Storm Over Europe (SOE)

[Donkeyman]

You spelled convoys wrong in all the city names that send the lend-lease stuff over.

 

[Civinator]

You spelled convoys wrong in all the city names that send the lend-lease stuff over.

Yes, you are right, it is perfectly regular. I will fix this.

AnthonyBoscia, thank you very much for your great input. When I have enough time, I will answer your post.

 

[Civ3Monki]

I'm playing the British and it's great fun!
I noticed the following " art\wonder splash\8th_Army.pcx = file not found "
New Orlans Ca Class is not possibel to upgrade so they stays in port.
German pak-40AT is invisble,only some ships can see them.

Also in my game Germany steamrolls over russia. Perhaps Russia needs
a boost? I'm in mid 1943 and there is no tanks in russia,only infantry.
I notioced the AI Germany controlls Kharkov and that way stops oile
to reach the russian Cities.
I'm wondering about transporting Tanks.Asfar as I got it doesn't seem to
be an option. Is it possible later to transport tanks?

Next time I will try Germany

Cheers!

 

[Civinator]

Well, I think my German game is about finished in Fall 1942. Meinen Soldaten have blitzkrieged their way from Glasgow to Grozny. Once the Allied back was broken in late 1941, victory was assured. After the penetration to Moscow, my forces split essentially into three army groups. Both Leningrad and Stalingrad were captured June 1941, while the Center group reached the Urals by early '42. The Italians and Bulgarians continued to get in the way down south but captured some key cities in the Ukraine, while resistance in the Crimea was grueling. In Britain, after the fall of London, the steamroller couldn't be stopped and every turn was an advance. The Royal Navy was smashed, and three USN battleships were savaged by air attacks. My forces in north and south Norway finally linked up in 1942, but the country remains unconquered. I even made a nice treaty with the Irish.

Congratulations to your victory. I hope next time it will become more difficult to early conquer Russia and Britain. The experimental gap around Tarnopol is closed, as it was enough to dim down the German AI, but not a human player who throws all his units through that gap. The same with the road from France to Dover. That border-terrain now is changed to border-terrain where no roads can be built.

What difficulty level did you play?

With the monarchy moved to Canada, the Anglo-Americans sue for a separate peace. Alexandria had fallen and Cairo becomes a German protectorate. Russian forces will continue to fight a guerilla war for years to come. Although I wanted to see some of the late game technologies, it's time to call it quits as my turns mostly involve a few battles and much shifting of units. Often it can be difficult to stick it out to the official end, since I require many more victory points, so we'll celebrate with a parade.

For later versions of SOE I consider to add the "Greatest Fieldmarshall of ALL Times"-Victory, a conversion of the space-victory in C3C. In theory it should be possible to give different civs different "space-victories". So may be Russia could achieve this victory if it is able to build victory columns in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, Britain/US if they can build victory columns in Moscow, Stalingrad, Berlin and Rome, Germany in London, Paris, Moscow and Stalingrad and so on. Each of the different "spaceship parts" = victory columns has a wonder that is placed in that city as a perequisite.

Mussolini small leaderhead has magenta background and needed reindexed. This is for the Art>Advisors folder. I attached a new one at the end of the post.

Thank you very much. There are some more leaderheads with palette problems, especially some leaderheads from CivArmy used in WW2 Global.

The locked alliances are simply called Alliance 1, 2, 3, 4. Perhaps, Axis, Western Allies, etc. might be nice?

That´s a very good idea!

There's an extra space open at Suez that allows non-British traffic into North Africa. I spent a lot of time fighting the French. Is this something you might want to close off?

Yes, this is intended. The main reason is, that the ownership of Suez by one civ (per example Italy) shouldn´t block an allied civ (per example Germany) from advancing on land to other enemies (per example Russia).

War weariness became a serious problem by 1942, even with luxuries maxed out at 50%. What's wrong with these people, don't they enjoy living in occupied Europe? I spent a lot of the late game dealing with all the revolts and unhappiness.

Did you rebuild all the cathedrales, cimemas and other buildings that provide happiness? May be it could be a good idea to remove culture from these buildings, so they are not always lost when a city is conquered. All Governments are set to have no war weariness.

The Battle for the Atlantic was very quiet after the initial naval battle. I saw very little coming from Canada or the U.S. and my U-boat crews were picking their noses.

As nobody reported a MUA with the current settings of SOE, may be some more autoproduced naval units, starting at convoys from US and convoys from Canada can be added.

Speaking of Britain, I not only got the French Battleship but two King George V's! But also, I was able to autoproduce British commandos, spitfires, Russian tank battalions, etc. Have you though of making these improvements go obsolete with a non-era German technology, à la MEM? I can understand the Germans capturing a half-built battleship, but the British commandos seemed funny.

Yes this must be fixed. Making them obsolete with the German tech could be one solution, but what is, if Russia or Italy capture these british buildings.? I think it´s better to connect them to the British form of government. The result should be the same.

The game overall is excellent and you and the team have done a fine job. I'll try the Brits or the Soviets next with the new version. Looking forward to finally having tank battalions! Great work and I hope I can provide some more feedback to help the cause.

AnthonyBoscia, thank you very much for kind words and your great help in improving SOE.

 

[Simon Darkshade]

Excellent to see this magisterial work out and about. The orbat alone is exceptional in its commitment to accuracy.

The combination of 2-3 aircraft squadrons into single units is an interesting one.

A few suggestions as to nomenclature:

- Possibly add ship type classification after the name of the ship for ease of identification, such as 'HMS Ark Royal CV' or 'HMS Verity DD'. A blanket standard of BB, BC, CV, CA, CL, DD, DE, FF and SS could be adopted for all nations should it be acceptable.
- Royal Artillery regiments could be named along the pattern of '69th Medium Regiment RA'
- Divisions, where present, can be fully named should space be available, rather than being abbreviated to Inf. Div. or even ID, for example.
- Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm squadrons can be labelled '819 Naval Air Squadron'

If the above notions are of interest, I could go through the biq and make the requisite changes, as I have a little spare time in the coming week. It is 90% cosmetic and 10% ease of use and identification of unit types, based on the model used by El Justo in TCW and AoI.

 

[Civinator]

I'm playing the British and it's great fun!
I noticed the following " art\wonder splash\8th_Army.pcx = file not found "
New Orlans Ca Class is not possibel to upgrade so they stays in port.
German pak-40AT is invisble,only some ships can see them.

Thank you very much for reporting these errors (so the problem with the 8th_Army splash was reported by texastarheel some time ago, too).

The "invisible"-flag of the German pak-40AT is a remnant of an old concept for AT-guns, making them invisibele and giving recon-cars the "detect invisible"-flag. This concept didn´t make it into the SOE betatest-file as recon cars then would be able to detect submarines, too and I think the creators of these wonderful units didn´t do their jobs to set their units all to "invisible" so the work of these great unit creators can´t be seen on the map any longer. The German pak-40AT is fixed now.

Also in my game Germany steamrolls over russia. Perhaps Russia needs a boost? I'm in mid 1943 and there is no tanks in russia,only infantry.

This is interesting, as you are not the only one who reports this situation. In SOE prebetatest games AI vs AI Germany always didn´t do enough harm to Russia in the early years of the war. In fact Russian tanks several times took away the German cities of Tilsit and Königsberg in 1940 and can´t be pushed back by the German AI. So some settings were be done to strengthen the German position against Russia including the placement of some strong immobile German units that can be upgraded to mobile units in May 1941. May be the Russian defense must be strenghtened, too (Stalin Line, etc.).

Did you play on the recommended highest difficulty level?

I noticed the AI Germany controlls Kharkov and that way stops oile to reach the russian Cities.

In my eyes this can´t be a problem, as Charkov in SOE is a microzone. This means the territory around that city is excluded from any trade-net. Therefore the control of this city shouldn´t have any influence on the tradenet outside the microzone.

I'm wondering about transporting Tanks.Asfar as I got it doesn't seem to be an option. Is it possible later to transport tanks?

Yes, here I made a bigger error in using the flags. The tanks carry the "tactical missile"-flag so the army-units (tank-bataillons), which are set to only carry tactical missiles can transport them. In an earlier prebetatest concept of SOE the rifleman-units should be upgraded to mechanized army-units carrying only foot-units (with using half-truck-army-graphics) and the tank companies should be upgraded to tank-bataillons by using the tactical missile-flag. The setting with the two different army-units wasn´t used by the AI in the frequency as it should be (so all these army-units did only carry one single normal unit). The tank-bataillons left from that concept. But now only ships with the "carry-tactical-missiles-only"-flag can carry these units. This means SOE needs ships with the carry only tactical-missile-flag, too. With these flag, these ships must be pure tank-transporters, otherwise the distincton for the army-units to carry only tanks wouldn´t work. The "carry-tactical-missiles-only"-flag will be set to the landing crafts, LCUs and so on in the next biq. Than there will be ships that carry tanks, but as said, they will be pure tank-transporters.

 

[Civinator]

Excellent to see this magisterial work out and about. The orbat alone is exceptional in its commitment to accuracy.

The combination of 2-3 aircraft squadrons into single units is an interesting one.

A few suggestions as to nomenclature:

- Possibly add ship type classification after the name of the ship for ease of identification, such as 'HMS Ark Royal CV' or 'HMS Verity DD'. A blanket standard of BB, BC, CV, CA, CL, DD, DE, FF and SS could be adopted for all nations should it be acceptable.
- Royal Artillery regiments could be named along the pattern of '69th Medium Regiment RA'
- Divisions, where present, can be fully named should space be available, rather than being abbreviated to Inf. Div. or even ID, for example.
- Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm squadrons can be labelled '819 Naval Air Squadron'

If the above notions are of interest, I could go through the biq and make the requisite changes, as I have a little spare time in the coming week. It is 90% cosmetic and 10% ease of use and identification of unit types, based on the model used by El Justo in TCW and AoI.

Hi Simon Darkshade, great that you are posting here.

The OOB really was an immense amount of work. Very helpful was the following site: http://niehorster.orbat.com/ , the OOB from Germany against Poland is from Guderian´s book "Erinnerungen eines Soldaten" (Memmories of a Soldier), the French regimental names, the names and positions of French and Swiss fortresses and some additions to the Polish OOB are from different sites in the internet that I lost due to the burn of my old pc.

Thank you very much for your offered help with the additions to the ship classes and unit names. Every helping qualified hand to push ahead SOE is needed. Please send me a pm with your email-adress, so I can send you the newest SOE-biq with fixes for most of the errors that are reported here and on other sites (SOC, Civfr).

Some of the abreviations result from the original regimental setting for landunits in SOE. The correct names of the regiments and the division this regiment belongs to, frequently was too long, so there only did remain an ID (for Infantry division). After running in the MUA (maximum units allowed in times when Civ 3 moddders didn´t know that a limit for the MUA in Civ 3 exists), many regiments were combined to divisions, so there were less units on the map, but on many of them the old abreviation of the division (sometimes ID) did stay.

 

[Civ3Monki]

The following occurred "art\wonder splash\Prod_Mob.pcx = file not found"

About charkov is that the culture boarder reaches out over the road to the east, so
no crude oil in Moscow once Germany controlls charkov. Perhaps russian should be able to build T34/76 without that specifik resource?.My first game was with russia at the recommended level and it was quite a challenge for me. Thats good, it should be hard to deffend against Germany but when Germany reached Moscow,Stalingrad and Leningrad it got alot more harder for the Germans. So imho I like the sound of strenghtend Russian defense.

My current game with the British is on Major level. I'm liberating France and all of North Afica is free and I'm on my way to conquer Sicily. Germany is strong but have not made any real
effort to fight back because they are busy in russia. Once russia is conquered it will be intresting to see what happens

 

[AnthonyBoscia]

The same with the road from France to Dover. That border-terrain now is changed to border-terrain where no roads can be built.

What difficulty level did you play?

Either Major or Colonel. I noticed in the difficulty levels that it goes from:

Grunt: 4 happiness (citizens born content)
Sergeant: 3 Happiness
and then Lieutenant: 4 Happiness
Major: 2 Happiness

But the early victory was aided by the exploitation of routes into Briatin and the U.S.S.R. Next time should be tougher.

For later versions of SOE I consider to add the "Greatest Fieldmarshall of ALL Times"-Victory, a conversion of the space-victory in C3C. In theory it should be possible to give different civs different "space-victories". So may be Russia could achieve this victory if it is able to build victory columns in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, Britain/US if they can build victory columns in Moscow, Stalingrad, Berlin and Rome, Germany in London, Paris, Moscow and Stalingrad and so on. Each of the different "spaceship parts" = victory columns has a wonder that is placed in that city as a perequisite.

That would be interesting, though good luck to the British player who intends to conquer not just Germany and Italy but Russia as well. I'm using a similar system in the game I'm working on although it relies on National (Luxury) resources that can either be conquered or traded.

Didn't Wyrmshadow make an SOE victory movie at some point?

Did you rebuild all the cathedrales, cimemas and other buildings that provide happiness? May be it could be a good idea to remove culture from these buildings, so they are not always lost when a city is conquered. All Governments are set to have no war weariness.

Yes, it was funny that German forces conquered cities and then immediately set about building cinemas and cathedrals. I've also had plenty of happiness issues in my new Russian game. The microzones prevent the accumulation of luxury resources, but that's Ok, the focus of this game is guns, not butter.

As nobody reported a MUA with the current settings of SOE, may be some more autoproduced naval units, starting at convoys from US and convoys from Canada can be added.

No complaints here.

Have you though of making these improvements go obsolete with a non-era German technology I think it´s better to connect them to the British form of government. The result should be the same.

Much better solution. I'll give you a break from typing before I start on my Russian game.

Excellent to see this magisterial work out and about. The orbat alone is exceptional in its commitment to accuracy.
A few suggestions as to nomenclature:

Agreed. The order of battle is excellent and thorough. I was able to follow the abbreviations well enough, but any clarification that Simon does is cool by me.

 

[ThERat]

not sure whether someone mentioned it before but the Russian winter wonder splash is missing too....

 

[ThERat]

I think the wrong name is used, it should be Winter_War

 

[Civinator]

The folder with the wondersplashes and the pediaicons-entries for the wondersplashes at present are massively reworked by me. Here many entries were done for wondersplashes, that never made it to SOE and existing splashes were disabled. Some splashes, as the winter_war splash, will be added with the next patch. Attached is an image of the winter_war splash.

Until the next patch with the fixes will be published, you can always continue your current SOE game by substituting the entry for the missing splash with the nosplash entry (what is a generic splash in the wondersplash-folder for all situations).

 

[Civ3Monki]

The following wonder splash is missing "art\wonder splash\Op_Overlord.pcx = file not found"
Also the 9th Army force wonder can't be built by the British. I believe the necessary resource
"airfield" is missing on the map.
I will continue my game and report here if something else occur.

 

[Civ3Monki]

It's mid 1944 and all of France is now under British controll ( apart from corsica ). I'm about to launch a major assault on Germany.Germany is still occupiad with conquering Russia, but starts
to send more troops west.Also Italian and Hungary do send troops. I really enjoy playing as the British. Their Units are weaker than the Germans,so one really depends on air support. I do feel
the scenario is superb, accurate and highly enjoyable!

I also like to report something I believe isn't meant to occur. I noticed the Germans builds many
Units that could only be build in a microzone. I found out that the AI is clearing LM forests and
than builds roads on the grasslands. Munchen is now connected with the rest of Germany controlled Cities. That might also explain why Germany makes such progress in Russia.
Being able to build the special units in all their cities. Imho it would be better if "clear forest"
is deleted from SOE.

Cheers!

ps. English is a second language to me so I hope I make sense

 

[Wyrmshadow]

Didn't Wyrmshadow make an SOE victory movie at some point?

Yes

 

[Civinator]

Yes

Hi Wyrmshadow,

it´s great that you are posting here, as most of these wonderful units were done by you. I´m very sorry, that it lasted such a long time to give all these wonderful units the scenario they were originally be created for - and SOE is still far away from beeing completed.

There are two intros and two victory movies at the end of the linked post:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=222434

Unfortunately for German civers the Axis victory movie (and this is the linked movie in the post above) can´t be seen and can´t be played.

 

[Civinator]

The following wonder splash is missing "art\wonder splash\Op_Overlord.pcx = file not found" Also the 9th Army force wonder can't be built by the British. I believe the necessary resource "airfield" is missing on the map.
I will continue my game and report here if something else occur.

It's mid 1944 and all of France is now under British controll ( apart from corsica ). I'm about to launch a major assault on Germany.Germany is still occupiad with conquering Russia, but starts to send more troops west.Also Italian and Hungary do send troops. I really enjoy playing as the British. Their Units are weaker than the Germans,so one really depends on air support. I do feel the scenario is superb, accurate and highly enjoyable!

I also like to report something I believe isn't meant to occur. I noticed the Germans builds many Units that could only be build in a microzone. I found out that the AI is clearing LM forests and than builds roads on the grasslands. Munchen is now connected with the rest of Germany controlled Cities. That might also explain why Germany makes such progress in Russia. Being able to build the special units in all their cities. Imho it would be better if "clear forest" is deleted from SOE.

Cheers!

ps. English is a second language to me so I hope I make sense

Hi Civ3Monki,

I understand your English perfectly. Thank you very much for your kind words about SOE, the report of your game and your very valuable input about improving the game. Especially the hint about disabling the "clear forest" worker job is extremely valuable and was added to the next biq immediately (as it was with the worker job "transforming special terrain" that now only is available short before Operation Barbarossa). The reported error about the 9th USAAF is now fixed, too.

At present I control every single splash entry of the SOE pediaicons file and I have found some more entries that don´t fit to the splash graphics in the SOE mainfile. There are many entries in the SOE pediaicons file about wondersplashes that never made it to the SOE mainfile. I hope soon I can post a new SOE pediaicons file combined with some of the missing splashes and fixes for the reported problems with some unit entries as a new patch for SOE.

 

[Ares de Borg]

For all the Germans not being able to watch the movie: Just type "ss" in front of youtube.

No censorship FTW.

 

[Civinator]

For all the Germans not being able to watch the movie: Just type "ss" in front of youtube.

No censorship FTW.

Ares, thank you very much for that hint.

 

[Sasebo]

The tanks carry the "tactical missile"-flag so the army-units (tank-bataillons), which are set to only carry tactical missiles can transport them. In an earlier prebetatest concept of SOE the rifleman-units should be upgraded to mechanized army-units carrying only foot-units (with using half-truck-army-graphics) and the tank companies should be upgraded to tank-bataillons by using the tactical missile-flag. The setting with the two different army-units wasn´t used by the AI in the frequency as it should be (so all these army-units did only carry one single normal unit).

I'm not 100% sure I am following you here, but if the AI is only loading 1 unit instead of multiples, perhaps you could do what they did in the AoI Deluxe scenario, and only allow the army to load 1 unit, but increase the HP bonus of the army itself? That seems to mitigate the 'AI stupidity' factor regarding armies pretty well.

Also, as an alternate nomenclature system possibility, I will suggest what I have seen in a couple scenarios, where instead of say, "Ark Royal CV", it would be "(CV) Ark Royal". This has the advantage of making the ships stand out a bit from the land or air units when you right click on a city, and keeps the same types of ship together so you can see at a glance what you have there. I find that very helpful myself when playing. I realise that is a lot of work, so if you like that I am willing to do the renaming for the BIQ file if you want, either before or after you finish any update you are working on.

Also, I'm not sure naming the artillery units is worth it, they do seem to die on me fairly often. Good units though!