AOD Enhancement Request?!

[mcaryf1]

First I should say that I am delighted to see AOD with its big map and additional unit types – congratulations to all those involved. However, I am going to be a little bit cheeky in making some enhancement requests for AOD although I only acquired the game yesterday and have not actually played the scenarios yet. My interest is in the underlying new unit characteristics and I wanted to raise the possibility for changes before any bug clearance releases.

The way I use Strategic Command is to create scenarios that match as well as possible the actual and potential capabilities of WW2 participants and then see how various alternate strategies might succeed or fail.

Relatively minor changes to three of the new unit types would considerably help scenario designers to model the real WW2 OOB’s. These changes are as follows:

Light Tanks

The creation of a second unit type whose combat is evaluated on the basis of being a “tank” is very welcome. However, I was extremely disappointed when I found that it has been set up as a dead end development with no possibility to change its potential to receive research upgrades via the editor. Changing this would have no impact on the existing AOD scenarios as the editor can always exclude any particular unit type for any or all countries from upgrades.

The modelling of tank units has always been difficult in SCGC with the previous single type. Representing the extremes of Germany deploying over 30 Panzer Divisions in total but only 2 in North Africa has required unsatisfactory compromises. The Japanese only formed 3 Armoured Divisions throughout their Empire and the Rumanians and Hungarians 1 each, so some form of Light Tank unit capable of a degree of upgrading would represent these far better than awarding the Japanese a weakened Tank Group.

Having an extra upgradeable unit would allow more flexibility and ironically represent what really happened. Many existing light tanks were actually converted into Tank Destroyers and Assault Guns so this was one area where the SC upgrade model actually happened.

Medium Bomber

The new Medium Bomber unit is mainly useful to distinguish the enormous investment made by the US and British in Strategic Bombers. The other participants in WW2 either did not make such investments or, where they did in the case of the Germans, the development failed to produce a useful aircraft.

I believe that the role played by Medium Bombers for the British and US can reasonably be modelled using Bomber and Tactical Bomber units and the new unit I am proposing below.

The lack of a Fighter Bomber unit represents a significant gap in matching the real WW2 capabilities amongst those currently on offer. Certainly all the major participants did deploy Fighter Bombers. The JU-88 is quoted in the Expansion Notes as an example of a Medium Bomber and that very plane was actually used by the Germans as a night fighter thus demonstrating the potential usefulness of a Fighter Bomber unit.

There would be another advantage of having a Fighter Bomber unit which purely relates to the way Strategic Command has been implemented. Since SC does not allow stacking, a Fighter Bomber unit could actually represent a mixed force of fighters and bombers based in a single hex. This would help to reduce the necessity to vastly inflate the apparent map size of locations such as Midway so that both bombers and fighters can operate from it.

In order for the Medium Bomber unit to become a Fighter Bomber it would need to be changed so that it could intercept and escort if required as well as being given an air warfare research attribute. This might entail some re-tuning of the AOD scenarios although of course fighter units can be set not to intercept and not to escort and a choice of suitably poor initial combat target values might make that the sensible option in the early years and would match the poor capability of fighter bombers such as the Me110. Thus initially the unit would just perform as a Medium Bomber. It would be great if the unit could be given 2 strikes like a carrier so it could escort itself but that might be asking for too big a change!

Small Carriers

I am very pleased to see at least one new naval unit amongst the plethora of new land ones but I think in selecting the CVL you have chosen the least interesting variant for your new small carrier. In WW2 CVL’s were principally developed as a stopgap in view of the very long production time for CVs. Thus the US chose to convert a number of cruiser hulls that were already under construction rather than wait the 4 years needed for a new CV. Production time is not so much of an issue in your SC scenarios as you already set that at less than half the real length.

More interesting options for the new small carrier unit could be created if you regarded it as a CVE or group of CVEs rather than a CVL. CVE’s were deployed early in the Japanese offensive to provide a small but critical extra amount of air support to their land operations. In the later war years the US created the Taffy’s which were Task Forces of several CVE’s to give more substantial air support to landings in The Philippines and other places. They were never intended to operate against warships but of course did so heroically in the action off Samar. The British and the US more critically used CVE’s to close the air gap both in the North Atlantic and for the Arctic Convoys where they operated both in an air defence and ASW role.

CVE’s were much cheaper and quicker to build than either CVs or CVLs because they used Merchant Shipping components and did not have to attain the speed required to participate in fleet operations.

The change I would like to see with respect to the current CVL unit is that it should lose its Naval Warfare research attribute and replace that with an ASW one. Research was critical to the ASW battle with improvements in radar allowing CVE’s and their aircraft to detect submarines on the surface and eventually just the periscope. Thus players could decide what type of CVE they wanted by giving it Tech upgrades for air warfare to support landings or upgrades for ASW and some air warfare to fight the convoy battles.

I would suggest that the role played by CVLs could be adequately represented by CV units. Certainly in the late war years the US tactic was to deploy CVLs in considerable numbers so, apart from them being built more quickly, their impact was much the same as a CV. The quicker building can be dealt with by giving players one or more Decision Events to convert existing cruiser construction into CVs which would be available in 6 months.

If it is too difficult to change the CVL to have ASW as an upgrade I could live with that as I would modify specifically Canadian CVL’s so that they started with better ASW capability and use them for the convoys with RN and USN CVL units for the landing support role.

I hope that these suggestions for possible changes are useful and I do understand that there might have been implementation issues which caused the development team to make the choices they did. I would be interested to know if there is any likelihood of any of my ideas being accepted as I will be setting about developing my own 1942 scenario for the new AOD map and units and some of the decisions I take will depend on what is likely to be done.

At some stage it might be a good idea to have a discussion on the unit types and characteristics that people might want to see in SC3 where I guess there will be more room for manoeuvre.

Congratulations once again on AOD.

Regards

Mike

[Hubert Cater]

Hi Mike!

Thanks for the feedback and some of this was under consideration such as having more than one level for Light Tanks but the current representation was the end result to keep things simple.

Some very good ideas and I think having Fighter Bomber units and CVEs as options for SC3 as described could certainly work but at the same time it is very unlikely we'll be making any more changes for AoD along these lines.

Unfortunately it is a big job do make these types of changes after the fact as it affects quite a bit of unit data tables as well as the unit sprites and it is always easier to do that at the start of development.

Probably not the answers you were hoping for but I hope it answers the questions nonetheless.

Hubert

[mcaryf1]

Hi Hubert

Thanks for the answer. I can in fact get round the lack of a fighter bomber by using minor country fighter units modified to have bombing characteristics. I can also make CVLs of different characteristics for different countries with the higher ASW variant to appear in 1942 so to some extent I can create ASW CVEs in the right time frame. The one thing that is harder to work round is the lack of a development path for the Light Tank unit. If you look like having to make new releases of AOD and AOC that is the main change I would really appreciate just because there is only one other tank unit type and it could help solve the problem of representing a 2 Panzer Division capability in the North African theatres without needing 14 German tank units elsewhere in Europe. I have previously used modified A/T units as tank divisions but they are of course rated as "soft" rather than "tank" and I rather suspect that the AI considers them as defensive units regardless of their actual ctv rating.

Regards

Mike

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