Technology

[Zuckergußgebäck]

I think we can squeeze in another industry tech as well.

[xayoz306]

Hey everyone...

I'm playing as the UK, and all my techs are moving along fablously, with the exception of my aircraft techs... No matter how hard I try, nothing will allow me to begin aircraft research, it won't trigger any events for "First Flying XPs", and I am slowly falling behind in the aerial race. Are there any solutions, or did I miss something early on in the game that automatically blocks out the ability for me to research aircraft.

BTW, I'm currently playing in 1910, and the New Naval Designs event has yet to trigger either.

[hmatthias]

This is broken in .41. It will be fixed in .42

[xayoz306]

Sounds good to me

Other than that, I am absolutely loving this game...

[Zuckergußgebäck]

I think we should change the background of the naval tech tree, since the Monitor is in the wrong position.

[hmatthias]

Sorry for my confusion, but what exactly is a monitor? I am thinking it is some kind of ironclad like the ones in the Civil War, but obviously it isn't seeing where it is on the tech tree. Is it some kind of modified battleship?

[Zuckergußgebäck]

Sorry for my confusion, but what exactly is a monitor? I am thinking it is some kind of ironclad like the ones in the Civil War, but obviously it isn't seeing where it is on the tech tree. Is it some kind of modified battleship?

A monitor is simply a hull on which you have plonked the biggest naval guns you can find. perfect for shore bombardment but not much more.

[TheLand]

I am working on the naval doctrines. The current doctrines do a very good job of differentiating (say) France in 1895 from Britain in 1895, but by and large miss out the differences between Germany and Britain in 1914 or Japan and the USA in 1922.

What I'm working on doesn't have a big choice between Jeune Ecole and battleship doctrine, but has more smaller choices. I am also excising some of the more general doctrines (e.g. "War-Ready Fleet" ... who can really say that such a thing was introduced in 1912 but not before?) and replacing them with more generic but more justifiable techs like "Dreadnought Battlefleet".

The main 'correction' in terms of gameplay I'm planning is that destroyers in most navies will end up with more than 10-20 positioning!

The other thing I noticed was that most nations start with very very high Org in 1914 - e.g. Germany has Org 151 for naval units. Is there any scenario-design reason for such massively high Org values, or did it just happen?

I am also looking at some techs which will extend things after 1919.

I am also going to update the Naval techs, but this will only involve one or two additional models (we could do with a super-heavy battlecruiser - do we really need another battleship?) and the main change will be in the tech descriptions which I'm going to make much less generic.

I hope these changes will make it into 0.5, please let me know if you have any thoughts.

A monitor is simply a hull on which you have plonked the biggest naval guns you can find. perfect for shore bombardment but not much more.

I don't know whether monitors are best placed in the battleship or the heavy cruiser tree. I can't see any player ever building them and if they aren't already ruled out for the AI they should be.

[El Pip]

I believe the model number for Monitors is very low so the AI shouldn't build them (they always try for the highest numbered model I believe?)

As for the high ORG I think that's deliberate, the aim was for very long fights to try and discourage the AI from fleeing after 4 hours.

[StephenT]

Monitors are great. They've caused more confusion and questions than practically anything else in the mod.

Like ZgB said, a monitor is a ship specifically designed for shore bombardment. They're not just "a hull" though; they're specially designed with shallow draught and anti-torpedo bulges (a technology developed shortly before the war) because they have to operate close in to a hostile shoreline, at risk from mines and submarines and torpedo boats.

Their armament consists of a single turret with battleship-calibre guns - the first monitors used 14" guns, others built used 12" to 15". That's why they're in the battleship tech tree; you can't build monitors until you've invented superdreadnought-calibre guns.

The first monitors were built by Britain in November 1914 - Winston Churchill had the idea. They were called "monitors" because they vaguely resembled the original ironclad monitors, and also because the guns used on the first batch were made in the USA and Churchill wanted to honour the Americans by calling the new ships after a US ship. (He actually planned to call the four ships General Grant, Admiral Farragut, Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson, but the US State Department objected because they thought that would compromise their neutrality...).

Britain constructed over a dozen monitors during the war, using them to support the Gallipolli landings, the operations at Salonika, and to bombard the Belgian coast - and it was planned to use them during the planned but never carried out amphibious landings on the northern coast of Europe. The only other country to build any was Italy. In the game, they're intended to be a cheap method of getting shore bombardment capacity. Not very useful, true - but in a scenario set after 1914 they'd need to be in the British order of battle, and besides I think they're an interesting bit of historical chrome.

[TheLand]

I believe the model number for Monitors is very low so the AI shouldn't build them (they always try for the highest numbered model I believe?)

As for the high ORG I think that's deliberate, the aim was for very long fights to try and discourage the AI from fleeing after 4 hours.

Monitors are the second-highest model number.

Take the point about the ORG, will build ridiculously high ORG levels into my changes - this actually solves a problem for me as well.

[Tegetthoff]

I am trying to put more research techs into the industrial tech tree for 0.5.
I want to habe the research techs a bit more colourfull than just early - basic research ...

So far I have found out:

both slide rules and mechanical adding machines made large advances in the 1890s and 1900s.

The very first attempts at technical standardisation were made around 1905.

Technical universities became more commonplace in that period

Of course the basics of modern physics were laid out in the 1900 - 1910 period.

Does anybody have something to add?

[v.Manstein]

Most colonial powers spend much money on increasing infrastructure in their colonies. Maybe this could be represented by a little tech as well.

Especially Germany founded institutes which did researches on tropical diseases.

Furthermore, there were "Colonial schools" (in the Metropolis as well as in the colonies) which educated people in colonial administration.

I don't know if these things were a little bit too early, but when we talked about combining aviation and air doctrines, we can talk about seperating the industrial techtree into an industrial one, and one called "Administration" which could hold such techs.

[Timmie0307]

That would be nice indeed...there are sometimes huge age differences like on the infantry ... 1895 and then 1912, I think that there fits at least one upgrade between these or even 2 (1900 and 1905)

Anyway, keep up the good work...hope that it will be fit in soon.

Tim

[Maj. von Mauser]

All this stuff looks pretty good.

My few grievances are:

Armoured Trains being here at all, if anything they should be a brigade. Gamewise it is beside the point wither they were an independant unit or not.

Battlecrusiers being secret techs, many of the nations built them and they wern't really secret or new. Even Austria-Hungary had plans drawn up for a class of BC's.


I am a supporter of Monitors though, maybe the Italian and British AI could be specially programmed to wan't to build some?

Anyways alot of nice hard work put in here.

[v.Manstein]

We already said that we have to make concessions to the fact that Plaines weren't important for WW1 at all.

So if we merge both techtrees, how do we use the new empty one?

[Zuckergußgebäck]

I'd say economy and social science. Including such things as sociology, economical schools and propaganda.

Asfor the armored trains, I suggest we just revert to the old police brigade - I don't think they were used very much, apart from the russian civil war (OK, so Austria-Hungary did use some, but I don't think that's enough for them to be included here)

[Tegetthoff]

I'd say economy and social science. Including such things as sociology, economical schools and propaganda.

Asfor the armored trains, I suggest we just revert to the old police brigade - I don't think they were used very much, apart from the russian civil war (OK, so Austria-Hungary did use some, but I don't think that's enough for them to be included here)

The big question is: what advantages should those techs grant? (we have already discussed this somewhere else)

Industrial techs give ic and supply efficiencies and production boni for anything from iC to coastal forts. We have TC modifiers, repair factors etc.

In current 1914, we have "financial" techs giving offmap money. We could have mining techs that give offmap resources - of course all of this is independent of the country size, one offmap money is crucial to Serbia but irrelevant to the US.

Is it possible to let a TECH reset a slider? Social aspects of the game are handled by slider settings, so a social tech might reset your sliders.

Don´t misunderstand me: I am all for including social techs but we have to be sure we know what we want them to do.

[Zuckergußgebäck]

They could serve as triggers for events - reducing dissent, giving free manpower, adjusting sliders etcetera. The more advanced techs trigger better events and (if possible) makes the less advanced events trigger more often.

[v.Manstein]

In general, Techs can use the same commands like events, which means that we can adjust sliders via event (F.e. "passing a new defence-law"-techs should become possible).

But here's my idea:

Let us use two tech-trees.

The industrial-Techtree only contains Changes on IC, Production Time and Ressource Production and a second administrative techtree will deal with values like Dissent, TC, Adjusting Sliders, Maybe money and Manpower.