Slitherine

One of the beta testers has suggested that the at start Canadian air strength is much higher (10 strength) than it really was in 1939. The Royal Canadian Air Force grew to a large air force later in the war. Britain had quite alot of fighters so having 2 in Britain could be supported.

The suggested change is to reduce the 1939 at start Canadian fighter from 10 strength to only 3 strength. Instead a second British fighter is placed in Britain at 10 strength. This means the net increase in strength for the UK is 1 3 strengh fighter.

To compensate for that it's suggested that Germany starts with a third fighter at 3 strength. This fighter will be located in central Germany outside any range of interceptions. The German fighter OOB for 1939 support having more than 2 fighters.

Germany will usually build a 3rd fighter after the labs in each area have been bought. Then they often build another tactical bomber. Now they can instead repair this fighter from 3 to 10 steps and have it ready a little earlier. This should make sure the Germans have air parity when they launch Case Yellow (either late 1939 or in the spring of 1940).

If Germany repairs the fighter right away then they can't afford to get one lab in each area immediately and will sacrifice some lab progress.

The British can't afford to repair the Canadian fighter for some time for 2 reasons. One is that they need to get some labs as well and repairing the fighter will delay the lab builds. The second is that UK has manpower less than 75% so repairing the Canadian fighter will introduce a -1 quality to the fighter.

I want your feedback if you would welcome such change for accuracy or keep things as is?

Another solution could be to do the following:
Canadian fighter reduced to 3 steps
New British fighter added at 7 steps
New French tactical bomber introduced at 3 steps (France had a bomber force that GS doesn't have)
New German fighter added at 3 steps

What do you think? We don't want to introduce changes to a critical time of GS without having support from many players that this is really an improvement instead of a source for a balance problem.

Stauffenberg wrote:Another solution could be to do the following:
Canadian fighter reduced to 3 steps
New British fighter added at 7 steps
New French tactical bomber introduced at 3 steps (France had a bomber force that GS doesn't have)
New German fighter added at 3 steps

What do you think? We don't want to introduce changes to a critical time of GS without having support from many players that this is really an improvement instead of a source for a balance problem.

That suggestion adds 2 allied air units versus 1 axis air unit. Do you think that might present a small balance problem? If the intention is to weight the play balance towards the allies then this would seems like a wise addition.

Also: Neither CEAW or the GS user made scenario are close to matching real world unit counts from September 1939, so 'country x had a bomber' seems like an arbitrary and haphazard way to justify a unit change.

BuddyGrant wrote:

Stauffenberg wrote:Another solution could be to do the following:
Canadian fighter reduced to 3 steps
New British fighter added at 7 steps
New French tactical bomber introduced at 3 steps (France had a bomber force that GS doesn't have)
New German fighter added at 3 steps

What do you think? We don't want to introduce changes to a critical time of GS without having support from many players that this is really an improvement instead of a source for a balance problem.

That suggestion adds 2 allied air units versus 1 axis air unit. Do you think that might present a small balance problem? If the intention is to weight the play balance towards the allies then this would seems like a wise addition.

Also: Neither CEAW or the GS user made scenario are close to matching real world unit counts from September 1939, so 'country x had a bomber' seems like an arbitrary and haphazard way to justify a unit change.

This set up change don´t have neccessary to affect game balance because of the reasons pointed by Borger (british will have to delay their air force built up until they get +75% manpower) and the 3 step tactical bomber is almost symbolical (french armee l´air had a large light bomber force with a lot of Potez 631´s) but I agree with you that if the new british fighter is at 7 steps, then the german fighter at 3 is a little bit short in strength (may be a 3rd german fighter at 5-6 steps sounds better)

I also agree that changes like these will not really affect the game balance in a significant way. However, I like slight changes like these, because they allow some new but not gamebreaking tactics in the opening phase of the game. This is good, because especially the opening phase can be very repetitive. Furthermore, if these changes are historically more "correct" so much the better.

For what its worth, I also support all attempts to make the game more historically accurate. I like the idea of the British getting another fighter at the beginning, even if it is at lower strength than 10 and the French getting their symbolic tac at 3. Keep up the great work!

Keep in mind, that repairing fighter even from 1 step to 10 is 54 PP only, while new one costs 100.
By the way, why unit with some steps (not 10) always turns into 10 steps transport? Isn't it more logical for number to stay the same?
So this weak canadian fighter will turn into low-strength transport and there will be real chance to sink it (when transport is 10 steps, you can move without escort at all almost safely - uboat will score 1 attack on it, but it has lower speed and can't pursue)

Plaid wrote:Keep in mind, that repairing fighter even from 1 step to 10 is 54 PP only, while new one costs 100.

To me more important than the PP savings you mention is the build time savings which sometimes seem to be overlooked in these 'game balance' discussions. Build time saved by having a unit start on the map is a significant value, especially for any at-start units, so in this example giving one side more air units is an advantage regardless of the initial unit strength.

This feature will be turned off by default in general.txt, but people can turn it on and decide for themselves the extra air units and how strong they will be. You can even decide where they should start. E. g. the French tactical bomber can start in Algeria if you like.

We decided after some discussion to NOT change the official GS version with the proposed changes because of a risk of game imbalance. It can't be helped that adding more air units would have been more accurate regarding the 1939 air unit OOB's.