Slitherine

The latest diary has been added at http://www.slitherine.com/commander/

We're planning to enter the Independent Games Festival (IGF) with both Arena Warriors and Commander - Europe at War, so the last month has been spent focussing on getting a playable version for the judges.

iainmcneil wrote: I have also been experimenting with animated GIF??™s on the map (who does not want to see smoke come out of a factory or see an ocean wave hit a coast hex?),

I don??™t.

This is a grand strategy game. Such things will give the appearance of a cheap children??™s game instead of a wargame.

iainmcneil wrote: We're also trying to decide what to call this statistic - morale or effectiveness. It's a combination of the units supply level, morale, leadership, equipment, organisation etc

Call it effectiveness. ???Morale??? would be misleading.

When you call for testers I am keen to volunteer

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Proficiency is shorter.

I don't care whether factories smoke and waves splash or not - as long as you aren't using programming time on them that could be better spent in sortign out game play!!


However this makes little sense to me:

First, the effectiveness/morale regain is now proportional to the amount lost meaning that if 2 units start at 100 and one is reduced to 0 and the other one to 90, then the one at 0 regains more effectiveness/morale. This means it will take longer to recover from disruption, allowing tank shock attacks and air strikes to have on going effects.

Uh....the one reduced to 0 is ALWAYS going to take longer to recover isn't it, unless you have some system whereby units always increase to 100 after 1 turn or something equally silly?

IMO a shattered unit is likely to have to be withdrawn from the line rather than just left in a quiet area - somethign reduced to 0 should be withdrawn and given several months refitting and reinforcement befoer being used again. Something reduced to 90 might be allowed to stay in the line in a quiet area to recover.

Yes the shattered unit will always take longer to recover, but per turn it is going to be recovering more points than a string unit. Our intention was to encourage unit rotation so worn down units had to be withdrawn from the line to rest.

The point with the system is, even a small disruption has a lasting effect!

Think about it, u hit a 100 morale unit down to 92. With a system where a unit gained 10-20 morale per turn, that unit would be at morale 100 again next turn , but contrary with our system the 100-92=8 lost morale points are regained by a fraction of 8 , say at 50% per turn it would gain back 4 morale points on first turn going from 92->96 and then 96->98->99->99.5

What i want now...SCREENSHOTS!!!

especially for Arena: Warriors....gee i can't wait to start playing this...

I can see the diary's now ie before there were people that could not read them.

I like the idea of a repair mode - most games like this the first thing you do is scan your units and seek the ones out that you need to repair the most.

I'm not sure if animated gifs will really be necessary or not ...

I'm not sure if you guys (developers) have played strategic command 2; I was a big fan of SG1 even thou the AI wasnt too great (in all honesty it mainly had to do with the fact that there wasnt really a grandscale game out there to play).
What were our options? Clash of steel? and High command? or maybe Hearts of Iron but that game doesnt really fit the bill necessarily.
My point being is that SG2's single player game is pretty poor (and I have a feeling that the company lost some people to that franchise because of this (ie I doubt I will be buying SG3 because of the poor SG2 single player game).
So my suggestion is to look what is wrong with the single player game of SG2 and try to make it better in CEaW (commander europe at war).

Some things I like so far ... the map (awesome looking); the oil system; the addition of light tanks, the use of commanders sounds good

firepowerjohan wrote:The point with the system is, even a small disruption has a lasting effect!

Was there every any question otherwise?

Think about it, u hit a 100 morale unit down to 92. With a system where a unit gained 10-20 morale per turn, that unit would be at morale 100 again next turn , but contrary with our system the 100-92=8 lost morale points are regained by a fraction of 8 , say at 50% per turn it would gain back 4 morale points on first turn going from 92->96 and then 96->98->99->99.5

Yes I understand that..........but I dont' understand why a shattered unit should recover effectiveness really quickly - eg would a unit at 0 regain (say) 50% of 100 = 50?

That seesm far too fast from me.

I'd much rather see teh shatrtered unit also only getting 4 points, so it has to be out of hte line for a long time.

SYSTEM1:
Say you have 5 air units, and you attack 5 enemy units, one attack on each. Enemy units start on Effectiveness 100.

Say for simplicity, all air attacks score 10 effectiveness losses.

Means the enemy air units are at

90
90
90
90
90

with a system that makes unit say regain 10 effectiveness per turn, those 5 units would be at

100
100
100
100
100

next turn, so those 5 units regained 50 points in total meaning if you attack several units you will have problem keeping them under pressure.

This means that the only way for getting benefit is you attack all 5 air on same unit so that it goes from 100->50 and then regain to 60 next turn.

SYSTEM2:
You have 5 air units, attack 5 different enemy units, they score 10 effectiveness points and the regain is 30% per turn.

90
90
90
90
90

next turn the units will be at

93
93
93
93
93

So your attacks had some effects.

Contrary, you attack all 5 air units on one enemy using this system.

Enemy goes from 100->50

next turn enemy will regain 30% out of 50 so enemy morale will be at 65.





RESULT:
Compare the 2 systems. In the first system, the only point was attacking everything on a single target and in the second system both ways had effect while attacking a unit heavily still means it is gonna take a while before it recover.




Effectivness penalties:
Another thing that is better IMO is that with system 2 you can really balance the game in a good way using small effectiveness penalties.

Say you want a penalty so that moving a unit means losing 5 effect points. With the new system, that penalty is not just gone in one turn but actually have a small effect

Examples:
Moving unit -4 effectiveness
Naval Landing -15 effectiveness
Rail Movement - 8 effect.

With the old system, moving a unit or doing a naval landing would after 2 turns be at same level (because of regaining 10 points per turn) while in the new system the naval landed unit would still have a considerable penalty left.

I hope you will be ready with the game soon. And to firepowerjohan I will say: Gongratulations, 30 years today.

RESULT:
Compare the 2 systems. In the first system, the only point was attacking everything on a single target and in the second system both ways had effect while attacking a unit heavily still means it is gonna take a while before it recover.

Yes I understand that - I'm obviously not making myself clear enough.

The math is easy, although I dont really know why yuo call a set recovery amount "the old system" - proportional recovery is something that has been around for a very long time - it's nothing new.

What I don't understand is why a badly distupted unit recovers more than a slightly disrupted one. Why shouldn't a slightly disrupted unit recover to "full" strength in a single time period? Such a system almost encourages you to keep disrupted units in line, because they will recover a relatively large amount of effectiveness very quickly.

The basic third system is to recover stength proportionally to however much strength you have left - usually with a minimum amount each turn so that very low strength units do recover eventually. Eg recover 10% of that you have left, or 5, whichever is greater.

So a 90% unit would recover 9 points, a 50% one would only recover 5 points - and a 0% one would also recover only 5 points, or whatever the minimum was - obviously you adjust teh percentages and minimum to suit what you want for game play.

This kind of system makes it much more important to remove disrupted units for refit/repair, because leaving them in the line simply exposes them to more attacks before they can recover much effectiveness.

We're also trying to decide what to call this statistic - morale or effectiveness. It's a combination of the units supply level, morale, leadership, equipment, organisation etc. If you have any thoughts on what it shoudl be called - let us know them on the forum!

Personally, I prefer Morale to name this statistic. But a more important thing is that, since it is a function of other parameters, why not make them all available/readable (ie popup? perhaps only in "advanced mode/grognard mode". If you store it, why hide it?

The strength statistic also should be considered consisting of personel status and equipment status. Separating the two could give a more realistic approach to the unit's experience parameter when taking losses or reinforcing (affecting also perhaps cost of reinforcing). In addition to that, this could visualize mechanical breakdowns or wear. Recover/repair type units to pick up repairable equiment (also enemy's) would also add depth, or even returning downed pilots/pow/others at beginning of turn

I will definately run to the store for this game when it's out. Have been waiting for the rebirth of PG for years. Hopefully it will make a success. I hope that the foundation is made scalable enough to implement stacking (could perhaps be achieved by zooming further where 1 hex is split to 7 hexes)/rules of engagement/order types etc in the sequel

I am available for beta testing, i am working in software development.

Cheers from Norway
??T

I've been an advocate of that configuration before, one hex is simply 7 smaller ones.

Now this leads to all kinds of possibilities. The middle hex could be your airfield, abstractly. You can interject facing rules for combat effectiveness. When zoomed out small icons would represent your hex side locations, observed appropriately.

Depending on the unit type variation and location(like a triangle deployment), combined arms bonuses may be in effect for both attack and defense.

There are numerous variations, even up to the effectiveness of adjacent ZoC on the enemy, again dependent on the deployment configuration.

Naahhhh!!! To much micromanagement.

I am aware that I??™m probably not speaking for the majority of players, but it might make interesting for Slitherine to see the prospects??™ different views of this.

User Shikai has also done a very interesting post regarding this
http://www.slitherine.com/eslitherine/f ... 18fc2d5add

Personally i would love to see more micro management. The main reason for this is that the map style does not seem to ???fit??? the complex system of terrain properties related to entrenchment, as explained in the August diary. A big city can often cover no more than one hex to fit the scale. To make it worse it may be surrounded by indefendable hexes, which hardly requires any planning/skills from the attacker. In this case, the city/key objective where you??™d expect a big fight can practically be defended by just 1 unit.

It would be very interesting to get a comment if/how the system is compensating for this issue. In my opinion this was not handled very well in the old PG series.

A 1->7 hex split/zoom could also make use of PeG/PG3 style maps, which in my view are a definate advantage compared to PG1 style maps. Such a system of course should still be playable on the default zoom levels (not allowing ???stacking???).

These environmental issues is why I always ended up enjoying the desert scenarios (PG1-3, PeG), where terrain properties are of less importance, increasing the feel of ???realism???.

Earlier I heard the idea of mixed unit types with points for soft, armour, air, navy, density assigned to units would provide a sort of stacking. I also seen that in a freeware game. We have come too far in this game to change that mechanism and get it to work with battle formulas and all that.
As for having a hex contain 7 areas, that could work better if we had bigger units so that you can fit more than a Corps inside a hex but also would mean we make bigger hexes since 150x72 would maybe be too great then. In World At War there is this kind of stacking but it is like comparing apples and oranges because it would produce a totally different game. The idea with such system would probably be that you could set stances and missions for units. Maybe for a sequel, but I welcome the ideas it is very interesting to hear them I am curious, how many units did the sides have in PG at most?

In CEAW, Axis and Allies will maybe have 80 units each (at leist) in 1942-1945.

Johan -

Max number of units on one side in Panzer General varied quite a bit from scenario to scenario. I'd say absolute max was roughly 35-40, with most scenarios being closer to half that.

The one scenario I am thinking of is the Balkans/Greece scenario, where you have to bail the Italians out. That one is huge, both in map size and in number of units, and probably approaches 40 units on the Axis side.

But keep in mind that PG was not a game on the same scale as EAW will be...