Armageddon Fleets and Airpower
One of the most interesting things to read is the advice for playing Italy in the ’36 scenario. Scrap your fleet and build a few NAVS, it is a “no brainer” choice. In fact your huge surface fleet will just end up as reefs, while Naval Airpower is just so effective. This is a problem; because the minute there is only one real choice that’s a bad feature for a strategy game.
So first thing we did was to overhaul the whole Naval Air system. We reworked the air search algorithm so that the chances of finding a fleet are linked to its size, although fleets in combat will always be found. There are two interesting effects of this; firstly small fleets are highly effective at things like convoy raiding, doing a Bismarck is now an interesting choice. The second thing is that you really need to maintain some sort of surface fleet to act in tandem with your naval airpower in order to maintain control of the seas. Your fleet finds the enemy and then your naval bombers add to the pain.
However that still leaves your Italian fleet as reefs in the making. What we wanted was some sort of upgrade system that would allow your fleet to improve. We finally settled on attachments rather than models. There are 5 types of attachments and each ship model can carry a certain number of them. Destroyers have the least (with one) all the way up to Battleships that can carry all 5 attachments. Also the attachments themselves have two models allowing them to further upgrade. In order for the whole system to work though, we did add one additional rule, attachments to ships can never be removed, so once you make a choice you are stuck with it. For your largest (and most expensive ships) the attachments will make them better in combat, increasing their survivability. While with the smaller ships we’re now giving you a strategic choice, build the (cheaper) upgrade and keep your ship half decent for a few type of missions, or scrape and replace with a more expensive newer ship.
This rather clever system left one outstanding problem, the micromanagement associated with it. So firstly we added a button that would automatically add built attachments to existing ships. It might not always upgrade the ship you precisely wanted, but for those of you who are short of time it will keep the game playable. The second thing was all the problems of building a new ship and then adding the attachments to them. However this was pretty simple, you just build units with attachments pre-attached. This is great but then we started thinking “wouldn’t it be nice if you could do this with other units too”, and so it became that you can build any unit that can have an attachment with the attachment already there.
On to our final big change: Airpower. Looking at air combat we felt you took too much organisation damage. A few fighters could quickly be grounded by a large number of unescorted TACs, simply because they would end up loosing so much ORG they just couldn’t fly anymore. Then it was just a matter of runway striking to keep them on the ground. So we reworked the damage in air combat to balance more towards strength damage than organisation. We then scaled this damage according to ORG. The net effect is that using a fleet of TACS to keep your enemies fighters and interceptors on the ground will become more expansive and take much longer. It will also make those air doctrines a little more useful.
Now onto the new game options, we have added 4 new game options, again for those of you who fancy doing something a bit different. These are as follows
Democracies can Declare War – Can be fun, but I do warn you your dissent gain is not 0, so you can have some unhappy bunnies in your country if you decide to take advantage of this option.
Variable End Date. – Chose between 1940, 1946, 1952, 1958 and 1964. The final date is more for the benefit of the modders out there.
Full IC Takeover – For those of you who really want war to pay, you can now get every scrap of IC you conquer.
Tech-Team Takeover – Now whenever you annex a country you get their tech teams. That is until they are released as puppets again.
Keep your eyes peeled this Thursday on Gamer’s Gate!
Your Paradox development team
:rofl: 
