Wushuki

I counted this once in SC2 PDE and came to 15 turns for both sides per year. If its still 1 week in the summer, 4 weeks in the winter and 2 weeks for the other seasons then it should still be 15 turns per year.

Yes, click here to go the the battlefront store.

1) When you click on a unit you see its listed supply, that supply has to be 5 or greater for you to be able to rebuild it. 2) I guess they say it in a bit of a strange way in the answer posted above. What happens is just that if a unit with 5 or greater supply is destroyed, the unit shows up at your build list again with a * near its name. There you can rebuild the unit for 60% of the cost and lower production time. If the unit gets destroyed with lower then 5 supply it won't show up in the last again.

I see, thanks for the answer. I look forward to it.

As I understood from an earlier post from Hubert, there will be a demo of SC Global. Is there any idea on what the release date of the demo will be? Thanks in advance.

As far as I can answer it, it is still the case. It works as follows: If both units have a point of technology, then instead of both doing 1 extra point of damage to each other they both do no extra damage. So the technology value bonuses of one unit are reduced by the other units technology value bonuses. The main result of this is that combat has less casualties in the end game as is the case now. There are several other effects, but it remains to be seen how the balance changes, such as tactical bombers becoming the most damaging unit in the game, affect gameplay.

In the first case you already moved the transport.

I agree, a system that awards you with medals or something once you have completed certain scenarios on certain difficulties gives you something to work for. Perhaps an achievement page with various challenges ranging from easy to impossibly hard would be interesting. On the other hand, programming time for this game is quite scarce as I understand it, it is somewhat doubtful they will have time for this.

Absolutely, of course. However, adding a storm of steel scenario would be little more then a copy and paste trick with a few days of testing and some minor tweaking. Considering the popularity of the scenario it would be hard to argue that the cost here would be higher then the increased longevity of the new game. So if losing the sales to the previous games really wouldn't be a factor, adding a storm of steel scenario would be an excellent idea.

Yes, it will contain a manual with 152 pages that is included with blitzkrieg. There is no additional printed manual for WaW though.

It would be cool to have all these scenario's with the new changes, but I doubt they are going to do that. If they did, all the previous games would stop selling and they'd miss out on a lot of money. Perhaps if you can only play these old scenario's with the new changes if you have the previous games installed?

Upon closer examination, my suggestion in the post above doesn't seem so good. The problem is that adding a bonus to readiness for attacking infantry in rough terrain is almost the exact same thing as reducing the terrain defense bonus. As stated before, reducing soft defense bonus of terrain would make terrain less relevant for infantry vs infantry combat then it is now, which is undesirable. It is still possible to add a small readiness bonus for infantry defending in rough terrain to make them better then tanks at this task, but it may be better to stick with just increasing the TDB of certain terrain types and forget about adding an extra rule. The lack of reactions on this thread seems to suggest that the majority of the community doesn't really consider the high effectiveness of tanks in jungles/forests and cities a very serious problem. If I am correct about that, it doesn't seem worth the effort to make a programming time intensive change.

Making infantry selectively stronger in rough terrain is, as far as I know, only possible in 2 ways: 1) Decreasing the defense bonus in rough terrain for infantry. This only profits the attacking infantry though and would also reduce the defense bonus to 0 for most terrain types for infantry. Both of these downsides are undesirable. 2) Program a new rule, such as an increase of 10% in readiness for infantry when defending rough terrain and a 25% readiness increase when attacking rough terrain. The difference in readiness bonus comes from the fact that a high readiness bonus for units that are standing in defensive terrain will completely negate the 25% offensive bonus for infantry. But if you don't add a defensive bonus at all, tanks would be just as capable of defending rough terrain as infantry. Hence, a small bonus for defense and a large bonus for offense is useful. There are of course many variations of this solution possible, so there might be other options to explore here. The second solution sounds reasonable and would indeed make sure that infantry begin to rule the rough terrain, while tanks rule the open terrain. Which is precisely what we are trying to reach. The downside is of course a slight increase in game complexity. The complexity should always be kept as low as possible and needlessly complicating games is in my opinion one of the main flaws in many games. However, there is a concrete gameplay advantage here and the small icons that they used in PT can easily help new players identify that there is a special bonus when infantry attacks or defends rough terrain. So I do not consider that a significantly large downside. Extensive play testing would be required of course to tweak the defensive and offensive bonus and to see whether it improves gameplay at all. As for a larger increase, I acknowledge that Infantry Corps are not very powerful, especially not with the change coming in Global, where they will hardly ever reach a higher combat value then 1. What is important though is that infantry corps seem gameplay wise not really meant for combat purposes. Realistic or not, their main purpose is to hold ground and delay the enemy. Remember, for those 100 resources you do not just get 1 attack and defense, you also get 10 hit points and these are every bit as strong as any other unit. So larger bonuses would be undesirable. Feel free to criticize.

Rivers are always located "between" 2 squares. So if there is a river between the attacker and defender then the penalty is applied. You should take that quite literally, if square A is only attached to square B with the tip, then depending on whether there is a river in that tip will determine if the penalty is applied.

I can easily confirm it with the following screenshot: All units have 100% readiness. According to your calculation the tank would now reduce damage by 3 points, the tank only reduces it by 1 point as you can see at the predicted casualties. This is only consistent with the 2nd way of reading the table. Full results: Predicted casualties table: Infantry attacking a tank: 1 Infantry attacking infantry: 1 Tank attacking infantry: 1 Tank attacking tank: 2 Notice the last 2 lines of the table. Whether infantry or tanks are being attacked, the casualty count is always reduced by 3 points.

It's fairly straightforward actually. Right now a tank attacking an unit without entrenchment in a forest does (4 - 1*readiness infantry) * readiness tank damage. An infantry unit attacking does (3 - 1*readiness infantry) * readiness infantry damage. So besides that infantry has a lower attack value there is no difference between attacking a unit in a forest with infantry or tanks. From both the perspective of realism as well as the perspective of gameplay this seems wrong as you should be using infantry and not tanks to fight in forests. If the defense bonus against tanks in forests is increased to two, the damage the tank would do would be further reduced by the readiness of the defender. In most realistic situations that would be a reduction of between 0.5 and 1 damage. This makes it a little bit more attractive to save your tanks for clear terrain battles and use your infantry to fight in forests. With cities there is already a difference as cities have a tank defense bonus of 3 and a soft defense bonus of 1. But if you consider that especially in cities units will rarely have a readiness of 100% when you start attacking them with ground forces this difference is not as big as it sounds. So tanks are in most games often used to great effect to capture towns. Increasing the tank defense bonus to 4 will increase the difference and make the option of attacking a city with tanks a bit less attractive. The effectiveness of infantry on clear terrain is not changed here. I consider forests and cities the most important terrain types for this change, but it might work well for other terrain types, like swamps and mountains as well.

I like the idea of making terrain more important. At the moment it is even easier for tanks to destroy enemies in forests then it is for infantry. In games like panzer general, infantry is almost entirely useless in the open, whereas they are the only useful unit for city combat. This is in my opinion more fun, as it really forces you to use other units then tanks to capture cities. So improvement here would certainly be nice. The change you suggest is a valiant and interesting attempt, but creates a number of problems. One of the main problems is that when an infantry unit attacks a city from clear terrain it would reduce his attack values to 1 attack or so in most realistic situations. That is: (3 - 1 * 0.7) * 0.7 * 0.5 In words: (attack - defense bonus * readiness modifier enemy) * readiness modifier * negative cover penalty In the above calculation I assume that both units have a readiness of 70%. Even if you would remove the defense bonus for infantry in cities it would end up being only 1.05. Since nearly all cities are bordered by clear terrain it would make infantry attacks on cities very ineffective. In my opinion, the point of a change here would have to be that tanks become less effective at taking rough terrain and infantry more effective. The suggested change would make tanks pretty much the only unit capable of taking this kind of land, because it is often bordered by clear terrain. So you would reach the opposite of what you are trying to accomplish. It has to be said that from the realism side you'd have to note that armies are not just infantry, they are a combination of arms varying from artillery and tanks to infantry. An army attack therefore is not just an infantry charge, but contains weapons that do possess sufficient striking power for offense as well. Realism is not that important in SC though and I prefer to see changes that increase gameplay, such as forcing the player to use armies for rough terrain and tanks for clear terrain. So I would hardly consider the realism argument legitimate against making armies slightly weaker on clear ground and slightly stronger on rough terrain. As alternative I would like to suggest something much simpler, just increase the tank defense bonus of all types of broken terrain (including cities and fortifications) by 1. This change would by itself already make infantry more valuable for rough terrain. For cities and forests this is most important, whether the other types of terrain also need such a change is debatable. Feel free to criticize however.

Thanks for responding, I look forward to seeing how it turns out.

Thank you very much for explaining this, it is clear to me now. It sounds like a very good system, although it seems to imply a very large number of balance shifts. These will be interesting to explore. So if I may, I'd like to expand a bit more on this topic. From your explanation I gather that the attack and defense values are used and not the upgrade level directly. Does this not raise issues with submarines? Because as the war progresses and submarines and destroyers get better, the submarine will comparatively get worse, because the submarine will never do more damage to the destroyer as long as the tech levels are equal. But the destroyer will begin to do extra damage to the submarine as the sub attack value of destroyers does increase, while the defensive value of submarines does not increase. So a level 0 sub attacking a level 0 destroyer does 4 damage to both units. A level 0 destroyer attacking a level 0 sub does 4 damage to the sub and 1 damage to the destroyer. A level 5 sub attacking a level 5 destoyer does 4 damage to both units (5 damage gets subtracted for both units). But a level 5 destroyer attacking a level 5 sub does 9 damage to the sub and 1 damage to the destroyer (no damage gets subtracted, because the sub defense value did not increase). Of course, if we compare this to the old system, one might argue that a submarine attack of 9 damage where the submarine also takes 9 damage back is not better for the submarine then a submarine attack of 4 damage where the submarine also takes 4 damage back. I disagree with this view however as in the old system the amount of defensive battles that a submarine has to fight decreases as submarine and anti-submarine technology increases, because submarines will begin to kill in one or two blows. So while the submarines in the current system may die quickly to highly upgraded destroyers, the fact that they kill destroyers so quickly themselves when highly upgraded leaves the destroyers with less attacks on the submarines. But by keeping the offensive results of submarine attacks low, while increasing the offensive results from destroyers to subs, submarines will become less effective late in the game in this new system. So in summary, if player A uses a level 5 sub to attack a level 5 destroyer of player B in the new system they will both do 4 damage. The turn thereafter the destroyer will counterattack and utterly destroy the sub. In the old system the sub would have done 8-10 damage, which would have made it far more difficult for the destroyer to counterattack. So this new effect of technology will gradually decrease the effectiveness of submarines as time progresses. The solution would be to reduce the damage to submarines as if their defense value would increase, without actually increasing their defense value. Is this considered an issue that might be addressed or does this mean the war will gradually move more towards surface fleets? Also, are artillery attacks affected by this rule when the artillery is attacking? If they are, artillery would be stuck at an an attack value of 0 for most combat situations. If they are not, artillery is one of the fewer units that retains its high damage in the late game. Is there any definite answer on how this will be handled already? Many thanks if you are willing to respond to these questions.

These are absolutely fantastic additions to the game. Glad to see an added partisan map mode. I am most curious about the updated combat: This sounds like a pretty big change and I am excited to see what influence that will have on the game. Could you expand on this a bit more, how exactly does it work when a level 5 tank attacks a level 0 tank? Will the level 0 tank be unable to damage the level 5 tank? And how does this affect combat between different unit types, like fighters vs bombers or tanks vs infantry? Some additional information on this would be greatly appreciated.

There are a large number of factors that could cause this. In general the defender advantage is caused by the following 2 factors: 1) The town is giving him a bonus to his defense 2) The unit gets an entrenchment bonus To work it out: if the unit has a readiness of 100 it would reduce the damage by the town defense + the entrenchment. So say that the entrenchment is 4 and the town defense is 3 then the damage will be reduced by 7 points. Obviously this would pretty much prevent the unit from getting hurt at all. There are two ways of dealing with this, the first is by reducing the entrenchment. In the above example if the unit would have an entrenchment of 0, he would only reduce the damage by 3 points (just the town defense bonus). Entrenchment gets reduced by attacking the unit, each attack reduces the entrenchment by 1. Tactical bombers, special forces and artillery reduce entrenchment by 2. So here 2 artillery attacks or 4 corpses attacking would reduce the entrenchment to 0. The second way is by reducing its readiness. In the above example if you would reduce the readiness by 50%, the unit would only reduce the damage by 3,5 (so the reduction is halved because the readiness is halved). There are several ways of reducing readiness, an obvious one is to attack it with a unit that reduces morale, such as tanks, tactical bombers, artillery and special forces. A second way of reducing readiness is by damaging the unit, if you damage a unit heavily and then wait a turn readiness will plummet. The last way is to cut off a town from supply. This will half the supply, which will begin reducing the readiness of a unit starting at the end of the turn. In reality it will almost always have to be a combination of these 2 factors. So cut off a town from supply, use artillery/tactical bombers to reduce entrenchment and morale and then use special forces and armies to finish the defender off. That all being said, it sounds like the factors that Bill mentioned probably play a large role in why you are having problems. You should make sure that your units have a high readiness before you attack with them and that you are not attacking from swamps or over rivers.

There are definitely a large number of good improvements to the game, such as: Increased importance of terrain, more choices in what fronts to focus upon and more useful strategic bombers. Unfortunately, in all honesty however it is not as great as the other games of the series. The main problem with PT in my opinion is that the engine and rules that worked so well for Blitzkrieg, WaW and PDE, do not really work that well in the pacific. For example, for the earlier games it was great that loading units in transports costed significant amount of MPP. You also needed to send a HQ with the invasion and sufficient troops to do 10 damage to a unit. This made land invasions expensive and difficult and that is exactly how it should be. In PT however these rules don't work, because you should be busy with small scale island hopping. If you don't send a headquarters and several troops land invasions are doomed to failure. So this means that if an island is guarded you'd have to spend either hundreds of MPP for a tiny island that provides no real benefit or just forget about capturing them. This is even true for using your air force as you'd have operate these units and transport a headquarter as well as special forces. The majority of the islands will remain unguarded however as small units are not present in the game and units can be put to better use elsewhere. This doesn't really add to the gaming experience either. Taking over half an empire without having to fire a single shot doesn't really reflect the situation in history. Navy battles are the other weakness. While land battles are fantastic in SC, naval battles are not nearly as much fun. In the other games of the series this wasn't so much of a problem, because sea battles played only a minor role compared to land battles. But the pacific theater is far more focused on sea battles and the lack of a very good seabattle system really becomes a problem here. Perhaps others disagree with me, but while I had and still have a great time playing the others of the series, PT never really managed to reach the same high level of gameplay as those games.

In weapons and warfare and PDE your subs cannot be stopped by enemy ships anymore, with the exception of enemy destroyers. Your own subs will still stop all enemy ships. The downside is that your subs are no longer capable of raiding convoys. In blitzkrieg it only has the downside, so the only purpose is saving supply by not raiding. In pacific theater it works the same as in PDE and weapons and warfare, with the exception that the speed of the unit is reduced to 66% when using silent.

Yes, it is sad. This is actually the reason for the main exploits in the game. You can scout German subs with Russian and US ships, since the subs cannot fire at them this will prevent their first devastating attack and allows your other ships to move in for the kill. The only penalty for this is that countries like Spain, Sweden and Finland will be 'alerted' to the presence of the US and Russia if they get too close and gain a bonus to Axis activation. The unfortunate reality is that these bonuses are either insignificant or easily prevented by not moving your ships close to these countries. In multiplayer games it is often a rule that you may only order the ships of countries that are not yet at war directly to a friendly harbor.

There are certainly some good ideas there. About these partisans, one thing that always bothered me is that the only way to find out where they are going to pop up is to manually check the script files. You just have to do this before you can play seriously. If you have to read through code before you can start playing a game then there is still some work that needs to be done! So it really wouldn't hurt to add small icons on squares where partisans may appear. It would be best to make it an option in the menu, so that it is possible to turn it off as well.