Overlords Playtest Thread - Testers Welcome!

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Hi Curt,

To be honest you have different files a little bit all over your two Overlord threads so I wasn't sure which ones were the most recent or not (I would recommend you have all your files placed in one single post and place all updates there).

For now I grabbed the Overlords v2.zip from the post #1 of this thread as it appears to have the one with the fix to the onSchsim.lua file.
 
Sorry, my bad. I didn't realize you had closed your original thread.

Quick question: I just noticed that Berlin (11,37) is an ocean tile. I kept wondering why I couldn't fortify my ground units in it. Was this intentional?
 
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Achtung! A bad case of flooding! I can only imagine this occured when I hit the key that instantly lays ocean tiles while in in the map.

Changed it back to an industrial tile with Ctrl-4. If you want to activate the cheat menu on and off, you can change it with that shortcut.
 
Conquered Kweiyang, Lingling and Canton with loses of some artillery units.
I moved parts of my navy including some Imperial Marines towards Midway to face the upcomming threat from America.
 
@civ2units
Did you research the pacific war tech? Did it fire off without problems? :)
Is the balance of unit capabilities OK - Not too difficult or too easy, I hope?

PS
If you want battles to go fast and furious, go to the reporting menu on ToT startup, and go to "delays",
set up the attack animation frame delay to 12, and watch how fast the game resolves battles...It's fun!
 
I should mention here that I have decided to work on the the sequel to Overlords, and take advantage of the 189 units and tons of techs...Not finish date set, more of an experiment with the ToTPP features, and Lua.

Thanks for the info. I will continue to play with the version I have.

As such, just a quick update. It’s now the beginning of January 1943.

America declared war on Germany in June 1942 and has been aggressively operating out of Tetouan in Morocco. Fortunately, I received the Rommel reinforcements around the same time and split my forces in two: one to go support my troops around Oran and the other to go finish the job in Egypt.

As such, since that time I’ve been giving the American’s a bloody nose in North Africa, while I’ve gone on to capture most of the Nile river down to Al Goled. I’ve also captured Petra and Jerusalem and are targeting Damascus next.

It took some considerable resources but I was able to defeat the British invasion in the north and have regained all the lost cities there.

But by far my greatest success as been in Russia, as of January, I’ve captured all their cities west of the Ural and Aral Sea. Beyond the Urals, I’ve conquered all the cities along the Trans-Siberian railroad up to Novosibirsk and Ust-Kamenogorsk and plan to reach Irkutsk in a couple of turns.

I would like to say most of my success in Russia is due to my great generalship but that would be an exaggeration. The truth is that the German player is rewarded with a substantial number of armored and other reinforcements upon the capture of various cities and certain special events.

As an example, at the beginning of the scenario, you begin with 10 Pzkw III and 2 Pzkw IV. Since the beginning I may have built an extra 10 such units for a total of around 22. Yet I currently possess 55 Pzkw III and 15 Pzkw IV (in addition to the 11 such unit I lost in combat) for a total in game of 81 units, which means I received in total 59 free armored units.

Under the circumstances, the Russian AI in particular doesn’t really stand a chance against even a moderately competent human player and I would personally recommend you reduce this total to even the playing field for the AI.

The only other observation I would continue to make remains the research rate. Even increasing my research rate to 60 or 70%, and running a substantial deficit, I’ve only managed to research 2 techs in 26 turns. My current rate stands at 70%, for a 1 advance per 7 turns, but I’m running a 2000 gold deficit per turn and this time my other gains aren’t sufficient to keep a positive cash flow into the treasury which means I will have to increase my tax rate to compensate.

I figure there are still roughly 17 or so advances to research. I’ve been trying to increase my overall scientific production by building more science improvements but at the going rate, I don’t know that I would be able to discover even half of them before the end of the game.

Otherwise, once again, I'm having a great time playing one of your scenarios!
 
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@tootall_2012

Thanks for the great feedback, sir! :)
Yeah, the spawned units for invasions will be scaled back. My intent is to eventually make versions of the scenario for each faction, so I was trying to find a balance where the player has a challenge and the AI gets a chance, but it seems to have went the other way around. The way to fix this is to make Lua events based on AI or player getting the tech to spawn the invasions. I will look into this. Right now, I would say enjoy the large amount of units! When I make the German player version, the USSR will be enjoying much more. I'll probably make the USSR player version first...It will have special graphics and events tailored to their national style.

Keep me posted - Your info is very useful!
 
@civ2units
Did you research the pacific war tech? Did it fire off without problems? :)
Is the balance of unit capabilities OK - Not too difficult or too easy, I hope?

PS
If you want battles to go fast and furious, go to the reporting menu on ToT startup, and go to "delays",
set up the attack animation frame delay to 12, and watch how fast the game resolves battles...It's fun!

I'm currently researching the Pacific War tech and looking forward to the events which will follow.
For me the balance of the units is fine. Until now my navy wasn't engaged in serious sea battles but this will change soon when UK and the US will fight against me.

Thanks for the advice with the attack animations. Now it's much better :thumbsup:

Btw, the Nazis conquered the complete Balkan (the Soviets 'liberated' Belgrade and Zagreb), fighting against the Soviet Union (good for me as they are now engaged in the West) and marching through Egypt (Alexandria, Aswan and Cairo are fallen).
 
Hi Curt,

Here is my latest update. It’s now January 1945 and I currently achieved a Decisive Victory, with the full 24 points required, when I captured the last city objective of London the previous turn.

As a recap, my forces in North Africa continued to keep the American bottled up in Tetouan (though they did expand to Marrakesh), which doesn’t mean they’d been inactive. They have sent forces multiple times on an end run through the Sahara all the way as far as the Nile valley but never in sufficient numbers to dislodge me.

For my part, I had continued my conquest of the British possession in Egypt, the Soudan and went as far as Bagdad and Basra in the Middle East. This for the time being was the extent of my operations in the region as my forces were being stretched thin and it felt unwise to move on to India.

In addition late in 1943 the British launched Operation Husky and my forces were unable to hold onto Sicily against the substantial enemy force deployed. The size of this operation made me fearful of being overrun in the south and compelled me to start sending all available reserves to Italy, to the detriment of the other fronts, to prevent any further Allied progress in the area.

This defensive posture was also compounded by multiple American seaborne invasions along the North African coast, and though they failed to dislodge me from there have inflicted there share of casualties on my troops.

In the east, after my capture of Irkutsk in February 1943, my advance slowed down considerably as my forces were beginning to be stretched thin here as well and I met with growing Soviet resistance aided by many Partisans forces entrenched in mountainous terrain. As I moved against the cities of Ulan-Ude and Chita I encountered a fierce Russian counter-offensive and for a while feared they might actually begin to push me back (and this was happening at the same time as Operation Husky).

As a consequence, I paused in Ulan-Ude while I brought up as many armored and air units in the area. Once I stabilized the region and reduced the number of enemy units in the vicinity I moved on to capture Chita and Blagoveshchensk the last of which I suspected might be the source all these Soviet units.

Overall, at the beginning of 1945, that just leaves the Soviets in possession of 5 cities in the Far East, including the great naval base of Vladivostok, and another 7 cities in Central Asia (from Mashhad to Khovd).

In Russia proper, I’ve been primarily building economic and scientific improvements, with just a few cities set up to build Mobile Artillery.

In the meantime, in anticipation, of the great Allied invasion of Europe, I’d been slowing building an increasingly sizeable force in France and the Low Countries to eventually repel any invader.

As I was extending my conquests into Siberia, I realized that I already controlled 7 of the scenario’s 8 objective cities and that just left London. As such, I began to prepare for a bold invasion of England plan myself.

As neither Operation Husky nor Overlord had yet been launched by September 1943 I took the leap and by the end of October of the same year managed to conquer both Southampton and Plymouth, not without taking some casualties. Prior to the invasion, I also figured that if the Allies invaded France, I could always re-embark my units and send them back to the continent to counter-attack the invading troops.

Again this is when England launched Operation Husky, and I went on the defensive in England as I wanted to avoid heavy casualties in trying to capture London, in case I had to deal both with Husky and Overlord at the same time.

Fortunately, after the initial shock in Sicily the English didn’t press their advantage by trying to move on to Taranto or Rome and as such, I’ve been slowly grinding down their forces there whenever they venture out of Messina. Hopefully I will be able to whittle them down enough to recapture the island at some point.

As the Overlord invasion had yet to occur and I’d made up my losses in England I decided to go for London in December 1944 and was successful in my endeavor.

I will certainly continue to play until at least the invasion of France, which I suspect is triggered when the Allies research the European Invasion advance but if they are affected by the same slow research rate it might be some time. I’m hoping the fact that I captured the 3 British southern cities will prevent the appearance of strong Allied air forces for the invasion, but just to be safe I will also try to capture Birmingham.

On the research front, as I indicated previously, I’ve had to drop my research rate to 30% to reduce my overall deficit. As it stands my science rate is 1 advance per 11 turns and I’m continuing to build as many science buildings and am currently working on the ‘Atomic Research Lab’ wonder in Berlin which I hope will drop my rate even further.

Since the beginning of the scenario I’ve researched 4 advances and received another four thanks to the ‘Foreign Affairs Ministry’ wonder, that I took control of when I captured Moscow, which grants a free advance to the owner whenever two other nations have discovered it. There's one advance, the ‘African Campaign’ which I seem to have received for free back in May 1942 but I’m not certain how as I never attempted to research it.

I’m still running an 1100 gold deficit each turn but my U-boat campaign continues to bear a rich bounty as I’ve sunk 63 Allied Freighters and 5 Ocean Liners over the course of the game (apparently, the 8 Liberty Ship’s I’ve also sunk don’t provide any economic bonuses, though I don't see why not).

Surprisingly, the conquest of Soviet cities provided much richer gold rewards than for England (typically 200 to 300 per Soviet city with as much as 1000 when I captured Blagoveshchensk). I believe this is due to the rich economic boost that nation receives through the event file.

Finally, some other observations:

At the end, I will prepare a casualties list to see what units and in what numbers each power produced, or didn’t, during the campaign. On first observation, it doesn’t appear as though any of America, Britain or Russia produced air units in any kind of quantity, if any at all. I was expecting to see streams of B-17 and Lancaster bombers pummeling German cities but to date have seen only 4 of the former and none of the latter.

Finally, I’m not certain what your ultimate intentions are and how you will treat the victory conditions for each power but in the current play through I would say a total of 8 objective cities is clearly insufficient for a game and map this size.

Even though my armies have made it almost all the way to the Pacific and are on the borders of Iran, after capturing Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad I could easily have stopped at the Ural Mountains and built up a strong defensive line there to repel any counter-offensives. The same is probably true after capturing Cairo, I could have stopped and consolidated my positions in Egypt. In essence, there is no true incentive to go beyond these borders other than my own desire to see how far I could go.

That’s it for now. Hope this information is useful to you.
 
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@tootall_2012

Thanks for the very detailed run down of your play-through. It has gave me much to think about and lets me know what areas to improve.
Also where certain aspects are working as intended. The main thing is the balance of units during the invasions and when those invasions
trigger. As mentioned, the challenge with this scenario was how many units to allow for the player when they research the campaigns.

I intend to make player-specific versions for each civ, where the enemies would spawn many more units than this test-version, and thus giving
far more challenge. For this vanilla version, the easiest solution would be making special Lua events edited for the civ chosen by the player, and
installing these before play, which will increase the challenge. Easy to create and install for each civ.

I'll look into making heavy bombers for the Allies a little more active, although Strategic Bombing is not a hard tech to get. Perhaps a little event
that spawns the bombers in England each turn will cause some pain for the 3rd Reich! It worked well in Eurasian Wars, and can work here too.

I have successfully integrated the ToTPP city sprites patch, which means each civ has very specific cities, some using the same slots, but with
different GFX, very cool patch, meaning some techs have been freed up - A new update is coming this week for sure!

Thanks once again!
 
I've found that there is no guarantee that the AI will build units just because they're available, especially air units. In the case of fighters, I think it has to do with particular slots among other things. I generally use events to create some units, rather than rely on the AI to build them. It can be fussy, but sometimes is unavoidable.
 
Hi Tech,

Yes, unfortunately, that has been my experience as well in the past. In my case, giving the AI these ‘assists’ as proven easier in my scenarios because I typically only allow the human player to play one specific side or nation. That becomes much more complicated to do if you plan on letting the player select any one of seven powers.

All the same, at the end of my current play through I plan on providing Curt a casualties list of all the powers so he can review which units may have been built or not. He will be free to use it and extract whatever information from it he deems useful.
 
With Lua you can define that the event only should fire if the certain nation/civ is controlled by the player. I'm using this currently for my Reformation scenario and it works very well.
For example, if thr Protestant League is controlled by the AI, certain nation converts automatically to Protestantism and Protestant units will appear within the Holy Roman Empire.
If you play with the Protestant League, you have to pay or researching a certain tech or fighting a war and units will appear for the Habsburg within the Holy Roman Empire.
 
I've researched the Pacific Campaign tech and it works without problems. With the additional units I conquered several cities at once. Pearl Harbor is complete destroyed.

Imperial army visiting Hong Kong for a sightseeing trip :D
upload_2022-1-24_17-57-38.png
 
With Lua you can define that the event only should fire if the certain nation/civ is controlled by the player. I'm using this currently for my Reformation scenario and it works very well.
For example, if thr Protestant League is controlled by the AI, certain nation converts automatically to Protestantism and Protestant units will appear within the Holy Roman Empire.
If you play with the Protestant League, you have to pay or researching a certain tech or fighting a war and units will appear for the Habsburg within the Holy Roman Empire.

Neat!
I will ask your advice to make a situation that the invasions only work for AI...That is the best way forward, I think! :)
 
Hi Curt,

Here is my final update. I’ve reached the beginning of January 1948 and still firmly hold on to a Decisive victory.

As I indicated previously, my strategy to whittle down the British in Sicily was successful and I was able to regain Messina and push them out of the island altogether by December 1945.

After the situation had stabilized in the Mediterranean, I was able to transfer more troops to England and finalize my conquest of the British home islands, including Northern Ireland by April 1946.

That left the English with only Reykjavik, Gibraltar, Malta and Nicosia in their possession on the European front.

Simultaneously, in the Far East, I was able to finally capture Vladivostok by June 1946, leaving just the Pacific coastal cities of Magadan and Petropavlovsk under Soviet control in this part of the world.

The final conquest of the Russian Central Asian cities took longer to undertake, as the resistance in this area was fairly heavy, but was finally completed when I captured their last stronghold of Urumchi in October of 1947, leaving the Soviets with just the two aforementioned cities.

Of note, in the conquest of the final 10 or so Soviet cities I was receiving between 2000 to 3000 gold pieces for the conquest of each of these cities, with a final payoff of 8300 gold for Urumchi itself. In essence, all the gold that was being granted to Russia through the event file was basically being used to fund my own treasury.

I’m not sure how the AI typically handles gold during the game, i.e. does it actually use it to buy improvements or units or does it only use it to bribe units and cities. If the latter, in this scenario, at least, it isn’t useful. As such, you may want to revise your event driven gold donations.

After capturing the southern most Soviet city of Mashad in central Asia, I redirected my ground forces located in that area and combined with the reinforcements I’d been accumulating in Iraq finally began my drive to push the British out of Iran. By the beginning of January 1948, I was at the gates Gombroon on the coast of the Persian Gulf.

In June 1947, the Neutral power launched a sneak attack on Germany but it isn’t in any manner a threat to me and I am easily able to brush off it’s attack and proceed to launch my own punishing counter-offensives to any region that might prove too much of a hindrance.

Finally, on August 1947 the great Allied invasion of France, Operation Overlord, took place. The invasion force was indeed formidable, with a wide variety of naval, air and ground forces at its disposal. Unfortunately for it, I’d been expecting and preparing for it for the past 3 to 4 years.

Though it was able to inflict many casualties, the assault force was unable to capture any French coastal cities though it came close to liberating Brest, it also sustained many losses in its efforts as well. So much so, that by the next turn, my reserve forces situated around Paris and England were able to completely wipeout the survivors, save a few Allied planes which had escaped to the airbase in Spain.

With the two great Allied invasions defeated, the Soviets down to 2 cities, the British basically pushed out of Europe and my scientific discovery of the Atom bomb (I’ve already accumulated a stockpile of 4 bombs with more on the way, compared to England’s 1), I believe my position is fully secure and unassailable.

Final observations:

As I mentioned, I prepared an excel file that tallies not only the casualties list but the scientific research progress and state of the treasury by power.

Of note is the Science tab. After 85 turns, Germany developed an extra 20 advances but 9 of these were acquired through the 'Foreign Affairs Ministry' wonder, which it captured from Russia, and a further 2 free advances when it built the 'Secret Weapons Program' wonder for a total of 11 free advances.

This means in 85 turns it only actually researched 9 advances for a rate of 1 advance every 9 turns (and of course this is only possible because the game is set to last up until February 1950). Even by January 1948, Germany still had at least 10 other advances to research.

America, as expected, fared relatively well, at a rate of 1 advance per 4 turns but Japan did horribly at only 1 advance per 17 turns.

Given the overall number of technologies to research, I believe the research rate is clearly insufficient, and would at least recommend reducing the Tech Paradigm level by half from it’s current 200/10 level.

As a consequence of this reduction, I would try to make it harder to be able to go down the whole Atomic Research path because under the current circumstances you can begin researching it relatively early on and it only requires 3 technologies to get Atom Bombs.

Of particular interest for you will be the production/casualties list for each power. As I expected America, Britain or Russia failed to produce not only air but tank units as well.

Britain and Japan in particular were champions in building freighter units, with each producing 209 and 323 respectively.

Finally, as far as I can tell, Japan never went to war with either the British or Americans, which I guess for them is a good thing as they seemed to already have their hands full with the Chinese (no wonder since they were too busy building transports :lol:). As I was playing as the Germans this didn’t appear to overtly affect me but I thought it was worth noting in case that wasn’t your intention.

Oddly enough, despite these imbalances, playing the scenario as the Germans still ended up being challenging. If the Russians had been able to put up greater resistance, the ending would have been quite different (the problem being of course, that even though it was being overrun, the majority of its cities were building improvements rather than units)!

In case you are interested, I also attached the last game turn save file.

As usual, I hope my feedback proves useful to you and feel free to use as little or much of it as you deem appropriate.

Overall another very fun scenario to play!:thumbsup:
 

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  • Scenario Casualties Tracking Overlords.xls
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  • 1948jan.sav
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