Arms, Armistice and Revolutions: Announcements

ulmont · Apr 16, 2012

So, I was trying to play AAR as China. As it's currently implemented, it's really no fun.

1) Every couple of months you get either +5% or +7.5% dissent, depending on what stage you're at.
2) You are forced into another country tag that has no cores on China, leaving you with about 10 IC.
3) The next stage forces you into yet another country tag - but only happens after you've lost a lot of the country to partisans.
4) And, then, practically all of your country is inherited by someone else, killing whatever techs you've researched or units you've build during stages 1-3.
5) For bonus points, every so often an event fires that secedes a truckload of your country away.

I mean, if I'm not actually allowed to play the country from 1914 to 1936 without tag changing 3 times and losing my direction for China from 1914-1936, why bother?

Is there a scenario that has the CCIP events but starts at 1933 or 1936?

Limith · Apr 16, 2012

ulmont said:
So, I was trying to play AAR as China. As it's currently implemented, it's really no fun.
1) Every couple of months you get either +5% or +7.5% dissent, depending on what stage you're at.

Historic. Pretty much unavoidable at 1914 start. You get dissent in Kaissereich as USA. Not unique problem. Also, it should only be 5%/fire. It's to prevent the ai/player from being able to mobilize and aptly simulates the discontent within the country. Otherwise, a human player can easily crush the warlords before 1915 war rolls by.

2) You are forced into another country tag that has no cores on China, leaving you with about 10 IC.

Historic. Pretty much unavoidable at 1914 start. Yuan Shikai's support was incredibly shaky in the south and it is highly likely that even if he didn't decide to be crowned emperor, he would've been forced to since his loyal supporters were imperialists.

3) The next stage forces you into yet another country tag - but only happens after you've lost a lot of the country to partisans.

That's what historically happens to Yuan Shikai's faction as they are taken over by the Anhui Clique. Behind the scenes, you get tag change since I split Imperial China ministers from Republic of China (UCH)/Beiyang China.

I mean, if I'm not actually allowed to play the country from 1914 to 1936 without tag changing 3 times and losing my direction for China from 1914-1936, why bother?

CYN (Yunnan Clique) is recommended for a reason instead of UCH (Beiyang China). CYN is what you are supposed to play in 1914. China during this period was this hectic. Not saying it's impossible to play the country (just very very challenging, and it is possible to hold out for a long time). That aside, try playing CYN instead. Yes, there are tag changes, and research is lost, but it is unavoidable.

Also, Beiyang will be playable in CCIP version 0.3.0. Current one only goes up to 1916/1917.

Lastly, it's only 2 changes. UCH->U74->UCH. The Zhili clique one is a flag change.

4) And, then, practically all of your country is inherited by someone else, killing whatever techs you've researched or units you've build during stages 1-3.

They are called placeholder events for a reason (it's supposed to be game over for you, but I guess inherit has problems with player control, thanks for the bug). Also, the research kill is a game engine limitation which isn't my problem. Lastly, you don't lose units you personally build afaik. Only starting units that are NOT LOYAL to the central government. You get them back anyway after the NPW.

5) For bonus points, every so often an event fires that secedes a truckload of your country away.

Err...what? I never see this in my playtests. If you want something that secedes a truckload of your country away, play the USSR.
Are you talking about Zhili Clique and Fengtian Clique? They are historic. They also aren't truckloads.

Is there a scenario that has the CCIP events but starts at 1933 or 1936?

CCIP for 1936 still works afaik. It's in my sig (go to the discontinued one)

Burning · Apr 16, 2012

Here is a first impression of a much asked for and brand new feature introduced in 1.4.1:

The Industry and Force Limit Indicator.

How it work functions:

Just hover your mouse over the decision. You will never be able to actually click the decision, unless you are both AI and human at the same time

, so it won't vanish. The event is active as long as the AAR related events can trigger (roughly: 1915 - 1937).

ulmont · Apr 16, 2012

Limith said:
Historic. Pretty much unavoidable at 1914 start. You get dissent in Kaissereich as USA. Not unique problem. Also, it should only be 5%/fire.

Limith said:
Historic. Pretty much unavoidable at 1914 start.

Limith said:
Are you talking about Zhili Clique and Fengtian Clique? They are historic.

If the answer is "too bad, the events are historic, that's what happened," then again, what's the point of playing?

Limith said:
Also, the research kill is a game engine limitation which isn't my problem.

It's certainly the player's problem.

Limith said:
CCIP for 1936 still works afaik. It's in my sig (go to the discontinued one)

Thanks; I'll take a look at it, and also try Yunnan out. Does Yunnan eventually become Nationalist China in AAR?

Burning · Apr 16, 2012

ulmont said:
If the answer is "too bad, the events are historic, that's what happened," then again, what's the point of playing?

It's certainly the player's problem.

Thanks; I'll take a look at it, and also try Yunnan out. Does Yunnan eventually become Nationalist China in AAR?

As far as I'm concerned with the Chineese nations, here my two cents:

There is a reason why there are recommended nations in the scenarios. Sure, you can select any nation. But this reads like picking the Dominican Republic or Tanu-Tuva and then expecting to get a hundred historical events. Or picking Austria in a 1938 scenario, then being annoyed by getting annexed all the time.
There is one explicitly recommended nation for doing hands-off games to observe: Guatemala.

Please try china with the recommended nation, I'm sure you will enjoy that experience a lot more than with the imperials.

Oh, and please use the general discussion thread in the future, thanks! This thread is for announcements, not discussion of gameplay topics. Though, i hope we will soon have our own subforum.

T.j. Arnold · Apr 16, 2012

Burning said:
Here is a first impression of a much asked for and brand new feature introduced in 1.4.1:

The Industry and Force Limit Indicator.

How it work functions:

Just hover your mouse over the decision. You will never be able to actually click the decision, unless you are both AI and human at the same time , so it won't vanish. The event is active as long as the AAR related events can trigger (roughly: 1915 - 1937).

How are you limited to 25 ships, yet can build 75 destroyers and 15 transports?

Burning · Apr 16, 2012

T.j. Arnold said:
How are you limited to 25 ships, yet can build 75 destroyers and 15 transports?

As the text says, there is limit of 25 ships in total. If the limit allows, you could have a maximum of 75 destroyers and 15 transport ships. I admit, the text is still unfinished, i though the additional information in the parenthesis was clear. But thanks for the hint.

T.j. Arnold · Apr 17, 2012

Burning said:
As the text says, there is limit of 25 ships in total. If the limit allows, you could have a maximum of 75 destroyers and 15 transport ships. I admit, the text is still unfinished, i though the additional information in the parenthesis was clear. But thanks for the hint.

Hmm, that's still a bit confusing, I must admit, I think it'd be easier to get rid of the second limit and just say you can't have more than 25 ships (it's kind of pointless otherwise).

The only thing I can see having to have a second limit would be BB's.

Burning · Apr 17, 2012

T.j. Arnold said:
Hmm, that's still a bit confusing, I must admit, I think it'd be easier to get rid of the second limit and just say you can't have more than 25 ships (it's kind of pointless otherwise).

The only thing I can see having to have a second limit would be BB's.

Well, you have the naval treaties for that, which contain their descriptions in the event-text. The destroyer/transport limit is just applied on top, to prevent nations from spamming a 500 destroyer fleet. IIRC that was reported by you, actually ;-).

Burning · Apr 17, 2012

Fernando Torres said:
Yep you should ask for one.

Sent a very friendly PM to the forum staff yesterday, asking for support in form of a subforum for this mod. I've removed any names or other things that could be used to identify who the moderator I contacted was.

Burning said:
We (I, along with others) are authors of the Mod Arms, Armistice and Revolutions, which has grown considerably in size and fanbase over the past months. Initially one single thread was sufficient to communicate with all the players, but as the mod has grown to multiple developers and a horde of contributors, it has become incredibly hard to interact with each other. AAR is growing fast and there is no end in sight; to the contrary: now the project has assimilated a couple of other mods, more and more people are coming aboard and actively participate.

Initially I though having multiple threads for discussions, tech-support, bug reporting, announcements, would help keeping things organized. However, actually it made things worse. Now we don't just have duplicate postings on every page once, but twice or even three times (one per thread ).

It's really hard to get keep track of things here, and I can understand why people are reposting questions that have been answered numerous times already, which also uses up space and compute-time on the forums, I guess. People also have started putting up their own threads for offspring mods which are based on AAR or directly relate to it. But now have dedicated, independent threads, which we can't even edit once people vanish, which frequently happens, resulting a lot of "is this mod still active?" questions for those sub-mods. Most of them are indeed still active, but they are fully integrated into the main mod today.

Currently we also have no way of administering and keeping track of things, which has become a considerable pain. For many topics and issues, independent threads would be needed (e.g.: install guide, FAQ, my game crashes with error "invalid command at line XY" - which is common if people have not applied the latest patch). Issue is, ALL of that information is already there, but it's not visible to the visitors, and we also can't make them search many threads, to perhaps find the correct answer. That information is simply not clearly visible, unless we start spamming the darkest hour mod-forum (resulting in about 40 threads within a few weeks, which would push out the rest of the modding forum).

Whenever possible, we use a dedicated bug tracking and collaboration site internally, but that does not cover user interaction. Also, we WANT the players to actively participate in discussions and not exclude them. We would, however, prevent player participation, if we no longer discussed on paradoxplaza. AAR lives because of the players driving the development of the mod. In a sense it has become very similar to CORE for HOI1, but we don't want to make the same mistake as the CORE guys (even though I LOVED CORE for HOI1). They moved away from the paradox forums when switching over to HOI2, severing most of their ties and evolving into a rather closed group. Most forumites never check third-party sites of mods, let alone create an account there and ask or contribute. Thus, going off-forum clearly is no viable alternative unless we want to kill the mod.

If there was a separate forum for AAR we could also merge all the threads, reorganize them, collect them, so people can check out similar issues and discuss similar questions with one quick look. Once in the forum, they are able to clearly see what matches their issues, or what matters are currently discussed, without browsing back 10 pages in some thread from 2 months ago (which just won't happen).

MartinBG, the DarkestHour-Boss, recommended us to contact you for this matter. If you are not the correct peer for this request, please forgive and I'd be happy if you could forward me to the right person. Please, could we get a subforum below the DH-modding forum (or below the DH main forum, either would be very supportive)? The mod team will be most grateful and make good and thoughtful use of it; else the situation will get chaotic pretty fast.

This is what i got in reply:

Let me say first that we really value the job the modders do, but due to the technical aspects of the forum software, and our exponential growth, we have had to limit the creation of new forums, so the bar is rather high now.
Looks like you have only had a sticky thread index for a few weeks, and only have 65 posts in your main thread, the fact that you have an off forum site for your Mod counts against you as well, as that takes care of all dev to dev communication.

If the threads and participation grows I will look at it again, but right now I do not think it currently warrants a separate Sub forum.

So, it looks like we are too small... strange... in the HOI3 forums even 1-man HOI3 mods do have subforums. As a comparison, TRP (Total Realism Project) has 446 postings in total and CORE3 has 435 alltogether. AAR currently has 1.564 postings in total.

Also, it seems it's being held against us that we are using project management tools to ease the pain of using forum threads. I'm paying the hosting for that place out of my own pocket... maybe i should pay fees for consuming forum-space in the future... Actually this hurts AAR a lot, as it has become almost impossible (or infeasible) to answer all the repeated questions again and again; now also in multiple thread.

Seems like we will need to spam the forum to death in the future, or just quit this shit and develop mods for some other (non paradox) game. I can just appeal to you to read the threads before posting things that have already been discussed multiple times, and not start anew. Also, make sure to use each thread for what it is supposed to contain (technical questions in tech support, general discussions, do bug reporting on the AAR site, ...)

novapaddy · Apr 17, 2012

Burning: I posted this thread, totally unrelated to your issue:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...the-future-and-how-things-will-be-done-better

The forum manager came back: "... As the Forum Manger, I would have to say that it is not too big to manage, in fact We are looking at and planing for exponential growth in the near future....."

So maybe you should contact him? Possible confusion?

Hope things work out for you.

Dichromate · Apr 17, 2012

So, it looks like we are too small... strange... in the HOI3 forums even 1-man HOI3 mods do have subforums. As a comparison, TRP (Total Realism Project) has 446 postings in total and CORE3 has 435 alltogether.

Yeah, and both Core and TRP are non-existent for HOI3 - they're not being developed and probably never will be.
The CORE team is developing for AoD, and TRP for DH. CORE does have a subforum for AoD (and it should) but it's a joke that those dead subforums still exist for HOI3, yet live projects for other games are denied subforums.

Also I'm not sure if they've actually requested it, but Divergences for Vicky2 also really deserves its own subforum.

Limith · Apr 17, 2012

Looks like you have only had a sticky thread index for a few weeks, and only have 65 posts in your main thread, the fact that you have an off forum site for your Mod counts against you as well, as that takes care of all dev to dev communication.

:blink: We have 65 posts?

but due to the technical aspects of the forum software, and our exponential growth, we have had to limit the creation of new forums, so the bar is rather high now.

If it's spam bots, I'm sure we can take care of it. Otherwise...I don't know of any "technical" aspects of forum management that might limit new forums. I can think of financial aspects.

Burning · Apr 17, 2012

novapaddy said:
Burning: I posted this thread, totally unrelated to your issue:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...the-future-and-how-things-will-be-done-better

The forum manager came back: "... As the Forum Manger, I would have to say that it is not too big to manage, in fact We are looking at and planing for exponential growth in the near future....."

So maybe you should contact him? Possible confusion?

Hope things work out for you.

Now, this indeed is an interesting coincidence (especially due to moderator involved in that thread). Thanks for posting that thread and the link here! So, they do indeed plan for exponential growth, so how comes a subforum can put this planning into jeopardy? Actually that's why you do plans for: to deal with such things. I can understand that a company imposes more strict guidelines on system-growth to prevent unmanaged growth, however this exactly contradicts the answer i got back

.

BTW: i fully agree to what you wrote there. I still think the forum is an integral part and central meeting point for paradox-game related discussion, and games profit from it a lot. However, forums clearly were never intended for information archiving and collection. They are good for discussion, but terrible as information-source for FAQ and tech support. That combined with the issues involved with the search function (or the partial absence and restrictions imposed on its use) guarantee for complexity and extreme administrative overhead. (though, they are more effective than individual, unmanagable threads

)

novapaddy · Apr 17, 2012

Burning: Thanks for agreeing with me.... BUT I'd now quickly delete that BTW paragraph... I'm sure my name is mud in Paradox circles... we don't need you joining me... especially when you are looking for something from them... Cheers

Burning · Apr 17, 2012

novapaddy said:
Burning: Thanks for agreeing with me.... BUT I'd now quickly delete that BTW paragraph... I'm sure my name is mud in Paradox circles... we don't need you joining me... especially when you are looking for something from them... Cheers

You mean the part about a forum not being optimal for information collection? Well, it's the truth. And on the other hand, I'm sure they are aware of that too. Still, the Forums are integral parts of paradox games.
Besides, I've posted my opinion of Steam, which is... let's just say not that good and rather reactionary. Though, it is my oppinion and i don't intend to hide it, as long as it's formulated in a friendly, non aggressive, baseline productive and thoughtful way. Everybody should appreciate feedback, whatever the individual opinion is. One does not need to agree to it, but punishing people because of what the say while staying within the rules (eg: piracy) would be counter productive for the paradox-forums spirit. If someone is pissed off with people wording their opinion instead of valuing different perspectives, than what's the point?

novapaddy · Apr 17, 2012

While I have you here:

What is your opinion of a rejuvenated RDD mod appearing in few months time... Do you think it would be a worthwhile exercise? Do you think its innards have probably been plundered for other mods?, making it a waste now to do? Your thoughts appreciated, thanks

EDIT: 2nd thoughts... probably best to post it in the RDD mod... as I'm sorry I don't want to intrude on your own thread... eek!

Burning · Apr 17, 2012

novapaddy said:
While I have you here:

What is your opinion of a rejuvenated RDD mod appearing in few months time... Do you think it would be a worthwhile exercise? Do you think its innards have probably been plundered for other mods?, making it a waste now to do? Your thoughts appreciated, thanks

EDIT: 2nd thoughts... probably best to post it in the RDD mod... as I'm sorry I don't want to intrude on your own thread... eek!

Nah, it's OK, thanks for the feedback!

@RDD:
There are indded features that are still uncovered by todays mods. Most important among these features are (as i see it):

the resource system
though, i'm sure we will need a dynamic resource system, a static one would be too sturdy for a game like DH which has a lot more likelihood for alternative outcomes and two world wars
Inflation, economic balancing (that's totally missing in DH, but we were thinking about doing something like that in AAR in the future)

All of these features will be very important for DH in the future, and will in some way need to be modeled in AAR too. Other features can be argued about (reworking of a techtree to fit the time post 1964 for example), and might be needed in the far future in DH. Ultimately i guess we would all love to see a mod spanning from 1900 until today

.

So, if you are willing to invest time into coming up with a way to properly trigger a dynamic resource system, that would be incredible! Also, you might want to talk to Limit via skype, as he's currently thinking about a way to simulate economy.

Limith · Apr 17, 2012

Err..NWO2 does some of those I believe.

Akaki · Apr 17, 2012

It's late 1915 and I have won WWI as France. Managed to encircle 1/4 of the german army in 1914. UK never participated since Germany left Belgium alone. Romania stayed out of the war too. Yet after the war, UK gets Kenya, Romania gets Transyvania and Austria-Hungary is bestroyed like in OTL. My thoughts: if war had ended in 1915 (or earlier than 1917) the peace terms would have been kinda different. In this TL Romania wouldn't get all of Transylvania (it's border would look like 1941 at most), if the Great Powers felt generous. Austria-Hungary would loose Galicia to Russia, Bosnia to Serbia but would probably survive as a state. Germany wouldn't loose Danzig to Russia (what for, Russia's got naval acces through it's own ports and Klaipeda). And so on. The point is: it would be nice to influence the shape of post-war europe, wouldn't you agree?

Arms, Armistice and Revolutions: Announcements

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