mcaryf1

Hi Hubert I have been examining the impact of unit losses on National Morale and as far as I can tell there is no setting for a scenario designer to adjust this. Thus if a scenario has more units, e.g. one with a larger scale map, then there will be a consequentially heavier loss of morale when these effectively smaller units suffer casualties. One other factor is that in at least some of the standard scenarios it appears that Garrison units do not figure in the AI build strategy. I have modified one such AI strategy to include Garrisons and have noted that their naturally high casualty rate has an unintended (by me at least) impact on morale. In your thinking about how to develop the use of National Morale could you please also consider making the impact of unit loss on it something that can be tuned by the designer. Actually it would be realistic to have unit losses making more of an impact on the democracies than the authoritarian states. It was after all Japan's actual strategy to try to make it too expensive in casualty terms for the USA to persue the war to its ultimate end, unfortunately for them the US had an alternative in the use of the A Bomb.. Regards Mike

Just an update - Italy has finally surrendered without any invasion of their homeland but after being at zero morale for about 8 consecutive turns. Regards Mike

Just to update you, AVG standard policy was to ask you to get any suspected false positives checked at one of the standard virus checker sites such as https://www.virustotal.com/ This found that AVG and only two others out of 40 or so AV packages thought the SC file a virus. After I reported this result and submitted the file to AVG they agreed it was a false positive and said they would include it in their next update. As far as I can tell they have done that and when I went back to Virus Total it was not identified by any AV package so I guess they share information. I hope therefore that nobody else will get this problem unless they are using an old version of AV software. Regards Mike

I have been testing out a scenario of mine that is based on Axis High Tide and playing as the Allies I concentrated on destroying Italian units wherever possible. I have had Italian national morale at zero for several turns (all their fleet and a lot of their armies destroyed) but nothing much has happened. I was expecting a surrender or at least an outbreak of unrest in Italian cities. I looked in the events and could not see how National Morale is actually used. One other unrelated point from the same scenario, when I handed the game over to the AI to play it on (Fn F3) after I have started the scenario I have noticed that it has rather a pathetic trust in the efficacy of garrison units to hold key locations. Thus I had been holding off the Axis from taking Moscow (and killing loads of Italians) in a heavy fight with a highly experience and entrenched Corps unit on Moscow but when the AI took over it promptly swapped the corps for a garrison unit with predictable consequences. It is perhaps unfair to criticise the AI when it takes over part way through a game but I have previously noted this propensity to use garrisons when a stronger unit would be better in a key location. I looked at the AI Scripts but could not see anything there that would dictate what unit types are used. Regards Mike

I notice that in the standard scenarios the AI has no Italian Fleet Scripts. Does this mean that the Italian Navy just reacts as soon as an Allied naval presence is detected without any tactics or strategy? Surely it would be sensible for the Italians to make some effort to conserve their navy and possibly build up some sort of action against Malta. Regards Mike

I have been thinking about the future for Strategic Command and how Hubert and his colleagues can derive some further return on previous and future investments in the series. There are probably some useful tweaks that can be made to the current facilities but it might be hard to persuade existing users and potential future purchasers to spend additional money on relatively minor changes. One area where there might be some potential, although it would not appeal to all current users, would be to provide an add-on that offered a significant level of additional detail with respect to how units are made up. One of my all time favourite war games was Gary Grigsby's War in Russia. Rather like Strategic Command that had Corps as the main unit that the player deployed, however, the player was allowed to adjust the individual components that made up the Corps and this changed its strength and capability. Gary Grigsby used the same type of approach with War in the Pacific where the main unit was the Task Force (TF) but each TF was made up of specific individual ships whose capabilities and damage were individually tracked. TFs could split up into smaller individual TFs so, for example, damaged ships could be sent home whilst the remainder continued to operate and new TFs could be formed from the pool of ships present in a port. My concept for this development of Strategic Command is that the main engine would be largely unaltered (but see below), however, an additional series of routines would allow players to track divisions and ships and move them between Armies and Corps and Maritime Units thus adjusting their strengths and capabilities. The bulk of the effort would be in coding the divisional and ship tracking feature, which might be sold as a bolt on, but it would require some changes to the basic engine. This would be to allow units such as armies to spin off some of their strength either to other existing units or to create new smaller units; also two or more units should be allowed to amalgamate either to gain strength or to change into a larger type. Thus an army might need to be able to become 2 x Corps units or two weakened special forces units might merge to become one stronger unit or one severely weakened unit might seek refuge by amalgamating with another larger nearby unit. Players who prefer a more straightforward game would probably enjoy a new facility in the standard game to split units and they would still be able to reinforce in the current way or by amalgamation. Players who might be interested in playing a more sophisticated game would purchase the bolt on facility that would enable them to choose, for example, to provide elite reinforcements to their Tank Group by purchasing or transferring the 12th SS Panzer Division into it. I have been spending time recently creating a scenario with naval units that are customised to individual country’s actual ships and capabilities. I have been pleasantly surprised at the level of differentiation that the current facilities already offer. Thus Italian ships were typically faster than their Royal Navy equivalents and their strategic concept was to maintain their fleet in being and only fight when they had a clear advantage. This can be modelled by giving the Italian ships a higher rating for defensive evasion (I am using 15%). Japanese heavy cruisers typically had very powerful banks of long lance torpedoes in addition to their 8” guns. I am modelling this by giving IJN cruiser units 2 strikes whilst Allied cruisers only have one. Allied warships typically had effective radar both for detection and gunnery much earlier than their adversaries and this can be modelled by giving them a higher offensive evasion factor (think of the Italian Cruisers surprised and destroyed without firing a shot in a radar assisted night attack at Cape Matapan). I am using these examples to illustrate that there is plenty of scope for customising TFs within the current facilities and I have effectively already been creating TFs in the way I am proposing albeit manually in the editor. I hope that all players would think an ability to split or amalgamate units might be useful enhancement and that Hubert might see some revenue potential in my proposed add-on. Regards Mike

Are there any units which cannot be transported? I created a rocket unit in USA and I do not seem to be able to get it to offer the transport option in the unit menu despite it being in a port area. I could understand that there might be limitations on rail guns but surely not rockets. I would point to the Cuban missile crisis as an example of rocket transportation being done in practice. In WW2 the Germans did create a mechanism for launching V2 rockets from containers towed by U Boats but by then the US coast was so strongly patrolled following the earlier East Coast shipping massacre they never tried out the technology. I think some elements of that research would have carried forward into the Polaris programme. Regards Mike

Hi Amadeus I guess it also depends what is meant by balanced. The China theatre was historically balanced in that neither side could totally defeat the other without outside intervention which eventually arrived in the form of the Red Army. If you want either the Chinese or the Japanese to be able to defeat each other on their own then you have to start playing around with their real historical capabilities. Initially the US Government had hopes that Chinese forces would eventually defeat the Japanese using US weapons and US training but they eventually came to understand that this was not going to happen. However, they did realise that substantial Japanese resources could be tied up in China with relatively modest US commitments and this was their most effective strategy whilst they were winning in the Pacific. Unfortunately the final US strategy of encouraging the Soviets to participate in the Chinese conflict was a huge political error as the Soviets used weapons captured from the Japanese to equip Mao Tse Tung who was thus able to defeat the US partner Chiang Kai Shek. If I was looking for a historic variant I might like to set a victory condition that the US and Nationalist Chinese should try to defeat the Japanese in mainland China before a certain date which might represent when the Red Army would be ready to intervene. Regards Mike

Just a quick response to Amadeus' comment above: I disagree in that case that gaming matters has to come first. Always and any time. Historical means are nice to have but I wanna play a game. I don't want to repeat history. That is my opinion. Clearly we all have our own reasons for playing wargames. Personally I prefer to start from a position that matches broadly a historic deployment of troops and capabilities and then I enjoy determining whether different decisions might have lead to different outcomes. Thus my motivation is not to repeat history but to see what other possibilities existed. Clearly after a certain point in time the broad outcomes of WW2 were inevitable and then for me the interest is whether the inevitable can be delayed so my victory conditions would have a time element. There is a big reality/scale problem in trying to produce a game which covers all the theatres of WW2 because, for example, a Nationalist Chinese Army was lucky if it had 65,000 men and almost certainly no artillery whilst a Soviet or German one would be around 200,000 with lots of artillery and A/T capability. The Japanese force capabilities in the China theatre are similarly overstated in the standard scenario. The Japanese had as many as 900,000 "Chinese" troops fighting with them which inflated their apparent numbers but these Chinese troops tended to change sides whenever appropriate for their well being. SC does not have an easy mechanism for representing individual units doing that so a "historic" scenario is pretty hard to produce. However, my earlier post was intended to point out that if the scenario designer allocates fewer units by using more historic numbers and capabilities then you can still get a balanced game (the reality was balanced in China) but it would be different to the standard one. Whether it would be more fun or interesting to play is a matter of personal opinion. Regards Mike

Adolf was probably concentrating too much on wrapping stone! Regards Mike

Hi Al North Africa/Middle East from 1940 to 1943 would be an interesting scenario but the ground scale might be a bit of a challenge. One of the first ever wargames I played was a surprisingly good one given the computer called Vulcan on the ZX Spectrum (later available on the PC). I think the PC version is available as freeware now. This covered the North African campaign in Algeria and Tunisia from Nov 42 to May 43 with the 8th Army and Rommel arriving from off stage right. It had good possibilities for both Axis and Allies. The game designer was a guy called RT Smith who was later involved with the "Total War" series. Regards Mike

Hi Hubert I have discovered what is causing the effects I have seen but I do not know whether this is an issue for the converter or the way the main program works. It seems that at the start of my converted 1942 scenario Italy is not yet at war with the Allies - hence Italian units do not interdict Allied supply and German U Boats cannot enter Italian ports. I do not know where the information about whom is at war with whom is carried (the AI events?) but it seems that it has not been converted. Regards Mike

Hi Hubert Actually I am not too bothered even if DEs that require spend are not inhibited if there are insufficient MPPs as the lack of subsequent production or repair on that turn would be sanction enough for my purposes. So please do not waste time fixing it even if it is some sort of bug. It would also be totally against history to provide an economic sanction to the US which always had enough economic resources to do whatever it wanted from a production point of view. The tonnage war was really a race against time with the sanction being that the US could not bring its resources fully to bear in various theatres until it was won. In the time interval created the Axis might have been able to defeat one or more of the US Allies. I would like to reproduce this threat in SC. Ideally I want to create a series of sanctions on the US Allies that escalate for as long as the Axis are being successful with the tonnage war. It is proving a bit tricky to devise suitable chains of inter-related escalating events. I am making progress but it is possible I might end up asking you to consider implementing more sophisticated relationships between events and that might be more valuable than fixing anything wrong with DE costs. Hi Bill My intention was to try to create difficult decisions for the Allies and to some extent the Axis by establishing DE's that have effectively two bad effects and the player has to choose what is best in the circumstances. For example Churchill had to choose between suspending the PQ Arctic convoys, which potentially gave a morale and supply hit in the USSR (actually he did suspend them for a while after PQ 17) or the UK having to spend more resources effectively to replace the lost shipping and supplies incurred by continuing. I do not actually stop the real convoys in the game but use supply or morale events triggered by the presence of Axis units across the supply route. It is valuable that the convoy route is there as this can show the opposing player where the raider was although in the N Atlantic raiders can have an impact wider than the main convoy route as a significant number of ships were actually sunk whilst not in convoys. Similarly the Japanese might have to divert MPPs from military production to pay the cost of extra shipping for getting food to the homeland when US subs have interdicted the food route from mainland China. For both the UK and Japan about 25% of the shipping tonnage carried food. The downside for the Axis player in the case of Japan is national morale hits from the lack of food or supply hits from the lack of oil - this was of course the real situation Japan faced in 1945. It is difficult to apply an MPP based sanction to the US itself without seriously distorting the game and reality although I did experiment with it by demanding extra large investments in Liberty ships mentioned in the post above. The trick is to find ways that make it difficult for the US to bring its economic or military muscle to bear. Thus most of the sanction for any U Boat success in the "tonnage" war has to manifest itself in MPP or supply or morale hits in Europe or Australia/New Zealand, India, the Middle East or China. The advantage of the tonnage war for Doenitz was that it had effects all over the Allied world - as an example 4m people died in India from famine in 1942/43 partly as a result of shipping shortfalls. I am in the process of experimenting with various sanctions to give both sides a chance to get an advantage whilst the rest of the war carries on around them. Churchill did say that the U Boat menace was the one thing that really worried him during the war and that would not be obviously true for most Allied players in the standard SC scenarios. Regards Mike

Hi Bill Thank you for the suggestions. I have confirmed that the cooperation box was ticked for both Germany and Italy. The German and Italian versions of the Supply events are both identical except for Country ID and in fact the text does work with the Gold version of the standard scenario as I pasted the events into that. It seems there may be some subtle change from 1.07 to Gold that the converter has not quite addressed. I have in fact given up on that converted scenario and started to make it over again using the standard Gold scenario for 1942 as the start point. I am just doing it to try out various ideas, such as, how to create the impact of the tonnage war, rather than creating a scenario for publication. My intention is to make a publishable version with my ideas once someone else has produced a larger map that gains wide acceptance (your planned new one perhaps?) I have trouble with the unit scale of the standard map. It gives a frontage of 50 - 60 miles (actually the scale varies due to the Mercator style projection map). In WW2 a good defensive line might have had 1 division covering 2 - 3 miles of front with a depth of up to 10 miles. Thus the biggest unit in SC at this scale for the Russian and NW Europe fronts ought to be capable of holding 20 - 30 divisions which makes it very difficult to scale down to theatres such as N Africa where you really need units that represent just a couple of divisions. If the converter had worked flawlessly I was considering unleashing it on the Nupremal scenario as his scale and country set up would be good for my purposes which is to make a scenario starting in May 1942. However, converting Nupremal's scenario as the basis for a 1942 Gold version would be a lot of work and I do not want to start it if I am not sure the converter will get it right. Regards Mike

You can always create National Morale events in both China and the USA if it appears that the US is providing insufficient effort. In real life the Japanese would have been happy to come to some sort of accommodation with the Nationalist Chinese. It would be interesting if the game mechanics allowed a major country with low morale to quit the war by returning to neutrality rather than surrendering. Stalin supposedly put out some sort of peace feelers to the Nazis after the failure of his winter offensive in 1941 to achieve a victory in early 1942. It was never Hitler's intention to completely conquer the Soviet Union. He wanted a new border on the AA line - Archangel to Astrakhan so he could have been interested in a negotiated peace at some stage. Regards Mike

Hi Hubert Thank you for clarifying that. Since the RAID Multiplier can go as high as 100 that might mean that the losses could be times 10 but presumeably still limited to the maximum MPP value of the convoy. In fact the value of the Merchant Ships sunk typically was similar to the cargo it was carrying so the true cost of the "loss" could be up to 2 x the MPP value carried although of course up to half of those sunk might have been returning empty! I have been experimenting with DEs that require the major Allies to pay significant sums of MPPs to reflect the MS Tonnage losses across the various Oceans when one or more Axis or Allied raider is present. I have also required the US by means of other DEs to invest heavily in Liberty Ship production in 1942 to replace the 2,000 or so Allied ships lost since 1939. In the course of these experiments I forced the US MPPs down to zero but noticed that I could still have the US accept DEs that required it to spend more money. Effectively the lack of MPPs was not a sanction on the DEs although of course the US was unable to order any production or repairs. As far as I could tell the US income was inflated somehow so that it could meet its various commitments including convoys and accepted DEs. Have I made some error in interpreting this or is it what you would have expected to happen? Regards Mike

I tried out converting a scenario of mine based on an adaptation of Axis High Tide in 1.07 to run under Gold using the conversion utility and encountered some strange effects. In my variant I had a German sub in the Med and I found that this was not allowed to visit Italian ports. I tried modding Gold's own version of the High Tide scenario and the German sub I put in the Med could visit Italian ports. I have to say that the various event files looked as if they had been converted perfectly but some aspects of them would not work. For example I had made some locations near to Malta the path of supply convoys from both Alexandria and Gib. If the Axis could place a unit on the route from Alexandria then the Grand Harbour (Malta's main port) took a supply hit and if it could place one on the route from Gib then the Malta fortress would take a supply hit. This worked fine in 1.07 but in the converted version the German submarine would create the supply hit but Italian units would not. The supply events look OK in the file but they just do not work. I had some other weird happenings with an attempt to create Morale events on the UK and USSR to simulate the US cutting supplies due to shipping shortages. These would not work in the converted scenario but did work when I cut and pasted the text files into Gold's own Axis High Tide scenario. There were a few other similar strange occurences so I am interested to know what success others have had with the conversion utility. Regards Mike

This comment is a reply to a post made by Yuvuphys. As it was a few posts back I have extracted the issue and repeat it here: Convoy Raiding One of the principal damages of convoy raiding was not simply the loss of material, but the loss of shipping capacity. Next time the attacked convoy of ships moved goods, it would move fewer goods unless the sunk ships could be replaced. I think it would add an interesting dimension to the game if the throughput of a convoy route was reduced for several turns as the result of a raid, rather than just for the turn it was raided. Raiding these routes would be similar to strategic bombing of a production center, reducing a city's MPP production from 10 to 5 causes the city to underproduce by 15 MPPs over 5 turns. Likewise, a raid on a convoy route which destroys 5 MPP of shipping could reduce the throughput of that route for 5 MPP for several turns, until new ships are built to handle the cargo. It is entirely right that Doenitz strategy was based on the tonnage war but a key element of that was that it did not matter to him where he sank ships so long as the Allies' overall carrying capacity was reduced. So when it was easy to sink ships on the US Eastern seaboard he sent his ships there, after they very belatedly introduced convoys he moved his ships to the Carribean and so on. Thus your solution to penalise a particular route is not really appropriate and the Allied player needs to be faced with a realistic cost that initially at least is much larger than the Axis investment in U Boats. In 1942 U Boats typically sank 100 ships per month with an average displacement of 5,000 tons per ship. The cost of constructing a Liberty ship was just under $2m and that compares to an Iowa BB at getting on for $80m so the replacement cost for 100 merchant ships was equivalent to at least two Battleships per month! If you reckon that a BB unit in SC equates to two real ones then the monthly cost to the Allies of U Boat merchant ship sinkings should be 400 or so MPP's. Clearly this is a huge cost and no way equates to the sort of convoy values used in the game. One solution I am thinking about is to create a series of Decision Events for the Allied player that requires them to pay an escalating amount to continue to run convoys and the amount in a 1942 scenario might start at 400 and increase depending on the U Boat activity on the convoy lanes. This would not necessarily require any new coding by Hubert and his people as I think it can be done with current facilities for Decision Events. They would be triggered by checking how many U Boats had been sitting on various squares along the major convoy routes. However, if it was possible for Hubert to cause this information to be available to scenario designers somehow via the convoy routines it might save a lot of work. Clearly the Allied player's MPPs would have to be adjusted up to allow them to even consider paying these large amounts. You might then ask why would they not suspend the convoys? If convoys, as they do now, just related to MPP transfer then clearly it would be a no brainer. However, convoys to the UK were typically carrying a wide range of goods. A broad brush estimate might be 25% food, 25% POL (petrol oil lubricants), 25% items to assist industry including the manufacture of weapons etc (i.e MPPs) and 25% military supplies such as shells and bombs. If the player took a decision to suspend or cutback convoys then there would be 3 potential penalties first reduced food supplies would lower national morale, reduced POL should result in supply penalties for both the bomber offensive on Germany (it took two tons of POL to deliver 1 ton of bombs) and the ability of UK ports to support Allied navies and cutbacks on military supplies should lower the readiness of Allied units located in the UK, compromising the possibility of D Day or even allowing an Axis crossing the other way! The main additional source of Allied MPPs could be provided by uprating the importance of oil. Clearly the Axis player would also potentially benefit from this so I would have to devise a suitable cost penalty for them to match their added oil or materiel consumption as they push deeper into Russia or other axes of advance. The increased importance of oil would help encourage the Axis to try to sieze the Soviet or Middle East wells. The Japanese were of course in a similar situation to the UK with respect to oil and food imports so the scenario in the Far East is almost a mirror image of that in the Atlantic. Even the Soviets were dependent on the West for high octane petrol and food and their transportation depended on both Western trucks and railway engines and carriages so a suspension/reduction of convoys would also have an impact on their supply net. Ships sent to the SU had to return even if they were empty to be used again so the SU could also be required to run convoys with some level of mandatory charges and associated supply penalties. I have a lot more work to do to understand what the various values might be but I expect that a key aspect will be to give countries such as the UK, Japan and Germany a starting pool of MPP's equating to the sorts of stockpiles that they actually had e.g. Japan started with 6 months of oil stocks, the UK started with 17m tons of merchant shipping, Germany captured a stock of oil after the fall of France that helped fuel Barbarossa. Players would need to realise that they would be facing a quarterly MPP bill that might escalate so they should not splurge all their MPPs on new units. Adding a "supply" dimension to SC could give the game more depth but the trick will be not to change too much of its beautiful simplicity. I think adding a relatively small number of decisions about convoys every 3 months ought not to be too onerous for players. Unfortunately to keep the game simple for the user might mean a load of work for the scenario designer. I can just about see how it might be possible to keep a broad brush tally of submarine activity also a track of the Axis advance over the course of a 3 month time interval. Both would require a series of inter-related Events but making it happen without introducing any errors or anomalies might be quite tricky given the number of locations that might have to be monitored. Has anybody ever proposed a scenario designers' cooperative to share this sort of workload?! Regards Mike

Hi Xwormwood Thank you for at least attempting to answer my question and I am sorry that I did not make it sufficiently clear. Let me please clarify it for you. There is a value called RAID Multiplier it is set in the Editor and applies to naval or bomber units which are allowed to attack convoys. It has a range in values between 0 and 100 but it is typically set at 3 for bombers, 5 for cruisers and 10 for submarines. From the example you included in your reply it does not seem to be a multiplier with respect to the strength because the strength is taken directly as the actual strength of the attacking unit, so my question remains what is the RAID Multiplier used for? Regards Mike

I am really surprised that 90 or so people have viewed this question but nobody has answered as to what the RAID value actually does. regards Mike

Hi Cantona66 I have downloaded your mod - congratulations on your map. I think your treatment of old BB's versus new ones (distinguished by very expensive naval warfare upgrades) is a good way of allowing one country to have both old and new battleships. I have so far found no sign of Bismark - is she included by means of an event? I would, however, comment that HMS Illustrious was not launched until April 1939 and commissioned for active service just over a year later. Having her at Malta, albeit with strength 1, in 1938 is something of an anomaly. I had a quick scan through your events and there seems to be an enormous number of them. I am wondering whether this might constrain the action to follow a historical path - is this your intention with the mod? Regards Mike

I would like to propose an alternative solution to the problem of China v Japan which is actually based on the true situation in WW2. The Japanese army was very much superior to the Chinese in the way of equipment. For example the majority of Chinese units had little or no artillery. However the Japanese units as portrayed in the standard game are too numerous. The real situation was that the Japanese could pretty well force their way to any location that they wished, as demonstrated during the Ichi-Go offensive, but they could not hold onto the areas they conquered as the countryside remained hostile and they did not have sufficient troops to garrison new areas that they could potentially conquer. The Japanese Army has 14 Corps and 18 Armies which is equivalent to 50 Corps sized units as well as 16 special force units and garrisons. The German Army has 20 Corps and 14 Armies equivalent to 48 Corps sized units and only 5 special forces and garrisons. In practice the German army was numerically 10 - 20% larger than that of Japan as well as being much better equipped. Thus my solution would be to reduce the size of the IJA by about 15% but have each of its units maintain a clear qualitative advantage over an equivalent Chinese unit. For the Chinese I would make their units cheaper to build or rebuild on the basis that they are manpower heavy but equipment light but make the cost of upgrading their infantry tech quite high as they are really starting from -1 in terms of equipment. This might need some fine tuning to give a balanced game but would better reflect the real problems both China and Japan faced. Finally in the standard scenario it is not at all obvious why Japan might have wished to occupy Manchuria and those parts of China with which it starts. In practice of course there were major mineral and coal deposits and mines in Manchuria and relevant parts of China e.g. Benxihu (scene of the world's worst ever mining disaster with over 1500 lives lost in 1942) in Manchuria, Chingching near Yenan (an important target for the Communist Chinese 100 regiment offensive) and Shandong near Nanking. Regards Mike

I am possibly being remarkably dim but I would be grateful if someone could tell me how the RAID factor is applied. In the manual the formula given for damage is this: Convoy MPP Loss = Sub strength + (Sub strength / 2 * Random Value) * City value Does this mean that the RAID is about how often a convoy is intercepted rather than how hard and if so what does a value of 10 actually mean? Regards Mike

Hi Big Al I guess part of the problem with shore bomardment is the scale of the map. Even with your "big map" there isn't a single location on Sicily that might not be reached by shore bombardment. This is plainly absurd for DD's and CA/CL and even a 16" gun would not be able to reach the centre of Sicily let alone target anything accurately. Shore bombardment certainly did play a part but restricting it to reducing entrenchment and impacting morale would be more realistic even for shoreline fortifications. I guess that a German sitting on Mount Etna might be demoralised by observing a BB bombarding his supply routes even if the shells could not actually reach him. Regards Mike

Hi Nupremal I have recently downloaded your mod (but not the very latest - what problem did that fix?) and I really like your map. Are you thinking of porting it to Gold and if so might you make a 1942 scenario for it? I have been looking at creating an historical (not balanced) OOB based on early 1942 and I think your map scale would be the sort of thing I would need. 1942 is a pretty good year for creating a historic scenario for naval forces as the true delay between ordering and availability for action for a WW2 BB was over 4 years and a CV not much less so the major fleet components were pretty well decided. I have also enjoyed looking at the XLS files you included as documentation. I am interested to know why you chose to give IJN warships less action points than the Allies. I would have thought that if anything they should have more APs because of their typically greater speed and endurance than Allied equivalence. I note that you give the Kongos a fairly poor rating as BB's but in 1942 they were faster than any Allied equivalent warship and therefore could choose whether to fight or not which should be an important consideration in judging effectiveness. In my "historical" OOB I am planning to give faster ships some advantage in evasion rating. It is also very interesting to consider the true cost of Bomber units. The UK MOD did a calculation that constructing and deploying a BB was pretty well equivalent in cost terms to constructing and deploying 53 twin engined bombers. This would be even more true for 4 engined bombers. I guess most people may not realise that each 40 or so heavy bombers that were deployed from the UK required a brand new all weather airfield with around 1,000 ground staff. Just the construction cost of such an airfield would have been about 1/7 of the cost of building a KGV class BB. As the heavy bomber units in SC have to represent around 400 planes each, this requires 10 new airfields and taken with the manufacturing cost of the planes equates to 4 x KGV's. Bomber Harris declared that training for 5 x aircrew (a Lancaster had 7 aircrew) was the same cost as building a 4 engined bomber! This gives us another 3 x KGV! Thus bomber units should be by far the most expensive units in the game as their production cost equates to more than 7 x BB's. There was also a huge disparity in POL consumed - KGV used just over 6 tons of fuel oil per hour whereas a single bomber consumed something like 2 tons of 100 Octane AVGAS for every ton of bombs they dropped on Germany. regards Mike