numdydar

It would need to be checked to see if it was a differnt side than what the script called for. So if the Allies wanted Mexico early (God knows why, lol), the script could still fire. If the Axis invested MMP, then the script would be canceled. Of course a gamey action, would be for the Axis to invest one chit into all the hirstocal Allied countries just to prevent the scripts from firing lol. So what should happen, is that as long as the opposing percentage is high enough, the script will not fire. Once the opposing percentage driopped to a certain point the script could fire normally. The percentage for entry on the Allied side for Mexico could even change every year to reflect the natural drift towards the US versus the Axis.

If are staing that industrial centers are setup in the game to produce as many and of any kind of unit possible independently of reources from the rest of the nation, then that is wrong. That is just not the way production worked then or now. If you are tying to recreate tanks rolling of the production line directly into combat like at Stalingrad, then while a good idea, it just does not work on a game of this scale. The parts/infrastructure needed to produce entire Armies/Tank Corps, entire air fleets, etc. is impossible from a single factory center. I totally agree that these center should supply supply, but without a rail and/or major road connection to the rest of the country nothing should be allowed to just 'appear there. By allowing this things like the Keiv pocket (which is far more important to model correctly than tanks coming off the production line) are impossible to recreate. I have the entire Causass isolated from the rest of Russia, yet I am still fighting tooth and nail for the area because units are 'magicly' appearing because Baku is an Industrial center. So you are telling me that Baku could produce any equipment in the entire USSR ToE AND had the manpower (not to mention the training, etc.) to have units of all typos muster there? You see how silly this is? Baku was important because of it's resources, not its factories. If you are going to keep this industrial center 'magic', then the easiest solution is to just eliminate Baku as an Industrial Center so at least the AI does not continue to put units in a pocket where they will have limited supply and just end up dead. The rest of Russia has been serverly weaken by this. The same mechanic is occuring around Arcangel too. Arcangel also has zero rail/road connection to the rest of Russia, yet all kinds of units are popping up there like mushrooms. So what I have done, gamy as it is, is just have a few units stationed East of Lennigrad to keep them bottled up and let the AI cram as many units as it wants up there lol. Less of them to fight to where I want to go . So not only is this behavior with the way Industrial Centers totally broken and should be fixed somehow, but it is causing the AI to waste massive number of units in totally unimportant areas when they are desprately needed in far more important areas of the country. To fix this, I would suggest that for units to appear next to a city, the city has to have to have a rail/road connection to the capital OR TWO other industrial centers. At least this way the AI will not waste units. There must be 20-30 units cutoff in the north and southern Russia. With more appearing ever turn. If these units were actualy in Russia proper and not cutoff, I can only imagine how much harder my game would have been than it is now. So please address this somehow if you can.

If Russia can indead declare war on Persia, regardless if Russia is at war with Germany or not, it needs to be fixed. Attacking Persia would be the same as decalaring war on Britian in RL. So if the game allows this then it is not really providing the player with the historical set of choices that the leaders at the time had to deal with. Of course if the team wants a free for all without any restraints on the player's actions, then that is fine, but it should definately not be marketed as a WWII strategic level game.

Something else for a patch. I have cut off several regions in the game where there are NO rail or road connections to the rest of the country. Yet newly build units are being placed in these locations. Very annoying. The other factor, is these untis are just going to die like the rest of the cutoff units versus being useful in areas that are not isolated. If the game uses these tiny ports (like on the Caspian Sea as an example) to bring in entire Armies and Tank Corps, then this needs to be stopped as well. You can certainly use these as secondary supply for food, ammo, etc. But to allow them to bring in huge amounts of troops is not very realistic. New units should only be allowed to be placed near cities that have a rail connection to the capital. I would not even use roads, especially in Russia as the road network there was abysmal. This would easily solve the issue

Try it and see Just load the game and start declaring war. You can look as US war prep before and after the DoW. If it decreases than you know what you did had an effect. If you are now at war with Britian and/or France then you know what happened.

Well that is why in the game these things do not happen, like Russia declaring war on Persia. There is an event that allows Britian to take over Madagastar, but it did not fire in my game. Probably due to England being overrun The Winter War and the Baltic states is also handled by event. The reasons why they are handled by event is because of what I wrote earlier because in RL, there were major reasons, Russia, Germany, etc. could not just run amock taking over whatever that wanted. So the game reflects that by using events verus allowing DoWs, that were impossible to occur in RL. Other than China attacking Indochina in the pre-release AAR which I certainly hope they fixed as there is no way China would have done that in RL so it should not even be allowed.

The Allies in RL avoided DoWs on minors due to the fact it would have pissed off everyone else, mainly the US. Also in this time period, everyone operated under a casus belli, a Latin expression meaning the justification for acts of war. In other words, you had to have a very good reason to declare war. This is why Germany went to great lenghts to 'manufactor' a casus belli by having German troops dress like Polish army and destroy a radio station within Germany's borders. This gave him the 'justification' to attack Poland. Russia got away with their aggressions because, they did have minor claims on the territory they took from the Baltic states, Findland, etc. They did not have any claims on Persia. Plus Perisa was a British protectorate which meant that anyone messing with Persia would be consdered an attack on Britian too. The Game of Thrones has nothing on 19th and 20th centuary polotics lol. As a Russia player, I do not know if you are resticted on DoWs or not. I would assume if you attacked Perisa, you would then be at war with Britain. I do not think your long term changes for survial would be good at that point Madagascar was French and became VF when France fell. Britain did attack it in April '42 and took complete control in Sept '42. You will notice that they waited until the US was in the war . This way the US entry would not be affected if they had done this earlier. I am not sure if the game would punish this trype of behavor, but at least if this happened prior to US involvement, VF sould become a German ally if it did. I hope this helps

The issue with using in game AC to do this is that there are too few of them and are far more important uses for them than flying search missions. Even adding a new unit just to do search would not work since there are too many other types that are more important. Every ship class in the game during the war, had float planes on baord that constantly did searching for both ships and subs. For example the BB Yomato had seven float planes assigned to her directly just for this purpose. The fact that you have these units in the game (which I am assuming represent larger task forces versus single ships. So a BB represents a Surf TF with a few BBs in them, CV units have 1-2 CVs, etc. along with the escort ships that would also be in these types of TFs) and NO search capability allows absurd behavior that was impossible in RL. CV TFs normally had 10-20% of their combat AC dedicated to searching on top of the float planes that were in the CV TF. I agree cat and mouse in the Pacific was and is something that should be modeled. However, this searching and avoiding searching, too place on a much smaller scale than what the game represents. Plus the fact that ships can sail all over the Pacific without any regard to fuel/supplies is also a factor in this. I can buy that tenders and supply ships are also imbedded in the actual units to allow this to occur, but even they would run of of fuel at some point. This 'unlimited' movement and lack of search are the main causes of this. Also while we are on this topic, There were only two location in CenPac where the Japanese could ream/resupply major fleets like CVs and BBs. Truk and Rabaul. The fact that I can get these TFs completely supplied back to 10 anywhere I have a port, while nice, also is very gamy. So it seems to me that to better model things so they work along a more realistic level, you need to do three things. First you could add fuel as a reource in the game and let ships use fuel to move OR a more simple solution for SURF TFs is to restrict ships from moving X squares from major ports. If the second option is chosen, you could add events into the game that would allow the player to inverst X/turn to upgrade a base to extend the ships radius. Ethier of these would prevent the silliness that is currently happening with Naval Ops in the game now. The second thing is you just really need to forget about the cat and mouse game. Every base and unit in the game had massive amount of search abilities to detect SURF fleets. Subs work really well as they are btw. The scale of the game is too big and the number of air units too small and too important to be used for searching. Emily's in Dec 1941 had a range of 4,440 miles! Which means their search range was about 2,000 miles in 10 degree arc with just one plane! Both sides had planes like these that were all dea cidated to searching. So anytimie any SURF fleet gets within X squares of a base gets put on the map with a question mark. This could indicate somthing was found within a one square radius. You could even add additional logic so that within a 1-5 distance you know exactly where they are (representing the larger number of shorter ranged planes available for searching), 5-10 random chance to know exactly where they are otherwise a ?, and longer than 11-X ? and the TF could be anywhere within a 2-3 square radius or nothing at all , based on randon chance. Lastly, only Japan, US, GB, and France had true blue water navies. These countries should be the only ones allowed to operate outside of their home waters. While the Italian Navy ships could operate in the ocean, it was mainly designed for operations in the Med. I am not sure even if the Germans had opened up Suez if the Italian Navy would have gone beyond the Red Sea. So any county with ships other than the above should be restricted to operating within a certain range of their 'home' waters. Of course how to do SURF raiders? Again these work well in the game as is. If you place a SURF on raiding, then the restriction of having to be in the home waters is lifted, BUT in exchange they cannot remove the Raiding flag until they return back to a home port and they cannot attack anything (but can defend normally). This represents that when a ship was sent out to raid, it avaoided combat ships if possible. Plus the raiders did not have the support vessals that a combat TF would have had. So if you want to raid, fine go wherever you want, but do not expect to turn into a combat TF in the middle of nowhere. Sorry for the long post, but I really like the game and want the naval system to feel like WWII, not Startfleet Battles. Of course, this is your design and effort, not mine. If you want a SFB experience for your customers, then that is definately your call, not mine. But as I said before, in a game that is marketed as a WWII game, I expect WWII behavior, not what is currently reflected in the game.

Well everytime i try and do that the image has a big red X on it. I guess your system does not like dropbox as an image site. Not sure why as I create a public link for the image.

Thanks as I wanted to give an indepth view of the various theaters at a midpoint. I would point out that the AI is doing a fairly good job of keeping its fleets togeather. I just had a massive batttle nesr the PI and both side got beat up. Japan lost both DDs and two BBs. They lost a CV, BB and 2 CAs. So a pretty even battle. While that was very nice to see the AI do that, there is no way those ships should be anywhere near the PI without being detected way before they got there. There really needs to be some way to spot ships at see and have the AI be able to tell if they were spotted and fall back rather than pushing on and getting themselves killed.

I think it is 316, 106. It is pink and says it is 5% VF. However cannot right click nor can enter. So it looks like the VF Indochina event missed a square. Or someting else is wrong since you cannot right click on it.

I hope the British deep within China are addressed as that never occured. Matter of fact large numbers of British troops never even went into China at all. It seems there should be some way the code could be written to tell the AI to consider areas of the map to be impassable on a nation by nation basis. This way both the US and British AI would be prevented from sending troops there. However, this would still allow the player to do so if they wanted to.

Warning this is a LONG post so be aware. I am in Fall of 1943 playing at 50%, zero bonus and as the Axis. Here is a summary of my thoughts on the game so far. ETO The French left a gap in the Maginot Line which I exploited in the winter of '39. France fell in July '40 and VF was accepted. This AI behavior and some map issues have been noted in other threads. It did seem too easy to get people into the Axis side. By the end of 1940, I had all the Balkans, Romania, Hungary as my Allies. This without any influence. After France fell, what to do? Well I had two paras so let’s see what happens when I drop them In England. Found out that England was pretty empty. By the time I decided to do something about it, one para was dead and the other was in bad shape. So I invaded, took Southampton and then realized it was not a port. Managed to take Bristol the next turn and the end of the UK was sealed. The AI sends way too many troops overseas and uses PPs to rebuild out of country troops even while the UK was being overrun. Somewhere during late '40 after the invasion, but before the UK was finished off, Russia declares war. Even though I had a 2:1 ratio in troops on the border. However, I definitely was not prepared so it took some time to get moving. The Russian AI, is very good, so working on AoC must have helped. I have not even looked at AoC yet. Believe it or not, I did not capture Odessa until June '43 :confused: I have just managed to take Smolensk and Leningrad and am ready to march on Moscow from the North. However, Russia is NOT anywhere near broken. Still lots of units and hurting me at many places. So definitely do not know how this will turn out. Once I got close to Leningrad, the Fins came in. They were a big help in taking Leningrad. However, historically, they refused to do this. Nor would they go much further past their '39 borders unless the Germans took Lenngrad on their on first. Not sure how the game could model this, but it should be fixed if possible. I did get Spain into the war finally. The random number generation was very unkind. I do wish you could see or have some indicator of the Allies pressure as this would have been fairly easy to see in real life. Took Gabrater after a major effort. Of course the Brits sent a Corp and a Army even though the fighting in the UK was still going on. They could have been much better used there versus Spain as all they did there was die. Took Greece in late '40 along with Crete. The italians had fun with the French and British navies. Losing a BB and a CA. At some point I notice I had left Cypres alone. I quickly invaded and fixed that. I never bothered with Malta and it is still British owned. In May '43 (or so) the US decides to try and free their opressed brothers in the UK by landing a MASSIVE army. Very shocking. The good news for the AI is that is it did a really good job with getting the troops on the land and surprising me. The really bad news is the AI seems to have no desire to actually capture a port so they can be supplied :confused: They have landed 5 Armies, 3 Corps and one HQ. If they had concentrated on getting a port they could have easily done so, but instead are now OOS and will soon all die. I am hoping the AI scripting can be tighened ups so that the AI will not land at all if it determins that capturing a port is unlikely. More on this in the PTO discussion. What was nice is that I had allocated extra units to be shipped to England but could divert them to Turkey once I realized that the US troops had no chance of getting a port. So was able to stave off a diaster due to bad AI planning Mid East Italy was able to completey capture Alexandra (with the help of a German Armor and Inf Army. The Africa Corps lives. Capturing Cario on the other had took forever since the Germans had to go East versus South. But finally it fell. This was the major event for the Italians as it now allowed them to actually get to their buddies further South. Syria joined the Axis anlong with Iraq. Of course the Bristish sent troops into iran (again with fighting in the UK ongoing). It took a while for AK to get down there, but made short work of the British when they did. Then we get to Persia/Iran. I thought they would join automaticlly so wasted a few turns waiting around and nothing happened. So went ahead and declared war. Was able to conquer then in two turns which was a good thing since quite a few Russians came pouring in. Lost my first Armor corp in the heave fighing. Current a complete stalemate on both side. The only good thing is it is tying up far more Russians than Germans. Got Turkey into the Axix, but was VERY costly to do so. Not really sure it was worth it. Since the Eastern part of the country was very quickly overrun by the commies. Only by diverting troops that were slated to go to England and Russia was diaster averted. Again, it seems like more Russians are being tied up than Germans which can only help the cause. Africa The quagmire of Ethiopia. What a mess. Neither side has enough troops to do anything. I was able to barely hold on and only because, I paid to send the SF and HQ down there. Once Cario fell then the troops sped South and caputred Sudan. Fighing is still going on in East Africa but it is only a matter of time. Currently the NA troops are contining to push West out of the Sudan while the rest are mopping up the enemy in the East. Battle for the Atlantic and Med Before we move on to the PTO. A brief discussion of Raiding. I really like the way this is modeled with the convoy lanes dynamicly changing based on what happens on the ground. I do think the convoys to Russia go too close to the UK. If the UK is captured, the lines should go much further North than they currently do. At the start of the game, my subs were getting killed pretty regularly. Also lost a lot of the German navy contesting the channel. At one point was down to a CA and DD as far as SURF ships go. I got my subs to lv 2 as soon as I could. I put two chits into subs as I was not sure if even lv 2 would be enough. Lv 2 was better, but it was not until, I got to 3, where the Battle of the Atlantic turned into my favor. Of course knocking out England helps too. Before England fell, my subs were costing England anywhere between 40-50% of their colony income. This was from mid '40 on. Needless to say this had a major impact on the game. Of course the down side is I overbuilt on subs because, I was losing quite a few at the start and did not know how good the lv 3 would be. So now they have to sail across to the Caribbean to be useful now lol. The German CV is PRICELESS and worth its weight in gold. So I would recommend always building it and protecting it at all cost. Because once the Eastern front opens up, you will not be able to afford another one if it is lost. I would not build the Italian CV because it is not really needed in the Med. of course you do not really need another BB either, but at least the BB costs nothing. One the Suez was opened for the Axis, most of the Italian navy heads to the Indian Ocean to raid every convoy line around. A few clashes with our British friends which took time to repair since we had to sail all the way back to Italy to get fully repaired. The plan is to keep raiding as much as we can around Eastern Africa until our Japanese friends can liberate India. Which brings us to the PTO PTO Even though this is a single game, the differences between the ETO and PTO are like playing two different games within the same game. What really works well in the ETO, does not work well, in the PTO. I am not sure if this is game design, AI scripting, etc. but something is off once you hit the Pacific. I have discussed the garrison, naval actions, and invasions in other threads regarding the PTO. But before I get into some of this, let me show you where I am in the game right now. China China is definitely not a pushover, but still able to be overrun. It will most likely take me to mid '44 to do this, but I should be able to. The key to this is HQs and lv 2 inf. Nothing else is really needed. I added the Strategic Bomber and one HQ along with a few more troops. I think 2 Armies, two SFs, and 3 corps. While partisans are a pain, I just decided to completely ignore them and this seems to be working much better than trying to commit the troops to kill them. So far their presence has not seem to had any detrimental impact on my operations. This is totally unlike Russia where partisans do make a difference. A reason it feels like a different game. DEI, Burma, Malaya, PI Went to war with them in mid Dec '41 along with the US. The PI fell pretty quick. Bataan did not seem to make any impact in the game. Once the PI surrendered, the unit there just disappeared. Kind of anti-climactic wouldn't you say? Java was a cakewalk which is pretty accurate. Actually thought it was a bit too easy so not sure what the AI was doing with the troops. OMG, Singapore. This was the Bataan of the game. The damn place just would not die. It finally took 4 SFs, 2 HQs, two BBs, and a Tac to finally walk into the city. plus I swear over a YEAR of fighting. Given the terrain, I think having a corps there is too much especially which it can build back to 8 every turn. There is no way Britain could get troops there once Japan landed. So why can it constantly build up every turn? Again this type of behavior in the ETO makes sense as units for the most part have direct connections to their home territories. Even Egypt makes sense as the British were able to ship troops there pretty regularly. But Singapore, with total sea and air control is very unrealistic. So again it feels like a different game than the ETO. I discussed Thailand in another thread so I hope something is done about that. Burma seems to work well. Except WAY to many British troops seem to be involved. Somehow, there was a British tank and SF deep in China. So the UK is being overrun and high quality British troops are near Manchuria? Again makes no sense. India With all the British troops in China and Burma, I thought I would pay India a visit. Nothing there :confused: I took Ceylon and the 4 most southern cities before I ever ran into a unit. I now have 5 units in India so I am wondering how far they can go before I can find another unit ? So the defense of India is in even worse shape than Britain. Which i really did not think was possible. CenPac Attacked Pearl and killed everything there. Ran amok across the Pacific. Was very surprised to find no units in New Guinea at all. Maybe they all went to China too lol? Got all the way to Lugenville but could not take Samoa. US had a frigging armor unit there of all things. Not a pleasant surprise, but glad to see something was protected. Lost my SF there obviously. In mid '43 a massive fleet shows up and lands on Guadalcanal. Lost the CVL, a CA, BB, and damn near lost a CV down to 2-2. They lost three CVs, a BB, CA and most of the rest damaged. Have left Australia alone since India is wide open. Plus they are not going anywhere. Invasions The US has made two major invasions following the same pattern as with England. One in Java and Guadalcanal. The Java one is also massive. 3 Armies, 1 corps, 1 armor, and 2 SF. Again no port captured in either location so all will eventually die. It will be interesting to see if the AI can even invade in a contested location and actually capture a port. So far three major invasions and zero ports captured. Other PTO silliness I had a US CV sail into the Yellow Sea next to China and bomb a city all by itself. I also had a US CA sail close to Japan. Have no clue as to why, but it activated the entire Home guard so now I have a bunch more troops to play with . Thanks US. Maybe I will take these to down under lol. Both of these happened in Sept '43 my current game turn. Spotting in general Fleets, especially large ones, the opposing player should have some rough idea of location and heading. Both sides in the PTO and ETO had many aircraft dedicated to searching for enemy ships. This works well for convoy raiders, but is awful when it comes to ships moving in the ocean. The Japanese had Emily’s while the US had Catalonia’s all over the Pacific. So having a CV and CA sail all the way to Japan without being noticed at all is nowhere close to reality. Again this is far more noticeable in the PTO versus the ETO. Maybe each base could be assigned a 'spotting range'. If anything sails within that range, a random die roll could be made to see if it is spotted. You could even add a 'spotting' tech to improve the range/detection chance. But whatever can be done to fix ships sailing through heavily patrolled enemy patrolled waters. Even if the planes did not spot the ships, the massive amount of Japanese merchant shipping would have noticed a CV long before it got to the Yellow Sea. Production/Loses Last but not least, I thought I would discuss this. The number of units and cost seems to be a little off. Too few smaller units and things costing a little too much. The amount of time seems about right though. In Sept '43, the three Axis countries are barely out producing the Allies. With the US alone producing over 700/month before losses. I am sooo glad I heavily invested in Production tech for all three. I can be pretty sure things would be a lot worse for me if I had not. However, i am NOT sure I can keep continue to do so. Only time will tell. As far as loses go Germany - 12 Italy -2 Japan - 4 Total - 18 British - 100 US - 34 (not counting the 15 or so stuck on invasions that will soon die off) Russia - 74 China - 90 Total - 298 Not too bad, almost 1:15 in my favor. However, ever with these odds, I do not feel like I am really winning. Russia is still nasty and the US production is massive. So I still feel that this is an open game. Once something is done to fix the PTO, then i think this game will actually be great. I keep talking about War in the Pacific but for a valid reason. You really need to look at this as it shows exactly how things really worked in the PTO. I do NOT expect anything close to that kind of modeling in this game, but it may give you some ideas to provide a better experience and bring the PTO and ETO experience closer together. Thanks for reading

There is also an odd square between China and Indochina. You cannot right click on it either.

But historically, Malta only affected supply convoys in the areas Tobrok and West of there. There is no reason Malta could affect convoys anywhere East of Tobrok. Once the convoys were re-routed to run between Athens and Alexandria once the Germans captured it, Malta's importance was non-existent and shold not effect supplies anywhere in NA.

That is true, but those are the execptions and not the rule. Plus execpt in the Balkens, those troops were not needed all the time. The Warsaw uprising took a lot of troops to put down, but those were not there from 1939 on. The issue is that everyone wants partisians in these games, but no one seems to be able to model them corrrectly. Partisians are a local problem 90% of the time. Only on rare occasions did they have an impact at the level this game represents. So maybe reduce the ability of partisians to appear to better reflect a strategic impact versus a local one?

Yes but if forgien troops started invading their country, especially Chinese and British (and the army did fight Chinese troops in Burma), the army would have resisted a lot more. So maybe if non-Japanese troops cross the border the army appears. Otherwise half the country can be ocuppied before you can respond.

Yes that is the case. The issue is that once you run out of divisions/garrisions you have to start using corps. As a 'normal' corp has three divisions and each division has roughly 15K men (execpt Russia of course), you are forcing the player to use 45K of manpower to just prevent a few thousand men from affecting you. Not only is this unrealistic (execpt in the Balkins) but not a good system. Depending on where the anoyance appears, you may actually may need to take an entire army to deal with it. So maybe you can give each unit an anti-partizian range. Garrisians just the square, divisions maybe the same, coups one square radius, and armies, 2. I still think it is easier to just add a global event every year, anti-partisian. If you can base the cost off the amount of enemy territory controlled, even better. Otherwise, to keep it simple, you could say 100 PP/turn for the year. Of course you would need two events, one for Germany and the other for Japan. As there would be times where you woud only want one to pay versus both or none. The cost could even go up if the Allies started getting closer to Germany and Japan proper. Using a turn over turn cost for an entire year, achieves the goal of slowing down the number of units to be able to be purchased while eliminates the unrealistic nature of the way things work now. The cost also represents the non-front line activities, like MPs, security forces, etc. which were important to the anti-partisian efforts. Of course an even simpler solution would be to just have a game option to turn partisians on or off. I know which one I would pick lol.

Well I finally figured out what is needed to get them in the Axis. Take Singapore The bad news is they do not get a single unit. The entire country is empty. If you are not ready for this, British and Chinese troops will rush in. Hopefully this will be addressed in a patch since the Thi army was fairly large for a small country in the war.

Very unhappy with the way Malta is modeled in the game. But now it has gotten even worse. I have captured the Suez and Gabrater yet Malta is STILL affecting NA supply. What the hell are they using for AvGas? Obviously there is no way this event should keep firing at this point in the game.

That is fine that it is done that way. But then you need to eliminate all partisan activity since it is impossible to garrision all the places you need to. It seems a little much to not provide enough garrision units while at the same time you allow all these partisians to pop up. The balance is definately off. Ideally when a city/mine/etc is captured the player should be given a choice if they want to pay the cost to garrision the location. If they do, then no unit will appear, but then no partisians can affect it. This way the balance is not affected.

Some additional thoughts on the Far East. Japan (maybe everyone else too) needs to have a lot more samll garrision type units. I realize that this is possible a game balancing issue, but still. I also realize you can use 'soft caps' and get more at increasing costs. But I think maybe an MP regiment/brigade type unit is desperately needed. If you run out of the Garraision units, you are then stuck with entire divisions as garrision units. While some locations in the world warrented this, there are tons more where a simple company/battalion is more than enough, especially in the Pacific. The Japanese had almost every island with some form of garrision in RL. Yet in the game, it is impossible for Japan to adquately garrision these places and the Allies can simply land and take whatever they want, even if the entire Japanese Navy is within range (I discuss the naval issues in another thread). So if landing ships can wave as they sail by, then there needs to be a unit type that can at least delay the attacker so that the opposing navy has a chance to respond. The way thing stand now, the Allies are fully capable of landing units in Japan proper in 1942 and there is nothing Japan can do to stop them. I realize that this is not something easily fixed, but it is definately a game breaker for me. I completely stopped playing when I realized that Japan had no more troops to build. Again I know that game balance is an issue, but the one thing Japan was NOT short of in the war was men and the equipment for them. So the game needs to find a better mechanic to limit unit builds versus saying you just get these and no more. Some types of units should have much higher quanities by nation than they currently do. All of this is just my opnion of course

No court would ever consider Aod/AoC frdulent. There were detailed descriptions of the games, AAR's which went into great detail about the games. The court would ask if you looked at or read any of this material prior to purchase. If you did not then this is your own fault and not SCs. If you did and still bought, then you did not really understand what you were buying and again, SC is not a fault. As someone else posted earlier, I too have spent quite a bit on games that I barely played. My hard drive is quite full of them Glad storage is so cheap lol. If your finances are so tight you cannot afford a $40-$50 loss, you have no business buying AoC/AoD in the first place. But to accuse SC of fradulent behavior is absurd and shows that you have no real understanding of what fradulent behavior really is. You may feel like you were defrauded, but there is a huge gap between what you feel and the legal defination of fraud. So I would suggest you use better terms to express your feelings versus accusing SC of a very serious crime which they did not commit.

That is a great concept xwormwood. It could easily be added to the game as a diplomancy option. Make Malta independent like the DEI and both sides could 'influence' it. You could even make the square impassable so that would be the only way you could get it too. As long as Malta was at 50% or more Allied, the event could fire. Or whatever percent was decided. On the Allied side, the points expended could be considered the effort to keep Malta supplied and operational against a more determined 'effort' by Germany to take it

I have played almost every ETO game out there and none of them do a decent job with the Atlantic naval operations when individual ship classes are used. Like I said HoI 3 does the best but it is not a true turn based system. The computer version of Decision Games War in Europe (no AI though) abstracts the UBoat and naval warfare and the model works really well. But just generic ship and UBoat 'points' are used versus ship classes. To be honest though, I would much rather have the naval warfare abstracted and work accurately versus have all the different ship classes and have it be so bad. In AoD I had two Allied CAs around an island in the Pacific. I had absolutely NO ships anywhere near them, yet I could blithy sail around them like they were nowhere near (even going into the square right next to them) with a transport and safely land. Like that really would have happened lol. I still like the game and it is fun, but I am REALLY hoping that someday some developer will get naval warfare right without have to go to lenghts that War in the Pacific goes to. But maybe that is the only way to use individual ship classes and have them work properly.