A case of magically appearing enemy units

[Shrike]

I can hear Kerensky say "it's a feature" before I type this, but this one's got me really miffed I'm in the scenario where you need to evacuate 18 units AND hold the victory hexes. First attempt I lost, because of the little AND condition in there. So I try again and this time I decide to try and conquer the entire island before retreating. Things go well and I manage to occupy both the USA city and airport halfway through the game. Short of one or two infantry units in the hills, it looks like the Americans are out of it. I figure I can now concentrate on the Brits and get enough units out just in time for a DV at last. Hurrah and all that. Only ... I end the turn and suddenly there's a load of American zombie units spawning out of nowhere, moving over and around my troops (causing drawing errors here and there) and ... ATTACKING the very same turn, killing off most of my suddenly blocked core units I have to tell ya: that was enough to make me give up on this DLC and close the game in disgust Am I the only one who takes offense on these kind of "hacks" to keep a player from winning certain scenarios? Frankly, if I want to see zombies I'll watch the Walking Dead

[Kamerer]

I ran into this, also - particularly Messina (which is what I think you are talking about - "evacuate 18 units" - that's Messina). Here was my thinking:

a) that enemy units might approach from "off map" is not at all unreasonable. They have multiple army groups backing up this invasion, and
b) my orders were to cover a retreat

So I figured that for disobeying orders and launching into vastly superior forces, it was not unreasonable. Fortunately I only did it with several very tough armoured units, so they could mutually cover each other, and I could pull back and not loose any core units.

[Vaughn]

Please pardon the rant. I'm playing on FM, and for the first time ever I have to restart at a much lower difficulty level.

I too am getting insanely frustrated. I'm might be the only German general that longed for the Good Old Days on the Eastern Front. The Western Allies are utterly annihilating me.

The really small core is getting to me. I'm constantly getting bypassed or overrun. All the enemy infantry and equipment is at least equivalent to mine, and in many cases, better. There is so much of it. My armored forces are just as outnumbered as they were on the eastern front and now my Luftwaffe is also. I'm rarely in a good defensive position, and with an ever-shifting battlefield my units are always in danger during transit.

(Man - that one sub in Hardalot sure can hold a whole lot of commandos).

With the units and prestige I'm getting, I'm pretty sure High Command wants me to lose. Which I am doing very successfully by the way.

[kverdon]

I finished This DLC on FM and am still left wondering how much I really enjoyed it. In many ways I too longed for the Eastern Front. I don't think it was one big thing, just a lot of little things that left me a bit disgruntled.

1. The 1942 Scenarios where you are the "Fire Brigade" against the raids. I like the idea but I was constantly amazed that the British raids were coming ashore in 1942 with more armored units than the Allies were able to land in Normandy in 1944. I liked the idea of portraying "what ifs" but maybe starting with an even smaller core with 1 or so Armored units and being to add in more each time or just letting me bring in more for Dieppe would have been better?

2. The Allied OOB seems off by about a year. I was encountering M18 Hellcats about a year before they were deployed. The M4A3 has the graphics of an M4A3E8 that was not available until also about a year later. At this rate am I going to defending against Pershings at Normandy?

3. The Sicily and Italian Campaigns did not really seem to gel for me. Unlike the East Front DLC where I thought I was part of the historical events of the East Front it just did not feel like I was part of the Sicilian or Italian Campaigns. The "lead the units to the beam up points" aspect did not help. I can see the reason for it but then how come in Messina I actually have to ferry them across? Is the transporter down for that Scenario? (Paging Scotty to Engineering...). Perhaps if I had taken a different path and defended the beaches instead of hunting down the Italians and attacking Taranto it would have been better?

I sat down to DLC 42-432 W expecting a nice steak and yukon gold potato dinner like I'd come to expect with the Eastern Front DLC, instead I feel like I got a Big Mac with Fries.....

Kevin

[Kerensky]

We've had issues with so called spawning units in the past, and have dramatically scaled back their use since then. I'm surprised you ran into these units at all. You must have been really aggressive in the Messina scenario for you to get anywhere near them.

This actually ties into the difficulty. One of the challenges of making these late war defensive scenarios is the need to not let the player completely wipe the map clean of enemy units. If that were the case, it wouldn't make much sense to follow the historical path we are sticking to when the invasion of Sicily gets completely wiped out, followed by the invasion of Italy and Normandy also both being totally wiped out. The scenarios are designed in such a way that victory should still very much be possible. I highly recommend following your objectives closely, this should pave the way for much more manageable victories. It is a departure from the normal formula of advance forward at blitzkrieg speed wiping out all opposition in your path and takes some getting used to. Not only is this important for keeping to the historical flavor of the DLC, but we also recognize that our players are seeking these challenges. After literally a hundred scenarios throughout the existing campaigns, we still strive to create challenges for our veteran players.

The prestige crunch is pretty tight admittedly, one good tip that should be remembered is good use of the disband unit function. During the early scenarios especially, not a lot of prestige is handed out, but a lot of units are gifted to the player. Second scenario Bayonne has 2 tanks and 2 infantry units, and Dieppe has a wealth of units gifted as well as can be captured. If you find yourself with too little prestige and too many of these extra units, disband a few of them during a deploy phase for a nice prestige injection. In fact, if you really want to, you can even disband every single Italian unit you manage to extract from Syracuse for a massive prestige boost. But if you do that, you might miss out on some very interesting rewards that are very hard to get from Messina without all these extra Italians.

Ultimately DLC West is just starting out and we don't want to put all our cards on the table at once. There are some really important battles coming up soon, and even a possible surprise to help address players who do feel like they should be winning the war come DLC45.

[Shrike]

Well, I was playing at FM level, so I expect quite a few players to bump into this issue, especially at lower difficulty settings. I figured the aggressive approach was preferable to getting pinned and witnessing my own core getting annihilated one at a time. I wanted to reach those airstrips in particular because I (misguidedly) assumed it would stop the AI from spawning the dreaded air attack waves.

You know, I definitely don't want to come across as someone who knocks your work flat out; there's just some development choices like these I have trouble accepting. Some of the DLC maps in the DLC 42-43 West are among the most enjoyable I've played so far. I guess I get ticked off too easily when I run into unorthodox ways you use to boost the AI, like the spawning units. I don't mind a little surprise attack every now and then, but I prefer to have all the cards on the table in a strategy game. Unannounced mystically appearing units without a legitimate spawn point like a city or airfield are harder to stomach, especially since the player is completely powerless against their attack that same turn. That's not "strategy" in my book.

I realize this works both ways, as the player gets some reinforcements in the same fashion (e.g. Dieppe). One has to wonder though: what has kept you from just having these arrive at and after the capture of a flag hex instead? I think the flag hex capture is most likely still the trigger event; it's just the location that differs, right?

[deducter]

Interestingly enough during testing there wasn't much complaint about these problems, but most players choose to use the stock core that came with the GC. Perhaps they weren't as attached to those units, and hence they didn't mind losing them so much. I don't think this DLC is harder than the Eastern Front ones in terms of map designs or scenario objectives, but rather, the challenge comes from a significant nerf to the player's core. Instead of being able to start GC43 with 30k prestige and 40+ 2-hero 4-star units, you have to pick at most 14 units to carry with you, and you have to train up about half your core, which often doesn't have heroes. Your prestige also gets reset.

If you try out the late war Eastern Front GCs using the stock core at the start of each, I think you'll find them to be much, much harder than this GC. The stock core for this year is actually quite good, much better than the ones on the Eastern Front.

Also, it seems that a lot of the frustration is losing core units, and that's what makes the maps seem hard. I really do think that the game could use a more integrated reform units options, as per suggestion in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=121&t=38306. Even if a player lose 50% of your core, as long as they can come back the next scenario with some small penalty (-100 exp for instance) it would surely make players less likely to give up in frustration.

[Shrike]

Deducter, for me it wasn't so much about losing the core units in itself that was upsetting, but rather the degree of onslaught from a totally invisible enemy force. I had enemies spawn in the same hex as my own units (!), move next to them and block their movement. Some artillery fire and armored attacks later I had indeed lost 3 core units and was sure to lose some more units the next turn. The fact that the player can't see anything on the map and doesn't get time to react at all makes this pretty much comparable to finding out you're playing a multiplayer game with a cheater.

[captainjack]

I, too, had a nasty surprise in Messina playing on Colonel. I thought I'd cleared the mid-left part of the board and could launch an attack on the back of the stubborn troops in the bottom left corner. I wasn't too happy to be surrounded in the turn after starting on my brilliant plan and then have a couple of key units wiped out the following turn. I managed to clear the area next time round playing on General, but having been bitten once I had the sense to capture the airport with a recon vehicle, and then pull it back into a prepared defensive screen of tanks. I have since learned to read the briefings even more carefully and focus on what must be done rather than what seems to be a good idea at the time.

Both times I was following ThvN's(I think it was) suggestion of disbanding unwanted Italian troops to allow enough prestige to upgrade to a tiger or two and settling for the MV. Having heard about the rewards for a successful evacuation, I am planning to follow the briefing and keep the Italians that bit longer, so the temptation to over-reach should go away.

I don't have any deep seated objection to facing near-endless waves of fresh troops in defensive scenarios, but I was a bit annoyed that they could get past my zones of control without any penalty AND block off my retreat without my realising it. Maybe my army started on the champagne and caviare a bit too soon and missed the dust and engine noise in the excitement. In such conditions it might be more player-friendly and perhaps more justifiable to force retreat to the friendly edge of the deployment area to represent a hurried retirement (maybe with a suppression, or some loss of strength, experience, ammo or fuel to represent being caught out). I don't have enough knowledge of game mechanics to know if this kind of forcible ejection from an enemy deployment zone is possible, but I think it would provide a nasty surprise as payment for over-optimism while also allowing some chance of recovery if you had a reasonable force in place.