W-I-P: Storm Over the Pacifc

Klyden said:

One of the important advantages the Japanse had at the start of the war is the fact their pilot corps was among the best trained in the war and most had flying time in combat conditions in China. The extra hps of being vet and elite will help substain the Japanese early, but as time goes along, like the real conflict, the Japanese will not be able to replace their elite aircraft formations and will likely suffer as a result.

Click to expand...

You may be saying this anyway, but I would think that for new aircraft production,
you could simulate the American system of rotating veteran pilots into training +
the Japanese *not* doing anything of the sort by having new US/Japanese planes be Veteran/Regular or Regular/Conscript.

EJ, in one of the early posts you mentioned dealing with war weariness. Just curious as to why
you would even allow WW in a scenario like this.

hi old buddy. great to see you over here

yes, definitely going to limit the 'allows vet air units', especially for Japan. and it's pretty much exactly as you pointed out with the US training etc.

not entirely sold on the war weariness inclusion just yet. been averse to it in the past and just kicking tires on alpha/beta versions. so we'll see how it goes. but i think you're sort of right in that it may not be suitable. Japanese were stoically defiant, until the end. US was marshalling incredible amounts of resources and manpower. so yeah, i can buy into not includingwar weariness. but gonna take most stock c3c settings and pare it down once beta testing.

The US would be the one to look at for war weariness. The kamikazie attacks and casualty figures coming out of the Pacific Theater were horrific late in 1944 and into 1945. With the surrender of Germany, I think everyone pretty much saw the end of the war in sight and were anxious to get it over with as quickly as possible.

There was a fair amount of backlash as well when talk surfaced of sending divisions that had served in Europe to the Pacific. The "European" divisions felt they had fought and won their war and it was time for them to go home.

Casualty projections for the invasion and occupation of the Japanese home island promised a incredibly bloody battle.

I think there would have been a lot of pressure to drop the "unconditional surrender" part and go for a negotiated settlement. (The Japanese started the war with this in mind, realizing they could never defeat the US, but aimed to occupy new lands and then force a negotiated settlement favorable to them). In the end, "unconditional surrender" was slightly modified when guarentees were given in regards to the Emperor.

quick update :

finished adding in commonwealth air units into editor/folders. got Republic of China air units onto xl sheet and into the folders and text. stats drafted, too nothing all that sexy but they did have an air force. will hopefully post something in the next day or so.

Republic of China Air Units :



nothing all too fancy. but they've got to have something, right ? leaning atm towards setting British India as req'd resource to build since they acquired most via lend lease and some were even manufactured in India. so for time being, this will be the pre-req.

probably no air units for chi-coms unless someone out here in cyberspace wants to make a case for them

with that said, this is the end of the air units. thank goodness ! took me months to finish !! now i wait for the sea units -nudge-nudge-

still trying to lock down victory conditions for other civs, ie not japan and us who will have to ship 'raw material-like' units back to the capital. not really sure, to be hinest, how to approach this. surely the other civs need some type of schematic to spawn the flag units. RoC seems easy : let them spawn something out of the capital, needs British India resource to build. British India, Australia, NZ a little tougher to nail down. ideas welcomed

a follow up to a point in the other post.

still trying to sort of final victory paths for each civ. this is sort of critical since this will form the backbone of play styles for each civ. the 2 main civs, the US and Japan are easy...and have been sorted out for the most part. US will have to ship spawned goods from continental US to its 'capital' in Australia. Japan will have to spawn 'raw material-like' units around the main strat resources (iron, oil, alum, prob rubber), send them back to tokyo.

still not able to really pin down how the lesser civs should behave in terms of victory points.

china : difficult...but their link with British India will have to be emphasized. thinking of allowing for air trade in 2 spots : RoC capital and British India capital. not sure yet though...may want to restirct it to land only and force a British push from India, into Burma, trying to link up by road(their primary objective). another set of objectives for the British in India would be recapturing Singapore or Hong Kong. not sure how i could let this unfold. first thought is to slap down some type of resource near those 2 cities, perhaps "Crown Colony" or something. just leave it out there for the British India player. could be interesting from a strategic pov. would be a real bltch actually dislodging the Japanese from these spots.

no idea atm for Australia. i guess if i were to pinpoint their primary objective, at least early on, would be the physical defense of the continent. once fears of an invasion began to subside, i guess it was the push into New Guinea. but how to translate this into VPs for them ? NZ too.

Nationalist Chinese should probably strive to get the British India resource in some way in order to spawn some type of flag unit. this would put all the chinese eggs in the british indian basket so to speak. not sure i want to put 'em all in one single basket. so i need to look at it more closely.

considering some type of points awarded for unit kills. keep in mind that this is based entirely (i think) off of the shield cost of a unit. so if it costs you 700 shields to build a B-24 Liberator state-side, and you lose it in combat, Japan would gain 700 VPs. a definite w-i-p. but stay tuned. no space ship vicotry or somethign derived from it. so it will basically be a VP win. be the first to hit a certain threshhold and you win. will probably make for 'allied' victory (the sum of the allies point total vs points for japan).

addit : forgot to mention that i'll tinker with a mass regicide vicotry condition too. this is 'kill all the kings' for a win; this'll be mainly for nuke strategies later in the game.

curious to see if others have some comments to think over

Greetings El J (et. al.)!

I know I'm jumping in late here but I had a few (dare we call them) ideas.

Use both VP Victory AND City Elimination Count Victory (I think the latter is possibly a better way of simulating morale collapse and, with the Allies as separate powers in a locked alliance, shouldn't be too onerous.)

VP Victory points:

• By Defeating Opposing Unit cost (x1 per shield)
• City Conquest by Population (1000 per Pop)
• Victory Point Location Scoring (100 per, for cities, strategic choke points, and resource-rich areas)
• Flag (resource) units respawning AND "Allow Anyone to Capture Any Flag"

Also, given three locked alliances (did I mention USSR + Chinese communists? => definitely a non-human player alliance) use Flag units at strategic resource areas, have them all begin non-Japanese controlled, and truly incentivize the Japanese literally to go after the gold (it was, essentially, a resource-driven war for them, yes?)

Granted, play balancing these will be "interesting" (as in the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times") but what are friends for anyway?

- Lastly, don't forget about Rhodie's fine Japanese vehicles.


Banzai,

Oz

thanks Oz your remarks are always welcomed

i will surely set a specific VP total needed for victory. it's a bit of a projection (for lack of a better term) though. just need to sort through the potential and projected point totals etc.

did a quick look at the City Elimination option and it seems i can only set it at most 10. so this would mean any civ to lose that number would be eliminated. this seems a little low for my tastes.

i like your ideas about the awarding of VPs. i was sort of leaning in those directions. i did not consider the City Conquest option. perhaps this is the missing piece to my puzzle ?

physical VP locations, ie the tiles that have the little oblisk thingy, will probably be located only at capital cities, if at all. i had some issues with AoI and locked civs trying to 'cash in' the flag units. specifically locked civs would dump off its flag units at the closest VP spots, even if it was not their tile. so as imagined, this put a damper on locked alliances and the reverse capture the flag settings. the easy way around it : switch off the alliances. this is one of the key reasons there are no alliances (outside of Germany/A-H) in AoI. it really screwed up the raw material shipping and cashing in. and with the locked alliances an almost must for this project, i just can't set it up where allies would be dumping off their flag units in the wrong spots.

one othe3r vivotry condition i may explore is Mass Regicide mode. this is kill off all the king units and you eliminate a certain civ. this may (or may not) help to simulate Japan's incalcatrince. a w-i-p for sure. but i have some base ideas for it. will report more once tested. a ways off though.

i took the soviets out. i know it seems a little quirky but it was either stagnate them a great deal until around 1945, seal them off, or a variety of other clunky workarounds that would keep Ivan bottled up until they broke the neutrality pact and acted on their promise to declare war against Japan. to play devil's advocate for a moment if there was no Japanese-Soviet neutrality pact, i'd maybe reconsider. but this strategic agreement basically took the soviets out of the ballgame in the pacific, much to Japan's glee. anyhow, as silly as it may sound, it was just easier to remove the russians. chi-coms are in there though.

believe it or not, all units except for the sea units are in. remarkable to write that. but it's true not sure if any of rhodie's units made it in. iirc, there were scale issues and i did not want to deviate from the base civIII unit scale. but i did see his stuff. pretty neat and spot-on for this time period.

On the VPL issue - since the flag units are supposed to go to the civ's capitals, who not make it "capture the flag" instead of "reverse capture the flag"? The sole difference between them is that ctf = the flag must be returned to your capital, whereas rctf = it must be returned to a victory point location.

This should allow you to use victory point locations without worrying about their effect on flag units.

rctf allows for them to be returned to the capital as well (ie the capital, whether it has a VP on the title or nor AND other tiles with the VP on them). this is the way it is set up in AoI. my concern is that the VP locations would act as a drop off point for the allies. we'll see how it shakes out i'm fairly confident i can get it to work how i want it it.

What I only would add in the Flag unit case is that I think that in AOI the huge amount of raw mat created even when you defat units almost swamped the game close to the end.
Not bragging but I had scores of 100s raw mats sitting waiting around outside VP areas just waiting for me to enetr it into the city. I might have cheated when I never used other units to "carry" the material to the VP points,
I guess that would be house rules since the AI uses units to carry these from where they are created all along to the VP area.

However I think it should be enough for the areas that created auto materials, and when you conquered a new city. It might be only in case of the AOI but I think so much raw mats where left on the battlefield. It became a hinder and a little sad.
You know that even after a country has been totally deceased its materaial still lingered on wherever it was left.

yes, the raw material stuff is imperfect to say the least. i am going to tinker with the AoI model of raw materials some, hoping to streamline it some more.

I just ran into an old problem in TCW fifties about airfields.

I remember it was mentioned years ago, but has anyone found out if the bug/issue was handled or whatever.

I though on it in case of this scenario, since I think you might have airfields on several islands.
Might be safer to have only airfields in cities to avoid this.

I hope you remember the bug/issue.
Player A (you) got an airfield in own territory close to border. You got units on it when the area changes to another civ.
If you try to move new units on to your "old" airfield you manage to attack your own units already at the airfield.
Very crazy indeed. One could of course play the issue Friendly fire (blue on blue).
Got no idea on how the heck the AI handles this problem, but someone might have seen it happen.

cemo1956 said:

I hope you remember the bug/issue.
Player A (you) got an airfield in own territory close to border. You got units on it when the area changes to another civ. If you try to move new units on to your "old" airfield you manage to attack your own units already at the airfield.
Very crazy indeed. One could of course play the issue Friendly fire (blue on blue).
Got no idea on how the heck the AI handles this problem, but someone might have seen it happen.

Click to expand...

In that situation I made a screenshot about another astonishing bug:
Visits of airunits of the enemy on well defended airfields:




The story can be found here.

thanks for those details, guys and yes, i've seen that before, TCW being the culprit for me.

i will try to limit airfields, if possible, at least pre-placed ones.

Thats what happend to me also.
I got some 2-3 ground units on the airfield, but the enemy landed 3 fighters.

They do got balls don´t they, landing on their old airfield in the middle of my units. Then have the unkindness of making my own units defend against my new units trying to advance on to the airfield.
Sorry that I can´t inform what happend to the enemy fighters.
I guess I solved the problem by moving my units off the airfield and back again.


The difference from the story around Lodz is that the airfield was Warszaw Pact from the start. I advance and took it. Then put both fighters and ground units on it. At that turn it was "inside" my culture area. However a few turns later that changed and I believe that was the turn the Warszaw Pact landed it´s fighters on the airfield again.
I do believe my own fighters was shot down during some air-raid, so the airfield was free from aircrafts.

I guess Airfields has a problem/bug that address what culture/area the airfield should belong to. When it´s inside your area the AI might only check if any aircrafts are on it. Some checking on ground units doesn´t happend I guess.

I can´t remember I checked out if it´s possible to build an airfield outside your area, well I guess "open" area is OK, but not in another country. It´s like building roads, fort and stuff inside another civs area. That´s not possible correct.

This thing could easily happend to a fort that changes during fighting, but now the AI only checks for one type of units, ground.
A simple additional IF statement might be missing

yes, you can't physically build airfields in territory owned by another civ. we can pre-place them. but that is where the issues start to crop up, especially when the tile is overrun. i will try real hard to stay away from this issue as i want to make this scenario as basic as i can from a gameplay standpoint. there may be a slight exception though : i may experiment with putting british india airbases in chinese republic territory. still a w-i-p though and i'll know more once i can fire up alpha tests etc. only thing goin' for me with this setup is that the airbases are inside allied territory, way back from the front lines (other side of the Hump).

got back to the gfx stuff over the last few days, adding to the buildings_large and _small sheets. i still have a pile of them left to do but it's moving

Re: airfields: Why not use airbase units (in the db somewhere ...) with DEF=0 to make them captureable?

Cheers,

Oz

it would sure cure the oddities, right ? but what will the 'units' do though ? i mean, the whole point is to have a location to land aircraft and maybe some other units ?

I remember having a problem with air bases where bombarding them with ship artillery only hit the air units stationed on them and ignored the land units stationed on them. I think this problem existed in the original Conquest Pacific War scenario, too.

The air base unit that Ozymandias mentioned could have the "carries only aircraft" flag. With "immobile", 0 defense and 0 move. I think that could work?