Future of CEAW

[Kragdob]

I disagree. If you make transports too vulnerable then you would need to completely cover all adjacent hexes moving them. That would mean 6 escorts for one transport or 9 escorts for two. If, for example, you tried to escort a transport with 4 DD's leaving two gaps, then I certainly would trade 7 or 8 steps of damage to my sub to sink it.

Stepping back, I have to ask what is broken?

I meant transports without escort. If escorted than losses should be considerably lower.

[Cybvep]

I think that this randomness, which player can influence in no way, is totally BAD thing in long and high level game player vs player.

(Leave alone the fact that roll randomness encourage cheating. Also if you get bad results and opponent get good ones, you might start to suspect him cheating, while in fact its all work of stupid RNG)

Randomness may sound cool (wow its like in real life!) but it break games and ruins experience.

Just my thoughts, its not like I say "please do it".

I disagree. Static losses would encourage min-maxing and make the game too predictable. However, the odds calculator definitely needs to become more reliable and maybe combat results should be a bit less random in order to limit the situations when you have 7:1 odds and the final result is sth like 5:3.

[Plaid]

Sorry, but what do you exactly mean? Game is already full of min-maxing as it can be.

[Cybvep]

If the players know how much damage unit X can cause in any situation with 100% accuracy, then min-maxing will be even more noticeable.

Randomness is good, as long as it doesn't become the only significant combat factor.

[Plaid]

If the players know how much damage unit X can cause in any situation with 100% accuracy

It will be major work for this type of player to gather complete data about what damage unit X with given effectiveness do to unit Y with some other effectiveness and tech.
If we add tech levels here, it would be already too many combinations.

Still I would be happy if GS team harness somehow our wild odds say to level of Panzer General series, where what written is frequently happening.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

If you look at most board games which use dice to determine combat you see that the spread in outcome from the best to worst result on the combat column is actually quite big.

So I don't mind that the actual result is different from the predicted result. The main issue I have with the odds calculator is that it predicts higher losses to both sides than you actually get.
If the results are skewed in the same direction every time then you stop using the odds calculator as a predictor.

I have a feeling that one reason we get results like we do with combat results is because use the average 3 battle results as the final result while the combat odds calculator checks for hit chance. When averaging combat losses you usually get the lower end result because it's harder to get the extreme results. Rounding is also important because fractions will in many cases be rounded down. E. g. if you get 4-1, 3-1 and 3-1 then the average is 3.3-1. I think the battle result will then give a 70% chance for 3 and a 30% chance for 4. I'm pretty sure the odds calculator would have shown 4-1 and not 3-1.

Ideally the odds calculator should make a test battle result and collect the 3 results and give the average as the predicted combat result.

I'm pretty sure we can improve the current odds calculator and for GS v2.2 or in a GS v2.1 patch come with a better version. We just don't want to delay the release because of this.

I've played till the end of 1941 and found the odds calculator to be pretty good. OK, the results you get are often slightly lower than what is predicted, but you rarely get the opposite result. If you get 4:1 predicted then you can expect something like 2:2, 3:2, 4:2, 3:1 etc. All these results are ok for the attacker. If you get a combat odds of 3:3 then you know the battle can be nasty and should consider using air bombardment to better the odds.

It's like in the board games you know as a rule of thumb that rolling on the 3:1 odds column is pretty safe. Less than that is risky, but something necessary. Higher than that should give heavy losses on the defender.

The situations we should avoid are those where you e. g. get 1:10 as predicted result and you end up with 6:4. Then something is wrong with the calculation. I've seen that late game when armor or mech are involved.

[supermax]

Not sure yet. We will fix bugs for sure. There are no current plans for changes we will begin to make shortly.

It could be that Ronnie will have a look at the AI and we will focus on that. First all of us in the development team want a rest so we can just enjoy playing and nothing else. Then we will see what happens.

Happy to hear that no more changes coming in the near future.

We will finally all play the same version. This will broaden the base of players we can play agaisnt and also put an end to stopped games and endless discussions about adjustments to Moriss strategies

hehehe i am now a happy camper.

[PionUrpo]

Any chance of adding the server based PBEM? Although I presume it's more up to Slitherine...

[PionUrpo]

A small but potentially significant thing: IMO troop transports are too resistant vs. air attacks. I saw two different cases of this over the last months:

1) mid to late game, my Axis was defending against repeated Allied amphibious moves vs. Sicily/Italy. In multiple actions, it was a very common thing (maybe 50% of attacks) for Luftwaffe fighters and Strategic Bombers to take 1 point of damage and to do only a very few points of damage to the transport (1-3). My airforce was very technically advanced (some of these results were with maxed-out tech) and operating at high efficiency in supply 5.

Use TACs. Even one will most likely do enough damage to make the landing unit useless, assuming there's opposition ashore of course. Two can even sink the transport. To me 1-3 points for ftr/str sounds good, it's not like they should be able to stop the landings cold.

2) very early game, my Allies trying to fend off Operation Sealion. Again, British fighters and strat bombers took 1 point of damage in approx. half of their attacks on the German transports, and in turn they did very little damage to the transports--most often only 1 point.

Sealion IMO is kinda off anyway as the major damage should be done with the navy. I'm assuming the Axis FTRs were intercepting? If so, consider it this way, the intercepting FTR/CV can't 'stop' the attack so there will always be damage. If the damage is too high then landings will take too much damage even before getting ashore. (same for 1 btw)

I suggest that in the future we do a little historical research and find out a) just how vulnerable transports were vs. fighters or strats and b) how effective those transports or their minor escorts* were in inflicting casualties on the planes.

I'm sure there's more knowledgeable people but, as I've understood, the early war anti-shipping capabilities weren't that good, esp for Germans. Heavies had trouble hitting static targets late-war, not to mention 'small' moving one's. Fighters sure could hit things but with limited firepower, mgs/small cal. canon/single small bombs(and afaik, carrying bombs in a dogfight is a big no-no, so enemy fighter opposition would force ditching the bomb load)

[*Maybe if troop transports are adjacent to major surface fleet units we consider the fleet to be escorting the transports and up their defense?]

Decent idea IMO, the late war BBs esp. were full of AAA and definetly used to screen other vulnerable ships. Wasn't there some dedicated AAA (light) cruisers too?