Exapnded Custom Scenario

[Major Spinello]

Some more thoughts on German (and adjacent) geography:

1) The Ruhr coal mine located at 78,16 should go to 77, 16.

2) I don´t know what the mine in Austria at 89,20 is supposed to represent. It should be deleted in favor of the important Silesian mines. These should be located between Breslau and Crakow, maybe 91,17 or 92,17 or 92,18. (If that places them on Polish territory, this would actually not be bad cause they would represent the Upper Silesian mines in that case which went to Poland after WW1)

3) Prague is somehow very off (which you can see from its relation to Dresden). It should be placed in between the ring of mountains and therefore go to 86,18.

[Major Spinello]

I heard that the will can move mountains .

1) The mountains at 78,19 80,19 and 82,19 should all go away. Actually, the tile at 78,19 should become a water-tile to represent the Bodensee.

2) A mountain tile should be placed at 81,19 however. There´s no reason why the Alps should be broken south of Munich.

[Major Spinello]

Some tiles which I noticed should switch owner:

78,19 from Switzerland to Germany (after making it a water area representing lake Bodensee).

75,14 from Germany to Netherlands

[Honch]

I have done everything you suggested Major except that I removed the mountain tile south of Munci to represent the Brenner Pass.

[Retributar]

Im playing HONCH7.ZIP and so far so good,...the only problem i have is that even though Mannerheim is at full supply, he cannot move at all, so far, toward Leningrad, and the Finnish Army that start's in Finland has so-far been unable to move at all!.

Other than that, i barely have just enough MPP's to keep the Axis in Europe/North Africa going, i do not have enough MPP's to expend on the Japanese!, so they will just have to sit tight!...until, when and if the situation changes!.

[HardRock]

Is it compatible with Ver 1.4

I did one turn with 1.4 and no problem.

[Retributar]

I will install version 1.04 after i finish my present game!. So, of course i expect that from what i have heard, that the v1.04 installation should not change your ongoing game's in the v1.03 of your game!.

Also, what's with the 'AI'???,...why is it taking nearly half an hour to do it's turn, i thought that computer's were able to work hundred's if not thousand's of time's faster than a human being?.

How much scripting would it take to force the computer to spend an eternal half-hour to do it's turn?.

[Major Spinello]

Retributar: by all means, install 1.04 right away! It will not negatively affect your present game, but instead will remove the "thinking" bug of 1.03 which is responsible for those long turns.

[Retributar]

Thank's for that tip Major Spinello !. Im on it right-now!.

[HardRock]

The turns are still long in 1.04. Didn't try 1.03

I'm sure its from the mod..more stuff..more to compute and its not like it was programed into the game on intial programming.

Played a few turns with 1.04. No problems.

Playing Allied.

Lots more counters..particularly naval. Kinda fun. AI for Axis sub pretty nifty at playing a cat and mouse game with me.

France is about to be attacked on time but seems Axis will have tough time with all the new ctrs for the French. We shall see when it falls.

Pretty cool mod though:)

[Honch]

Thanks HardRock, with a little more time and some extra features available to us from Hubert I think I can make this about as historically accurate and playable as possible.

[Honch]

Following my "fleshing-out" of France, for Version 8 I have really put some effort into re-arranging Germany slightly but I have discovered that the map is quite distorted, not just because of the isometric tiling but that the layout of Germany is way off. Berlin should be much closer to the Polish border but I have left it where it is for now. I have moved the Ruhr in from the border one tile to better represent the Ruhr Valley and I have combined Essen-Dusseldorf and Cologne-Bonn into cities. Frankfurt and Stuttgart are minor cities. I have added Nurmeburg, Breslau and Stettin and moved Leipzig, Dresden and Munich slightly. I also moved Prague closer to Dresden. The port of Hamburg has been renamed to Hamburg-Bremen.

I cannot add the Bodensee (sic?) as there are no "one tile" bodies of water avaialable in the tiles and it really doesn't deserve to have two tiles dedicated to it. I also realized that the Brenner Pass actually connects Austria and Italy, not Germany and Italy, correct? Thats fixed.

As for the complaints from some Axis players that they don't get enough MPPs. I have one word "conquest"! You really need to grab as many resource tiles as possible (Yugoslavia, Greece etc.) and push for those Russian mines and oil. It also makes an attack on Norway more of a consideration.

Version 8 will be out soon.

The Austrian mines are deleted (I had added that from a resource map of Austria that showed coal deposits there) and created the Silesian Mines in Czechoslovakia.

[Major Spinello]

Dave, that all sounds very reasonable to me (except that the Silesian mines should of course be in Silesia and "Nurmeburg" should probably be "Nuremberg"). I will give feedback on your changes once I see the next version. I think that step by step we will eventually approach something looking geographically like Central Europe.

[Stormbringer]

Honch, I love the scenarios but I am an impatient person. Even with the 1.04 patch the first AI turn lasted 5 minutes! That is just too long. I will play the scenario PBEM but I would love to play against the AI.

How about paring down the map a bit, perhaps leaving the far east out? It seems like the Japanese are a wash, they bring as much to the Axis as they cost.

After some thinking, and just a few minutes with the editor, don't worry about it. I simply opened the editor, loaded version 7, and then reduced the map size to 150 X 64. It reduced from the East, leaving the Americas the same as before. I had to edit out a few scripts and I haven't had a chance to play yet but it sped up the first AI turn to under 1 minute.

Honch, your s**t is cool, and by cool I mean totally sweet! Keep up the good work. Anything I don't like about it, Hubert has given me the power to change.

[ September 10, 2006, 11:50 AM: Message edited by: Stormbringer ]

[Major Spinello]

I really love this scenario and I couldn´t do without it anymore.However, since Stormbringer brought the issue up: Dave, I too was thinking that the mod somewhat lost its focus through the whole expansion to the East. Maybe it should not go beyond the Western border of India, and Japan should be left out of the game and be represented only by events. Instead I think that some (not very much, just some) more space could be used for a slight expansion of the map to the West. This would allow to have a somewhat more realistic representation of the Eastern part of South America (with Montevideo). And of course the Swiss could return then, and maybe the abstraction regarding the Baltic states could be replaced by having Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia ...

Another idea (which could be considered independently, would be to have Africa represented only as far as Somalia and use Naval loops for getting around the Cape. Then the map could be expanded a bit further to the North to have ALL of Europe covered. I think all this would help to recenter the game a bit to the conflict in Europe. Plus, there would be no map abstractions anymore.

[Honch]

I have decided NOT to go further East but will leave it as is for now. As for going West or North I know that you can shift the map but I am scared it will screw things up, royally.

What I would really like to do is have the original map, maybe expanded South to Somalia, North to include all of Norway and East to India, take up the entire map size avaialable to us. I would then chnage the OOB to a division scale game, instead of corps. That will probably be my next effort.

I will, of course, continue to tweak the current mod as new patches add more options.

[Major Spinello]

Originally posted by Honch:

What I would really like to do is have the original map, maybe expanded South to Somalia, North to include all of Norway and East to India, take up the entire map size avaialable to us. I would then chnage the OOB to a division scale game, instead of corps. That will probably be my next effort.

THAT will be another winner! :cool:

[HardRock]

Update. V1.04-Honch7

Allied vs Axis AI

May'41.

France did indeed hold out a little longer. I had a lot of $$ (300 at times) which I assume comes from the added colonies. It did dwindle finally.

Brits took Tripoli as usual. About the same but more ctrs for each side.

Britain also has some good $$ by 1941.

So far the new ctr mix seems to be balanced. Although I haven't seen the axis on the eastern front which I'm sure I will soon:) The Russians are dug in and ready as much as possible.

I don't pay attention the far far east so as alluded to above..maybe leave out..especially if it'll speed up the AI.

Fun mod!!!!!!

[Honch]

OK, this is my plan for version Eight, I need everyone's thoughts.

I will move the map back to go as far East as 1/2 way through India, maybe New Delhi. This will go as far as Krasnoyarsk in Siberia.

I will then shift the map South and fill in the rest of Norway, Swden and Finland so that we can delete that naval loop. Murmansk will be put in its rightful place.

I will then shift the whole map East so that we can put more of the US and Camada in there as well as Brazil and Uruguay.

China and Japan will become Brazil and Switzerland.

Cool?

[Gorgin]

Sounds like a positive change.

How far South will the map then go in Africa?

Did you mean that China and Japan will become Brazil and Switzerland -- or Brazil and Uruguay?

Good luck with the project.

[Retributar]

On the surface,... your plan sound's good to me.

[Major Spinello]

Great!!! Thanks, Dave.

[FerrisB]

Cool?

- Yes, cool!

BTW: If you remember I had problems with your mod.

I solved it!

I`m using the german version & the campaign-folder therefore is named "Kampagnen" (german translation). If I want to play your mod (and that`s for sure) I have to create a second folder "campaigns" within the main folder & copy your mod into BOTH (Kampagnen/Campaigns)- I guess in the main menu SC2 uses the german folder but the time it tries to load the localization-data it searches for the english folder.

This problem only occurs only with your mod - I guess the complete localizations you made are the problem. (If I load your mod into the editor, even the editor changes the language! - wich is quite cool because this way I know the right translations for all features!)

Keep on working, I`m really looking forward for v8. (I`m now playing v7 - it`s summer `41 and I just started Barbarossa - first I thought it would be easy as I have about 500mpp per turn but Russia seems to have a lot of troops & mpp too)

Frank

[japinard]

Originally posted by Honch:

OK, this is my plan for version Eight, I need everyone's thoughts.

I will move the map back to go as far East as 1/2 way through India, maybe New Delhi. This will go as far as Krasnoyarsk in Siberia.

I will then shift the map South and fill in the rest of Norway, Swden and Finland so that we can delete that naval loop. Murmansk will be put in its rightful place.

I will then shift the whole map East so that we can put more of the US and Camada in there as well as Brazil and Uruguay.

China and Japan will become Brazil and Switzerland.

Cool?

Wow, that sounds like the mod I was going to make. YES YES YES!!! Will Eretria be in there as an Axis territory?

[Honch]

Version Eight is done.

1. I have moved the map down to include all of Scandinavia.

2. I have moved the map East to include the US up to the Mississippi.

3. I have reduced the map to exclude anything East of New Delhi. Don't abandon India, the Afghans and Persians won't like it!

4. Switzerland is back in.

I have not had time to extend the map South to fill out Africa. Version Nine maybe.

Other changes:

I have changed the starting OOB for Yugoslavia to be more historical. They had a very large army, over 1,000,000 men strong.

To account for the poor starting quality of infantry in many nations versus the more modernized countries I have adjusted starting INF attack and DEF values for corps and armies.

USSR, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Persia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Palestine, India, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Tunisia, Morrocco, FWA, Vichy France, Venezuela, Poland, Portugal and Turkey all start at corps INF values of 1 and army INF values of 2.

Other all nations start at corps INF 2 and army INF 3.

Germany, UK, France, USA and Italy all start at INF tech 1. USSR starts with one chit in IW.

This will better reflect early-on domination of the German army over less modernized foes as well as the struggle to modernize USSR forces during the war.

Should be on cmmods within the hour!