Slitherine

I got my copy of CtGW last weekend from Steam and it runs very stable. Nevertheless I noticed some minor bugs and I have some suggestions to improve gameplay I want to share :

- Known minor Bug with Disbanding Units return CostPP as MP instead of CostMP. Can be easily fixed in game_deployment.lua.
- Small garrison outside city can move further away from city with free move from killing an enemy unit but then is stuck and cannot return to city anymore.
- If a river on the map is "below" an alliance border, the river cannot be seen. See western border of Serbia for example. This makes it very difficult/time-consuming to decide where to attack and where to defend.
- The seatiles near enemy ports which provide naval combat malus should be marked on the map, similar to the green seatiles around own ports. Otherwise the player will always have to count tiles near ports when moving.
- The statistics about kills is not working 100% correctly. If you kill the serbian garrison on turn 1 you can get 11 kills instead of 10. Maybe the overkill of last attack was counted, too.
- If a tech is in range of research (<=5 turns) and the respective labs are set to zero, the tech is still shown to finish in a few turns while it never really finishs.
- Research Speed for 1 lab is around 9 points per turn instead of expected 10 points from gameplay.researchSpeed = 10. (see my post in Mods)

- A statistic about lost/killed MP would be nice.
- Research : For every tech in Research Window there should be the number of turns until the tech is available displayed. Otherwise it is difficult to decide which tech to focus (or not to focus at all).
- Research : There should be an UNDO option when accidently focused / unfocused a tech since the focus points are consumed
- It seems that repairing units can cost too much PP / MP due to rounding when CostPP, CostMP of a unit are not dividable by 10. This seems to make the repair-bonus of 0,7 sometimes irrelevant. (Idea : scale all values by 10.)
- Serbia starts with 430 MP in 1914. The historical scale seems to be 1 MP equal to 10.000 men. Serbia is a small country with population of about 4-5 million in WW1. Therefore an MP of about 100 would be historically more appropriate, especially if you compare MP with France and Great Britain.
- gameplay.FreeUpkeep = 70 is a very strong bonus for all small nations which allows forces free of upkeep comparable with the size of German Army + Navy at start. It should be possible to solve this problem by rescaling starting PP, PP income for all factions (e.g. multiply PP Income by 2) and setting gameplay.FreeUpkeep to 0-10.
- PP-Income of Russia and Germany seem to be ahistorical. Germany starts with 75, Russia with 67. (compare with tables below)
- In WW1 Industrial Mobilization for War (= PP income) in some countrys increased from year to year by a high rate (see below : British arms production 14-18)

For historical scaling :
According to Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers :
Table 18 : relative World-Industry-Production 1913 : USA 32%, Germany 14.8%, Great Britain 13.6%, Russia 8.2%, France 6.1%, Austria 4.4%, Italy 2.4%,
Table 15 : total Steal Production 1913 (in million tons) : USA 31.8, Germany 17.6, Great Britain 7.7, Russia 4.8, France 4.6, Austria 2.6, Italy 0.93,
Table 21 : Total Income 1914 (in billion $) : USA 37, Germany 12, Great Britain 11, Russia 7, France 6, Italy 4, Austria 3
Table 23 : British arms production (type : 1914,15,16,17,18) : (artillery : 91, 3390, 4314, 5137, 8039), (airplanes : 200, 1900, 6100, 14700, 32000), (machine guns : 300, 6100, 33500, 79700, 120900)
Table 25 : War Effort 14-19 (in billion $) : British Empire 23.0, Germany 19.9, USA 17.1, France 9.3, Russia 5.4, Austria 4.7, Italy 3.2, others 0.1-0.3
Table 25 : Mobilization 14-19 (in million men) : Germany 13.25, Russia 13, British Empire 9.5, Austria 9.0, France 8.2, Italy 5.6, USA 3.8, others (CP) 2.85, others (Entente) 2.6

Thanks for the feedback.

We have moved any gameplay related updates into one big patch we want to start in Beta next week or week afterwards, at least after the patch releasing today/tomorrow that is fixing some irritating bugs like AI loops, hangs etc... those had absolute priority.

This gameplay patch has been in the pipeline for quite a while now, but because of the Steam and iPad releases, stability risk and PBEM crossplatform vulnerability, we opted to do it after iPad and Steam were released and as expected would give some other priority bugs to fix, that we dealt with last week.

We also have to make sure all platforms remain on the same version or PBEM will crash, so testing is slower as we have to double check everything.

So almost time for a bigger round of re-balancing and fixing some gameplay bugs we have on our lists, Kirk is preparing a big gameplay patch.

To be continued...

Historion wrote:I got my copy of CtGW last weekend from Steam and it runs very stable. Nevertheless I noticed some minor bugs and I have some suggestions to improve gameplay I want to share :

- Known minor Bug with Disbanding Units return CostPP as MP instead of CostMP. Can be easily fixed in game_deployment.lua.
- Small garrison outside city can move further away from city with free move from killing an enemy unit but then is stuck and cannot return to city anymore.
- If a river on the map is "below" an alliance border, the river cannot be seen. See western border of Serbia for example. This makes it very difficult/time-consuming to decide where to attack and where to defend.
- The seatiles near enemy ports which provide naval combat malus should be marked on the map, similar to the green seatiles around own ports. Otherwise the player will always have to count tiles near ports when moving.
- The statistics about kills is not working 100% correctly. If you kill the serbian garrison on turn 1 you can get 11 kills instead of 10. Maybe the overkill of last attack was counted, too.
- If a tech is in range of research (<=5 turns) and the respective labs are set to zero, the tech is still shown to finish in a few turns while it never really finishs.
- Research Speed for 1 lab is around 9 points per turn instead of expected 10 points from gameplay.researchSpeed = 10. (see my post in Mods)

- A statistic about lost/killed MP would be nice.
- Research : For every tech in Research Window there should be the number of turns until the tech is available displayed. Otherwise it is difficult to decide which tech to focus (or not to focus at all).
- Research : There should be an UNDO option when accidently focused / unfocused a tech since the focus points are consumed
- It seems that repairing units can cost too much PP / MP due to rounding when CostPP, CostMP of a unit are not dividable by 10. This seems to make the repair-bonus of 0,7 sometimes irrelevant. (Idea : scale all values by 10.)
- Serbia starts with 430 MP in 1914. The historical scale seems to be 1 MP equal to 10.000 men. Serbia is a small country with population of about 4-5 million in WW1. Therefore an MP of about 100 would be historically more appropriate, especially if you compare MP with France and Great Britain.
- gameplay.FreeUpkeep = 70 is a very strong bonus for all small nations which allows forces free of upkeep comparable with the size of German Army + Navy at start. It should be possible to solve this problem by rescaling starting PP, PP income for all factions (e.g. multiply PP Income by 2) and setting gameplay.FreeUpkeep to 0-10.
- PP-Income of Russia and Germany seem to be ahistorical. Germany starts with 75, Russia with 67. (compare with tables below)
- In WW1 Industrial Mobilization for War (= PP income) in some countrys increased from year to year by a high rate (see below : British arms production 14-18)

For historical scaling :
According to Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers :
Table 18 : relative World-Industry-Production 1913 : USA 32%, Germany 14.8%, Great Britain 13.6%, Russia 8.2%, France 6.1%, Austria 4.4%, Italy 2.4%,
Table 15 : total Steal Production 1913 (in million tons) : USA 31.8, Germany 17.6, Great Britain 7.7, Russia 4.8, France 4.6, Austria 2.6, Italy 0.93,
Table 21 : Total Income 1914 (in billion $) : USA 37, Germany 12, Great Britain 11, Russia 7, France 6, Italy 4, Austria 3
Table 23 : British arms production (type : 1914,15,16,17,18) : (artillery : 91, 3390, 4314, 5137, 8039), (airplanes : 200, 1900, 6100, 14700, 32000), (machine guns : 300, 6100, 33500, 79700, 120900)
Table 25 : War Effort 14-19 (in billion $) : British Empire 23.0, Germany 19.9, USA 17.1, France 9.3, Russia 5.4, Austria 4.7, Italy 3.2, others 0.1-0.3
Table 25 : Mobilization 14-19 (in million men) : Germany 13.25, Russia 13, British Empire 9.5, Austria 9.0, France 8.2, Italy 5.6, USA 3.8, others (CP) 2.85, others (Entente) 2.6

Hi Historion,

Your first point disbanding unit return has been fixed,that one was easy. Free Upkeep has also been fixed,the hardest problem to fix is game balance.You have to try and find an historical level,but at the same time,try and please everyone's different playing styles,because there are a great many combinations,and permutations in game play styles.

I know each Countries GDP for the war years,I also know their available manpower for military service,the problem is finding the perfect game scale that ticks all the boxes,there are Countries that have very little,and then you have Countries, who dwarf all others as per the resources at hand.I have been play testing various trials using different settings,trying to find the one that works perfectly.

Footnote: In real life war is not balanced or fair,but in game you have to find a balance.

Footnote: In real life war is not balanced or fair,but in game you have to find a balance.

Yes, the purpose is always to produce a fun game in a historic well researched setting. We have to bend the rules a bit for gameplay balance and also allow for alternative outcomes.

But going into a full historic simulation would get boring...

Thanks for the replies.

Thanks to LUA the game is very much modable and allows to try out different designs : historic, ahistoric, balanced, fun

Here are some more ideas for future patches :
- convois could provide not only PP and MP but also additional AMMO
- It should be possible to convert part of PP-Income to Ammo-Production, e.g. pay 10 PP (fix price) to convert a factory to a new Ammo factory and get +1 Ammo per turn at an upkeep cost of 1 PP.
If you don't need the additional ammo any more you could switch back the factory to PP-Income
- Is it possible to rescale the map
- Is it possible to add a World scenario including colonies and Japan?
- Is it possible to actively support mods in game by allowing to select a mod at start? The mod files would be located in a seperate folder and would overwrite the default files.
At the moment, modding is done mostly in the original scripts folder and you have to be careful to not overwrite original files without keeping a backup.

Historion wrote:Thanks for the replies.

Thanks to LUA the game is very much modable and allows to try out different designs : historic, ahistoric, balanced, fun

Here are some more ideas for future patches :
- convois could provide not only PP and MP but also additional AMMO
- It should be possible to convert part of PP-Income to Ammo-Production, e.g. pay 10 PP (fix price) to convert a factory to a new Ammo factory and get +1 Ammo per turn at an upkeep cost of 1 PP.
If you don't need the additional ammo any more you could switch back the factory to PP-Income
- Is it possible to rescale the map
- Is it possible to add a World scenario including colonies and Japan?
- Is it possible to actively support mods in game by allowing to select a mod at start? The mod files would be located in a seperate folder and would overwrite the default files.
At the moment, modding is done mostly in the original scripts folder and you have to be careful to not overwrite original files without keeping a backup.

Hi Historion,

I have reduced the production costs for ammunition for the next patch,as the previous patch I think ammunition cost to much.

The separate folder for modding purposes,was one off the first suggestion's I put to the software wiz kid,when I first got officially involved with the games future development,as you say,you can create a new Campaign Scenario,but to do any modifications,your only have one set of scripts to deal with,meaning you have to change the scripts that come with the game,which in turn changes everything,with the other Campaign scenarios,because they all use the same set off game files.The only way to create a stand alone mod,is to have all the files for that mod contained within its own folder,this method also gives you the opportunity to change all the graphic files,this would be perfect for me,because I have created hundreds of new 2 dimension ship art,best place to see that if you like is over at the Matrix forum.

All the best,Kirk.

We are adding some more mod friendly features in the engine, so good news for you...