Over the Reich: A Multiplayer Scenario for ToTPP and Lua - RELEASED

[JPetroski]

@Prof. Garfield and I are very pleased to announce the public release of "Over the Reich." Please note, this is a Multiplayer ONLY scenario, so grab a buddy and take to the unfriendly skies!

DOWNLOAD:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/over-the-reich.27172/

As can be seen from the nearly eight-year-old development thread, this has been a long time coming. My greatest thanks to everyone who helped to make this dream a reality, especially @Prof. Garfield, @Knighttime, @Grishnach, @McMonkey, @Fairline, @Tanelorn, @Civinator, @TheNamelessOne, and many more who have offered words of encouragement and assistance througout the years.

This scenario would not be anything like it is without my co-author, Prof. Garfield. I really think anyone who is interested in seeing the true power of lua in a scenario would do well to play this scenario with a friend and check out the numerous lua events files and modular files included within it. I am amazed at what the good professor was able to accomplish. This scenario is what it is because of his efforts.

We have decided to release this scenario without certain Historic Missions that will be added later. We wanted to release this in time for the Christmas holiday and life events would prevent the inclusion of these. With that said, they don't take place until several dozen (or more) turns into the scenario and they're savegame compatable, so there is no reason not to jump in and play, and no reason to delay the release.

This is, to an extent, an open playtest. While we've both done considerable quality management tests and individual playtests as well as a test against each other, this is a multiplayer scenario. We need fresh eyes. We are relying on your feedback to help us balance this game as it is essentially impossible for two people so familiar with it to anticipate everything that all of you will come up with or encounter. To help us with this task, we have a few asks:

REQUESTED FEEDBACK:

1. Please hold on to your save games in a folder and then share them with us at the conclusion of your game. We would like to review how your industry and air forces developed over time. It would also be great if you could include Prof. Garfield and me in any playtest threads or private messages you start with a friend so we can monitor things.

2. How many turns did it take the Allies to reach 1,000 points? What were Germany's points at this time? (you can press "1" to bring up a box with the points earned).

3. Were the Italian Theatre or Russian Front much of a factor?

4. Did either of you find yourself running out of fuel (gold)? If so, when and under what circumstances?

5. When did Germany first start deploying jet aircraft? Did this turn the tide?

6. Were there any units or classes of units that you felt weren't useful?

7. Was there anything that was confusing that *you couldn't clear up for yourself* by reading the Readme, or visiting the Civilopedia, or both?

8. Aside from your first few turns, how long did turns usually take you?

9. Did the clouds impact your plans?

10. Who won the Battle of the Atlantic? Was it close or never really in doubt?

11. Any bugs/general feedback/questions, comments, or emotional outbursts that you may have.

***I would HIGHLY suggest that you read the readme before playing. You may also want to watch the following videos:***

STRATEGIC BOMBING (HOW THE GAME WORKS):

RADAR

FORMATION FLYING

WEATHER

We hope you enjoy this scenario!

 

[JPetroski]

McMonkey and I will be playing a match against each other. You can read our open thread here. In it, you will also (eventually) find links to two other threads which will contain an AAR of our game. We have a gentleman's agreement not to view each other's AAR thread until the match is over and would ask that you please not spoil anything for us. We thought this might be a fun way for you to follow along and enjoy the action.

 

[JPetroski]

Reserved for change log / needed changes.

Known Issues/Fixes for 3.1 (as of yet unreleased)
-Historic Mission functionality

-Readme discusses flak only firing from installation terrain or within cities. It can also fire from refinery terrain and industrial terrain. I need to change the readme and probably civilopedia describe.txt to account for this.

-Readme could be clearer on the Battle of the Atlantic. Perhaps give better examples.

-Readme could be clearer on Battle of France - how units get the most points for having full movement points.

-Text with "no aircraft detected" pops up even if radar signatures are found. May need to revisit the false negative.

-Barbarian "neutral territory" units all deleted and I'm not sure why. Hopefully it is user error caused from using a different save but if not will need to find a work around of some sort. I was under the impression that there can be 0 movement AI air units as barbarians but perhaps they need to be ground units and the destroyer/u-boat both need sub advantage/disadvantage so they can't accidentally run into it and explode.

-Adjust some German cities so they don't start with negative food as not every player can be expected to change specialists around turn 1.

 

[McMonkey]

Congratulations guys. This promises to be a belter. It's been a long development but hopefully a worthwhile one. Th previous version I tested was full of potential but was pretty clunky in terms of game mechanics. It looks like most of these issues have been sorted out with Lua & your ingenuity. Now the player should be able to focus most of their time on the fun aspects, many of which have also been streamlined to pick up the pace of each turn. I can't wait go get immersed in the experience.

 

[tootall_2012]

Congratulations to you John and all the team members that have worked so hard on your project. Having followed your development thread, I know you have worked on implementing some pretty incredible and revolutionary features for the Test of Time platform.

Hopefully other members will be inspired to create more lua based scenarios.

 

[JPetroski]

Th previous version I tested was full of potential but was pretty clunky in terms of game mechanics. It looks like most of these issues have been sorted out with Lua & your ingenuity. Now the player should be able to focus most of their time on the fun aspects, many of which have also been streamlined to pick up the pace of each turn. I can't wait go get immersed in the experience.

I am infinitely interested in your feedback in this regard. While I have no doubt that (as with any scenario) the first few turns will take some time, I do think you'll find that you can eventually get through them pretty quickly. Prof. Garfield and I were exchanging 2-3 saves per day on some occasions. We've done a number of things to cut back on the clunkiness of former versions:

-Battle of the Atlantic is condensed and streamlined - there is still a bit of cat and mouse but you don't have to aimlessly wander the empty ocean.
-Formation assistance should help larger bomber streams later in the war as you can move several units at once.
-Strategic bombing concept/workflow is simply kill a unit to destroy a factory and build a factory to get it back.
-Very much fewer freight trains to move each turn.
-Resistance is an abstract concept - you need ground forces in France, but you don't need to move them all over the place looking for the Resistance. Set it and forget it.
-Significantly fewer freight trains to move (I believe each side can spawn up to 11 - there was something like 50+ per turn in older versions).
-Radar auto-detects rather than spawning a unit to search.
-Flak gives a pop up warning telling you which map has enemies or if there are no targets in range so you don't waste your time searching with ammunition.

Anyway, we think that a lot of your feedback has been addressed but please let us know how we did

I spent a lot of time on the readme and civilopedia so I'm interested if it was helpful to anyone.

 

[JPetroski]

Prof. Garfield and I realized that we forgot to disable the "6" key. We'll fix this shortly however in the meanwhile a good house rule would be to not press it as it will move the clouds (it is a pretty neat thing to check out on your own, however!)

 

[committed hero]

Do I have to load bombs on planes prior to using K/backspace?

 

[JPetroski]

Do I have to load bombs on planes prior to using K/backspace?

No--we didn't explore if that would be possible as it would likely be too much micromanagement. You just fly your aircraft to where you want to attack, and press k or backspace there. A munition will automatically be created, and your aircraft will have its movement points reduced (to prevent it from having infinite ammo).

Beware that pressing k also triggers "reactive attacks" from interceptors, defensive gunners, or flak. So if you fly into a swarm of B17s and attack the dead center, you're exposing yourself to a lot of fire. You will want to work on the edges and stragglers instead.

 

[Civinator]

JPetroski and Prof. Garfield, congratulations and thank you very much to both of you for finishing this very ambitious, innovative and creative project.


It´s a milestone (and a hope) for all civers (like me) who don´t like the path the Civ series is taking since the introduction of 3D units in the ugly and badly arranged table top presentation, coming with Civ 4 (...and 5, and 6... and so on).

 

[JPetroski]

Now that everyone has had some time to poke around with this scenario on their own, can I please get a set of volunteers who weren't involved in the design of this scenario to take up a match against one another? Tomorrow is promised to no one and I want to make sure this scenario is as accessible as possible to someone who is not intimately aware of its intricacies in case it is found by new folk in the future. It's also a very hard thing to playtest a MP scenario against oneself or someone else who knows what is going on.

 

[JPetroski]

Hotifx for events that fixes the German trains and enables them to work each turn. I forgot to add:

setFlagFalse("FrenchOccupationCalculated")

to the onTurn calculation to reset states. If anyone out there wants to learn a little bit about troubleshooting lua search for "FrenchOccupationCalculated" in your old events and compare where it does and doesn't show up compared to "ConvoyZone1Calculated."

Sorry for any inconvenience. As this is pretty critical I'm going to update the resources here and at the wiki.

Edit - while I'm unaware of any other matches going on I will point out:

There's no need for "delevents" or anything of that like. You can simply drop this events file into your game and carry on and it will be save game compatible. This event, however, is "onTurn" rather than "onLoad" so it probably won't work for your current turn (assuming you're in the middle of a turn when you load it) so if you need to go ahead and open up the cheat menu to give yourself a few trains to get past this for one turn. It should work fine for every turn after that.

 

[JPetroski]

A new updated version has been added to both sites. It may be simpler just to download the events (the only thing that has changed at this time):

3.11
Changed the reaction priority function (something that could dictate the order of reacting units, but we never bothered to use) to be strictly based on the unit id, instead of a semi-random system there was before, since I received an error during testing. This should work, though I thought that the last time too.

This will probably necessitate an update for everyone.


Removed 109 from these two tables, to keep special target from disappearing

local unitTypesToBeDeletedEachTurn =
local unitTypesWhichCanBeDestroyedWithoutMovementReduction =

For some reason, night map bombed industry shows the prepared terrain sprite from Ceasar's Gallic Wars. Not sure if this is a problem on my setup, or a general mistake.


Operation Gomorrah seems to be working. Tested it out by setting setting the first and last turn really low.

Made the following changes to the target modifier, since A multiplier of .8 does not cancel out a multiplier of 1.2, etc.

dTM = {clouds = 1.5, cloudsTech1=nil, cloudsTech1Mod = 1, cloudsTech2=nil, cloudsTech2Mod=1, tech1=nil, tech1Mod=nil, tech2=nil, tech2Mod=1, enemyTech1=techAliases.TacticsI, enemyTech1Mod=1.2, enemyTech2=techAliases.TacticsII,enemyTech2Mod=1.5,counterToEnemyTech1=techAliases.TacticsI, counterToEnemyTech1Mod=1/1.2,counterToEnemyTech2 = techAliases.TacticsII, counterToEnemyTech2Mod=1/1.5,}


targetDRM[unitAliases.GermanFlak.id]={clouds =dTM.clouds, cloudsTech1=techAliases.ProximityFuses, cloudsTech1Mod =1.25/dTM.clouds, cloudsTech2=techAliases.AdvancedRadarIII, cloudsTech2Mod=1.18/1.25, tech1=techAliases.ProximityFuses, tech1Mod=.85, tech2=techAliases.AdvancedRadarIII, tech2Mod=.85, enemyTech1=nil, enemyTech1Mod=nil, enemyTech2=nil,enemyTech2Mod=nil,counterToEnemyTech1=nil, counterToEnemyTech1Mod=nil, counterToEnemyTech2Mod=nil,}
targetDRM[unitAliases.AlliedFlak.id]={clouds =dTM.clouds, cloudsTech1=techAliases.ProximityFuses, cloudsTech1Mod =1.25/dTM.clouds, cloudsTech2=techAliases.AdvancedRadarIII, cloudsTech2Mod=1.18/1.25, tech1=techAliases.ProximityFuses, tech1Mod=.85, tech2=techAliases.AdvancedRadarIII, tech2Mod=.85, enemyTech1=nil, enemyTech1Mod=nil, enemyTech2=nil,enemyTech2Mod=nil,counterToEnemyTech1=nil, counterToEnemyTech1Mod=nil, counterToEnemyTech2Mod=nil,}

Proximity fuses reduces the cloud 'bonus' from 50% to 25%, and advanced radar reduces the cloud bonus to 18% (without proximity fuses, advanced radar reduces the cloud bonus to 41.6%). Additionaly, Proximity fuses and advanced radar increase accuracy by 15% each for all attacks, meaning that together, any flak event with probability of 72.25% under the base system becomes 100% certain (and everything less so is scaled up).
targetDRM[unitAliases.He219.id]={clouds =1.1, cloudsTech1=techAliases.AdvancedRadarIII, cloudsTech1Mod =1/1.1, cloudsTech2=dTM.cloudsTech2, cloudsTech2Mod=dTM.cloudsTech2Mod, tech1=dTM.tech1, tech1Mod=dTM.tech1Mod, tech2=dTM.tech2, tech2Mod=dTM.tech2Mod, enemyTech1=dTM.enemyTech1, enemyTech1Mod=dTM.enemyTech1Mod, enemyTech2=dTM.enemyTech2,enemyTech2Mod=dTM.enemyTech2Mod,counterToEnemyTech1=dTM.counterToEnemyTech1, counterToEnemyTech1Mod=dTM.counterToEnemyTech1Mod, counterToEnemyTech2Mod=dTM.counterToEnemyTech2Mod,}
targetDRM[unitAliases.MosquitoXIII.id]={clouds =1.1, cloudsTech1=techAliases.AdvancedRadarIII, cloudsTech1Mod =1/1.1, cloudsTech2=dTM.cloudsTech2, cloudsTech2Mod=dTM.cloudsTech2Mod, tech1=dTM.tech1, tech1Mod=dTM.tech1Mod, tech2=dTM.tech2, tech2Mod=dTM.tech2Mod, enemyTech1=dTM.enemyTech1, enemyTech1Mod=dTM.enemyTech1Mod, enemyTech2=dTM.enemyTech2,enemyTech2Mod=dTM.enemyTech2Mod,counterToEnemyTech1=dTM.counterToEnemyTech1, counterToEnemyTech1Mod=dTM.counterToEnemyTech1Mod, counterToEnemyTech2Mod=dTM.counterToEnemyTech2Mod,}

Deleted most lines of areaReactDRM, since only heavy flak and flak trains actually can react in this way. I should never have put in all the units here.


-- default target modifiers for area reaction against reacting units
dARTM = {clouds = .9, cloudsTech1=nil, cloudsTech1Mod = 1, cloudsTech2=nil, cloudsTech2Mod=1, tech1=techAliases.TacticsI, tech1Mod=1.2, tech2=nil, tech2Mod=1, enemyTech1=nil, enemyTech1Mod=1, enemyTech2=nil,enemyTech2Mod=1,counterToEnemyTech1=nil, counterToEnemyTech1Mod=1,counterToEnemyTech2 = nil, counterToEnemyTech2Mod=1,}

These are the defaults for the area reacting unit doing damage to its allies. I figure that being in a cloud means a greater chance of friendly fire damage not less. Better tactics reduce the likelihood of friendly fire damage, hence the 20% reduction in damage likelihood. I eliminated the effect of enemy techs, since it doesn't seem likely that the enemy's technology will impact how likely you are to accidentally shoot your own side. (We can put it back if we like, I suppose some technology might make your enemy more likely to have friendly fire incidents)

German and Allied Heavy Flak, and flak train are all set to the default. This can be changed if necessary. No other units do area reaction damage.

-- default target modifiers for area reaction against bystander units
dABTM = {clouds = 1, cloudsTech1=nil, cloudsTech1Mod = 1, cloudsTech2=nil, cloudsTech2Mod=1, tech1=nil, tech1Mod=nil, tech2=nil, tech2Mod=1, enemyTech1=nil, enemyTech1Mod=1, enemyTech2=nil,enemyTech2Mod=1,counterToEnemyTech1=nil, counterToEnemyTech1Mod=1,counterToEnemyTech2 = nil, counterToEnemyTech2Mod=1,}

I figure that 'bystander' units are neither being targeted nor avoided, so clouds really don't affect their likelihood of being hit or missed, and that not much else does either. I suppose development of RadarIII might make flak more accurate at attacking the intended target, and so make friendly fire and "accidental" hits more rare. So, perhaps these should be revisited.

Commented out the line that updates clouds with a key press.

setFlagFalse("FrenchOccupationCalculated") added to the apropriate place.


[unitAliases.Fw200.id] = {base = 0, moveBonus = 4, germany = 0,}
changed to
[unitAliases.Fw200.id] = {base = 0, moveBonus = 0, germany = 4,}

so that the movement is not expended for the german unit.

In operation chastise, the construction crews are teleported to the square (290,80,0), which is roughly in the center of the three dams. The teleportation is done on the German turn, and on the daylight map, so the bombers attacking the dams can't simply pick off a stack of construction crews. The Germans will have a chance to defend the units, or at least spread them out. Allied units on that square will be moved over.

Tested operation chastise, which seems to be working.

For some reason, the umlaut in Peenemunde doesn't display properly if done in a string, so accessed the name of the city of Peenemunde in the hydra strings. I ran through all text aliases in a loop to make sure the strings were displaying properly, though I may have missed something.

 

[McMonkey]

I'd recommend anyone looking for a fast paced PBEM head to head to give Over the Reich a go. It's a steep learning curve to begin with, but the readme is immensely helpful. Once you're in to it you can easily get through multiple turns in a day & with every turn the game becomes easier to understand & manage.

 

[JPetroski]

Uploaded latest version that has some pretty important bug fixes. These fixes are save-game compatible.

-Added all Historic Missions (Gomorrah, Schweinfurt and Regensburg, etc.)
-Fixed bug where cities were deleting after certain number of turns, including Italian Theatre and Russian Front cities
-Fixed oversight where some German cities started with food shortage.
-Fixed oversight where Red Army improvement could be sold - now it cannot be sold.