Fortress Europe

How about make "strongpoints" not so strong, make them not hard to destroy at all, and give a event to creat a strongpoint in the city when one strongpoint get destroyed. Just make sure there are enough strongpoints in one city so Germans can not get through in 1 turn, and the next turn there is a fully recovered city.

And a side effect may be, if the "strongpoints" are somewhat easy to kill and only able to hold the city by their numbers, that the repeating German attacks may train them some eliet forces.

Both solutions actually make things more complex. To be honest I'm Ok with the way Strongpoints are as they achieve what I wanted them to do. They stop the Germans or Russians advancing when I don't want them to advance and when the time is right they disappear and the AI can advance. The only side effect is that the Axis attack them when they cannot win. In Russia that's Ok as the Soviets get loads of units via event and most of their cities are churning out bombers. Its a bit of an eyesore in Vichy France but I find it easy enough to ignore. I may solve the problem in France completely by transferring them to a proper Civ slot. Ideally I could find some stats that the AI would just not bother with, but I have tried very high Def/HP and low unit cost and that doesn't seem to make much difference. Thanks for the suggestions though.

FAO: Playtesters

Can you please replace your current rules file with this updated one. I have been working on the Tech Tree and I found a few bugs and loops that may well make the game crash. I have eliminated these and checked you can go through the tree to the future techs. It is not finished yet, I still need to streamline it a bit more and add a few 2nd prerequisites etc...

If you also make a copy called SUMMERRULES with the road move multiplier set to 4 and a WINTERRULES with it set to 2.

Adding the new rules shouldn't have any negative effects on the save games you may be playing from.

Thanks

Just picked a look at the Rules
But i doubt one thing: you make most fighters 11a,8d,3h,2f. IIRC that's 30 hit points 2 damage per shoot, which means at least 15 rounds of combat. And we know the more rounds there are, the more the battle is favored to the side have a higher A/D factor, even if it's a minor advantage.
Not yet calculated that, but i guess 11a/8d will make fighter dogfights to be somewhere like 3:1 exchange rate in favor to the attacking fighter, in this case it means Luftwaffe Fighter will enjoy so much over escorting Mustang...... Is it suitable?

Good point clightning. I will test it out and see how it works in the game and tweak the stats from there. One thing that has a bearing on aerial combat that I often forget is the terrain under the unit. If you make sure your bomber/fighter stack ends its turn over a hill with a river running through it the Luftwaffe will have a much harder time shooting them down than if they were over the sea! Just my top tip of the day

For Terrain Bonus...i wonder whether it should be considered as cheating to deliberately place fighters on high defence terrains to lure AI fighters but i can't restrain myself from doing that.
Because this is not so unreasonable as it seems. Fighters fly low over a rough terrain are more difficult to be spoted by both enemys eyes or advanced Doppler Radars today. But the cost of this advantage is hight, which is also imprtant. While it is another story in morden combat, b/c the hight gap is easier to be met by missiles compare to bullets. Yet there is also a balancer for the morden birds: AWACS.

Back to A/D/H/F settings, the easist way would be to make most major fighters Af=Df. Exceptions may be some specialised interceptors(heavily armed Me109 sub-types, Me262, some MIGs) to be Ai>or=Af>Di (but short legged to differ from a fighterbomber).
Also low H high F would help, so the disadvantage side can have a much better changce. This is also helpful to make the Terrain Bonus not that unfairly huge (yet still significant).

I'm finding the playtest the best way to balance the stats. I can see where they are too high or too low and make minor tweaks until they work perfectly. At the moment I think I have almost got it right, but I will keep on working on the stats until the final release.

Just a progress report (and shameless scenario self promotion ). I am up to turn 16 February 1942 (its been a busy week!) and I have just launched my attack towards Benghazi. My tanks and engineers have cleared the northern road of Axis troops and Defences terrain. I plan to encircle the city to prevent reinforcements getting in (though I guess some may be created in the city via events) and wait a turn or two for my artillery to get forward and blast the defenders. I will check the defences with my single Armoured Car and if they are light enough I will assault the city with my Infantry and Armour instead.



If I can take the city I will have a short break to re-organize and repair then I will take advantage of the summer rules change to make a full blooded dash for Tripoli. If I can make it there and take the city I can then wait for reinforcements to help break the Mareth Line and head for Tunis. Of course by this time the Torch landings will have happened so I will have a new campaign to manage! Wish me luck

Here's the latest version of the rules with shortcuts blocked off and a copy of the Tech Tree (I will delete all those tech names floating in the middle!):

Cool tree, McMonkey!

Hey, SOE (Storm over Europe) is the title of the giant WW II mod for Civ 3 I´m working on since a long time.

What means SOE (Mys) in your techtree?

I'm starting to think that doubling the speed of the scenario (each turn becomes a fortnight instead of a week) would be a good move. The playtest version I'm playing is slightly easier than JPetroski's test version, perhaps too easy. The Torch events are a bit too strong and the 8th Army starts with too many units. I need to find a nice middle ground.

I will continue my playtest for now and see how fortress Tunisia goes, but I think 85 turns would be much more of a challenge than 170 turns. Hopefully players won't be put off an 85 turn scenario which is still long. 170 turns is a long prospect!

I also plan to restrict Battleships to an event only unit as they make the Battle of the Atlantic too easy and historically they were not used as convoy escorts as I am doing in my test. I think the summer road move multiplier is too high. I think I may reduce it from 4 to 3.

McMonkey said:

keu
I have just been trying to use CivRiver on my master save but I can't seem to get it to work. I remember trying it out when you released it and it worked Ok. I have been through the read me and I don't think I am doing anything wrong. The file I want to work on it called FORTRESS.SAV so I type:

civriver FORTRESS.SAV +r 199 191 (then press enter)

Unfortunately when I load the save nothing seems to have happened. I was trying to add a river under a city and I thought this might be the problem, but when I try it on a square in the open nothing happens either. Can you advise?

Click to expand...

Did you run it in this black window with grey letters? If error then civriver (or OS) should say you what was wrong. But if you run it via "Start Menu -> Run" then many error messages will be lost.
May be you problem is:
1) wrong path to civriver.exe
or 2) working map is not map 0

or you can send me your scenario and I will test is civriver works OK with it.

You are right McMonkey, it's always most important to watch the game performance THEN to tweak stats. But from my limited CIV2 modding experience, this would be very hard and needs a lot effort. I often get into Cheat mode and free creat dozens of one type unit to test it.
And about air combats, even if fighters are A>D, those defenders who have a big numberical advantage(historically enjoyed by Allies) can balance the exchange rate back to at least 1:1 in the nest turn, when they attack. But please also be awared that when bombing the Reich, bomber/escort fleets are very likely to hover next to a city square, from where the Me/Fws are free from (or at least get an advantage in) a counter attack next turn. Thus bombers/escorts may have a much poorer exchange rate than dogfights in a more neutral air, unless escorts have a better D.
Anyway i believe you can handle this right. And awesome tree as well

keu said:

Did you run it in this black window with grey letters? If error then civriver (or OS) should say you what was wrong. But if you run it via "Start Menu -> Run" then many error messages will be lost.
May be you problem is:
1) wrong path to civriver.exe
or 2) working map is not map 0

or you can send me your scenario and I will test is civriver works OK with it.

Click to expand...

Ok. Thanks keu.

McMonkey said:

Ok. Thanks keu.

Click to expand...

I have sent you an answer via e-mail.

When I am creating units with the Cheat Menu in my master save game they often disappear! For example I put an Axis Strongpoint in El Agheila, set its home city to Benghazi then do the same in Sirte. When I go back to El Agheila the Strongpoint has vanished. This happens with some now Allied units created outside of cities too!

These cities have enough shields to support the units. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the maximum unit limit, even though I'm using Civ2Unlimited with the no limits option on.

Has anyone ever seen this behaviour before and does anyone know how to fix it?

EDIT: It only seems to be the first unit I create that vanishes. Any ones subsequent to this stay on the map. I have experimented and the unit doesn't go into the twilight zone (odd,even co-ordinates) or exert any ZOC. They do count in the defence ministers report as existing!

Where can I download the latest version of Civ2Unlimited ?

I'm having a really tough time with Tunisia.



I'm on turn 35ish? Not sure when I'll break through Tunisia, if ever. It depends on how much events help the Germans get, I suppose. By reaching its border, I am just slightly slower than the historic allies were on a 75 turn scale... So that might actually work OK. The question is how many turns will it take to destroy the substantial troops there? I don't think it'll take less than 10.

keu said:

Where can I download the latest version of Civ2Unlimited ?

Click to expand...

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5101371&postcount=40

Paste both the Civ2unlimited.exe and the .dll files into your main TOT folder.
Create a shortcut to the .exe and put it wherever you will use it.

When you load the file, you'll get a popup.
Check everything except Autodetect, Multiplayer Gold Edition and Time Limit.
Click Launch Game.