Amphibious Transports

[Desechecs]

I am enjoying the game and am a fan of all of the SC games. However I have a minor quibble.

Amphibious transports in the SCWWI game start out at 3 hexes per turn or 75 miles every game week or more. In reality, they could make that distance in a day. It can take months (in the game) to move units the same distance the Romans or Vikings could travel in a week or two.

E.g. traveling from Egypt to the Dardanelles or from the Gulf of Riga to Germany proper or from France to around Rome.

It also seems a bit excessive that it costs about 75 percent of the build cost (for corps) and 80 percent of the build cost (for detachments) to embark an amphibious transport. Put another way, it costs something like 1/40th of Great Britain's entire annual war production to put an already existing corps on a ship.

[worg64]

Yes well I dont mind the cost because that should cover the actual logistic problems and the effort it took to hande and plan a big operation like this.

The slow move however I agree with because first you have to use a full turn to do nothing and then as already stated it takes ages to go somewhere with just a speed of 3 in this big maps.

There is of course a difficulty in obtaining a balance versus realism and in game playability regarding this but I think at least you should consider to

increase the base start speed of 3 to at least 4 maybe even 5.

[Bill101]

Hi Desechecs

Worg64 has explained the main reasoning behind the cost, because these offensives required a lot of planning and resources and were therefore pretty rare during the war.

Quite a number of operations were planned but never carried out, e.g. a landing in Flanders, or at Alexandretta in the Ottoman Empire. But the risks were considered too great, and charging a high price makes the players consider the risk more significantly than if they were just risking the cost of the unit itself plus a small premium.

Generally an assault would be launched from as close to the objective as possible, so in the case of the Dardanelles the nearby Greek island of Lemnos was the base of operations. Operation Albion, the German landing in the Baltic in 1917, was launched from Libau which was the closest friendly port.

If amphibious units were to either be cheap or have a large movement range then we would probably see them used far more prolifically and also against far away objectives, and that probably wouldn't really feel right in the context of the times.

Given the large coastlines that some countries have this could well distract from the overall feel of the game, especially if players are then forced to divert undue attention to guarding their coasts rather than fighting the enemy in front of them.

Overall then the aim is to make it so that amphibious operations are possible but rare, just as they were during the war, and the link between range and cost is the means to achieve this.

Bill

[SeaMonkey]

You know for the future you might want to consider getting Hubert to code a greater combat variable for high risk operations like amphibs, paratroops etc., like have a different combat results table.

You could minimize the risk as the owning player by taking appropriate actions, like greater intel, amphib, doctrine tech advances, perhaps using experienced units for the operations to hedge your outcome, but still that great variability would serve to create player apprehension.

In Nupremal's mod, he has a +-2 combat variable setup and believe me it can get real messy quick when you think you have an advantage and all of a sudden you're faced with a strength loss of 4. It can also go the other way too!