mcaryf1

Hi Bill Well my technique of changing the ownership of tiles but not surrendering the countries to get to 1942 from AOD 1939 worked in that I could then place the correct Axis (i.e. Japanese) units in the conquered countries. However, I got an interesting run through of all the countries surrendering when I started the scenario. Which is fun for players the first time through as it is rather like showing the earlier episodes in a series, however, I suspect it will become tedious after a while and if I leave it I will have to offset the credits awarded for the conquered countries! I presume there must be a better way to do this. My impression is that my Axis Triumphant scenario unit mix will rather rattle around on the new large map, having been too dense on the old scale! I think I shall have to convert some more armies to corps and divisions to be able to build continuous lines. At some stage I think it would be worth having a debate about how to handle such a variety of unit sizes. At the moment AOD effectively has units representing strength 1 (div) strength 2 (corps) and strength 3 (army) . Of course irl the relationship div/corps/army might be more like 1, 4, 8. I will make some suggestions as to how this might be handled once I have tried out a few of my current ideas. Regards Mike

Hi Hubert That sounds like a very useful feature - would it operate between AOD and Gold for, say, transferring production queues between scenarios or will it only be suitable for similar versions and releases of the game? Regards Mike

Hi Hubert Unfortunately there will be an impact on my attempt to provide an enhanced version of AOD to include more naval loops as I will need to either apply my loops to the new map and scenario or apply the map and scenario changes to my "looped" version. It will be helpful if you include a fairly detailed description of the changes you make so I can evaluate which will be the less work. I can obviously just lift the loop events from one to the other but it will still need me to mark up the 400 or so loop entrances and exits on the new map. Regards Mike

Hi Bill I found what I was doing "wrong". I had set the country as surrendered before trying to change the ownership of each tile. It seems that locks the ownership to only one of the opposing powers and not always the correct one. So first have the country set in its original ownership state then go through with the tile changer and you can set it to whatever country you wish as controlling each tile. Whether this will subsequently play correctly I am not sure. Certainly if I then go back to the country and mark it as surrendered it reverts to the wrong opponent again. You might like to check whether this is how the editor should be behaving. Regards Mike

Hi Bill Are there many changes coming on the AOD map? I am trying to use it as the basis for a new scenario. In particular I am trying to roll it forward to use in 1942 but I am having trouble with adjusting the newly conquered territory as compared with 1939. This is particularly the case with ex-French territory. So I have for example created French Indochina to replace the previous French territory but when I try to mark it as now controlled by the Japanese it will only give me the option of the territory being German although it marks it as yellow on various strategic maps. Unfortunately once the territory is German I cannot place Japanese units in it. I guess I could make the Axis partners be fully cooperative to get round that but I would prefer Japanese flags to be flown and so on. Regards Mike

I have been converting the AOD 1939 scenario so I can use it for one starting in 1942. In order to do this I have had to go through all the events to remove any that relate to happenings before my start date of May 1942. This caused me to read a large number of them and gave me a thought about the complaints in an earlier thread about unrealistic DOWs such as the UK attacking Ireland just to get a readiness boost. If this is done after US war entry there is no real sanction other than Switzerland being offended. It made me think about whether the impact of Swiss dissatisfaction could be made more punitive. So I came up with an idea that if the UK DOWs and conquers Ireland the Swiss ought to be authorised to release some secret Irish Republican bank accounts, equivalent to 100 MPP, to help help fund the Axis war effort. I must say that having looked at the territory events for the partition of the USSR between Germany and Japan, I can only offer respect to whoever had the job of typing in all those tile references! Finally to anybody who is also thinking of creating a 1942 or other post 1940 scenario I can tell you that establishing the various different types of countries arising from all the French overseas possessions is quite a task and one that I have not yet completed. Regards Mike

The first para is a reply to Ludi the second relates to loops past Gibraltar. Hi Ludi As far as I know there is no way to link a loop to intelligence. You can make them depend on a trigger, that is a random chance of failure, a friendly position, as an example you might set it up to be able to loop next to an island such as Midway only if you owned that island, and you can make a loop depend on a response to a Decision Event. DEs themselves can depend on various factors such as dates, states of war, numbers of units in an area and national morale and of course you can require payment of MPPs to accept a DE. So sorry I cannot do intelligence. Dear All It seems to me that there are two cases in blocking access into an area of sea. An example of the first type is a transit that require use of a canal such as Suez or Panama or Kiel. Clearly it should not be possible in any circumstance for a hostile unit to pass through a canal owned by an opponent. Unfortunately submarines do occasionally dive through canals and we just have to accept this as a current weakness in the game engine. Gibraltar is an example of the second case where a narrow strait was dominated by guns but in practice enemy units such as submarines could and did pass through although there would be some hazard involved. Units from countries not at war with each other should also be able to pass - typically this relates to Italy. I have been experimenting with a single loop entrance on each side of the Straits of Gibraltar which emerge (if there is room) next to Gibraltar on the opponent's next turn so the owner of a coastal gun on Gibraltar could fire if appropriate at the unit if it is hostile. If the port of Gibraltar is also occupied then that unit would also be in a position to attack the looping unit. Clearly there should be little chance of a surface unit getting through without heavy damage and only one can try at a time but a sub could get lucky and dive its way to safety which would be about right. I think this would make the situation of Gibraltar and possibly some other Straits more akin to reality. Certainly Italian submarines did participate in the Battle of the Atlantic and German submarines did enter the Med and enjoyed some successes versus the RN. I have added this extra loop to the AOD plus loops scenario I am testing. I am not an expert on all the Straits in the world so would appreciate suggestions as to other loops to pass Straits that it could be appropriate to add. Regards Mike

Hi Al I know you are not a fan of artillery. I am currently experimenting with a beefed up artillery unit to represent an Army Group it only has range one so has to sit in the front line but has suitable ctv so it can look after itself. I give it two shells minimum and maximimum. It has the advantage that it will shoot back if artillery shoots at it even from range 2 and will still defend itself even if it has shot both its shells. It will also provide covering fire to any unit being attacked by an enemy adjacent to it. Its disadvantage is that it cannot move and fight but as an army group it is obviously not going to be highly manoeveurable and should be alongside other units that will do the exploiting for any gaps it creates. Now that we have two artillery type units I thought I could try to create one that was not effectively shooting unrealistic distances. The other thought about this is that essentially the current AOD Army and Corps units effectively only represent 3 and 2 divisions each in terms of cost and ctv. really they should be army = 6 - 8 and corps = 3 - 4 x divisions. The ctvs start to get too high so you have to introduce some other factor but then the tech levels get out of balance. Two strikes for an army helps a bit and I thought that integral artillery might be another differentiator at the army level. If it works satisfactorily that also ought to help differentiate Chinese armies as they had virtually no artillery. Regards Mike PS The other unit mod I like is giving BBs 2 strikes as I think that better represents their capability versus other naval units. Regards Mike

Hi Al German DDs conducted 7 missions to lay minefields off the East Coast of the UK in late 1939 early 1940. They sank 3 RN DDs and 82 x MS. This is an image (if it works) from a Finnish newspaper at the time. Mike

I can offer you an alternate suggestion which I am putting into my AOD variant scenario with more loops. If you set up loops from the Baltic to the coast of North Norway and arrange it so the German (amphibious) units emerge with surprise (delay =1) then you can pretty well emulate the actual German surprise attack on Norway but the Allies would still have an opportunity to hit back which they did in real life or even pre-empt with an invasion of their own in which case the German unit could still use the loop but to try to reinforce Norway. To make it more sophisticated it is possible to give the Baltic loop 3 entrances and make it only operate if all 3 were occupied (you can do this with a DE). This would effectively require the Germans to send one or two naval units to escort the amphibious one(s) unless they wanted to spend rather more MPP and more land units on the Northern attack by using 3 amphibious units. Regards Mike

Hi Numydar You have a reasonable point concerning the Italian Navy as the ranges of their capital ships between refuelling stops were typically just over 4,000 nautical miles so they could just about have got from Ethiopia to S Africa and back. The Italians were also desperately short of oil so I doubt that raiding near S Africa would have been a priority for them even if they could get into the Red Sea! Hubert If you do decide to change the supply impact on raiding please make that adjustable in the editor. In contrast to the Italians the Graf Spee had a potential cruising range of 18,000 nautical miles so one size fits all would not be appropriate for raiders. It would still be relatively straightforward for players if we had 2 levels of port. One being major naval bases where all actions would be possible and naval units would automatically refuel or be capable of being repaired if within, say, 2 squares of a major port (note you need to allow the 2 tiles as repair capacity might otherwise be too limited). All other ports should only provide supply and repair to a maximum of half supply/strength and only if the unit was actually in the port. Finally there might be a level of naval tech that would equate to fleet train with different variants for surface and subs (the Germans had their milch cow subs) which should prevent specific naval units with that tech upgrade from suffering supply reductions from raiding or combat. If you need to free up a naval tech slot you could always make AA another factor improved by naval warfare. Regards Mike

Hi Numdydar The development of at sea supply and refuelling was I think more advanced than you suggest in WW2. Towards the end of WW2 the US fleet's major units could stay at sea virtually indefinitely. Even in 1941 when the Germans sent the Bismark to operate in the North Atlantic she was preceded by 7 tankers so that she would be able to replenish herself if she had successfully broken out. The main weakness in AOD in my view is not that the US Navy can operate in the Persian Gulf but rather that it should take it so long to get there. The cruising speed of the more modern major warships was 15 - 20knots, this gives a range of 2500 nautical miles per week or 10,000 in the 4 weeks elapsed between player turns. The USN Wichita had a maximum range of 10,000 nm so she could theoretically have done the whole trip from Fiji to the Persian Gulf (about 8,000 nm) without even refuelling. The CV Essex had a range more than double that of the Wichita so my example is by no means unusual. Given that warships could travel much much further than AOD allows I think you should accept the abstraction that allows them to refuel at minor ports given that they could have travelled backwards and forwards to a major port in the same time if you had wanted to bother the players with doing that. Regards Mike

I think this is getting into the area of making SC too complex but one solution for you would be to introduce the concept of factory cities and limit some unit types so they could only be produced from a factory city. I have experimented with units being automatically produced from some factory cities if you own them on a particular date so it might be possible to develop that idea. Thus you could stop the USSR being able to manufacture tanks but have tank units emerge regularly from Stalingrad or Tankograd as long as they were owned. You could do this for all units using specialised equipment, e.g. Saratov would build fighters, so that only variations of infantry could be built in cut off areas. I am not sure I would enjoy that as much as the standard game but the editor could certainly make that happen and it would be more realistic than the present situation. Regards Mike

Hi Hubert The fault is being reported in the Decision Event not the Loop event and in part of the code that I did not change. Since that format command should not be appearing there in a DE I do not understand how I can fix the fact that the editor is saying it is not there. In fact if I load up the unmodded version of the original AOD scenario and try to run the Update command on the DE file it still reports that unaltered file as being faulty because of the missing command. Is it possible that I have somehow corrupted the editor? That seems very unlikely. Now here's another clue I tried inserting a FRIENDLY_POSITION= at the 240 line mark and the Update ran past line 240 and then reported the same fault at line 282. However, I am not keen on going through all the DE commands and inserting a new dummy line in each! Regards Mike

My mod to create a set of loop points in all the major oceans just for the base AOD scenario so maritime units can move move round the world is progressing very well. However, I have run into a couple of issues and would appreciate some help. First I wanted to create a loop to help the Germans to get to US East Coast once the Americans join the war. I made this loop conditional via a DE that the US must be at war before the loop starts to work. I only added 1 x DE at the end of all the other DEs but the editor is reporting a fault in the DE file saying that it could not find Friendly_Position= at line 240. Two problems with this report - first I never changed anything near line 240 and second you do not seem to use Friendly_Position any more you use an Alignment indicator instead. Can anyone help me please? Second SC is set up very well to allow events with trigger dates as to when activities might start but it is less easy to prevent things (e.g. loops) from being available after a particular date. Thus I want the Germans to have Raider loops available into various oceans from the Baltic up to the end of 1941. The method I have found that might do it is to use a square of teritory in the very bottom RHS of the map where various mines etc are located. There is a blank tile of German territory there and I can use a date specific territory transfer event to make that empty square become British territory with effect from 31/12/1941. I am hoping that I can make the Raider loop depend on this tile being Friendly. This should switch of the loop from that date but I am worried as to whether there might be any side effects with my doing this. Can someone advise whether I can use existing blank tiles here and even make a few extra blank German tiles if I want to fine tune the date availability of some other loops? Regards Mike

Hi numdydar Thank you for your very interesting description. You might like to think about using the editor to make the game more challenging for yourself and others when playing the AI by creating some variant scenarios of your own. After I played the AI once or twice in Gold I set it to play itself and tried to spot where it got into trouble and then tried to fix that issue. For example the AI would typically commit its naval units to attacks before it had assembled a strong enough fleet so a human player could easily overwhelm and destroy the few ships that did attack. I went back into the editor and changed the arrival dates so that the AI would get whole batches of new ships at the same time. Similarly to you I noticed that the AI was not brilliant at obtaining ports for supply when invading and sometimes it did not bring an HQ. In consequence I observed the favoured spots where it likes to invade and sprinkled a number of towns around so that its units could get at least some level of supply. I also noticed that it was very casual at escorting transports and many of its land units went to watery graves so I implemented 80% evasion for those. This is not unreasonable in view of the low real rate of loss in WW2 and it certainly helps the AI not suffer as much as it used to do. Clearly from the numbers of destroyed units you have reported it is not enough to give the AI lots of extra units. It probably needs specific unbalanced scenarios designed for itself so that it can provide a real challenge but not just unbalanced in terms of numbers of units. My current effort in AOD editing is going into designing a whole series of loops so naval units can travel relatively easily throughout the globe whilst still being liable to interception in certain key areas. Once I have that working I will have to see how I can help the AI to use the loops or at least compensate it for any advantage they give to a human player. Thank you once again for your comments. Mike

In my scenario for Gold I made Thailand a minor Ally of Japan because I needed her to provide a number of additional unit types for Japan to use. In particular weak Corps level units to simulate the nearly 2m Chinese warlord troops that fought under Japanese direction. This was the way I solved Japan not having enough regular units in China (historically about 40 divisions). That is not so necessary in AOD as the Cavalry Corps unit could play that part but I also used Thai BB's to be older IJN BBs such as Yamashiro, Thai DDs as minefields and Thai planes became late war Kamikazes and early war Maritime Recce. It is not too much of a stretch to make Thailand a Japanese minor ally although many in the country opposed that and eventually a resistance movement of 100,000 or so started guerrilla ops. Thailand actually invaded French Indo-China after the fall of France with a reasonably equipped army of about 60,000 men to reclaim provinces "acquired" from them by the French colonialists. They were beating the French on land but suffered a defeat at sea when the Japanese offered to mediate and pretty well gave them their old provinces. The Thai army as a whole including reservists was of the order of 500,000 so a substantial force. I have not finally decided what I will do about Thailand in any AOD variant scenarios but I am currently inclined to make her a minor ally of Japan again because I still want to differentiate the older BBs and have minefields again. Regards Mike

Hi Hubert Well I guess you know I would be in favour but you may want some other comments. Once you do this the Axis have chances to make some progress into Iraq and even execute Hitler's grand pincer move but the fall of Egypt is not the end of the story for the Allies in the Mid-East as they can still reinforce through Aqaba and Kuwait bringing troops from India. Regards Mike

Hi Hubert In my Axis Triumphany scenario in Gold I used the Variable Country Condition to make the Malta supply failure event not apply if Egypt had surrendered to the Axis. Currently AOD uses that condition to determine whether Germany has already surrendered. To be honest if Germany had already surrendered the status of Malta and supply in the Med would be fairly irrelevant. I also made it so the supply hit would not effect Alexandria as I think if the Axis had captured that their supply problems would have been at an end both from the point of view of the port and the stockpiles they would have captured. In fact it was the real stockpiles they captured at Tobruk which enabled them to advance to Alamein. Regards Mike

Hi SeaMonkey I have done a couple more tests to see if it might be possible to have more than one loop with the same start tile. This is actually the way convoys work thus if one convoy route cannot be completed, due to loss of the destination, ice or whatever, then the convoy routines take the next specified route for that country and tries that. I had hoped that loops might use the same logic but it appears they do not. I tried 3 loops - one with a very low trigger and one with a failing condition regarding a friendly tile and finally one that would be able to work. Sadly the unit just stayed on the start tile so I assume that if a loop attempt fails there is no second chance other than within that loop itself in the case when all destinations are occupied. Convoys are special in that you can only have one outbound per country so I guess there is different code for convoys and loops. However you can still create uncertainty for the opposing player by specifying several loop entrances that end in different locations that are near each other. Thus as far as the opposition is concerned they could not be sure to be in precisely the right place for an interception even when they were in the right general sea area. Regards Mike

Hi SeaMonkey The way it works is that you specify one destination tile and the loop will send you to that for preference and then any of the other 8 tiles around it if that tile is occupied. If all of those tiles fail then, if you have specified a second destination tile it starts to look at that in the same way and so on to however many tiles you specified. You can specify multiple start positions as well as multiple finish positions. I have not yet checked how far apart the start positions can be but I suspect there will be no limit. You can of course have more than one loop able to emerge in the same vicinity thus rather than having multiple starts and multiple finish positions in one loop you could have multiple loops with single starts and finishes so you could have more control over the relative position of each emergnce but you may or may not know whether an enemy unit is on or near a finish position depending on your recce situation there. Of course all the emergences happen after the end of your turn so you cannot send one through and wait to see what happens. Has this answered your question? Mike

I have been considering how to set the AP value for various types of warship in my pilot scenario for testing loops. Differential APs will be important as it is possible that units will emerge adjacent to enemy units and will then have the option to fight or flee/evade. If one unit type has 2 more APs than another then this should ensure that it could flee in most directions without risk of being caught. My current thinking is this: 25 x AP CV, CA 23 x AP Modern BB, fleet DD, CVL 22 x AP Allied Transport (e.g. Liners) 20 x AP Old BB, IJN Transport 19 x AP ASW DD/DE, ASW CVL/CVE, SS 18 x AP German/Italian/Soviet/Other transport 14 x AP Amphibious transport However I would allow amphibious transports to improve their AP range by 5 for each level of research. Eventually I might fine tune some of the AP values to reflect national characteristics e.g. Italian ships were built for speed rather more than RN ships. Comments anybody? Mike

Hi Clausewitz You make a reasonable point in saying that an operated unit is available to defend after "two weeks" rather than four but two weeks is still not unreasonable to complete even a long journey by rail. It is a similar situation to allowing reinforcements to be purchased for a unit and for them to be ready to defend in the next opponent's turn. In the LAH example I quoted the division actually left their tanks in Russia and picked up new ones for their deployment in Italy so it was quite similar to the ability in SC for units to be reinforced. Conceptually you can consider that reinforcement equipment is either newly purchased from a factory somewhere in the home country and transported to the front or that spare equipment and men have been kept near the front line on a sort of delayed purchase payment basis. I think in SC you have to accept a degree of abstraction to achieve simplicity of game play and I would not want to see "operating" made more complex. Regards Mike

Hi Clausewitz The thing about Operational Movement is that it is taking account of the elapsed time of a turn. Thus in the standard AOD 1939 scenario there is 4 weeks of elapsed time between a player's turns. There is a notional charge for using it and I guess this is intended to represent some sort of capacity limit on the railroad system. The old Gary Grigsby War in Russia game had a nice feature where Russian capacity to move troops "operationally" was temporarily restricted in 1941 whilst the trains were being used to transport factories and workers to the East. In my view the idea of operational movement is OK as it is and you might only think of some extra restriction if you were creating a game of this scale but for example using just 1 elapsed week per turn. Just as an example the LAH SS Panzer Division was withdrawn from the Battle of Kursk about the 12th July 43, it was re-equipped and deployed in Italy by the 8th August 43. Regards Mike

Hi Hubert I thought I had set it to 1% but when I went back to double check the trigger mechanism did stop the loop. I think I must have had two versions of the event file in notepad open at the same time and saved the one without the trigger change! My apologies for the false alarm. I can now also confirm that the fail delay of zero just leaves the unit sitting where it was on the loop entrance. Hi PowerGMBH Actually I am inclined to think that we will need loops in the future unless quite a lot else changes. The 100% intercept for units in adjacent squares is actually quite unlikely if you consider that a unit is surrounded by 8 other squares as well as its own square. This is equivalent to 45,000 square miles of sea and yet all these ships are supposedly finding each other. Also as you increase the ranges for APs you have big problems with the "I go You go" model as ships can come in and attack from huge distances which would notionally take sufficient time for the spotted enemy unit to have moved away. When I first heard from Hubert et al that the maximum range for naval units would not be increased despite a 4-fold change in the map scale I was a bit disappointed. However, now that I have thought about it a bit more and looked at how loops might be used I actually think that using a lot of loops but with gaps between some of the loop entrances and exits could provide a sensible way to model naval warfare with the ability to move historic distances with some possibilities for interception but without other enemy units rushing in for the kill unless they were already relatively close. I will try building a bit of a test bed for this using the AOD map and 1939 scenario but unfortunately I am quite busy with other activities at the moment so it will probably take me 2 or 3 weeks to do it. My aim will be to create something like "operational movement" for ships. However, I do not see any reason why I would want to charge MPPs to use it as in most situations the game does not try to model operational costs such as expenditure of shells or bombs or fuel on bombing missions. If you did create extra cost you would only need to find some way of giving each side extra MPPs to pay for it and that could unbalance the game if the player spent it on some other item. The virtue of SC is simplicity and abstraction and I would want it to keep to that. Regards Mike