W-I-P: Storm Over the Pacifc

[El Justo]

i would have to review all the possible unit settings. but i'll admit, it's not the most organic set of options. always 'all ears' though

 

[cemo1956]

The issue with huge masses of raw material is perhaps bigger that I thought. I play AOI as France and stealing US plans in 1917 reveals that the entire northern Canada on the tundra is hundreds of raw materials belonging to US.
I say the WHOLE tundra up in the north is filled with raw material boxes. I guess it´s the leftover from US war with and destruction of Canada, but they only sit up in the tundra.
My point is that the masses of raw material is on the verge of overdone.
If it´s possible killing other units should not give any materials and getting material in any other way must be thought strongly on and kept much lesser than the result have given in AOI.

For your info some 100+ US units are fortified by the AI in many stacks north of Fort Severin. They just seam to sit still instead of heading for the material.
Leftover raw materials after battles doesn´t look like the AI handles correct.

Anyway I´m sure many has other views, but thats my two cents ...

 

[El Justo]

i think i know why you have all those arctic raw materials it's likely that they're caused by the 'barbarians' settings at startup. click below to see how to cure it.

Spoiler :

to have absolutely have No Barbarians, you must follow these quick and painless steps:
start a regular epic game w/ Conquests, select No Barbarians at startup, generate your map, etc, get to that first turn and then bail. yes, quit w/out saving. now, fire up the AoI biq and you're good to go. strange but the game engine will only not generate Barbarians on the AoI map (and every other mod or scen you play!) with this particular sequence. Virote_Considon brought this to our attention in the summer of 2009.

not 100% sure this is why it happened. but at first glance, this is my solution

agreed that moving around all those pieces can get tedious and i will surely try to temper this issue for this one.

 

[AnthonyBoscia]

You can also set barbarians=-1 in the conquests.ini. The setting should stay until you begin a new epic game and choose a setting, which overwrites that line.

 

[cemo1956]

You can also set barbarians=-1 in the conquests.ini. The setting should stay until you begin a new epic game and choose a setting, which overwrites that line.

As a fact I don´t have any barbarians=-1 in the Conquest.ini file.
Can I just add it on a new line ??

Hm Barbarian raw materials. Not sure about that, but possibly. I haven´t seen any barbarians anywhere so I assumed I got no barbarians running around anywhere. I still think they are from the US vs Canada deadly war, that wiped out proud hockey-players.

 

[El Justo]

getting through the resource based improvements in the editor, text, and pcx files. got to the uranium ones and figured to attempt to solicit some possible ideas from my interested folks here at cfc

in a nutshell, nukes will be a part of the scenario. and uranium will be on the map. atm, there are only 2 spots, one in Colorado and another in central Australia. Uranium Mine will be the resource-linked city imp. simple enough.

however, i'm not sure how to entirely spell out the Manhattan Project stuff, in terms of city builds.

here is what i'm pretty sure of :

US will be only civ that can build the manhattan project infrastructure
nukes will be autopro'd

here is what i'm not sure of :

do we make it so that an intricate sequence of city imp's are needed in order to get from start to finish with the manhattan stuff ? in reality, it was a gigantic industrial and scientific undertaking that required so much in terms of enrichment etc, it just begs for us to follow a similar route (if playing as the US). of course, this adds to the tediousness of the game. and i'm not in a mood to bog things down. however, a certain amount of respect needs to be paid to reality. and the reality was that the US dumped an awful lot of resources into the program with it all culminating over hiroshima and later, nagasaki.

one other potential scheme would be to use the stock rocket launching victory type. we could set it where the US player would have to build a set number of 'buildings' in order to hit the 'launch' button, iow spaceship victory type. not really in favor of this for a few reasons, first is that it would be like an inevitable US victory if the americans are the only civ that can actually build a nuke related program. and secondly, it would be acting as if the nukes were never dropped. or to be specific, it would be as if once the thing is 'launched', it's game over. not really sure i like this...yes, the Japanese surrendered and all that and the 2 bombs, in essence, ended the war. but it was not a foregone conclusion in 1945 that once these new weapons were deployed that they'd surrender. anyhow, this scheme isn't the worst. it's just that i think it has its deficiencies imho.

so, to be direct, i ask those of you who may actually play this thing once it's ready should it be layered and so-called tedious to get to the point where actual nukes are appearing for you...or streamline it ? by streamlining, i mean to not layer it so much and sort of use a model similar to the stock c3c Pacific War scenario. what of the spaceship victory type for the manhattan stuff ? thanks in advance

 

[Bowsling]

I assume that it will be a coalition victory? If that is the case, then I think I'd be a really good implementation of the space race. Just as long as it's not inevitable, that Japan can stop it if they are successful enough.

 

[eazyhasaids]

What about a mass regicide system. If the scenario starts out at the max extent of japanese control you could put kind units in all the japanese locations that were captured by the allies at the time of the A-bombs being dropped. The allies would have fewer king units. For example the U.S. would have these in units in Hawaii, Alaska and the West coast cities as, at least in my mind, thats all it would take for the japanese to get the US to the negotiating table.

My reasoning for this is the issue with the lock alliances and the inability to ever declare peace. The mahattan project and nukes certainly should be in the scenario they really weren't the end all in the pacific. There was no guarantee that nagasaki and hiroshima would lead to peace and the Japanese could have still decided to hold out.

 

[El Justo]

thanks for the remarks, fellas spaceship victory may be tough to pull off due to the 'automatic' win that the US would get. some type of nuclear test (ie launch) seems ideal. but as a victory condition, it leaves a little to be desired.

agreed on the mass regicide. that will definitely be in and sort of work hand-in-hand with the nukes (i'm hoping).

 

[Simon Darkshade]

G'day El Justo. I'd find a layered and complex system with a variety of components (resources, improvements, small wonders and wonders) to be a quite interesting rendering of the situation.

 

[Ozymandias]

Do you want the US having nukes as an inevitability? If so, just make the Manhattan Project part of a tech somewhere far down the tech tree (NB: if viewing it as an inevability, you might want to lower the US's production capacity accordingly.)

Best,

Oz

 

[Bowsling]

If done as a Space Race, you could make it possible for Japan to get a nuke too. Because gameplay > reality, after all.

 

[Klyden]

If done as a Space Race, you could make it possible for Japan to get a nuke too. Because gameplay > reality, after all.

I think this highlights some of the issues we are facing while working on this particular scenario.

In history, there is no chance the Japanese can get anything other than a negotiated settlement. It is what their war plan called for. They wanted to establish a far flung empire, wipe out the US fleet and force the US to the negotiation table where they thought the US (and others) would acknowledge Japanese gains and arrange for a settlement favorable to Japan.

I think it was safe to say that after Pearl Harbor, the US was never going to enter a negotiated settlement that would be favorable to Japan and even if the US had lost the battle of Midway, etc they still would not have quit the war. The war would have taken longer to prosecute to a conclusion, but it was going to happen. The US simply had way too much in the pipe line and her industrial might ensured the Japanese could never compete, no matter how many resources they got access to.

There is a point where war weariness started to set in for the US when it comes to the Pacific theater and it was a direct result of the casualties the US was taking to dig the Japanese out of their islands at places like Iwo Jima and also the effect the Kamakazi was having by generating a lot of hideous casualties aboard US ships. The US had not taken severe naval loss of life since 1942 into the very first part of 1943 at the conclusion of the Guadalcanal campaign. After that, US naval casualties were few and far between until the kamakazi attacks started up, mostly in 1944. I think a lot of Americans began to question if unconditional surrender really needed to be enforced on the Japanese as it was prolonging the war.

A bit of a update on the naval aspect of things. I have most of the Japanese ships done and sent to El Justo for his review. I still need to finish up the subs, carriers and what we plan on doing with escorts. I was sort of surprised at how well some ships did stat wise and how poorly others did. In short, the Japanese were wise not to expose their older battleships that much because they just were not that good. Their later cruisers (not what I call the 6 gun cruisers) were really good and many of the destroyers are excellent as well and will carry the bulk of any surface actions the Japanese may wish to force.

I was able to find out a fair amount of research on the Kongo class in particular and I found out a lot of really interesting little factoids I was able to confirm some things with and it also cleaned up some other issues with them. Essentially, they have always been an interesting ship class to me as they underwent a lot of reconstructions that supposedly changed their roles and they became one of the first "fast battleship" escorts meant to work with carriers. What got me was just how easily they seemed to be put out of action/sunk. For those who don't really understand, remember that these were battlecruisers designed by the British and the design predated WW1. There were some changes made to accomodate Japanese requirements, but a lot of the "bad" features of British battlecruiser design remained, even after repeated rebuildings. I found this article that examined the sinking of the Kirishima which I found really interesting and it is quite an eye opener on just how much of a glass jaw some of these ships had. http://www.navweaps.com/index_lundgren/Kirishima_Damage_Analysis.pdf

 

[scratchthepitch]

IJN Kirishima didn't have a glass jaw, she was a light weight duking it out with a heavy weight. The ship in that battle who had the glass jaw was the USS South Dakota. She was rendered helpless with communications, radar, and fire control all knocked out. Had the Japanese been able to press home their attack, without being so rudely interrupted by USS Washington , they probably would have sunk her. After the battle the commander of the American force described what happened to USS South Dakota as "render one of our new battleships deaf, dumb, blind, and impotent." The "glass jaw" in a WW2 naval sense is that many of the important modern systems can not be very well protected, but are never the less vital if the ship is to fight a modern battle. Without such systems operable, the ship has to fight a 19th century type of battle, something the crews are not trained to do, as the chaos aboard the USS South Dakota shows.

I'm not sure how using the Civ editor this can be represented very well. Maybe if the more modern battleships were not made overwhelmingly powerful in comparison to older and smaller ships, several smaller ships might be ale to wear down and sink a much more powerful ship. I do know that the AI is capable of using such staged attacks.

In a mod years ago I had all ships with some sort of ranged fire. The AI would prefer to use the ranged fire if its units were not capable of destroying the opposing unit using the regular attack value. If confronted with a more powerful foe, but had enough ships that together they could defeat the unit, they would come up next to it one at a time using ranged fire till the larger unit sank or was badly damaged. This stopped the player tactic of using a powerful ship to squash all in its path because during its turn, the AI could use this artillery tactic to knock the behemoth out with several weaker ships. It made player battleship rampages a lot more risky. Since the AI used artillery effectively at sea, I couldn't figure out why the programming failed so miserably for land artillery, or why this wasn't addressed.

 

[El Justo]

i think what he means is that the battlecruiser construction, compared to that of a modern BB, does not have the same protection and is somewhat at a disadvantage in terms of the ability to take hits from the large caliber shells.

 

[Klyden]

El Justo hit the point a bit better.

The issue with South Dakota was she lost power not due to enemy action, but crew error. She took damage from that action, but was able to steam away on her own power without too many issues.

The article is eye opening to me in that it spells out what the ship designers hope to accomplish with how they designed the Kongo class and while it may have worked in a earlier time (like WW1), shell construction had come so far that it totally rendered the protection scheme obsolete and mute, despite the ships being reconstructed several times.

Hiei took severe damage from 8" cruiser and 5" destroyer gunfire in a night battle. The 8" gunfire knocked out the steering and then the steering compartments flooded. With speed reduced to 5 knots, she was left to the mercy of the US air power the following day. I didn't see where she was struck by any torpedo during the night action. Protection so weak that it was possible to be put out of action by 8" and 5" gunfire?

Most of the actions I had read about Kongo report she was struck by a single torpedo and sunk. At some point, the reports changed and it appears she was hit by two torpedos and sunk. This after being rebuilt twice and with torpedo bulges. The only other battleships sunk by subs during WW2 were old British battleships in European theater.

My entire point is don't be surprised when you see the stats for many of the Japanese battleships and especially the Kongo class.

 

[scratchthepitch]

i think what he means is that the battlecruiser construction, compared to that of a modern BB, does not have the same protection and is somewhat at a disadvantage in terms of the ability to take hits from the large caliber shells.

BC construction suffered from that problem from its inception in 1906, they were vulnerable to contemporary BBs. It's the nature of the beast. It was a design that wasn't thought through, a common theme in many of Fisher's "brilliant" ideas. BC, and some of his other ideas, the Baltic scheme, leave me wondering if he had ADD.

What is even more strange than the original BC concept, is that at the start of WW2, 3 countries had revived this folly. Japan, Germany and the USA all had designs for Invincible style BC (BB guns-cruiser armor). Germany and Japan cancelled theirs, but the USA went ahead and built 2 of them.

The issue with South Dakota was she lost power not due to enemy action, but crew error. She took damage from that action, but was able to steam away on her own power without too many issues.

The power loss was a critical design or training fail, but that wasn't what I was really stressing. The Japanese shellfire massacred her communications, radar and gun direction and left the ship almost helpless. That was done by Japanese 8", 6" and 5" shellfire (with the exception of 1x14"). The ship was thought to be safe against such attack, but proved to be extremely vulnerable. While that kind of damage is not capable of sinking her, it did leave her in a position where she could barely see (crew not well trained for night ops with no radar) and with her weaponry effectiveness reduced to pre-WW1 ability. As I wrote earlier, USS South Dakota would have probably been sunk if the USS Washington had not been there to take the heat off her at that very critical time.

The article is eye opening to me in that it spells out what the ship designers hope to accomplish with how they designed the Kongo class and while it may have worked in a earlier time (like WW1), shell construction had come so far that it totally rendered the protection scheme obsolete and mute, despite the ships being reconstructed several times.

Hiei took severe damage from 8" cruiser and 5" destroyer gunfire in a night battle. The 8" gunfire knocked out the steering and then the steering compartments flooded. With speed reduced to 5 knots, she was left to the mercy of the US air power the following day. I didn't see where she was struck by any torpedo during the night action. Protection so weak that it was possible to be put out of action by 8" and 5" gunfire?

Yes, like the USS South Dakota was knocked out by 8", 6" and 5" shellfire. The IJN Hiei vulnerability was pretty bad, but I don't know if the steering gear weakness was due to weak protection, or something else. The Kongo design was never a good one, despite claims one sees in Janes. The ship was sunk by air attack, not the gunfire. These WW1 designs were at a much greater disadvantage in both air attack and torpedo. The potential of these attacks was not realized at the time. You also need to look at the criteria of the Kongo class modernization. They didn't increase the vertical protection, only the horizontal. This was because of the various naval treaties in force that forbade improvement of protection in these older ships except against air and torpedo attack. So that means decks and other horizontal armor can be increased, and underwater anti-torpedo enhancements could be added.

What should be realized is the American Alaska BC class were roughly equally vulnerable to this kind of attack as the modernized Kongos. They had slightly better protection, but weaker armament, and were faster. Faced with similar circumstances, these BCs ran equivalent risks from surface engagements with other cruisers and destroyers. At close ranges, like the ones experienced at Guadalcanal, all of the WW2 heavies were vulnerable to light and medium shell fire. It was a British 8" shell that wreaked the KM Scharnhorst's main FC radar position early on, rendering that ship much less able to reply to HMS Duke of York (she never even hit DoY).

Most of the actions I had read about Kongo report she was struck by a single torpedo and sunk. At some point, the reports changed and it appears she was hit by two torpedos and sunk. This after being rebuilt twice and with torpedo bulges. The only other battleships sunk by subs during WW2 were old British battleships in European theater.

Not only submarines carry torpedoes, you know. Quite a few BB and BC were sunk by torpedoes. 2 German, at least 4 British, at least 2 Italian, at least 4 Japanese (inc. IJN Yamoto and IJN Musashi) and at least 3 American. Most of these were by air torpedo and 1 British, the Italian, and the American ships were sunk in harbor. In 1940, 20 antiquated Swordfish biplanes bottomed 3 Italian battleships in Taranto harbor, at night. That gave the Japanese the idea of the Pearl Harbor attack. In that attack, 7 active American battleships were taken out. At least 3 of them sinking to the bottom due to torpedoes. These modernized WW1 American battleships were very vulnerable to both air and torpedo attack (and would have been equally vulnerable to concentrated medium and light gunfire of the kind experienced in the battles during 1942-43). A good example is the USS Nevada. She took a couple of bomb hits and 1 torpedo and beached in sinking condition. The Nevada class is roughly equivalent to the Japanese Fuso and Ise classes. Just so you know, the torpedo that struck Nevada, and the ones that sank the other BB at Pearl Harbor, used a warhead of only 1/2-2/3 the size of the USN torpedoes that sank IJN Kongo.

I'm pointing these things out because through late 1943, the Japanese were giving as hard as they got, despite the theoretically large superiority of American equipment and sometimes numbers. The most spectacular perhaps being Tassafaronga, where 8 Japanese destroyers opposed 5 cruisers and 4 destroyers and decisively won the battle. Ships often fell victim to weapons they were thought to be well enough protected against. Also, critical damage did not have to defeat the heavily protected parts of ships to cause crippling damage. You could put some incidents down to bad luck, but a lot of this vulnerability was because many systems modern ships relied upon, to make them the modern "super ships" of popular imagination, were very vulnerable to damage. These often were destroyed early on, rendering the ship much less effective than those it opposed, even though theoretically, it should be able to wipe the floor with them.

My entire point is don't be surprised when you see the stats for many of the Japanese battleships and especially the Kongo class.

I'm more interested in how you guys represent real world aspects in the Civ3 games system. The kind of clever manipulations of the program so RW things can be included in the game better than the stock version does. And also in the reasoning placed behind those modding decisions. I don't really care much about specific unit figures beyond that. Everybody has their own subjective ideas on what those should be, so everybody's ideas of what seems right will be different.

 

[Takhisis]

scratchthepitch, what type of cruisers were they that the Americans deployed at Tassafaronga?

 

[scratchthepitch]

scratchthepitch, what type of cruisers were they that the Americans deployed at Tassafaronga?

The heavy cruisers USS Minneapolis, USS New Orleans, USS Pensacola, and USS Northampton, the light cruiser USS Honolulu. The last should be considered the equivalent of a heavy cruiser. And there were 6 American destroyers, not just 4.

 

[Takhisis]

The Japs were outgunned indeed.