious, Transport, and submarines. So the demo now runs at decent speed on my machine and I have high hopes of the release when it finally arrives. Thanks for all the help!

Misery loves company.

9.0c (or that's what I found). Nice to know it's not just me, though.

OK, here are all the replies to the above posts: File Dates Video: 11/7/2002 Sound: 2/11/2003 Video Drivers: My driver version (8D04) appears to be the latest, although it was rather vexing to find out my card is now considered too old to be worth supporting. Direct Draw Test: All OK, no conflicts or errors found. New version of Demo: Still same failure message, current failure point is "Draw_War_Map_to_buffer" DirectX 9.0: Removed as per directions. Re-ran Direct Draw test, 9.0c no longer listed, passed tests. Reloaded Demo, same failure point. So basically I'm down to reloading Windows to play SC2? [ April 13, 2006, 02:45 PM: Message edited by: Cheese Panzer ]

No idea - where can I find those?

Nope, changing to DirectX 8.1 didn't help. Now what?

I went back to a restore point from a couple of months ago, well before I was fooling with the graphics stuff. Same problem, although it now appears to be running faster - it didn't take anywhere near as long to crash this time. As for taking it to a friends computer - as far as I can tell everyone else who posts on these forums isn't having a problem, it's just me. I'm sure someone is running DirectX lower than 9.0c, so I'm inclined to think the problem is the interface between DirectX, SC2, and my graphics cards. I'm certainly not a power-user and the only piece of software I've installed in the last 6 months was a tax program. I'm off to try DirectX 8 to see if that helps.

OS: Windows XP Home Edition v 5.1, build 2600 Card: S3 Graphics ProSavageDDR Driver Ver.: 6.13.0010.1100 DirectX Ver: 9.0c

Yeah they just let me out of the sanatarium(again). Not used to the freedom I guess. I'm working on restraining myself from the F-word but the latest turns in the "Panzerliga-gate" got me a bit heated. </font>

OK, I downloaded the demo. It ran once, but very slowly. After the first time it refused to run, always giving me a: DirectX "dderr_unsuported" error during the "calculating supply" phase of loading the first turn. I've updated my drivers, installed DirectX 9, and reloaded the demo several times. Nothing works. I've already pre-ordered the game and I'd hate to have it not run on my machine. HELP!!!