numdydar

Actually, there was never an official Japanese sub doctrine that restricted what the subs could shoot at. There were lots of Allied merchant ships sunk by Japanese subs. During the war, IJN submarines did sink about 1 million tons (GRT) of merchant shipping (184 ships) in the Pacific Of course the smaller number of Japanese as compared to the Germans and Allies, plus the larger vastness of the Pacific also helped this number to be small. Plus Japan used them as scouts versus anti-merchant duty. This was why they tended to be able to sink more warships than merchants as they were scouting. So they had just as much chance to find a waeship as a merchant. But 90% of the time they found nothing at all. Which is why they were so ineffective. Not because they could not shoot a torp because it was 'only' a merchant.

This is one of the major issues with designing a global WWII game and why not many people try it In the PTO, TAC was limited to ground support roles and would occassionaly attack shipping. This is due to short ranges of most of these planes, like the Sally for Japan. Medium bombers were the real ship killers in that theater. Planes like the Nells, Bettys for Japan. Both had long ranges and could carry torpedos. In the ETO, TAC was more often used because of the much shorter ranges involved so there was no real reason to use Mediums for anti-ship duties. So abstractions must be made in order to simplify the code and have the AI use it the best it can. So looking for historical behavior in a game scaled like AoD is not going to work. What the game is trying to do is provide the correct 'feel' of how the world acted during this timeframe versus detailed historical accuracy. If you want that you need to find a different game

Has your game been modded? I reloaded one of my games around that same time frame and the max number of Japan Inf type units is around 75. If you add in Tanks, Art, etc then you may get to 80-85 before maxing out. My priorities as noted above, China, Burma/India, then Oz. Once China falls, I usually have several groups at the far Western border to keep the Russians honest. Plus I keep garriisons in China/Manxhuria as well. Which ties up a bunch of troops. Now whether I need to do any of this is an open question But I found that I had a cronic shortage of troops until India fell. Even though my Inf builds had been maxed out.

The supply level has to be greater than 5 for subs to raid. Once they get to 5 or less, the supply number is greyed out and I found that subs at that point will not raid at all. If they still do, then their effect is minimal at best. Not sure it that is how it is supposed to work, but that is what I found occurs in the game. It made sense so I assumed it WAD

Depends of what WWII game you play and when it starts All Germany needed to do in 1936 (or earlier) is ignore several treaties and concentrate more on Naval than the rest. Then when the Japanese go wild, do not delcare war on the US lol. Sounds like an easy plan to me

Getting through North Africa as the Germans/Italians will help the most for Addis. Once Egypt is overrun, I send all the Italians south and the Germans East. This also allows the Itlian fleet to operate in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea which is a big help in that area. As Japan you really do not have the assets to capture India, hold off the US, and deal with Austrila as you are limited by the number of ground troops you can get. Limiting Japanese to X amount of Ibf troops is obviously a game balancing issue since the one thing Japan had plenty of was manpower. So there should be no limit on Corps/Armies for Japan. Tanks Art, etc types should be limited since Japan had limited abilities to made those. There should be a lot more Inf units than the game allows imho As Japan your priorities should be, China, India/Burma, Austrila, and once the US is in the war, the Eastern Pacific. If you manage all of that then you can go on an Africian adventure Of course by then, you should have been able to overrun most of it just with the Italians.

So you want a turn based HoI 3 lol

Here is a link. SC3 is the last set of screenshots http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3368558

Here you go. Last set of screen shots are SC3 with hexes, thank God These squares keep messing me up big time http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3368558

Hopefully you can do SOMETHING to make the naval system better too Or at least not as bad lol.

Unless you actually have Egyptan troops in the force pool, none of these units should surrender unless they no longer have a viable supply path say <5 in value.

That's what I figured, unfortunately. So will just to wait until then

Thanks so much for listening Now if we can get the naval system revamped, then we are getting a lot closer to perfection

I'd like to add one item to the list I got the event to arm the Indian army for 50 MMP for 4 turns. I accepted, had the cost deducted. Then when I took Mandaly as the event told me I needed to, nothing I could see actually happened. No popup or message to indicate that the cost was well spent. So I have no idea if the event helped me or not. If it was countered somehow, it would be nice to know that as well.

I can definately tell you it was not scripting. Plus we are not just talking small types or weak units. These were Army size units of Art, Tanks, and Inf. Also, if you want to get into specifics, that area of Russia was not real keen on fighting for the Motherland. So if The three major cities in Russia had fallen, and the Germans were pushing past the Urals like I was, somehow I do not think hundreds of thousands of men would be suddenly deciding to fight tooth and nail when there was no hope for them to succeed. I know you are trying to help, but there is no historical background for this to occur. So it should be fixed.

Not sure. I Know that Baku was a IC and units that appeared there were due to Baku being an IC. As i had units on both the North and South sides, there was no FoW so I could actually see the units pop up out of thin air next to cities within the pocket. With Arkangel/Murmansk I do not know. Neither location was connected to Russia by rail or road, but I think because the port was open, the AI may have been able to have units placed there. If so that should no be allowed either. Transported in from a different port is fine, instantly appearing is not. All I can say that at one point, there did not seem to any units at all East of lenningrade, then a large force of 10 or more units appears and strats heading to Finland :eek: While region was not a pocket the way the South was, the only land connection was miles of forest and not roads or rail in or out. In the South the pocket was just north of the mountians which included the city of Grozny to the Caspian Sea, south to Tabriz in Iran, West to Erzurum which the Russians owned for a long time, then to the Black Sea. So all in all, it was pretty big. About a 10 x 15 square area. With no connection to Russia in or out other than the Port at Baku to a land locked body of water. If the port is why units could appear, then the game really needs to add some checking mechinism so that tiny ports like Baku are treated differently than major ones. Just like Arkangel, units transporting across the Sea is fine because then they can be interdicted as in Stalingrad when this occured. But this instant appearing of troops in places where they should be be able to is a game breaker for me.

This is the second half of The Road so Far thread http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=110590 Well I won the game as the Axis in Aug, 1946, but it was not easy. I have discussed the Naval and units 'magicly' appearing in pockets in other threads and will not go into details about those here other than to say these have a major impact on the game and should be addressed somehow in a patch. Russia fell in Jan '46 and India in March. China was defeated in mid '45, six months after I thought it would. It is a LONG way to the last city. ETO Absolutely no effort by the US to invade VF or anywhere else in Europe after the failed invasion in the UK. It did take me quite a while to root out the invasion remains in the UK as the Scottish help the defense a lot. Most of my German subs and fleets were sent to the US coast to disruot shipping there. I was surprised that all those ship icons around the coast only affected a few cities. And only one unit was needed. The rest did nothing. Also surprising is I could resupply all my ships from Fort de France so never had to go back home I kept waiting for the US to attack with planes/ships or something, but from mid '43 on but nada. Not a single Allied ship was seen in the Atlantic for the rest of the game. I did find a few ships 'stuck' in the Artic in Russia and on Russia's west coast, but nothing major when I looked at the map after the game. I did take Malta finally. mainly because I got so annoyed with the NA supply event. Especially since the Med was an Italian lake at that point. Found out that you cannot paradrop on a unit, the space has to be vacent. Not sure how that can be fixed, but you should be able to para drop since that is what the Germans were planning on doing there. It seems very anticlamtic to destroy the unit with planes and bombardment and then just pop in. But other that the entire ETO was a snooze fest for the rest of the game. Russia I am treating Russia as a seperate theater since it extends way beyond the ETO for the rest of my game. The breaking point was taking Lennigrad. This allowed me to take those troops and swing south and attack Moscow from behind. Plus I THOUGHt it would cutoff lendlease through Murmask and Acrangel. But apparently it did not which was very annoying. Of course I did not realize this until much later. Russia proper cracked pretty fast after the fall of Moscow. However it is a LONG road to the last capital. The Urals were a pretty hard fight but circling around from the south helped outflank them. Then is was just a slow slog to the end. Of major reason, was the Turkish border. This and Burma was the hardest fight in the game. I lost most of my units in the figthing around Turkey/Russia border. Even when I finally cut the region off from the rest of Russia it was still a mjor struggle. I was actually past the Urals before I finally killed off everyone in the pocket. Definately not sure it was worth the effort. Since when Russia surrendered all the units go away. I sould have just left them alone and just kept pushing past the Urals faster than I did. I could have left the pocket alone (since they were not going anywhere lol) with a lot fewer units than what I needed to actually reduce the pocket. Once I realized that Russia seemed to still be getting lend lease, I captured the entire rail line going north hoping it was a trigger in a square or something. But could not get the actual port since I just took a single unit to do this. I also did not leave a lot of units in the area since I assumed that no further units could appear at Arcangel. Boy was I wrong. Imagine my suprise when all these units started pushing towards Finland :eek: So I threw some ad hoc units togeather but could not stop them from getting to the Finish border. I was able to hold them from going further south and was able to take new units that were built up to the area to finally push them back and actually take both Murmansk and Arcangel. I took Murmask first and the lend lease finally ended. Howerver the next turn, it started back up again to Arcangel. Which makes sense. Also when the Artic froze over the lend lease went away too. So good job on that. However, I do not think lend lease should be active at all through these ports if there is no rail connection to the rest of the country. One more issue with lend lease. The US started the Pacific route to Russia at some point. So at some point, I decided to send a German and Italian sup to interdict it. So I send them all that way and the route has vanished and never went active again. No idea what happened and why it went away. What was cool was the subs could resupply but not get replacements from Japanese ports. I am not sure how two different torpedo systems could be adapted to a third, but for subs, I can live with that for now. While it may or may not make the game more complex, splitting supplies into non-weapon replenishment and weapon supplies. non-weapon supply could be gotten from every port while weapon supply can only be gotten from ports that are owned by that country that the unit belongs too. Africa Once NA fell, the italians headed south. It took forever to capture the Suden and clean out Eteopia. Once that happened, then the Italians just marched West and South. Once they started getting close to the West coast, the US planes arrived in force. Not sure why they though Africa was that important versus the Pacific of the ships raiding the East coast, but there they were. It took quite a while to overcome this since I just wanted to use Italian forces. But finally Africa mostly turn green. Mid-East - not including Turkey While India was being attacked, British and US troops defided to push up to towards Iran from India. Which of course caused me issues lol. So I had to pull some Italians fron the Africain pacification program to stop them. Once the Turkish border dispute was solved, the Turkish army headed down to take care of the pesky Allies. Turkey and Japanese forces met at the border and great celebrations were had Far East As I noted in the other thread, India was mostly empty EXECPT for the India/Burma border. Just like the Turkish border, the fighting took forever and Japan lost several units in it. Major forces had to be committed in order to counter the Allied forces, including a BB and three CVs. Of course this lead me to speculate that Oz was pretty empty too. And indeed it was. Overrun most of northern Oz before I met resistance. But the forces were all US. The invasions in Java and Solomans were all wiped out. Again massive US fleets visted Japan and ended up with an undersea tour. There were no further invasion in the Pacific for the rest of the game either. General comments I completely ignored the following techs Artilery AA (1st level only) Shells Rockets ASW (japan 1st level only) Heavy Bombers AT All three countries, I maked out on both production tech and Inf warfare I built every Inf and tank unit I could. Only built SF for Japan and no engineers for anyone. I did buy the German rail gun. How could I not Ended up using it against partisians of all things lol. Also built every AC I could expect Strat bombers. Japan and Italy built every ship they could too. With japan building all the CVs first. Never build a CVL though. Also did not build any light tanks. I also maxed out all the minor troops. Spain and Turkey are great to have as Allies since both have large forces you can build out. Which is surprising since Rouminia's Army was the 4th largest in the war. So I think the Romainians need to have a larger force pool than Turkey or Spain. Also why no lend lease to italy from Germany? I feel artilery is totally useless. Only the Russians had artilary formations sthat large. Artilary should be 'baked' into the actual units versus being a seperate research and unit. Plus it would simpilfy the AIs decision making if they were removed from the game. The AI seemed to make too may of them versus actual units that could hold ground better. It also seems that AC units are too strong against INF and tanks. They should be much easiser to kill off than they are. I actually would put AC in an exposed city on several occasions to stop the Allies from taking it. In Africa, I had two AC units hold off a Corps AND a Army for months. Also fighter AC should do a lot more damage to non-fighter AC than they do now as well. Once soultion would be for the AC to immeadately fly away after the first attack by a ground unit and lose half or 2/3rds of it's strength to represent the hasty nature of its departure. Bottom line Was the game fun? Yes. Did it capture the realities of the period? Absolutely not! Would I paly it again? Doubtful. If I did it would not be with any country that had a navy. So I would play with just Russia if I played again. And it will be a while before I do. As the team has mentioned in other threads, many of the issue I have brought up will not be addressed in a patch. Which I can understand, but is disappointing all the same. From an outside view, some I feel are easy enough to do as a patch, while others may not be. But I will defer to their judgement since they are the ones that need to make money off these games. Was my money well spent for AoD, AoC, and Gold? Not sure at this point. I am disappointed in the sacrifices with reality for game play. I would not have made those choices (so it is probably good I am not the one making these games lol). I wish the team the best and will visit back every now and then, but it is time to move on. I hope all my comments have been taken in the light to improve the game and make it reflect the realities of the period better than the game does now. Thanks for reading

Thanks for your comments Hurbert and the time to make them. I know first hand the tradeoffs between a 'fun' balance and historical reality. While your audience may be differnt than most games, the great majority of people play against the AI. So it seems like you may have fixed issues with MP and mesed up the AI. I have NO interest in MP. So I buy games for the AI. in Gold and BF I thought the AI was one of the best I had run across. But the AI putting troops into pockets needs to be addressed somehow while leaving that option for MP. Because the AI is not 'smart enough' to determine where a risk of that magintude is worth it or not. The Russian AI in my game lost 30+ units for doing this stupidity. And I was able to beat Russia because of it. I can only imagine how much better the defense of Russia would have been with 30 units on the front versus trapped in various pockets. I would definately NOT have Baku as an Industral Center, because it was most definately not. Unless you want to add Oil as a resource for tanks/planes/etc. the entire region was totally unimportant for military production of units. I am not sure what you can do to fix this, but it is an important one to fix. As a critical part of any German strategy in Russia is the surrounding and isoluation of units. The game breaks this. At least for me anyway. I want to stress that I REALLY like the game. If I did not I sure would not be spending time on this board trying to help it becaome better lol. Yet at the same time it has so many issues that totally break the realities of the period. Because these realities are broken and seem not to be considered as important, it should not be considered anywhere close to a semiblance of WWII. You might as well have unicorns and dragons as units Of course if you did then, then I would have no issues with the game mechnics since 'magic' covers a lot of ground

Thanks for the thoughts mcaryf1. I am aware that late in the war, the US Navy had improved capacity to stay at sea for longer period of times. The issue I have is the game allows ships to be on station for YEARS. From '43 on I was able to keep the entire Italian Navy raiding convoys from Oz. Where could I restock my fuel and ammo supplies? Ethiopia!!! Nonsense. I am sorry to keep repeating this but the naval system, while it has a lot of great features that I do like (subs for example), the way SRUF and transports can move and operate is sooo unrealistic it destroys the game for me. Plus the AI does amazingly wierd things like sending massive fleets to the Japanese HI just to get killed off. This happened several times in my game from '42 on. The US Navy NEVER went near the HI until '45 yet they are doing this in '42? Why? because sailing from Pearl to Japan, while could be done in '42 with tankers, etc. it was just too damn far for actual combat operations. So the naval system needs to really re-worked to better reflect the realities of the period. While you correctly point out what the US could do in te war, they were the only ones. Yet EVERY navy in the game can do what it too the US four years to accomplish. Turkey, Spain all can go out to sea and get supply value back to 10 at ANY port they come across. So EVERY, no matter how tiny in real life, port in the game has all the ammo, supplies to refit and repair EVERY country's naval units in the game? I realize the desire to make things easy, but this is going way beyond that. Like I said before, I would suggest a naval range for all SURFs (not subs). With options to spend MPPs to develop other ports to extend the range. So if Italy wanted to operate around SA, then they would need to spend the time and money to build up an Ethopia port for example AND the Allies should know about it too. As this type of construction was impossible to hide. This would actually help the game immensely since this is exactly why Guadacanal occured. Also Japan had to expend quite a lot to build up Rabal to be able to have their fleets operate from there. You could even have Naval Tech researce improve the range. This would allow the US to go further as the war went on versus having that capability from the start. Regardless of what is done to the naval system, it needs something to be done. Before SC3. Otherwise, I have wasted my money.

Just be careful with this feature. If you can take a city in a single turn, you should be able to have it not be damanged or just minor damage. If it takes longer than a single turn, then the defenders would have enough time to damage things in a major way. Because no one is going to start damaging the stuff they need too until it is obvious the city is about to fall and is usually the last thing they do as they leave the city. For example if a city is empty and I just run through it, it should not become damaged at all. Or if I para drop into a city, I should be able to capture it intact. So I hope that every time you capture a city it does not get destroyed as there were many locations where this did not occur. Edit: Just had another thought Air units defending a city should not be able to damange the city since these units did not really have the manpower to effect the city the way that army units did. Or maybe half the damage (rounded down so a 5 becomes a 3).

But that is not the historical record. Armys spent huge efforts on both sides to break back into troops that were cutoff and extract them. So with units allowed to apear anywhere they want regardless of connectivaty to the rest of the country, neirther the opposing player nor the AI has to do anything in order for a pocket to survive. Just keep adding units to your hearts content. So rather than trying to do something to save the troops, the player can just ignore them and not have to worry about them dying off. If it looks like things are going bad in the pocket, just add more troops until it stablizes again. Plus it REALLY screws up the AI's efficent use of troops. If the Axis had taken Stalingrad, it WOULD have been difficult for Russia to raise troops in the Caucasus. So why is this a flaw in the old game design? Because it was not 'fun'? I do not think the Russian's would have thought losing Stalingrad would have been fun either. Which is why they spent so much effort to save the city. One thing that seems to be lacking in the game design is the understnading of the scale of the game. We are talking about ARMY level units here. The typical Army was THREE corps, a Corp was three divisions. With a division consisting of around 15K people, so a Corp is 45k plus all the equipment as well. So an Army is 135K of people, plus all the extra equipment it needs. So in an isolated pocket, the game allows you to create units that need 135K of people plus the support as many times as you want? Are there breader vat units in the game? And we are not even talking about Tanks and AC units that can appear either. If I wanted to play a 'fun' game, it would definately NOT be a stragetic level WWII game. When I buy and play these games, I want to be confronted with the same issues the leaders of the time had and I am pretty sure none of them were able to magicly create entire armies in isolated pockets. For reference Baku had THREE general Heavy Industry factories in June '41. Compare that to Stalingrad which had 19 Armament, 62 vehicle, and 4 general HI factories. Yet Baku can produce whatever you need just like Stalingrad? And you wonder why I find this mechanic so absurd? The bottom line is I am not a looking for a science fiction game in an alternative universe. There are plenty of those out there already.

As I told mcaryf1 in another thread, I do not buy games that I have to mod in order to play properly. From your comments, it appears that fixing the naval problems cannot be addressed in a patch. Which is a shame since the way it works now totally sucks in my opinion. As this game has progressed, the naval absurdness has become even more pronounced. I will finish this one out since I want to see how the game works from start to finish. But it is very unlikely to ever be played again due to the naval system. While I do not have access to your code (nor do I want to lol), it seems like an easy fix to limt naval movement to within X squares of a major port. No other parameters in the current system would need to change. Or anything to limit ships, transports and Assult ships from sailing to India from the West Coast. I have major US forces in the Persian Gulf and they had to go across the entire Pacific AND the Indian Ocean to get there. The closest Pacific base the US has is the Fijis. While others that play the game may think there is nothing wrong with this, if it was not possible to do in the real war, the game should not allow it either. If the game does allow absurd things (and I have a list ), then it ruins the game for me. I have not tried AoC yet and I am hoping it does a better job or recreating that Theater of Operations better than what AoD allows you to do.

I am glad you are able to mod your game to your liking . And thanks for letting me know things like this are doable. However, I have no interest in moddding, nor should I have too in order to get a semblance of what I thought I was buying. So I am pointing out these things so that the team can decide if they want to add them or not in the hopes of making a good game better.

I think this is a great idea

As noted in my Road so Far thread, Spain is an Axix member. However all their bases in the New World are still theirs. Years after they joined the Axis. Once the US entered the war, theese would have been immeadiately invaded and taken over. Yet in 1945, there are still Spain's and I can resupply all my ships there, both subs and SURF :eek: Not very realistic. So I think two events need to happen. If Spain is in the Axis and the US goes to war, these bases are immeadiately swithched to Allied control. Matter of fact any Spanish bases in the Western Hemsphere should be handles this way. You may want to assign a small MPP cost to represnt the equipment needed to do this. The sceond thing is that if the US is in the war, Spain can no longer be allowed to join the Axis. As she would not want to lose her overseas possisions. This also puts pressure on the Axis player to commit to getting Spain in sooner than later.