Hi,
Thanks for your feedback and detailed and very nice AAR!
In the beginning you wrote something that games like this should be played at "neutral" i.e. medium difficulty, when the computer does not cheat to help any of the sides. I fully agree with this, however, in my opinion the preferred difficulty level to achieve it should be "General" and not "Colonel" and hence "General" is the recommended difficulty level for this mod. The only difference between these two is that the "AI level" is set to "1" for Colonel and "2" for General. Other than that both sides get neutral experience and prestige in both cases. Although the exact nature of the difference between the AI levels have never been clearly explained by the developer, as far as I understand, level 2 is the highest which makes the AI play the smartest. And thus I always tested and created the scenario with this AI level in mind as the AI sometimes plays quite silly even at this highest setting. In fact I have never even tried playing Panzer Corps with any lower AI level, so I am not even sure of the difference. Nevertheless, I tried to build in some tweaks and scripts to make the AI a bit smarter in some situations but some of the scripts and AI unit settings may have an adverse effect if played with any lower than AI level 2. Keeping all this in mind I am of course still very happy that you were able to achieve a total victory and proved that the mod can be fully played with AI level 1 as well.
The other thing that I noticed in some of the screenshots was that you might have played with fog of war switched off? That is all enemy units are visible on the map even if not in the actual spotting range of a friendly unit? I might be wrong, but if so, would you explain your reason for that? I would think that seeing every enemy unit takes away some of the fun and makes ground and air recon units somewhat useless.
As for your suggestions:
You know that McGuba is working with next version which will be harder.
It may not be harder, just hopefully more realistic. With other words, I will take away a few things with one hand, but will give something with the other in return.
You know that McGuba is fan of realism but I really would like to see the extension of this mod to Pacific and Panama-USA-Canada.
I seriously doubt that it would be possible at this map scale with the current game engine. That would make the map many times bigger and would cause several problems. PzC was not designed with such huge maps in mind, even this one struggles at times. For the most part I think I have already passed the limits of this game engine and it is a small wonder that it still works.
1. Add one more theater of war beyond the Arctic Circle. This need a map extension on north of Norway, Finland and Russia and need cover territory of Petsamo and Murmansk. Hard battles were here.
It can be done by cutting map for 6-7 hexes in Africa's deserts where a many empty territories which were not used even for maneuvers.
This one comes up frequently. Although it is theoretically possible with the new exe which allows 256 AI zones instead of the current 32, it would still require a lot of work, mainly as I would need to rewrite many of the scripts due to changed coordinate numbers. Increasing the map to the south is not a problem as it does not interfere with the existing scripts, but any increase to the north would mess up all the existing coordinate based scripts as all "y" cooridinates would change by the added number. And now I have several versions of the same scenario which would of course multiply this task. Maybe I will do it one day, after I retire, but quite possibly you will need to wait for that several more years/decades... The coming next version still uses the older v1.31 exe with 32 zones only (which does not allow me to add more events, convoys, etc.), and even the release of this is seemingly delayed endlessly... but not forever.
Also note that the new 256 AI zone exe is still untested and using it to its full potential may cause unexpected problems or may even break the mod at some point. Therefore I wanted to be sure that the current changes work flawlessly with the current 32 AI zones version before starting to experiment with adding more AI zones.
2. New scripted events like a convoy PQ-17, St.Nazaire Raid (Operation Chariot) or Operations Anton and Lila.
Yes these are all possible with the new exe and there may be new events if I decide to continue development later. Actually I would have more ambitious ideas than just adding somewhat local events like these. But for now let's just wait for the next version as that will bring quite a lot of other changes.
3. Extension of units roster. I would like to see more Finnish units, Italian paras and combat engineers, more heavy artillery units, more naval units (probably this is under construction) and different coastal defense batteries (probably this is under construction too).
You are right, some of these are coming with the new version, with some others, too.
4. For me needs to add one more hex to width of English Channel and Strait of Dover.
I am not going to move the whole of Britain by one hex to the north only to make the English Strait a bit wider. That would require me to redraw the whole British Isles for that purpose. The editor is not as user friendly as one would think. One cannot just copy paste or move whole areas all over, this would have to be made hex by hex. But bombarding across will not be as easy as before due to the new coastal guns on both sides of the Channel. In v2.0, Winnie and Pooh and their "friends" will make the life of a German artillery gunner near Calais quite difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Strait_coastal_guns
