Wushuki

You don't actually have to build transport ships, you create them for each unit seperately when you need them. If you move a unit next to a harbor of at least strength 5 and press right mouse button on the unit, you get the option to turn it into an ambiphious transport. This costs 30% of the unit price. Alternatively you can create transport ships in this way too, which only cost 10% of the unit cost. Special forces have the ability to use ambiphous transport from any square, they do not have to stand next to a harbor square.

Normally you would just put a unit on such an arrow and it would dissappear at the end of the turn. Then the next turn or so it would appear on the other side. If you put your British carrier on an allied arrow and it didn't dissappear at the end of turn, you have found a bug. If this is so, would you happen to know which arrow it was?

I tried to reproduce the result by capturing Poland and the Benelux on turn 2, but Canada joined anyway. So I doubt this has anything to do with it. What happened most likely is that you got unlucky. Canada has a 50% chance of joining each turn, but will only join if France hasn't surrendered yet. So there is indeed a small chance that Canada doesn't join until the fourth turn, if France surrenders then, Canada won't join anymore.

It could be considered historical in the sense that it represents a start years before the actual invasion of Poland. During this time it was possible to develop the army into several directions. Part of the army was in place at that time already of course, which is represented by the units that are already placed on the map. As I stated above, the game can have many units that are already bought and/or placed and give you only a development choice for a part of them. Above I presented this as a balancing rule, but it might as well work for historical purposes. This system would be preferable to actually starting the game before the invasion of Poland as that might lead to some horribly boring first turns.

A possible way to make the start of the game more unpredictable and varied is by adding a "build-up" phase before the game starts. This is a special kind of turn in which the player is presented with a number of choices he can make regarding the start of the game. He is presented with 3 kinds of choices he has to make: Technologies and unit purchase choices. Unit placement choices. One or several decision events that he has to reply to that determine later decision events and/or other things. To start out with the first item on the list. The game gives you a list of all technologies and tells you to spend an X amount of resources on technologies. The first Y amount of technologies that you click get researched instantly, the next Z amount get a chit invested in it, but are not researched instantly. Then it presents you with a list of units and an amount of MPP that you can spend on them, the player selects for example 3 corpses, 3 tanks (with upgrades), 1 HQ, 2 cruisers and so on. Obviously this might lead to some balance issues. If cruisers and battleships are not as good as carriers for example, players might decide to just get carriers and destroyers. These balance issues are not impossible to deal with however and can be solved in a variety of ways. Some examples: A number of units can already be bought at the start of the game, this way players will still get cruisers and battleships. Each unit of the same type bought can be more expensive than the last, so that players cannot get away with buying the same type of unit massively. Prices may be different from standard prices, cruisers could be made a bit cheaper in the build-up phase for example and carriers more expensive. A certain amount of MPP has to be spend on the navy / airforce or land force and cannot be spend on other unit types. A nation could be forced to spend 1500 MPP on sea units for example. Besides these other balancing measures can easily be thought of. The point is that it is perfectly well possible to make up some rules that prevent players from making the "one best choice" that might arise from allowing players to determine their own starting army. Because the point of this build-up phase is to allow the player to pursue different strategies from the start and to make this phase less predictable, not to give the player the best possible army in the beginning of the game. Once the technology and army has been selected, you can place it where you would like it. The allied player might decide to place the BEF in Egypt, rather than in Britain or he might choose to place his entire fleet in the UK. Restrictions can again be applied as necessary, some units might already be placed, some placement areas may only contain a certain amount of untis. Finally, the game can present you with start-up decision events. It is best to actually do this before the other phases, but the other phases had to be explained first. Decision events could be things like "Should we focus on Poland or on France first?". They might determine future decision events, allowed starting placement locations, starting technology and unit MPP, starting technology and unit restrictions and so on. If correctly implemented this could open up a near infinite variety of openings and will make each game different from the very first turn. There are of course risks involved and potential balance issues to be resolved, but these are managable and, as I have shown above, can be dealt with in a variety of ways.

I think that the highest level improvement should be a way to "plug-in" expansions in the game itself. There are currently 5 SC2 games and each time a new one comes out you can basically toss the previous one out of the window, because the newer one has a lot of improvements to the game engine that you no longer want to play without. Take a look at the forums of the older SC versions, they are practically dead, no one plays them anymore, because GC has replaced the game. So what I am proposing a system similar to the one used in Company of Heroes and Dawn of War. In these games you could buy and install each game in the series seperately without owning any of the others. Your options in the game then dependent on what you had installed. So you could unlock new races to play with, new campaigns and new units by buying additional expansions. Players that owned one expansion could even play online against players that owned another, but they both had different races and units to choose from. Similar systems have been implemented in RPGs like Guild Wars. I assume that the new engine would be used to construct a lot of games again. So what I would really like to see is a way to add all these games together into a single game with more options, rather than have the previous game replaced every time. There are a bunch of different ways of doing this. If SC3 would follow the same path as SC2 however, that is, that expansions basically give some new maps and some improvements to the engine, it might not be economically feasible to give these improvements to the engine for free and only ask money for the new maps. So instead, buying a new expansion could offer a new "ruleset" as well, which is a fancy name for the improvements to the engine. Whenever you set up a new game you can choose the ruleset you'd like to play with. This way you'd have to buy the newer games to get both, the engine improvements and the new maps. That offers 3 advantages over doing it in the current way: 1) You'd give players the option to play the older maps with the new rules. This might create some balance issues, or it might not. Either way, I think that a lot of players would be interested in playing the older maps with the new rules regardless. It would even be possible to play newer maps with an older ruleset, although that might be unpopular. 2) It makes it a bit easier to play against people that own older SC games. You just have a single game in which you can click on an older ruleset when you start the game, rather then to have to start an older expansion. So you'd have everything in one place. 3) It works as a motivation for players to buy the other expansions. It would make a lot more sense to buy PDE now if you can play it with the GC engine. Similarly it also works as an advertisement to buy the newer expansions, because you can see many options greyed out that you'd want to have. The game menu would be updated with a patch each time a new expansion is brought out to keep it up to date. It may also open some additional options for the development of new expansions. In general, such an integrated system seems like something you might want to build up during the development of the first game of a new engine. Since it is so likely the engine will be used for many games, spending some time on planning ahead for this by making it easy to add all these games together sounds like a good idea.

I don't think that such a chaining rule has ever existed. Headquarters can relay supply to each other, but this supply is only used by the HQ itself, it is not distributed further among units. So only the supply from cities, towns and fortresses is used to calculate the distributable supply of HQ. If I misunderstood you, please use imageshack to post a screenshot and clarify what you meant.

On second thought, I think I understand why Riga did not change ownership and why you found different results. It has to do with operating units, I operated the unit to Riga and moved them manually in the other cities. Operating the unit to Riga did not make Romania capture the city. I think that when you did your experiment with this you operated your Romanian units to Odessa and Kiev, which is why you found a different result. That solves all questions and gives a clear understanding of what happened. In summary: If you move a unit into a tile that originally belonged to a hostile country, that tile becomes property of whichever country owned the unit (even if the owner of the unit is a minor country). This is true even if the tile was already under control of an ally of the nation that moved the unit onto it. If you capture a nation, all tiles of that nation become property of the country that defeated the nation, including tiles that were captured by this nation. Here, all tiles that were captured by Romania were transferred to the USSR. Many of these tiles could be far away and may seem to have no relationship with the conquered nation at all. So when an active minor gets captured you lose tiles all over the map and you don't have any ability to see which tiles you will lose until it happens. Unless of course, you remember exactly at which tiles the units of that minor have been. This seems to be a rather severe issue and should be fixed in my opinion. Unfortunately, it might not be very easy to fix. It seems to me that the best solution would be to change the territory transfer rule, so that when you capture a minor, only the territory that minor originally controlled gets transferred to the capturer of the capital. So in this example, when Romania is captured, the USSR would only gains control over all tiles that are actually inside the borders of Romania.

It is more difficult to capture it in one turn now, because the SA of fighters has been reduced from 1 to 0. This might occasionaly make the fighter air attack on Warsaw do 1 less damage. The fighter air attack damage was not absolutely necessary, but there definitely is a bit more luck needed to capture it in a turn now.

You can find a zip file with the savegames here. My apologies for using rapidshare, but I don't know how else to send it to you. If you prefer to receive it some other way, please let me know how. There are 2 files in there, both are multiplayer hotseat. The first is the test that I described above. The second is another similar test that gives a bit more insight in why this happens. I will explain the second savegame with screenshots. Look at the following picture, it is the same situation as above in every way with 2 differences: The romanian HQ and the Romanian corps have switched positions. While moving the Romanian corps to its new location it was temporarily moved to Minsk. Now take a look at what happens the turn after the russian corps captures Bucharest: Riga remains under control of the Axis and Kiev and Odessa switch control, this shows that the fact that Riga did not change ownership had nothing to do with the type of unit in it. More important however is that Minsk changed ownership as well, even though there was no Romanian unit present there. This leads to the hypothesis that Romania "captured" the cities from Germany once it moved a unit into it. Once Romania surrendered, all Romanian territory switched to the USSR, including the cities that Romania had "captured". This is also shown by the ownership of the tiles surrounding the cities. All squares that Romanian units moved onto have turned red, all squares that Romanian units did not touch remain under German control. It remains odd that Riga did not change ownership. An explanation for this might be that Riga is a bit of a special case: there is a trigger that switches the control of the city from the Baltic States to the USSR. Apparantly that prevents the city from switching ownership in this way. Feel free to download the savegames and run the experiments yourself. I ran it several times and the same thing happened every test.

There seems to be a somewhat confusing bug in the game (v 1.02) that occurs when a minor nation that has troops in another nation surrenders. Take a look at the following screenshot: The Soviet Union is just about to take Romania with that corps and you can see three Romanian units garrisoning Russian cities. Now look at the following screenshot and see what happened the turn after the corps took Romania: Odessa and Kiev have suddenly switched control to the USSR without any Soviet troops entering these cities. So cities that were occupied by troops of a nation that surrenders are suddenly captured. Note that Riga did not change ownership, which is definitely very odd. You'd expect that either all cities switch ownership, or none of them do. This bug is moderately severe, especially if you are not aware of it. In my last game my opponent lost Odessa and Gibraltar when I captured Bulgaria. My opponent was not aware that he lost these cities and therefore did not respond to it, leaving them both under my control. This eventually turned out quite devastating as it led to an easy invasion into Spain with normal transports. The point is that I believe that this issue is severe enough to be fixed, if another patch is made.

When you select "new game" you have several difficulty options. Try reducing the difficulty if you find the game to be too difficult. Also, it might help you to read some parts of the manual, in particular the combat calculations. This will give you understanding of why you have difficulties to defeat the enemy units. In general, try to keep your units in good supply by having headquarters nearby. Then demoralize and de-entrench enemy units by bombing them and attacking them with special forces. Once your enemies have very little morale left and are not entrenched anymore they are easy to defeat with regular infantry and tanks. Keep in mind though that you are not supposed to win the game in a few turns. The game lasts roughly 8 years, which is about 120 turns for each player. So it is perfectly fine if it takes you many turns to capture China.

I realize that the 1.02 patch has just been released, but if there is going to be another one I'd like to request the following feature. Currently you have to manually check the files of the game to see what the diplomatic consequences of declarations of war are. This information is very important however and largely determines whether or not you would declare war on a country. It might even change the outcome of a game when, for example, the allies player doesn't know that a DoW on Iraq greatly increases the activation of Turkey and declares war on Iraq because of it. So would it be possible to add an indication of the predicted changes in diplomacy to the DoW confirmation message? In the screen below it could then say below the phrase "Should Germany declare war on Norway" something like: There are many different ways of implementing this of course and others may be more viable. I do believe, however, that this will make things easier for everyone as you can just check in game what the consequences of DoWs are.

I assume that you are referring to "Strategic Command 2: Blitzkrieg" and expansions. There is also a Strategic Command 2: Pacific Theatre. The main difference is that Global Conflict only has world maps and Blitzkrieg only focuses on Europe. There have been many gameplay improvements since Blitzkrieg however and if you buy the older games you will not get those. So in my opinion the choice is pretty simple, go for Global Conflict, because these improvements make the game much better and you really don't want to play the game without them.

I agree, that would definitely make production tech a bit more worthwhile. It would make sense from the realism perpective and from the gameplay perspective. As for the current use, I have heard others defend it as well, so I guess there are different opinions. But it seems to me that an extra level of heavy tanks will help a lot more than those three hundred resources or so you'll gain from production tech over the duration of the entire game.

I partly agree with what you say, many of the research options are not really worthwhile or only marginally so. Of course it all depends on your country as well. Basically Industrial research is the most important technology of all. For the USSR and the US this gives you about 100 additional resources per turn per tech. So for these two countries these two technologies are absolute game changers and should always be given the highest priority. For China and Germany industrial technology improves the income by about 30 resources per tech. A year has about 15 turns, so you'll make back your investment 1/3th of a year after getting the research. Still an excellent deal. For Japan it was about 18 resources if I remember correctly and for the UK is only 12 or so. In the case of Japan it is still worth it to research it, although its priority is low, for the UK its practically useless. Note that the bug from the earlier games, that countries could profit from the industrial modifier of the nations they captured, has been fixed for as far as I have been able to tell. So you are not helping your enemy by researching it. Infrastructure is useless in my opinion. A 15% reduction in 10% transportation cost is 1.5% of the unit cost. 100 / 0.015 = 6667, so you'd have to transport for 6667 worth of MPP just to get your money back. That is about 25 fully upgraded armies or so, not a very good deal. Production tech is also useless. The calculation is simple, 100 / 0.05 = 2000. So you'd have to spend 2000 resources on buying units to get your money back. That is too much to make the research worth it for any country. About intelligence, I think this research is critical. Remember that each higher tech level has a reduced chance that you research it. So researching level 1 tanks may give you 5% per chit invested, level 5 tank research only gives you a 1% chance per chit. Intelligence raises this by 1% per level, so it would increase to 8 and 4 percent respectively. The difference between 1% and 4% is huge, if you don't have a high intelligence research it would on average take you almost 7 years to research a level 5 technology if you have just 1 chit invested in it. Obviously this is absurdly long, so without intelligence research you simply cannot get level 4 and level 5 technology.

The fort belongs to the Germans, you have to use an amphibious transport to land there.

The other thread can be found here. At the end Hubert talks about a solution, so I guess it will be fixed in 1.02.

I think Nupremal is right. This stretch of land normally belongs to England, once you captured the last capital of England in Australia all English territory became Japanese, including that part.

Yes, blockading the city until it was reduced below 5 took the port with it. It won't be reduced to zero though as a port that is not connected to the capital always has a supply of 5. So the only way of reducing it further is by attacking it with surface ships or airplanes. You might be right about India, I am not 100% sure on this either. But it is certainly true that some ports, such as the one is South Africa, can be reduced below 5 by blocking them. At other places the city or mine close to the blocking point is reduced in strength, rather than the port.

No, that happens because a city near the port was reduced to an efficiency below 5. This cut off the railway connection as that only passes through cities with efficiency 5 or higher. Since the port was no longer connected to the capital, its efficiency dropped.

I think that only the cities in England can be damaged by blocking the ports. This is the case for many different ports around the world, such as those in India for example. So it doesn't have anything to do with that you used subs, its just impossible to reduce the harbors by blocking them.

Timor isn't usually bugged, but if Germany captured Portugal then they own the island and not the Japanese. Germany does not supply Japanese units, so this might very well cause it. So did you capture Portugal with Germany?

It does indeed, thanks a lot for answering.

I am currently in a multiplayer game and just about to take Manchester. It looks however as if it would be useless to do this. He would simply transfer his capital to Australia and receive many more resources from the cities there. Also, I assume that all UK colonies would start transferring resources to Australia if I take Manchester. So my question is, would it not be better to just take the harbors in England, thereby permanently cutting off all convoy routes and leave Manchester in the hands of the UK player? Is this indeed better or am I missing something? What exactly happens when you take England? Any clarification on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.