Slitherine

In v1.10 the air units will be very vulnerable to land attacks and to some degree to naval bombardment. So putting air units in coastal hexes or close to the front is a bad idea. Even worse than before.

One exploit I do is that I attack coastal fighters with my BB's and DD's to prevent them from intercepting. This means placing air units on islands is not smart.

Stauffenberg wrote:One exploit I do is that I attack coastal fighters with my BB's and DD's to prevent them from intercepting. This means placing air units on islands is not smart.

Changes sounds good, but why not fix this as well. Why shouldn't fighters intercept even if bombarded? I would see why they shouldn't intercept if attacked by ground units, but a bombardment is rather different.

ncali wrote:

Stauffenberg wrote:One exploit I do is that I attack coastal fighters with my BB's and DD's to prevent them from intercepting. This means placing air units on islands is not smart.

Changes sounds good, but why not fix this as well. Why shouldn't fighters intercept even if bombarded? I would see why they shouldn't intercept if attacked by ground units, but a bombardment is rather different.

Basically they just should not be at coast, with long air range its not this hard.
Also I think, that even if bombardment is not this good against planes itself, its good against airfields.

We've recoded the XP system so we can control from general.txt how to earn XP from combat and lose from repairs. At the moment we've set a value to 0 so naval units won't get XP from shore bombardment since there is no risk of losing any steps. Ground and air units being hit from shore bombardment will receive some XP though because they can take some losses.

I have an idea similar to the "visible" experience levels on unit icons. Would it also be possible to have the entrenchment level visible aswell? I think this would add to gameplay on both a superficial and tactical level. Superficially, it would be nice to see "defensive lines" on the map guarding rivers, strategic points etc. On a tactical level, it would allow the defensive player to know exactly where to place reverses, ie. where the line is "weakest". It would also allow the attacking player to know where the enemy is weaker and where an attack may result in a successful offensive. I think this would be a lot simpler than having to manually click on each unit to find their entrenchment level, enabling faster gameplay.

The visible representation could maybe be "dotted lines" surrounding the icon on the lowest entrenchment level, and maybe double solid lines at the highest level?

Thanks for all the great work you guys do!

MrPlow

We discussed adding entrenchment level on directly on the hexes. The problem is that the hex is already full of data when a unit is present. We need the unit image, roundel, strength value, supply level and XP level. It's already quite crowded inside the hex. So adding yet another level is maybe too much.

Personally I don't think much about the entrenchment level when I designate targets. I try to use 1-2 air attacks per hex I attack anyway. That means I remove the entrenchment level in all hexes except capitals, cities and fortresses. Those are hard to take anyway.

If I want to check if a fortress or city is at full entrenchment I check the hex and bombard them with air units only to lower the entrenchment level before attacking another turn. That's the time I usually check the entrenchment level.

So unfortunately it seems there is no room to show this information in a user friendly way.

We've updated the leader stats with the rules we discussed. What do you think?

Some more leaders might be added and some stats changed.

Formula is like this now:
this.price = (int) Math.max(5,(15 * groundAttack + 10 * groundDefence + (quality-1)*10 -5)); // GS v1.10k

Old formula was:
this.price = 5 * ((25 * groundAttack + 15 * groundDefence + (int)(7D * Math.pow(quality, 1.3D))) / 5);

I'll look over this a little more closely later. But two quick comments:

(1) Will units use the leadership rating of the best commander in range or will it be an average of all commanders in range as I believe it is now?

(2) I like the idea that you have given more leaders attack and defense modifiers - but it will prompt a comment like the following. Isn't Montgomery more deserving of a defense modifier than an attack modifier? Mark Clark seems to have gotten short shrift on command rating and range and, on the other hand, I'm not sure he warrants an attack bonus. And maybe a select few leaders should get both attack and defense bonuses (like Manstein).

I like the idea of reduced command ranges (meaning more generals), but I have some critical comments on your current implementation.

First, I would prefer to have only one command range, because having the whole range from 2 to 6 means I will have to do a lot of looking up which unit is in which general's command range. Further, command range is largely determined by hierarchy and not ability. While some of the Generals in CEAW were promoted to Generalfeldmarschall early, and others (such as Schörner) late, they were all Heeresgruppenführer (Army Group Commander) at one time. It would be more realistic that a player would buy Generals at, say, command range 4, and then would be able to upgrade (promote) them to command range 6 (and maybe even downgrade/demote them again!).

Second, since in your current implementation the command range is tied to the leadership value, I think that the leadership values needs more weight in the equation. In other words, attack or defense boni increase the cost too much, because leadership and command range are much more important. With your current implementation, I would always buy the generals without attack or defense bonus.

As always, thanks for sharing your plans and giving us the opportunity to comment on them!

Hi,

I like the idea of different leaders. One thing comes to mind immidiately, though. Because of different command ranges and increased number of leaders used it will a bloody nightmare to visualize which units benefit from whose leadership rating. Esp when planning your moves. Would it be possible to implement a keyboard command that would outline ranges with say a dotted line from different leaders on the map? You'd just hit the key on the keyboard to turn on and off the ranges to quickly check them.

If it's just a button in menus or in screens it would be too cumbersome to go between showing the ranges and not showing them.

_augustus_ //A vote for the "use the highest rating" from here, too. If that is possible to implement and is not hardcoded of course.

I like new commander system aswell very much, now we will see many generals in action.
Also I have suggestion that range shall not depend on general's skill. Skill and attack/defence is "inborn" atributes, but range is "assigned" atribute.
So if you want to make low skill general army group/front commander, basically you can do it, why not?
Maybe it will be better for each power to have several army group/front commander slots (with larger range and cost) and some army commanders slots (with smaller range, cost less) and you can assign any general into any slop.
It will be also a way to unificate range - lets say 6 for army group one and 3 for army one.

deGaulle must be turning in his grave to be listed as a "USA" commander. Leclerc was nominally under US command, until deGaulle told him it was time to move on Paris, so he could go either way I guess.

AGEOD's American Civil War game has a nice feature in that you can select an army commander and his command radius will show up as different color for the regions he has command over. Makes it very easy to see what is in and out of the command radius.

Of course, I've no idea how they do this. I'm pretty much still amazed that I can click a mouse button and something happens on the screen. But then I played Pong way back

Otherwise, I like these changes.

Plaid wrote:I like new commander system aswell very much, now we will see many generals in action.
Also I have suggestion that range shall not depend on general's skill. Skill and attack/defence is "inborn" atributes, but range is "assigned" atribute.
So if you want to make low skill general army group/front commander, basically you can do it, why not?
Maybe it will be better for each power to have several army group/front commander slots (with larger range and cost) and some army commanders slots (with smaller range, cost less) and you can assign any general into any slop.
It will be also a way to unificate range - lets say 6 for army group one and 3 for army one.

Maybe you could make the units with a commander in the army group slot have a different color or special graphic so that you can easily differentiate these from the commanders in the army slot. Then it would be easy to see which units are within the range of the commander. In comparing the two approaches, I tend to like the 2-range (army and army group commander) approach.

gchristie wrote:deGaulle must be turning in his grave to be listed as a "USA" commander. Leclerc was nominally under US command, until deGaulle told him it was time to move on Paris, so he could go either way I guess.

CeaW is coded so minor countries can't produce units and also not leaders. It means it's not possible to place a leader on a minor power unit or we could have added Mannerheim, Antonescu etc. as well.

Since we added the CW minor power (UK controlled) images and leaders for each of them we thought we could change Free France into a similar status as the CW minor powers. We could change the Free French units to US control, but keep the Free French colors. That means these units can get tech upgrades just as for the major powers.

De Gaulle will arrive as a free leaders when Vichy is DoW'ed upon. The Free French units arrive near Agadir in Morocco (replaces Dakar which is removed). So De Gaulle can be placed on one of these units and actually command the Free French units. That he game wise is seen as a US unit is a minor issue to actually get him and Leclerc into the game. In theory you can place De Gaulle on a US unit, but I guess most players will place him on a Free French unit to boost the efficiency of these units.

I think Roosevelt would turn in his grave hearing about De Gaulle commanding US troops, but that's another matter.

We're testing code to show the command range of a leader. This is how it looks at the moment:


Manstein is selected and all hexes with German units within his range will get an L drawn over the unit to indicate it's within his range.

We're discussing making the L a bit more colorful and maybe even use a green L for the hexes where the selected unit is the EFFECTIVE leader and a yellow or red L where another leader has better command. This way you can see where the overlaps begin. Do you think that would improve the command range on map even further?

We've also updated the tooltip in the unit panel for the leader so the command range is shown too.

Another possible thing we could do is to hide the location of the leaders if FoW is turned on, but that might be going too far so we're discussing if that would actually improve the game or not. At least we add the show command range ability when a unit with a leader is selected. That is necessary to have when leaders have variable range.

Bravo! Don't know what is in the water in Oslo, but keep drinking it - and ship some of it to Brad at Stardock while you're at it. He could use all the help he can get.

Regards.

If things gone so far, what about making axis minor units also "german" with different insignia (and providing their commanders, like its done with commonwealth and FF)?
It can hurt balance though, so maybe their numbers should be reduced.
Maybe not good idea, because they would show unrealistic high performance, but now they are showing unrealistic low.
Sad, there is now way to allow german commanders to affect them without sharing TECH level, that will be most realistic way.

The problem with that is that these units would then use the same manpower and have the same tech as the German units.

It's possible to show the current leader with an L or a symbol in the upper right corner using one color and if another unit also can command the unit hex then a different color is used to show overlap. Is that an improvement?

Should I only show a different color if the other leader has BETTER leadership quality so he's giving the hex efficiency improvement?

A good thing about the former is that you can then see overlaps and side slip your leader unit if you want to and still keep all front line units within leader range.

I'm still confused so I'll ask one more time. Will units receive the average of the leaders' ratings within range or use the best leader? I located the old thread that explained the average was used =

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