The Incredible Expanding Atlantic in Storm Over Europe

[Ludi1867]

Playing this new scenario has been both fascinating and frustrating. The larger map allows much more room to maneuver, but also causes a host of challenges. One of the challenges that has started to become increasingly evident is the challenge of simply getting US ground and naval forces to Europe – it seems to take a LONG time. Exacerbating this problem is the comparatively low US industrial production level. The US is hardly, in this scenario, the industrial powerhouse of the Allies that it was in the real WW II.

So I fired up SC Global Conflict and had a look at the size of the map there. By my measurement (I did this pretty quick, so it might be off by a square or two), there are 34 squares that a transport or naval unit must pass through on a direct route from Norfolk Virginia to Bristol UK (the great circle distance is approximately 3100 nautical miles). If you then go to the SC WW I Storm over Europe map, the distance in squares is now 137 (the real distance remains about 3100 NM).

OK, so the number of squares has increased by approximately a factor of four (4x34=136). Therefore the speed of naval units and transports should probably be about quadrupled, right? No, not really. The speed of a destroyer in SCGC is 10 squares per turn, while in SC WW I it is more, but only by a factor of 1.5 (15 squares per turn). Transports do better – in SC GC transports travel 12 squares per turn, while in SC WW I SoE that increases to 24. This is double, but hardly the quadruple needed to keep the already very wide Atlantic in SCGC down to about the same proportions.

The designers HAVE made it a little easier to get from the US to the European side of the Atlantic in SC WW I SoE – there are naval loops now. These do make things a little faster than plodding across the Atlantic – it only takes four turns for a naval unit to go across using these loops.

Four turns?? Really? If a convoy traveled at 10 knots – a very common, even low speed for troop convoys during the war, and these type of convoys are the ones modeled by transport units in SC - it would take just under 13 days to travel from Norfolk to Bristol. That is perhaps two turns (in the summer) in SC WW I. Even in SC GC it only took four turns total to get across the Atlantic, albeit without the luxury of loops. Now it takes one turn to get to the loop, plus four, so a minimum of five turns. If you don't take a loop, it will still take a transport (without an escort, which cannot keep up) six turns to plod across (6x24=144, which is more than enough, but 5x24 is only 120, which is not enough). So WITHOUT loops, naval units and transports are quite a bit slower in SC WWI SoE. Even with loops transports remain slower in SC WWI SoE, and both games are significantly slower than real life.

This additional penalty (which is what it amounts to in the game) is added to the low production level of the US. Now an Allied player not only has to labouriously produce a unit, but then has to painfully (and expensively) push it across the very, very wide Atlantic. This makes it much harder for the Allies to mount a credible second front, or that much easier for the Axis player to try to win.

There are somewhat arbitrary penalties placed on the Axis in this game too (the random partisans in Russia that garrisons cannot prevent is an excellent example), but overall there seems to have been more new penalties placed on the Allies. Especially in the naval and production sides, which make it much harder for the western Allies to operate historically.

Why has this happened? I can only speculate, but I think a combination of reasons are responsible. Hubert has suggested that the AI struggles with higher speeds in the naval game. Well, that is possibly true, but the solution really penalizes the Allied player. In addition, it is clear that trying to 'create' a Battle of the Atlantic in the SC game engine is challenging, and the modifications to SC WW I SoE seem more suitable for promoting a Battle of the Atlantic. But overall the result is unfortunate. The Atlantic is much too large now (in terms of the time penalty exacted on the Allies) and there are too many events that are dubious at best (Iceland and the Azores 'automatically' becoming Axis when Denmark and Portugal are conquered) that the overall impact is to skew history quite significantly in favour of the Axis. Perhaps this is needed to keep the scenario 'balanced' in game terms. But it is rather distorting, to say the least, in terms of both reality and history.

[Sharkman]

I too have allways felt that there should be better strategic movement for ships. It takes forever to get ships from point A to point B.

I wanted to move my French fleet from the Med to the nort atlantic in the game I'm playing, by the time they got there the French were just about ready to surrender. Moving the British fleet any distance from Great Britan to fight u-boats leaves the home waters undefended for a very long time.

[Colin I]

Agreed - we should be able to plot the entire (intended) path of a transport/similar, or specify start and end points, and have the computer automate the details and move the unit every turn unless we chose to intervene. Really would speed up game play a lot and minimise an uninteresting aspect.

[SeaMonkey]

I've actually modeled these parameters in a mod I made of N.Africa and the Eastern Med, where ships and aircraft could move 25 tiles or whatever the max was in WaW.

It worked quite well, as units could sorti from base and back in one turn.

[Sharkman]

Agreed - we should be able to plot the entire (intended) path of a transport/similar, or specify start and end points, and have the computer automate the details and move the unit every turn unless we chose to intervene. Really would speed up game play a lot and minimise an uninteresting aspect.

This would save me from myself, I have a bad habit of forgetting ships and transports somewhere, a few turns later I remember that I had intended to move somthing somewhere, and there it is right where I left it, awaiting orders.

[John DiFool the 2nd]

Of course the tradeoff is that manuever during naval battles becomes...strange. Ships will "pop out of warp" and suddenly appear in the middle of a scrum, and you get none of the cat and mouse aspect of a real naval battle. Increasing the number of turns (and thus making naval movement more to scale) would probably be a good idea-I've already mentioned elsewhere that your speed of advance in Russia is ultimately limited by how quickly you can build up your supply levels, which is always going to be +1/turn no matter how many action points you give your units. My advances into Russia in the WWI engine have always gone slower than historical for this reason. That makes for 2 good reasons to increase the number of turns per year.

[Hubert Cater]

Thanks gentlemen and we'll experiment with slightly increased ranges for the naval units since unfortunately for each range increase it does slow down the AI as it has that many more tiles to consider when moving but a small increase should be doable... and we'll look to speed up the cross Atlantic loops as well as this was actually suggested before release but it looks like I forgot to make the change.