Brit
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Posts posted by Brit
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- from EoS startup window
That information is old now. The limit is 10 players. The other 9 can be any combination of humans or AIs.
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As others have said it is too easy to transport lots of troops onto another players 'territory' camp them outside an enemy city and then wait for the right moment before attacking with overwhelming force, seizing it, making peace and then repeating ad infinitum. It would be like Russia transporting troops into Kent or East Anglia in the UK and sitting them outside Norwich - I doubt the British government would stand for it any more if the UK landed troops near St Petersburg. I feel that cities and resources (both land and sea) should project a zone of national territory around them into which other forces (unless they are your allies) cannot enter unless they declare war. That would represent the sovereign national territory of that nation and perhaps have it marked out by a border that expands and contracts with your empire.
Sounds like what the game of Civilization did. It's a reasonable system. It gets a little odd when the borders expand and suddenly your units are inside the enemy's territory. In the Civilization games, I've had the AI declare war on me because his borders expanded, and suddenly one of my units was inside his territory, and he acted like I moved into his territory. The other issue is related to the fact that players setup unit-orders to move into unexplored territory. Units (including aircraft) would have to update their course during a turn to avoid crossing those boundaries.
I'm sure I can find some decent solution to this.
Also, can you explain (sorry if it is in the manual) the difference between declaring war and a sneak attack. I assume the latter gives you some kind of surprise bonus but I feel it should really hurt your reputation if you do so- look at Pearl Harbour.You don't get any bonus for doing sneak attacks. They allow you to attack an enemy player without giving the warning of a declaration of war. So, you get the advantage of not letting the enemy know you're coming, but that enemy will probably dislike you more.
I also agree that when you build up an army and give it a name (6th SS Panzer Army or whatever) it would be nice if you could transport the whole army (perhaps with a stack of transports) without losing the name.I can understand that, but it gets odd if any of the transports get sunk en-route. For example, if you're moving 3 transports, and they've got 2 infantry and 3 tanks, what happens if one of the transports is sunk? What ground-units are lost? I suppose I could setup a system where some random combination of ground-units gets destroyed. I don't know.
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If it seems to freeze on a start of a turn try pressing the "ALT" key
Hm. I wasn't able to reproduce this.
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Just a small update.
- Added 'Airforce Base' to the tech tree (just after 'biplane'), so cities can build it
- Fixed some scenario/unitset link problems
- Fixed a crash that occurs in "City View" (Rowley, 10/29)
- Added flags for Denmark and Iceland
- Fixed an exploit that would allow too many units in transports (by using UnitGroups)
- Fixed an exploit that would allow illegal units in transports (by using UnitGroups)
- Fixed the 'beached ship' problem (hopefully)
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Brit, I really think you need to add a few more playable maps to the demo. Right now we have no idea how the system and the AI would handle maps which are (say) mostly land. At the very least generate a new demomap for the next build (pretty please).
With the release in the near future, I think what we're going to do is just push ahead with that. I don't know what will happen with the demo. We'll certainly want a demo available for people that doesn't end on December 1st. Whether we'll change up the demo at the same time the release happens, I don't know.
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I added some more code to try to avoid this problem in the next update. Let me know after the next update if this is still happening.
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I've been playing the demo for a couple of weeks and love it. I don't have the latest version so these comments may be moot.
1. Transport Planes and Transports seem to have no limits on the number of units they can carry. I've loaded at least six paratroop units on a Transport Airplane level 1. Similarly, I've put six tanks and two arty on a transport ship. Is this correct?
Hi Jonah. Yes, there was a bug that would allow you to create unit-groups inside a transport and there would be no limit on the number of units they can contain. This is fixed in the next update.
2. I've built wonderful groups of ground units in a city and then tried to transfer the units to a ship as a group with no luck. The only way I could do it was to drag each unit to the ship and rebuild the group once all the units were on the transport. Is there any way to drag a group onto a transport as an intact group (i.e. move my whole '1st Division' to a transport intact in one move).I'll take a look.
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Thank you very much. This is going to be a great game.
Your response brought up another question (not a game breaker though lol). Will the game support multiple cores for processing?
The AI runs on a different processing thread than the player. This means that the game should make good use of a dual-processor system. I don't think three or more cores would be an advantage over two, though.
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Brit, would you mind hotfixing the airbase/airforce base thingy before the end of the week? It kinda cripples the airforce completely when you have to develop and build carriers solely to have these flying buckets of screws repaired...
Sure. I'll either get out a new version or hand-off the updated ruleset. (The ruleset is where the fix to this problem is.)
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Started a new game. Sent the plane exploring each turn. Sent the infantry down the road looking. Sent the transport out looking for stuff. The transport hit an island and stuck. I could not move it. There was a circle with a slash everywhere. So I got out and started over. Same thing happened on a different island with a different start island.
Ah, the beached-ship problem again. Seems like I've gotten quite a few reports about it lately, so it must still be a problem. I'll see if I can reproduce it.
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1. Use of BBs etc
Whenever an AL country goes down, he always seems to have 3-4 BBs just sitting around somewhere (not helping much). The AL is great at building a strong navy, he just doesn't really use it. To beat him, just avoid his navy and take the cities....
So, what should AL do with the biggest & baddest navy around?
A. Protect his cities / islands. Since AL doesn't seem to need to be in port to upgrade, as long as he doesn't need repair put his ships outside the perimeter of his islands/cities instead of in port.
B. Chase down and attack any enemies within / near owned territory. It is pretty common to be attacking one AL city while 3-4 BBs sit in nearby cities and do nothing.
C. Support AL invasions and escort his transports. He just doesn't do this now. Really the only thing he does now is take sea resources.
2. Use the air force
Been talked about before, so I won't reiterate. However, since AL can already see-all know-all the recon aspect of this isn't helpful. Without that, maybe planes aren't much good to him (other than paratroopers, bombers, missles).
3. War & peace
AL should not let you land troops on his islands without declaring war (and hopefully sinking your transports). Ideally, once he sees a loaded transports within his recon range he may give you a warning (if far enough out), or just shoot to kill. Same is true for landing paratroopers. Other ships can have more leeway, since their absolute position isn't as big a threat.
Yup, yup, and yup. The AI needs to be smarter about these things, and a good AI is essential for a good single-player game.
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Hi Rich. I'm certainly willing to add features to the game, even after release.
1. Allow resources, diplomacy, trading, etc to be options.Sure, why not? There are a couple places these options could be surfaced - on the Game-Setup window, inside the scenario editor (they would only apply to that scenario), or in the ruleset system. Dropping it under the "Rules Modifiers" in the Game-Setup window would probably be the easiest of the three.
2. Allow for much larger maps, up to 5-6 times the current max.Sure. My only concern about this was memory usage and processing time (larger maps take more time to process). Although, I guess that depends on the user's individual system. The AI runs slower on larger maps as well, but that's something that will certainly be fixed, so that's not really an issue in the long-term.
3. Allow the option to start random games with everybody already at war with everybody else.Sure. I recently added some options to the scenario-editor so that players can't make peace with each other, and this isn't too different, although, I'd have to add it to the Game-Setup window.
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Sent a destroyer around to explore the dark areas, and the darned things get locked. Can't move them anywhere.
Hi Sivodsi. Are you using the latest version of the game? I ask because this was a problem in earlier versions, but I thought this was fixed in later versions. (Maybe it's just less common in later versions.) The current version of the demo is 0.97.10701. Let me know if you're using that version.
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I had added them to the install for the full version of the game. I decided to just leave them in the demo because I thought it might be useful to let people see the thumbnails of other maps playable in the full version.
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I ran a few combat simulator tests and it didn't really feel like anything's changed. Assuming all units' classes are on similiar tech levels, the simulator says that over 4000 calculations you are still much more likely to lose two or even three subs, or 5 tactical bombers, than have them kill one BB, which means there is still no cost-effective counter to BBs.
The fact that artillery is better against ships is very good news though. It may not be particularly historically accurate, but there has to be at least one way to scare a BB away from your most precious cities, other than by bringing two BBs of your own!
It is not a counter though - you can't kill a BB with arty unless it's commander is plain stupid ^^.
I ran some tests putting a battleship against artillery. It's true that the battleship is going to win against a single artillery, but if you look at the 'production loss' on the bottom of the combat simulator, the artillery function about 50% better against battleships than with the old rules. Under the new rules, battleships take about 60 production worth of damage and artillery take about 60 production worth of damage in a fight. The artillery would be dead, and the battleship could sail back home to get repaired (*which is, at least, a good way to get battleships out of your territory and take them out of the game for a few turns until they get repaired), but things would be a little different if the artillery-player built a lot more artillery. (Note: A battleship costs about the same as five artillery.) Under the old rules, the battleship would've taken about 40 production worth of damage. Also, none of these numbers take into account the terrain defensive bonuses that artillery would get.
It was (and still is, according to the simulator) a suicide to send top class strategic bombers against a city with two infantry units inside. Who ever needs SAM sites?The strategic bombers now preferentially target cities now. One of the problems with the old combat system was that strategic bombers would often target the units inside the city. When strategic bombers do that, the units get a counterattack, and often destroy the strategic bomber. Now that the strategic bomber targets city-improvements, in-production items, and population, those other units don't get an automatic counterattack, which improves the strategic-bomber's survival. You can open up the combat simulator and pit a bomber against an infantry. The bomber doesn't survive very well. Now, hit "add location" and add a city. Now, the bomber is targetting the city, rather than the infantry. They do a lot better. The infantry doesn't really get much of a counterattack against the bomber because they're not setup for that. But, if you drop-in a flak gun, the bomber does worse again.
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It appears that the hit point changes are not in effect in my game. Do I need to start a new game for the upgrade to apply?
Yes. The way the rules system is setup, your old games continue to use old versions of the rules. There are some cases when you'd want to use the new rules, but some other cases when you'd want to use the old ones. For example, if some of the names of the units, buildings, or technologies change, it can mess things up. (Today, I changed the name of the "Airbase" city-improvement to "Airforce Base" to avoid confusion. If you had built an Airbase in a city, and moved up to the new rules, the game would've magically erased your Airbase from the game.) I also wanted to prevent cheating - since players can change the details of a ruleset. This would be especially important during multiplayer games.
So, I just set it up so that old games (and scenarios) are linked to whatever game rules they started with.
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One note: "X damage" units (I checked cruise missiles only as of yet) seem to be broken after the patch. (well, not really broken, just their effectiveness nerfed by 50%)
Ah. You're right. I remembered to bump-up the damage of nukes, but forgot cruise missiles.
E.g. Cruise missiles used to be the only somewhat effective counter to battleships, excluding the obvious one - more battleships. You could send two and if your guess was right and the missiles found their target, they could effectively eliminate a careless BB. Right now it takes four cruise missiles, which makes it hardly worth the hassle - you have to send double the previous amount of missiles (4 cruise missiles ~ 2/3 of a BB) for certain death, not being sure if the target doesn't move an inch and all your missiles don't just run out of fuel without hitting anything. Needless to say that if one is shot down and the ship returns home with 2 hit points... you've just wasted quite a lot of money.In general, please consider giving the official 1900-2030 ruleset a final balancing touch in one of the upcoming patches, that would address the issues:
- weak aircraft
=> useless anti-air units
- dominating BBs (dominating everything - seas, air and anything that happens to be in range on the ground, which includes most cities on Demomap and all random maps except the Large Continents ones)
- cost-ineffective subs
- accidentally (?) nerfed missiles, possibly along with all fixed-damage units (didn't check nukes et al).
... of course, those are issues in my opinion, any or all may not agree.
I tweaked a number of units in the last ruleset update. The AA units should be a little better, and artillery are better at fighting ships. I don't remember what other tweaks I made. (I guess I should've written it down.)
A tiny bug - Airbases don't seem to be buildable? They exist, according to the Help book, and have no prereqs, but are not buildable.Yup, you're right. It looks like I forgot to set it as 'initially buildable' and it's not in the tech tree.
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edit. A tiny bug - Airbases don't seem to be buildable? They exist, according to the Help book, and have no prereqs, but are not buildable.
Strange. I'll take a look.
Another awesome upgrade.EoS is getting more powerful every day ;D.
GJ!
Edit. The Large Continents are very nice. Thanks a lot for this.
It was really a dreadful thought that battleships would be the winning thing on all random maps...
This update is a huge leap forward I say.
Except for more Ruleset Editor capabilities (which are all welcome) I can't think of any other mechanic improvement right now.
There are only some Ruleset tweaks that could help a lot (buff aircraft, buff subs, differentiate the research trees a bit... stuff like that), but that's of lesser inportance. I'm very happy with the combat tweaks... I was tired of sweating like a horse every time I sent a Cruiser against a destroyer, a tank against a militia and the like.
edit edit - altogether, you deserve a hug, Brit ;D
Thanks!
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- Changed the unitset for more predictable, more regular combat results
--- This was done by doubling the HP of all units and doubling the hit chances
----- Some effects:
------- Fewer surprises from combat ("I lost three infantry against his militia")
------- Combat time is more average (fewer very short or very long combat times).
------- Repair rates are the same, so repair effectively takes twice as long
- Doubling the HP of aircraft means that they can be damaged.
--- The "airbase" city-improvement repairs aircraft (1 HP / 2 turns)
--- Aircraft carriers can repair aircraft.
--- Airfields cannot repair aircraft.
- Made aircraft attacks more predictable (strategic bombers go after city improvements, etc)
- Tweaked some of the combat numbers
- Increased the cost of building airfields from $20 to $32
- Added a x0.3 turn-replay speed
- During the city-needs-orders popup phase, I moved the build window to the left side of the application, centered the visible map on the city
- Added a button to trigger city-needs-orders popups
- Added player restrictions to the scenario editor (cannot offer or accept peace, cannot declare war)
- Added functionality to the Combat Simulator to handle ranged-combat
- Added map labels
- Added 'rounder' continents (listed as "Large Continents" in the game)
- There are now three (optional) victory conditions: capture all cities (only player/team with cities left), capture 90% of the population, capture 80% of the population
- Fixed some upload/download problems
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I can not seem to figure out how to group ships. I have them all in the specific space and hold down CTRL as I click each one. I then click where I want to move them and/or establish a beach head.
If they're all inside a city, you can drag and drop them (as N3rull shows below). If they're out at sea, and they're separated, you can select ship #1, then right-click on ship #2. This will cause the ships to join together. Unfortunately, there's a little bit of inelegance here - you can't give the group orders until the units have combined into a group (which means you will lose a little bit of time).
Also if I can group them and move them, how do I make sure the cruisers take the attacks before the transports do? Or is that even possible?When a group of your units goes into a fight, the enemy units will randomly target your units. This means if you have a group of transports, damage will be randomly distributed among them. If you have cruisers and transports, the damage will be randomly distributed among them as well. (Although, cruisers are less likely to take damage, so the transports in the group will end up with more damage than cruisers.) In all of these cases, it's better to have a group of transports or a group of cruisers and transports than a single lone transport because a single transport will take all the damage and probably sink. When damage gets distributed among ships, it means they'll be damaged, but each ship is less likely to take so much damage that it sinks.
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I wonder why the forums seem to be dead recently. Brit, are you still receiving feedback? I must admit that my participation is mostly halted because I'm just sick of the demo map ;-p. I wonder if it iz just my own weakness or a general syndrome. If the forum silence is caused by a contageous allergy to the demomap spreading among the fellow players, maybe it would pay off to give us another map?
Yeah, it's been kind of quiet in here the past few days. I plan to put out an update tomorrow, maybe that will wake things up a bit.
Brit, are you still receiving feedback?Yes, I still get feedback from people everyday through the bug-report system.
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Well, I am aware that was the intention. But it's just my feeling that you might have gone a little bit too far ;p.
(nod)
PS. Any updates comin'? ;pThink it will be the end of this week.
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+ add an option in properties that all "need build order" pop-ups start minimized and we'll have solved the issue. I must admit that it is sometimes annoying to see that my armada of 3 transports with nine Class 6 tanks on board is about to crash into an enemy battleship, but I can't order them to get away because the next game turn begins with 10 BUILD SOMETHING HERE windows jumping at ya. On the other hand, without those pop ups, it would be a nauseous task, keeping all cities working.
I don't know if I want that solution exactly. There might be some other ways around this. Right now, you can turn-off the automatic city popups, but (even though cities are in the left panel) it's a little more difficult to make sure all your cities have orders. I suppose another option might be: don't show any city popups until I click a particular button, and then the popup sequence starts - might be a good middle-ground. That way you're controlling when the city popups begin appearing, rather than having them automatically appear at the end of turn replay.
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When the city build screen pops up it is always over that city in the map. So I have to drag it to the side to check the map. The small map in the city build screen isn't very helpful... would it be possible to have the city build screen pop up beside the city instead of over it?
Something like this?
By the way, the size of the application in the screenshot is less than 1000x700 pixels, which means it should work for most people.
Finally, would it be possible to add an experience value option for the units. I guess some people wouldn't like the extra complication, but it would be something interesting to have in the optional rulesets.Yeah, I see no reason not to do that for optional rulesets.
AL tweaks
in Empires of Steel
Posted
Yeah, something like that. The AI sends a message telling you to remove your units within a certain number of turns. Also, the AI could detect if your units move towards anything valuable, and get less patient if you do.