Wushuki

A unit that has a morale of 50% will that gets demoralized 10% will lose 5% morale and its new morale will be 45%. This will reduce the readiness of the unit and thus reduce the damage it does and reduce the reduction in damage it receives on subsequent attacks. There is a formula to determine how fast morale goes up again, which is dependent upon the current morale, the supply and the strength of a unit. So if you greatly reduce the morale of a unit it will take many turns of standing in good supply with a high strength for that unit to recover its morale. You can find these formulas in the manual. So yes, if you attack a unit with a tank first and then follow up with infantry attacks your infantry will receive less damage and the defending infantry will take more damage. But note that artillery is generally far better in demoralizing enemies as upgraded artillery also demoralizes 25% and it can attack 5 times in a turn. EDIT: I see Bill already answered your questions. He beat me to it.

I realize that strategic bombing probably wasn't that well developed during WW1 and that they shouldn't play a large role in a WW1 game, but it seems that bombers in SC:WW1 are completely useless. Every country can only produce a single bomber, but there is 350 MPP of bomber research that you can do. Such a huge investment to improve a single unit is wasted. On top of that an a bomber will do 2 damage (3-1) in the ideal circumstances, which would cause 9 MPP (one turn 6 MPP, 3 MPP on the next) in damage against a mine. However, there is a 25% chance the bomber takes a point of damage, which would cost 10 MPP to repair. On average then the gain of bombing is then 6.5 MPP in damage under ideal circumstances. But this is only achieved if you manage to get a bomber with 100% readiness, which is rarely ever the case. In practice, you'd probably destroy about as much of your enemy as you'd destroy of yourself, because when the bomber has 70% readiness it would do only 3 MPP in damage to an enemy mine and take 2.5 MPP in damage back. And that still excludes enemy interceptors. Of course, you could use the bomber to attack regular units, but this will on average cost about 10 MPP, because it will damage your bomber and that is just not worth the 10% demoralization that it causes. So anything that you'd do with bombers will generally end up harming you more than your enemy. Even if this would be considered realistic by some, gameplay wise it is absurd as it will lead to no one ever producing or researching bombers. It is really not impossible to buff bombers a bit without having them play a huge role. Solutions might be: 1) Give them a 100% attack evasion rate, forcing enemies to use interceptors or dedicated AA units to shoot them down. The rationale would be that bombers fly too high for machine guns to shoot them down. 2) Reduce the amount of research levels and increase their effect. Two levels of research that increase the strategic attack of bombers by 2 points each would make investing in bomber technology a slightly more valid choice. 3) Increase their strategic attack value, demoralization value and/or de-entrenchment value. 4) Give some countries the ability to produce 2 units of bombers, this is necessary to make investing in research worthwhile. Implementing some of the above changes will really not break the game in any way and will at least ensure that players will not just disband any bombers they might get to gain a tiny amount of MPP. On top of that it will not take more than a minute or so to make such a change for the next patch as no programming is required. Any responses are appreciated.

I can't answer whether he should wait for the WW2 scenario as I'd have to play it first, but if you are going for one of the other games you'd probably be best of buying SC2: Global Conflict, even if you are not into the war in Asia. It is the latest into the series and there are some pretty big improvements in Global Conflict that I don't think you'd want to play the game without. Most notably, the improvement that high technology units deal less damage to other high technology units, so that your units don't die instantly late game.

I am not quite sure about which parts of the manual you are talking, but I am pretty sure that mobilisation and belligerence refers to the same thing. Basically each country has a mobilisation value which determines how close it is to entering the war. Once it is at war this value is 100% and the country just receives its maximum amount of MPPs * by its industrial modifier. Russia is already at war at the start of the game and thus has a mobilisation of 100%. A country like Turkey starts with a lower mobilisation and gets a few points extra each turn, continually increasing the percentage of its MPPs it gathers. Diplomacy and declarations of war also affect its mobilisation value. Unfortunately there is currently no way of seeing how much declarations of war will affect the mobilisation value. Then there are a bunch of triggers at the start of the game that show a message like "XX is mobilising its army". These are scenario specific and have nothing to do with the other meaning of mobilisation: they are just special triggers put in there by the scenario creator. These extra units cannot be seen on the production schedule. Does this answer your questions? Edit: Hubert beat me to it.

It works as you described. The unit will disappear on the end of its turn. It cannot be attacked at that point, because the unit will disappear before the enemy starts its turn.

Holding cities of your enemies increases your national morale by its NM value each turn. Triggers also increase national morale, such as when the US enters the war. Generally the casualties each turn will be larger than the returns however, as you'd have to control 20 enemy villages for a turn to compensate for a single lost corps.

In principle you can do that, the same range to artillery applies. You might have some issues with vision range then as most land units only have a naval vision of 1, so you'd need airplane or ship scouting.

It seems to me that heavy artillery upgrade should not increase the naval attack of artillery. In my current game a single piece of fully upgraded unit of heavy artillery destroyed 2 upgraded and fully healthy battleships in a single turn. Artillery with shell/gas production upgrades is already very powerful against ships because it will generally have 3 stars of experience, and be able to fire many times against ships. It seems a bit exaggerated to make them even more effective by increasing their naval attack through upgrades. Thoughts?

The neutrals will still be created and you will still only get Poland if Russia's morale goes below 1%. I think even more neutrals will be created actually. I have no idea what happens when you capture both capitals however, but I doubt that would give you the entire country as it would be grossly overpowered to get all their territory.

Units that entrench themselves in cities actually reduce their defense rather than increase it in some situations. Below I explain why. Trenches and cities are mutually exclusive, if you choose to entrench in a city the trench will simply not be build and not add the defense bonus. So you do not receive the +2 soft defense bonus of a trench when entrenching in a city. However, the trench is build in the sense that it changes the maximum ground cover value of the city to the maximum entrenchment value of the trench. The maximum ground cover for cities (and mountains) is 2 and for capitals 3. The maximum entrenchment value at the start is 1. That means that if you build a trench your units will have a lower entrenchment than they would have had ground cover, effectively increasing the damage they take once they decide to entrench. Not adding the trench bonus to the city bonus looks like a design choice to prevent defense bonus values from becoming too high. Otherwise a city on a mountain with a trench would get a defense bonus of 6 (1 for the city, 2 for the trench and 3 for the mountain), which might have been considered too high. That I can understand. However, reducing the defense of units for entrenching is not logical and should be changed. In the code a check should be made to test whether the maximum entrenchment of the trench is higher than the maximum ground cover of the square and the maximum entrenchment should then be made equal to the highest of these two values. Otherwise entrenching in cities like Belgrade at the start reduces your actual defense. Another problem that I see here is that the defense bonus of the city is used and not the defense bonus of the trench when calculating the defense bonus. The defense bonus of the city is lower than the defense bonus of the trench and thus when you entrench in empty squares you will have a higher defense bonus than when you entrench in cities. So you are better off not defending in cities, but in empty squares beside them. Should cities not be more difficult to take than regular squares? If so, then the defense bonus of the trench should be used, rather than the defense bonus of the city when there is a trench in a city. In summary I suggest 2 changes: 1) Do not replace the maximum ground defense value with the maximum entrenchment value is the former was higher. 2) Use the defense values of trenches instead of the defense values of cities if both are present in a square to make sure that cities are not easier to capture than normal squares of the same type. All of the above claims about how it works were tested in the editor.

I would hardly say I have played it enough to give any kind of thorough analysis on this, but I'd say that infantry weapons and industrial research should counter it. Infantry weapons reduce the damage artillery does, when both the artillery and the infantry are fully upgraded the damage of the artillery is still only 0 (1 if you count experience, which artillery easily gets to the maximum). Industrial research then provides such a massive boost in economy that you'll easily overwhelm your enemy with much more and much more powerful infantry. I rather doubt that a nation that has 3 points in shell production and 2 points in heavy artillery would be very successful against a nation with 2 points in infantry weapons and 2 points in industrial research instead.

Which of the changes made in SC2:WW1 will be present in the WW2 scenario? So will there be national morale, shell production, airplane scouting and/or trenches?

When I look at these poor research results I am let to believe that Germany has been heavily investing in intelligence at the start, while you were not. Intelligence increases the chance of researching technologies by 1% per chit. It also reduces the odds your enemy researches technology. Without it, it is almost impossible to research technologies up to level 5, so he must have had that in order to reach such high tech levels. That implies that he slowed down your research and is thus an explanation for why you didn't get a lot of technology. I am not saying that you weren't unlucky this game, but I do think that things might have gone differently if you had invested more in intelligence at the start.

Is this only true for the downloaded version of the game or does this also apply to the cd version? If not, then how does it work with the cd version?

As I understand from your post there would be 2 requirements of the progression of sub warfare. 1) Destroyers should be able to effectively counter submarines, especially late game. 2) Subs should be able to effectively counter surface ships, even late game. In my opinion the best solution for this problem would be to let ASW do something different for destroyers than for other surface ships. That is, for destroyers ASW increases their sub attack and sub defense, whereas for other surface vessels it only increases their sub defense. However, this does not seem to be possible with the current engine and so something simpler is required. I did some calculations and made some graphs about this. In figure 1 below you can see the current situation. The line depicts (damage ratio / cost ratio), where cost ratio is the cost of the sub / by the cost of the surface vessel. Damage ratio is calculated by the following formula: Damage Ratio = (damage to surface vessel when sub attacks + dmg to surface vessel when surface vessel attacks) / (damage to sub when surface vessel attacks + dmg to sub when sub attacks) Long story short, it shows the effectiveness of subs compared to other units, where a number below 1 shows that the surface vessel wins for cost and a number above 1 shows that the sub wins for cost. The left side of the graph shows the situation for the lowest tech level and the right side shows the situation of the highest tech level. A intermediate situation is added in between. Note that I used cruisers without the naval warfare upgrade for the calculations. As you can see, the red line is significantly lower than 1, showing that cruisers beat submarines for cost quite easily when fully upgraded, but submarines beat cruisers quite easily when not upgraded. The graph for the idea in your post is as follows: As you can see, it works in the sense that the red line never falls below 1. This means that subs will always defeat cruisers for cost. A downside of this method is that midgame subs will be marginally effective, while they will be very effective both at the end of the game as well as in the beginning of the game. This forces you to either spend enormously in the technology of submarines, or not at all. There is no option in between. An alternate solution that does not require any coding and does not have the above downside is by making all of the following changes: 1) Reduce upgrade cost for subs from 10% to 5% 2) Increase submarines naval attack from 2 to 3 3) Increase destroyer sub attack from 2 to 3 4) Increase submarine naval defense by 0.5 point per upgrade level 5) Decrease the maximum ASW from 5 to 4 6) Decrease the maximum AS from 5 to 4 This results in the following graph: This removes the downside that submarines are not useful halfway through the game and makes sure that submarines are still a viable counter at the end of the game against surface vessels. The main idea here is the same as is used with bombers in SC:WW1, a small increase in defense prevents them from being destroyed too easily late game. Of course, you don't want submarines to become too powerful defensively, so upgrading their naval defense by 0.5 point makes more sense then upgraded it by 1 point. This is change 4 from the list above. Change 5 and 6 make sure that ASW doesn't end up doing 1 more point of extra damage at tech level 5 due to rounding issues. Change 1&2 ensure that submarines do not fall behind on cruisers late game. These are not absolutely necessary, but without them submarines will be just as strong as cruisers when both are at tech level 4 and that should ideally not happen. Change 3 is to compensate for the early boost of submarines to make sure they are still reasonably easy to destroy at the beginning of the game despite their improved damage against surface vessels. These are my suggested changes, to prevent having to do any extra coding. Of course, testing would be required to see how they will actually turn out.

About the naval warfare, I agree that there might be a problem there. Although I don't actually have the game yet and can only go with my experience on the demo and earlier SC games, I can imagine what will happen. From what I have seen in the demo submarines now have a naval attack of only 2. Considering that ASW upgrades both damage and defense and improved subs techs only increase damage it is likely that end game submarines will have little chance. The combat results between a fully upgraded cruiser and a fully upgraded sub would be as follows for example: Sub attacks cruiser: cruiser takes 2 damage, sub takes 1 damage Cruiser attacks sub: cruiser takes 1 damage, sub takes 6 damage If we add this up we get: cruiser takes 3 damage, sub takes 7 damage A fully upgraded sub would cost 300, a fully upgraded cruiser (naval technology included) would cost 465. The difference in cost is about 50%, but the cruiser deals about 2.5 times as much damage! And it is not even a dedicated anti-submarine unit. The reduced attack of submarines makes a problem from SC:GC, that submarines are getting progressively worse late game, much worse and seems to make submarine based strategies useless as ASW is far more useful than improved submarine techs. A solution for this seems obvious: ASW should ONLY improve the defense values of ships and not the offense values. This would keep the statistics of naval units equal throughout the entire game as long as the technology remains equal. I could imagine it would be a decent idea to let ASW increase the sub attack value of destroyers in addition to their sub defense value. Other surface ships however should not be able to effectively counter submarines, which they are currently doing when submarine and surface ship have equal technology.

I would say it is fairly easy to gather up sufficient forces to take all high income targets in the area (Philippines, Brunei, Malaya, Burma, Indochina, Hong Kong, the Solomon Islands, Dutch East Indies, Nauru and Rabaul) while simultaneously attacking Pearl Harbor and keeping sufficient pressure on China. In my experience the best strategy for China seems to be to invest in industrial technology (to about level 3) and shortly after in infantry weapons (to level 2). If China then manages to successfully retreat to Lanchow and beyond and avoids getting caught in a pincer movement by a northern attack in the direction of Lanchow they will have a sufficiently strong economy to mass produce upgraded corpses and stuff the whole area with them. By then they will have lost sufficient corpses already to be able to constantly rebuild destroyed corpses and thereby avoiding the high upgrade costs. A wise Axis player will foresee this and by this time use upgraded tanks and tactical bombers, against which the Chinese cannot possibly defend themselves, because they simply cannot afford getting AT technologies and an airforce as well. China therefore can do little else then spend all its money on corpses just for the hit points that will delay Japan. Japan however will constantly gain terrain on China by taking the land they destroyed enemy units upon and thus this is not a long term solution. The result of this is that by the time the US enters the war Japan will only need several infantry units in addition to its tanks and aircraft to finish off China and can relocate most of its units to other fronts. It seems to me then that Japan just does not face any serious opposition until late 1942, and by that time they will have such a huge advantage over China that turning the tide has become impossible. Admittedly, most of my experience in this comes from before patch 1.02 where Russia received boosts to its airforce, so I am not quite sure how the situation in Russia would be once China falls. Prior to 1.02, the early fall of China would almost certainly end in a victory for the Axis however as Russia would have to spread its forces over 3 locations (south east Russia, far east Russia and western Russia) and would eventually be captured, making an Allied victory impossible. Some solutions to the current weakness of China might be: 1) Increase their maximum research funding to 500, so that they can simultaneously put 2 chits in IW and 2 chits in IT. This increases the speed at which they will get their required techs and makes them therefore more resilient at an earlier date. 2) Remove the Japanese IW level 1 at the start and give them a chit in this instead. This would make it more difficult for Japan to break through early on and therefore buy China some extra time. 3) Increase the mountain tank defense bonus to 5, which makes tanks perform more poorly in China. As I have said before, considering the enormous difference between upgraded tanks and upgraded infantry a general tank nerf would be in order for the whole game. This can be achieved by increasing the tank defense bonus on all rough terrain by 1 point. This makes sense both from the historic perspective as well as from the gameplay perspective. 4) Give China an anti-air unit to have some defense against the Japanese tactical bombers. 5) Reduce the high upgrade cost for Chinese units from 20% to 15% to make it easier to provide Chinese units with upgraded weapons. Obviously any of the above suggestions would have to go through rigorous testing first to see what the exact effects on the game balance would be. It is difficult to make accurate predictions without testing. Similarly I have no idea how historically accurate they would be, for that reason option 2 for example might not be viable.

Great, thanks a lot. It certainly makes sense this way.

I've always wondered how the defense bonus for fortifications on rough terrain is calculated. What happens when you build a fortification on a forest for example? Is the defense bonus of the forest added to the defense bonus of the fortification to make a total defense bonus of 3? Or is the defense bonus of the forest replaced and the final defense bonus only 2? Any idea? Answers are appreciated.

I see, thanks for answering the question.

In the manual I am unable to find any information about the new rule that was implemented in SC2:GC, that the upgrade levels of both combatants were reduced by each others upgrade level. That is, when two level 2 tanks fought, the combat would be equal to two level 0 tanks fighting. Has this rule also been implemented in SC:WW1 or has it been removed?

1) I believe that plunder is dependent upon the size and strength of the army, so you might want to try to reduce the German plunder by getting your units as damaged as possible. Of course, the actual gains here won't really determine the outcome of the game. 2) Yes, IT gets you about 100 MPP per turn. When I need cash for intelligence and IT I always cancel motorization, production technology and advanced aircraft. In addition I scrap the plane I receive for additional cash. With the 1.02 patch air might have become a viable option for the USSR however, so you might want to keep your air. For China it is a different story, scrapping your air units with them for cash to invest in technology is an excellent idea. As for motorization, you won't have any large scale offensive operations with the USSR and so motorizing your infantry is very unwise to begin with. If you need chits, it might be worth considering to drop that one, although motorization is still useful for tanks, so you might need to research it again later. PT has been improved in 1.03, but I'd probably still drop it for IT. IT makes its money back in 1 turn, PT in 6 or so. In general I wouldn't be too worried about losing 50 MPP if it means you get important technology earlier. 3) IT and infantry weapons. IT gets you about 30 resources per turn and infantry weapons are highly necessary to stop the Japanese from killing your units with just infantry. 4) The french fleet is useful for raiding Norwegian convoys close to Germany. I believe it doesn't even increase the Norwegian activation if you stand near Denmark, so you can destroy fairly many enemy resources with this. 5) Good question, I don't think so, but I am not sure. If you could still land units in fort de france even if you say do not first accept the decision event, then what would be the point to agree to the fort de france decision event? But if you want to be sure, start a new game and try it. As for the other tips, the most important thing to realize is probably that tanks are heavily overpowered. A fully upgraded army is weaker in every aspect and more expensive than a level 0 tank. On top of that, tanks have more upgrades than regular armies, so in the late game they completely obliberate all infantry without any risk of being destroyed themselves. To illustrate this, in order to destroy a level 5 tank with fully upgraded armies it would take 5 consecutive army attacks, the infantry would take about 35 damage points back in return. Clearly this is not realistic, so infantry simply cannot defeat tanks, especially not in the late game. This means that for all country you need to rely on tanks and you should always build them before you build any infantry, even the tanks that only get 1 attack per turn. Getting the heavy tanks research should also be one of the top priorities with all countries. The only country that does not need tank upgrades is China, because they can only build a single one.

If a unit is next to a square with a partisan marker in it, there will be no partisan activity in that square. So one well placed unit can cover many squares.

I would say that the optimal distance for your HQs depends on whether cities in your immediate surroundings have 5 supply or 10 supply. For the USSR, cities provide 10 supply, which means that your units will generally already receive very high supply from the cities. In that case the HQs should be kept at maximum command distance to prevent enemy attacks on HQs, the advantage of keeping them closer is very small anyway. For Germany in the USSR the reverse is true, the low supply forces you to keep the HQ close. At the very least you should make sure that your units never fall below 5 supply to prevent the enemy from destroying units that you cannot rebuild for reduced cost. The difference between an inexperienced HQ and a experienced one is huge, an experienced HQ provides a massive morale bonus to units under its command. I believe its like 10% per shield or something. HQs reduce damage to your units by increasing their readiness, readiness determines to what extend damage reduction modifiers (experience / terrain and entrenchment) are applied. For a complete understanding of the combat mechanics please refer to the manual, all combat formulas are given there. In addition, the exact workings of HQs are explained there as well.

I tried it a few times, but it isn't worth the cost. You can only build like 2 units of rockets and that isn't enough to compensate for the research cost necessary to make them effective. In fact, even if you exclude the research cost, they are far too expensive. On top of that, rockets cannot target units in cities and even with the research they are not effective against strategic targets due to the range penalty they receive. Perhaps if they were to remove the range penalty and reduce the cost they might become effective again.