About WWII scenarios....

[Putmalk]

Hello everyone.

I've had a question on my mind for a while now. When it comes to World War II scenarios, what is your favorite type of scenario? Large Earth maps which feature every country in the war and grander-scale combat, or specialized scenarios which focus on a certain battle or location (e.g. WWII in Europe, WWII in the Pacific, The Battle of D-Day, Battle of Tobruk, Battle of Britain)? Please note that when I say large scale and small scale, it somewhat refers to map size, but I mostly mean that an Earth map and an Europe map could be the same size, but the Europe map would have a lot more area available to position troops and more city placement.

I personally would enjoy the smaller scale scenarios more. Not only does it run faster (less civilizations, less land to load, less units), it makes for better tactical combat as there is more land to move troops around in. It also gives the civilizations that exist more cities to work with. Places such as the English Channel would properly have a large space for ship movement. Pacific islands would have loads more room for proper naval battles.

I'm sure people have differing opinions on this. So I'm curious to see whether or not you enjoy larger scale WWII scenarios, or smaller scale WWII scenarios.

 

[magzhi]

I prefer small scale battles because it is (as you said) more tactical. panzer generals are the best lol

 

[KevinMiles90000]

Small scale in the sense of a theater of war (pacific, eastern europe, etc.) Anything smaller and there is no real reason to be using the civ engine. Anything bigger and it becomes just another game of civ with different graphics and units.

 

[Ahriman]

Small scale. The large ones are too slow and tough on the system resources, and they have to zoom out so much that they really lose too much detail.

It would be great to see scenarios particularly aimed at smaller theaters or particular operations Barbarossa, D-day and western front, North Africa/Italy, etc.

Take a small scenario, and then use scripts, cheats, whatever to tune the mod and make sure that it is *hard* from the human perspective, no matter which country they choose.

Most ww2 mods fail in this. If its tough to play as the Russians defending against Nazi advance, then its too easy for a human German player, and vice versa.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Most ww2 mods fail in this. If its tough to play as the Russians defending against Nazi advance, then its too easy for a human German player, and vice versa.

Not necessarily. After all, the goals of each faction might be different; the Germans might need to conquer Moscow by turn 100 (start of winter) or else they'll lose automatically, while the Russians' goal might be to keep civilian casualties below a certain threshold. Even if you keep the triggers the same, it doesn't take much to make it difficult in both directions; after all, the whole point of the HandicapInfos table is that it gives the AI a discount on everything regardless of which civ you play. So if you make it so that on Prince the game's just as hard for the Germans as it is for the Russians, then all the player would need to do is play on King or Emperor, and it'd be a challenge for either side.

But I'd highly recommend giving each civ a unique set of victory conditions. You can do a lot of this in Lua; turn off the <WinsGame> flag on the appropriate victories, and then set them by hand in a Lua event. (Players:SetWinner() works for this.)

For instance, let's take a hypothetical full WW2 scenario, something on the world map. If you're Japan, then maybe you win by occupying any two or more cities on the U.S. West Coast (Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles) at the same time, or by conquering AND holding all of the cities in China, Indonesia, and Australia for 20 turns; make a simple timer, where each turn you have all of these it subtracts one, but if you lose any one of the critical cities it adds one.
If you're the U.S., you can win by removing Japan's and Germany's capitals (or having one of your allies do so), OR by getting to the end of the tech tree and building the Manhattan Project.
If you're Germany, you can win by conquering England while still controlling at least five major cities in Europe, OR by conquering Moscow before turn 100, or by reaching the Manhattan Project. (Only the U.S. and Germany would have that option, the other civs would be locked out of it.)

And so on. The point is, each side can be structured in a way that's still tough to win at, as long as you alter the victory triggers.

 

[Putmalk]

I appreciate all the responses. I've been curious about this for a while, especially since most of the WWII scenarios I see are all global maps (quite unnecessary in my opinion).

I'm going to be devoting some time to developing a WWII in Europe scenario (specifically, two scenarios). I don't have much LUA experience but I know how to use the XML pretty effectively, so I dunno. This isn't set in stone and I may never release it, but I'm pretty excited just to be doing it altogether. I have my ideas, and if you're curious:

1. 1939 scenario (Play as Germany). Your goal is to capture Moscow and London by turn 100 (which would be year 1943). You have a large force to begin with, but Russian production speeds are extremely quick and the English Channel is heavily defended. This'll probably be the harder of the two scenarios.
2. 1944 scenario (Play as Russia). Your goal is to capture Berlin by turn 100 (which would be year 1945). The main goal of the scenario is to push the heavy German resistance back to Berlin, while the Allies breathe down Germany's western flank. To make things interesting, you lose if America or Britain capture Berlin.

I have a tech tree and unit plan and I'm eager to start work on this, but don't expect anything for a while....

Keep on the responses about the initial question! If I ever finish the Europe scenarios I may branch off and do a Pacific or specialized European scenarios (like Africa or Germany's attack on Russia)

 

[kiwitt]

I preferred the WWII European theatre as shown by my own "Road to War - Historical for Civ 4". If you would like some design ideas, take a look at mine. I introduced the concept of "Divisions, Corps, Armies and Army Groups and Fronts", which transformed the game from simply being a game of unit type versus unit type, e.g. "Sherman versus Tiger", to US Armoured Div versus German Panzer Division, German Korps versus Russian "Guards" Army, etc. I also reduced the propensity for the AI to create stacks as I made it a happiness penalty for having to many units in cities, where AI tend to build before invading, so the AI is forced to spread its forces over all it cities, which it still needs to defend, which made for a more realistic game.