Looking at the amount of posts since CORE 0.5 I gather everybody is busy playing.
So am I, but I also wanted to give the devs some preliminary feedback on my experiences on 4 games as the US until 43. A lot of the stuff mentioned below has been reported by other forum members already, I can only confirm their findings. These are of course my observations and other players/members may not experience the same things I have. If required I will try to simulate or present savegames wherever required.
I categorized them in things I see as definite improvements over the previous CORE version with AOD and things I observed during my games as improvements.
Improvements:
- Japan Invasion AI is marvelous. Previously Japan used to stop after annexing Philippines and invading Borneo/Sumatra/Java. It now goes all the way to Guadalcanal and Japan is quite aggressive. Also in Birma, it used to get stuck a lot of the time but finally they break through to India. In my second game Darwin was overrun and I was totally unprepared to counter the Japanese. Good stuff. We don’t want to snooze while playing the US.
- Japan Naval AI: playing as the US I was faced with 14 IJN carriers at the time of war (July 14, 1941 a date that will live in infamy). I got a bloody nose a few times until I finally got some new carriers built. The Lexington and Saratoga were sent to Pearl twice for some heavy duty repairs and they blew several BBs out of the water near Pearl as well. Even playing on Normal/Normal as suggested, it was exhilarating to see Halsey and Nimitz trying to save the East Pacific from further attacks until reinforcements could arrive. Those 6 months were so intense; they were part of one of the most exciting games I played as the US in the Pacific Theater.
- Convoy raiding; absolute improvement here. The first few years I am not doing much damage, but once my Convoy Raiding reaches 120% or more (mid to end of 42), it really rips. Surface fleets on Naval Combat Patrol (156% for the US in 42) and Gato-class subs on Convoy Raiding (134% in 42) gets great results. First year of war (41 to 42); 100 convoys sunk, second year of war (42 to 43) 347 convoys sunk, most of these Japanese and Italianese, only some Germanese. Finally I can starve my enemies with subs.
- As a side note; my 3rd game I changed the # Combat Modifier: Total Naval Overstacking Mod for each non-transport division above two. from -0.02 to -0.01. Funny enough, I have seen more larger fleets from the enemy (between 11 and 17, I was used to 6-8 vessels) and the naval battles in these games were much more interesting. In my last game I met an IJN fleet of 17 vessels with 4 CV, 1BB, 1BC, 1CA and 10 screens. I was chewing on my Heineken bottle during that battle. My fleet survived, the bottle did not…. Not sure if it was due to the changing of this statistic though.
Observations/concerns:
- Resources; I know you have done a great job in converting 0.49 to 0.50, but as some members on the forum already mentioned, the resources in my games don’t reach the point where Germany, Italy or Japan feel the pain of being isolated from most of the world trade. In 43 as the US I have 52K rares and 200K oil, Germany has 42K rares and 54K oil. Japan and Italy also do not seem to have any problems in any of my games. I think the resources in combination with the several Industrial techs need some work.
- Sino-Japanese War; what I liked about CORE with 1.04 was the fact that China could hold out… to a point. Being the meddler that I am, I increased the infra, resources and IC in Chengdu and Chongqing a bit, and it made the Chinese hold out indefinitely without hampering the Japanese in their naval conquest. What I see in this version is that late 41 is the point that China gets overrun despite the ridiculous mass of troops (including MTN/HQ) they produce. To be honest, I liked the previous version better in this respect.
- SCW; after editing the “The Cause seems lost event”, everything seems to work. The -2 and -3 units indeed cause an issue after manually firing it and commenting these lines out seems to fix the issue for me. Still, I had to enter a few revolt commands to get things going after a stall in the civil war in 38.
- Italy/England; the North Africa Campaign is pretty random still. Sometimes the Italians penetrate the English defenses in Egypt, but most of the time the English kick the Italians all over the place. What is most worrying is that not only the Italians are very interested in the sands of the Sahara and want to camp there for the next ten years, the British seem to be infected as well. They would probably hunt the Italians all the way to South Africa (if I want to play through to 47)
- Operation Barbarossa: Germany is doing quite well in 41, but after 42 the Soviet Union already seems to stall them. In 43 the Germans are hopelessly lost; but not because of lack of units or resources. They are simply beaten back every time, even in summertime. Resources are not the issue, so it must be either be tech or build related. With the new debugai I can see the Germans are building a lot of … Reserves. Maybe it’s a MP thing, Germany has 9 MP in July 43.
- Italian Surrender; Once the Italians surrender to the Allies, the ISR gets no units (as far as I can see anyway), so the Allies gain a huge amount of low-level infantry to rush to Berlin. Seems a bit too easy in my mind and I thought German units were holding the line to Northern Italy. Maybe an extra surrender event that gives ISR some extra (german elite) units?
- When selecting a naval units and then moving the mouse to several islands (Anreanoff, Kiska, Amchitka are some examples) you get an UNKNOWN STRING WANTED. Probably cosmetic, but you may want to check it out anyway.