Slitherine

Makarska ( 24,18 ) is missing a flag on the Balkans map.

Fixed, thanks for reporting.
I'll likely be releasing a new version by the weekend.

After getting bogged down a bit with my Spanish Civil War campaign (which was supposed to be a mere starting mission for an expanded version of this campaign) I returned to working directly on PG Classic for a while.
Currently, I'm in the process of recreating all missing units that were in the original PG but not in PzC.
I'll then try to re-examine each map to replace units I swapped with alternate units with the supposed PG units.
Next step will be balancing the Moscow maps as was discussed.

Afterwards, we'll see. I'm thinking of creating an optional replacement equipment file featuring unit stats from PG.
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rezaf

Another note on the Crete map, I think it's better to increase German Air Transport Capacity to 12 or 14, to accomodate Core Paratroopers. I personally had 2 veteran troopers from Norway who would've been forced on sea transports, had I not demanded that the High Command allow them to join in (ie Edited them some slots).

Also the initial sea transport deployment zone is too small to accommodate a large land-unit core (8 aircraft+23 land units+3 SE units for me, had to leave some to deploy on the first turn), is this by design?

Fimconte wrote:Another note on the Crete map, I think it's better to increase German Air Transport Capacity to 12 or 14, to accomodate Core Paratroopers. I personally had 2 veteran troopers from Norway who would've been forced on sea transports, had I not demanded that the High Command allow them to join in (ie Edited them some slots).

Also the initial sea transport deployment zone is too small to accommodate a large land-unit core (8 aircraft+23 land units+3 SE units for me, had to leave some to deploy on the first turn), is this by design?

I had the same deployment issue in Norway and Crete. I used the Air cheat code to increase aircraft slots. I have not found an in game workaround for additional deploy hexes for land units/sea transport. Later will adjust using scenario editor.

CampaignV 014 test and update. Modified the campaign.pzdat file in order to iclude more scenarios. Up to Kharkov 43 and no campaign crashes or bugs to report. AI not very aggressive so far playing on colonel difficulty. I am certain this will improve on higher difficulty setting. After the Balkans scenario Germans accumulating too much prestige. Also it looks as if the Allies are not awarded enough points. This also mat resolve on higher difficulty? When I finish the campaign I will go back and adjust prestige awards.

Rezaf, I am enjoying the fruits of your labor immensely. Thanks again.

BriteLite wrote:

Fimconte wrote:Another note on the Crete map, I think it's better to increase German Air Transport Capacity to 12 or 14, to accomodate Core Paratroopers. I personally had 2 veteran troopers from Norway who would've been forced on sea transports, had I not demanded that the High Command allow them to join in (ie Edited them some slots).

Also the initial sea transport deployment zone is too small to accommodate a large land-unit core (8 aircraft+23 land units+3 SE units for me, had to leave some to deploy on the first turn), is this by design?

I had the same deployment issue in Norway and Crete. I used the Air cheat code to increase aircraft slots. I have not found an in game workaround for additional deploy hexes for land units/sea transport. Later will adjust using scenario editor.

Well, conratulations gentlemen, you just cheated. These limits weren't picked arbitarily by me, that's how these missions were designed in PG - I double checked to be sure.
The whole idea of the first version of this mod was/is to replicate PG as closely as possible, and thus I have tried NOT to adjust anything like force limits and deployment zone sizes.

You feedback is still valuable, I will consider makind mission adjustments down the road, but on the other hand, I guess it's intentional that you aren't able to employ the full force of your army in Crete...

BriteLite wrote:CampaignV 014 test and update. Modified the campaign.pzdat file in order to iclude more scenarios. Up to Kharkov 43 and no campaign crashes or bugs to report. AI not very aggressive so far playing on colonel difficulty. I am certain this will improve on higher difficulty setting.

Yeah, I have to admit I made this experience as well - much of the AI in the original PzC campaign is sheer make-believe by aggressive placement of units when designing maps and by generous prestige per turn allotments.
At least on standard difficulty, most actual difficulty comes from the high costs of units and reinforements and from tight time limits on some missions.
In turn, some of the classic PG missions are almost impossible to DV, like the Moscow scenarios, but others are a total walkover.

BriteLite wrote:After the Balkans scenario Germans accumulating too much prestige. Also it looks as if the Allies are not awarded enough points. This also mat resolve on higher difficulty? When I finish the campaign I will go back and adjust prestige awards.

Now, that's entirely my fault, and I think I outlined it in the OP, too. This is probably the area where most balancing is still in order. In my last playthrough I did the "long russia" route, and at times, I had 3000 spare prestige AFTER elite-reinforcing every single of my units. Then again, I think I had like 20 free unit slots in the last missions, and it's not that I'd been able to afford that many high end units with 3000 prestige.
Plus, I actually dropped from 2600 to 250 in one scenario for all the repairs I had to make...
Anyway, definately some finetuning is in order.

It's a bit unfortunate that your feedback loses a lot of it's usefulness since you basically didn't play the campaign as-is, but felt free to edit slots and even alter the campaign path to include more missions. I can understand why you did it (and you can naturally play however you want), but of course that throws the difficulty off balance - if there's two missions on two different campaign branches that each give 5000 prestige to prepare you for an upcoming hard fight, but you played both, you'll naturally be swimming in prestige a normal player would not dream of...

BriteLite wrote:Rezaf, I am enjoying the fruits of your labor immensely. Thanks again.

I'm glad you've been able to get some enjoyment out of my mod despite running into several issues. Thank you for playing.
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rezaf

rezaf wrote:
Well, conratulations gentlemen, you just cheated. These limits weren't picked arbitarily by me, that's how these missions were designed in PG - I double checked to be sure.
The whole idea of the first version of this mod was/is to replicate PG as closely as possible, and thus I have tried NOT to adjust anything like force limits and deployment zone sizes.

You feedback is still valuable, I will consider makind mission adjustments down the road, but on the other hand, I guess it's intentional that you aren't able to employ the full force of your army in Crete...

You can still use your full army in Crete though. You just deploy the rest of them on the first turn.
I'm not sure how PG solved it, but if there was a limit to the amount of core troops you can bring, then perhaps reduce the core limit for Crete, similar to how you can bring only 18(?) Core units to Kiev in PzC.

rezaf wrote: Yeah, I have to admit I made this experience as well - much of the AI in the original PzC campaign is sheer make-believe by aggressive placement of units when designing maps and by generous prestige per turn allotments.
At least on standard difficulty, most actual difficulty comes from the high costs of units and reinforements and from tight time limits on some missions.
In turn, some of the classic PG missions are almost impossible to DV, like the Moscow scenarios, but others are a total walkover.

What I noticed earlier and especially in the Balkans is that the AI does some terrible moves when baited.
A 9 Fortified Infantry in a city moves out to attack a river Opel Truck (Poor Italians, used as bait), then gets wiped out.
But this happened in PzC as well, so it's inherent to the AI and not really a issue with the mod.

rezaf wrote:
Now, that's entirely my fault, and I think I outlined it in the OP, too. This is probably the area where most balancing is still in order. In my last playthrough I did the "long russia" route, and at times, I had 3000 spare prestige AFTER elite-reinforcing every single of my units. Then again, I think I had like 20 free unit slots in the last missions, and it's not that I'd been able to afford that many high end units with 3000 prestige.
Plus, I actually dropped from 2600 to 250 in one scenario for all the repairs I had to make...
Anyway, definately some finetuning is in order.

It's a bit unfortunate that your feedback loses a lot of it's usefulness since you basically didn't play the campaign as-is, but felt free to edit slots and even alter the campaign path to include more missions. I can understand why you did it (and you can naturally play however you want), but of course that throws the difficulty off balance - if there's two missions on two different campaign branches that each give 5000 prestige to prepare you for an upcoming hard fight, but you played both, you'll naturally be swimming in prestige a normal player would not dream of...

At the start of Balkans I had 4000 Prestige left after Overstrength/Upgrades. This on Field Marshal & all DV until Sealion 40 (Marginal for access to Balkans+Crete).
I did wait around on almost all the maps before taking the last victory point on the last DV turn, thus earning quite a bit of prestige from that.

rezaf wrote: I'm glad you've been able to get some enjoyment out of my mod despite running into several issues. Thank you for playing.
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rezaf

I echo BriteLite's thoughts, the mod is great and has given me another incentive to play PzC.

Yes. It's a good campaign, rezaf.
I've not played much PC lately, but I tried a little your campaign.
I liked it very much.
Thanks for all your efforts.

Hallo!

When once PG to PzC conversion creating, have you considered about corrections of bugs in original scenarios?
Details:

http://hartmann.valka.cz/panzergeneral/ ... eindex.htm
http://hartmann.valka.cz/panzergeneral/ ... index1.htm (CZ only - use Google translated)

Pepa Hallo! Pepa is one of the old timers from PG and JP's Panzers. He has done extensive research into all areas of PG related and historical. His knowledge base is phenomenal. Very happy to see you Pepa.

Rezaf I hope you didn't think my posts were criticisms of your excellent work. I knew ahead of time deployment would be a limitation especially in Crete and that this was designed in the original game. An airborne assault that limits the inclusion of core troops while forcing the use of aux units never made any sense to me.

For me the value of your efforts is two fold. Obvious is the additional scenarios allowing for a longer and fuller campaign. My opinion is PzC shipped with short campaigns by design. The developers counted on the game community "modders" such as yourself to develop scenarios, campaigns equipment etc. If not so we would not have file types that can be accessed. Nor would we have a game editor.

I had attempted with limited success to produce alternate campaigns in PG and PGForever. Truthfully though I understood the concept of campaign structure I was unable to grasp and quickly "see" what could be done. That is until you published PG Classic mod. I finally realized how it worked and how you made your changes.

Thank you again.

BriteLite wrote:Rezaf I hope you didn't think my posts were criticisms of your excellent work.

Not at all, I mainly created this thread to get bug reports and feedback from actual people playing this, as I knew I wouldn't have time to do MAJOR work on it when working (I created most of a campaign when I had a week off and the weather was pretty bad...).
I'm still actively working on the campaign, too.
I've now recreated about 80%, maybe even a bit more of all missing units from PGF.
I also converted most stuff (stats, cost etc.) from what it was in PG - I only need to do the traits, the rest is done.

When I'll release the next version, it'll be a major release in need of a lot of additional playtesting - to see wether the PzC engine works well with units given PG1 stats.
I can also cut back prestige rewards to PG levels, because stuff will be MUCH cheaper again.
I'm thinking about finding a middle ground later - some PG1 units seem VERY cheap, but one step after another.

Here's a little teaser for the added units:


@Pepa:
Thanks for those links. Many bugs do no longer apply to PgF for various reasons, but others might still be worth looking at, I'll get to looking at these links more in-depth when I finally get a chance to work on scenarios again.
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rezaf

I've been playing this mod for the past two weeks or so. I really like it. It is well done, most scenarios are balanced and enjoyable and the maps are cool, especially the desert ones.
I have a few observations.
In the North Africa scenario there is an Italian artillery unit that starts out in a clear hex that is surrounded by marsh/swamp. It can't move.
In the Beylorussia scenario the AI won't move forward. I wanted to try to get an MV so I retreated from turn 1 and the AI only advanced to take the first city in the lower right hand portion of the map and then did nothing. I'm not sure if you can do anything about this as the AI in pretty clueless in Panzer Corp to in certain scenarios.
The North Africa scenarios seem to have too many turns to get a DV. I'm not the greatest player and I had no problem getting DV's in every North African scenario with many turns to spare. I think the time to get a DV should be shortened in them.
I have never been close to getting a DV in any of the Moscow scenarios. Between the many defensive lines, short time frame and the one objective way in the East I don't even try to get a DV.
I think there are a few to many Elephants in the Kursk scenario and they are really overwhelming. I think they were only deloyed on the Northern front and there were a lot of Panthers on the Southern front. Maybe consider making the Elephants in the south Panthers.
I played on the default difficult and I had a lot of prestiege, over 12,000 after El Alalmein. It wouldn't be a bad idea to tone the prestiege down a bit.
Thanks for making this mod, it's really good.

I finally got to Stalingrad and found there a re a few airfields without flags. One is up north next to Voronezh (maybe as I'm not at the game). The other is behind the German starting positions in the South.

MartyWard, thanks for playing the mod and for your feedback - it's very much appreciated.

A few points:
Are you sure you've been playing the latest version? The current version of the NA scenario has the artillery on a swamp tile so it can move out, and changelog indicates it was on the last update.

The AI often does totally unpredictable stuff - I've had it disband all it's forces when playing the invasion of Sicily in the original Panzer Corps campaign. Not sure if I can do anything about the problems with my campaign, but I'll look into it.

Turn length for all scenarios are identical (unless I made an error) to their counterparts in PG, but it's true, the often very different unit balance in PzC makes it so some of PGs scenarios are now very easy, others borderline impossible (like the Moscow scenarios).
I've toyed around with the force composition a bit in the Moscow scenarios, but haven't yet finalized the changes. I'll see about looking into the african levels in the same manner.
I try to make as little changes to the PG levels as possible, but I realize in some cases, changes are necessary.

Prestige (or excessive amounts of it) is definately an issue. If you have specific suggestions, I'll be glad to consider them, otherwise you'll have to wait until I get to playtest more, then I'll try to cook up some more sensible numbers. It's not really easy to strike the right balance here - PG units are usually SO much cheaper, and you get prestige for combat...
Wish you could edit the gamerules file and make the game work exactly as PG worked. Most of the changes to the formula I'm not too thrilled about. But for now, it'll have to do, I guess.

I added the missing flags to the airfields in Stalingrad, thanks for pointing those out.

Ah well, I guess I'll have to roll back some of my more ambitious equipment file changes for the time being to be able to release a new version of the mod in a remotely timely manner.
I did finish PG-versions of all units that were in both games, but there's a throng of units that are only in PzC, and a lot of it is "filler" material like lots of Trains, Trucks etc., and minor power units etc.
Making PG versions of their stats is annoying gruntwork, time consuming and also error-prone - I often have a hard time placing unit values in an area that "feels" balanced.
Also, the release of 1.01 gave me a little pause - every new balance update won't be reflected in the mod for no real reason. It's not terribly important, but still.
Not the least, I'm not having fun. Crunching numbers in speadsheets can be terribly boring, especially if it's all there is to do...

Ah, we'll see, for the time being, thanks again for the feedback.
_____
rezaf

I will check the version this weekend. I'm at work at the moment.
Regarding Prestiege I think there were some scenarios where I received ~250-300 per turn, maybe that is part of the reason I have so much. I'm not sure which ones they were though. I do know that in the early scenarions I didn't have an overwhelming amount, after reinforcing I would have maybe 1,000 left to buy new units. IIRC it was after France or Africa that my number started to rise. I had over 20,000 when I started Stalingrad.

I'm using version 0.14.

A bit of a conflict with two mods.


I loaded up the sound mod from VPaulus and then tried to load the Panzer General 0.14.
Received an error "efx.pzdat has already been altered by the VPaulus Sounds mod.”

Anyone run in to this before with the Gen Mod Enabler?

And what might be modified in the efx file with the Panzer General mod? If I allow the sound mod to take precedence, will that mess up the PG mod?

If we're sharing the same file there will be a conflict. That's what I'm afraid will happen with the kind of mods, like the Real Sound Mod. We need better mod support, but I don't have much hope that this kind of collisions will be avoidable.

What I can do Xerkis, is at least if people request so, I can alter and make a special version of my mod in order to work with other mods.
My problem is if the modder will alter their efx file, version after version.
This was the problems that I was afraid when I was doing the Real Sound Mod.

But with rezaf's mod I'm more than interested to make a working version of my sound mod. The only thing that will change is the efx file. So, Xerkis, stay tuned because I'll do it and announce it here and in the Real Sound Mod's thread.

There's a workout in the Real Sound Mod thread, for those who want to combine the two mods.

Sorry rezaf, for derailing a little, your thread.

Thanks VPaulus, I look in to it tomorrow… I’m sitting here with only one eye open