BJR Mod Suggestion

[ncali]

Thanks for all your hard work with the mod - the new hardcoded house rules look great. I'm impressed with your coding, so I thought I'd suggest something that I've suggested in various forms before version 2.00. I think that the Germans should receive a blitzkrieg bonus on the West Front in 1940 to account for initial, tactical surprise against the French. I think this would also work well with your new weather rules, which should encourage a slightly more historical German attack in 1940.

I'd propose that on the Axis turn (or subsequent Allied turn if that's easier) that Germany declares war on Belgium, all British and French (and possibly Belgian) forces in Western Europe receive a -20 to efficiency, similar to what happens to Axis forces in Russian winter.

[rkr1958]

Thanks for all your hard work with the mod - the new hardcoded house rules look great. I'm impressed with your coding, so I thought I'd suggest something that I've suggested in various forms before version 2.00. I think that the Germans should receive a blitzkrieg bonus on the West Front in 1940 to account for initial, tactical surprise against the French. I think this would also work well with your new weather rules, which should encourage a slightly more historical German attack in 1940.

I'd propose that on the Axis turn (or subsequent Allied turn if that's easier) that Germany declares war on Belgium, all British and French (and possibly Belgian) forces in Western Europe receive a -20 to efficiency, similar to what happens to Axis forces in Russian winter.

Intriguing!

[rkr1958]

Thanks for all your hard work with the mod - the new hardcoded house rules look great. I'm impressed with your coding, so I thought I'd suggest something that I've suggested in various forms before version 2.00. I think that the Germans should receive a blitzkrieg bonus on the West Front in 1940 to account for initial, tactical surprise against the French. I think this would also work well with your new weather rules, which should encourage a slightly more historical German attack in 1940.

I'd propose that on the Axis turn (or subsequent Allied turn if that's easier) that Germany declares war on Belgium, all British and French (and possibly Belgian) forces in Western Europe receive a -20 to efficiency, similar to what happens to Axis forces in Russian winter.

Intriguing!

This was such a popular suggestion among our team that we decided to put it on our list. I thought we might defer it but Borger prototyped it and Tim implemented it last night.

The way we implemented is that the efficiency drop is defined through the "general.txt" file and is applied to all countries that are DOW'ed. The amount of drop is defined on a per country basis. In general, we sent the efficiency drop to -20. For some countries (e.g., Yugoslavia, Greece) we sent it to -10 or even to 0 (e.g., USA, Italy). We even give Russia -20 hit on the first turn they're invaded. Also, France gets an efficiency hit when the Germans invaded Belgium. We decided not to drop UK's efficiency because of a Belgium invasion. However; all this can be controlled via setting defined in the general.txt file.

[Amandil]

Same topic, different suggestion:

(and I wouldn't be surprised if you've already given this some thought)

Now that there's a nice DAK armour unit sitting patiently in Tunis awaiting the Italian entry into the war, wouldn't it be similarly cool to have a nice BEF mech inf (or corps?) unit sitting patiently in Belgium awaiting a German DOW on the country?

Just a thought, anyway, arising from the fact that when I invaded the Benelux & France in my first ever game of BJR, there weren't any Brits there to contend with.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

First I would like to explain a bit further Ronnie's comments about efficiency loss. I set the normal efficiency loss to -10 (including USSR), but set it to -20 for some countries (Vichy France, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Denmark and Norway). Countries like Egypt, Iraq, Free France, USA and Italy won't lose any efficiency from DoW because we don't want people to exploit DoW'ing countries just before they would join anyway.

The efficiency loss applies to all units within the country that's affected by efficiency loss. So if the British have a BEF inside France then also these units would suffer the blitzkrieg morale loss when Germany DoW Belgium. But British units in Britain won't suffer the loss.

This change means that using the Sitzkrieg strategy is now a good idea. In the vanilla game or BJR-mod v1.06 or earlier you just attacked Holland and Belgium as soon as possible and captured France in April 1940.

In BJR-mod v2.00a1 we added winter weather in Europe and arrival of active minor country reinforcements each january turn. So it was a good strategy to knock Holland out of the war in October / November 1939 and start the assault on Belgium in January 1940. Then France would fall in June after some heavy losses.

With the first turn morale loss it's probably better to wait till March 1940 (when the winter ends) to attack and conquer Belgium in one turn. It's actually very easy to take out Belgium in one turn if you do it properly. It's possible for Germany to have 3 fighters and 3 tac bombers by March 1940. That should be sufficient to take out Belgium easily in one turn. Next turn you can attack France while they're still suffering from the first turn morale loss. So far playtesting has shown that France falls in June 27th 1940, but with quite low losses to the Germans. If the British engage more to the battle then the losses will be higher, but the British will suffer a lot too.

So now the Sitzkrieg option for the first time can be a good option to choose by the Axis.

We've decided to not force the players too much and give freedom to do other things. So we decided to remove the DAK in Libya being ready while Italy joins the Axis. One option was to spawn the DAK in Tripoli in February 1941 as when it arrives historically. But we dropped that as well. One reason was that many Axis players just moved the DAK back to Europe and to the eastern front or as a reserve in France. Not all Axis players want to attack towards Egypt so they want to use the DAK elsewhere.

Instead we removed the DAK and added the Swedish iron ore resource to Germany (3 PP's / turn). Sweden provided this resource to Germany historically and now the Allies has a reason to land in Norway and try to grab the resource from Germany. These extra PP's / turn will be sufficient for Germany to finance an extra armor unit before Barbarossa. That means they can send this armor unit to Libya if they want or use the PP's on something else. This means we give the Axis player freedom to select his next actions instead of pushing him in a historical direction.

For the same reason I think it's not right to let Britain start with a BEF corps in France. Britain can easily send their mech corps near Birmingham or one or more of the Canadian units to France if they like. That should be up to the British player and not us. It's silly if the British player starts with a corps in France and then decides to not risk losing it. Then he must pay 8 PP's to get it back to Britain. It's better to let it start at home.

The big map changes will also affect game balance so we have a lot of testing to do to get feedback data. So far the game seems quite balanced till the fall of France at least, but we will know more when the betatesters start testing next week.

We've currently frozen the changes for BJR-mod v2.00 so we can get to the beta phase and hopefully to a released version not so far into the future. The betatesters will soon start working to find bugs and game balance issues.

[Amandil]

Sounds cool, I figgered you'd have put more thought into this than I! Keep up the great work.

[ncali]

The efficiency loss applies to all units within the country that's affected by efficiency loss. So if the British have a BEF inside France then also these units would suffer the blitzkrieg morale loss when Germany DoW Belgium. But British units in Britain won't suffer the loss.

Your changes sound great. I like the implementation of a bit of a blitzkrieg/surprise bonus elsewhere, such as in the Soviet Union. One question - this only effects units in France. So that would mean you could exempt the French air force from the effects by basing it in Britain? I don't think this is a big deal, but I thought I'd mention it. (The French would probably initially just put the air on sleep anyway.)