European MP game - DEG 3

[unmerged(21817)]

Excellent work. Save game files are AFAIK stand-alone files, they are not dependent on any other files (except the exe and graphics). In other words, there is no way to include new ai files in a save, other then editing the save of course. All you have to do is edit the military = { } and technology = { } tags, in which case you just put in the same values as in the ai files (armor = x, infantry = y, etc).

Event files are also not included in the save game files, I don't know about ai, a possible way to change it is to add the following to one of the included event files;
#############################################
# Bulgaria AI
#############################################
event = {
id = 64003
random = no
country = BUL

trigger = {
ai = yes
}

name = "AI_EVENT"
style = 0

date = { day = 1 month = january year = 1936 }
offset = 1
deathdate = { day = 29 month = december year = 1948 }

action_a = {
command = { type = ai which = "switch/bul_deg.ai" }
}
}

Where bul_deg.ai is the new ai file, unfortunately I have not found a way to direct the path to anything but the "HOI2/ai/" directory, does anyone know how to do this?, on the up side I can put all files in a seperate DEG folder so nothing would need to be overwritten, the bad thing is I prefered having everything in one neat folder.

I would rather not go into the savegame files and start editing the AI in there (if that is how it is done), thats just begging for crashes, giving minors some free rares is about as far as I think we should go with edits.

I agree we should make a decision about the minors boosting, as I see it really comes down to:
Scenario A: No free resources = German annexation of all minors
Scenario B: free resources = possibly overstrengthened minors

Let me then propose Scenario C: Enough free resources to run minor industry at 75%, if Germany wants to make it 100% they have to help out, but even without help the minors will still field something resembling an army.

 

[unmerged(14035)]

unfortunately I have not found a way to direct the path to anything but the "HOI2/ai/" directory, does anyone know how to do this?

Can't you simply write something like:

command = { type = ai which = "..\scenarios\DEG\bul_deg.ai" }

Or does the game engine not recognize the ..\ part of the command?

I agree we should make a decision about the minors boosting, as I see it really comes down to:
Scenario A: No free resources = German annexation of all minors
Scenario B: free resources = possibly overstrengthened minors

Let me then propose Scenario C: Enough free resources to run minor industry at 75%, if Germany wants to make it 100% they have to help out, but even without help the minors will still field something resembling an army.

Scenario C is a nice compromise I think. Running at 75% would mean the following free resources:
Slovakia: 5 rares 10 steel 20 energy
Hungary: 2 rares
Romania: 4 rares 5 steel 15 energy
Bulgaria: nothing

Btw why would editing the AI in the save file cause crashes? I don't see how this is different from editing resource stockpiles or other stuff that we have done in previous games.

 

[unmerged(21817)]

Can't you simply write something like:

command = { type = ai which = "..\scenarios\DEG\bul_deg.ai" }

Or does the game engine not recognize the ..\ part of the command?

Works smooth as silk, smoother, I may even go as far as kashmir.

Btw why would editing the AI in the save file cause crashes? I don't see how this is different from editing resource stockpiles or other stuff that we have done in previous games.

Matter of preference I find the .ai files more well ordered than finding specific values in a save game file, one wrong value in the save game files and it is bound to crash (sooner rather than later). But with your idea working it should be fairly simple to implement all changes forthwith.

Is everyone ok with propping up minor resources to 75% of daily IC and improving their AI build priorities? If yes I'll provide the download this evening, kindly make suggestions before that if you want anything changed.

 

[unmerged(40103)]

Is everyone ok with propping up minor resources to 75% of daily IC and improving their AI build priorities? If yes I'll provide the download this evening, kindly make suggestions before that if you want anything changed.

After my previous post in this thread it's needless to say that it's fine with me. But I assume this means we'll use it on Thursday?

 

[unmerged(21817)]

After my previous post in this thread it's needless to say that it's fine with me. But I assume this means we'll use it on Thursday?

Thats the plan, Juv should be glad to know that before long he'll (hopefully)have Mountaineers, Marines, Vanilla infantry and some varied fighters arriving from his allies instead of the Naval bases he said the were building.

I'm unsure if an improved French AI will make it in, but they won't be around long enough to take advantage of a new AI anyways (new build orders will only kick in once current ones are finished thus it may take a couple of years to see effects).

I'm running some final tests on the AI:s now i a new handsoff game, I can't do any testing on the current game since I would then see all players positioning but it really shouldn't affect AI performance that we have played for 2 months.

Edit: I am unsure how well the AI files will work in SP since I am assuming that all nations will be military controlled by players.

 

[unmerged(21817)]

Download new scenario file from my sig, important to note is that most of the changes in the readme file applies to the vanilla scenario and is therefor not implemented in our save game, the only new things that will be implemented in our save game is

1. AI (through events)
2. Free resources to minors (through save file edits)

Ok in an effort to eliminate completely the need to edit the save game file I created a new scenario file which handles all edits by events:

V 1.031

http://hem.bredband.net/teknikersupport/DEG1939V1031.rar

 

[juv95hrn]

Thats the plan, Juv should be glad to know that before long he'll (hopefully)have Mountaineers, Marines, Vanilla infantry and some varied fighters arriving from his allies instead of the Naval bases he said the were building.

I'm unsure if an improved French AI will make it in, but they won't be around long enough to take advantage of a new AI anyways (new build orders will only kick in once current ones are finished thus it may take a couple of years to see effects).

That's indeed good news concerning the CW.

What's rather terrible, and mostly the explanation for France's quick demise, is that France doesn't repair it's groundforces at all but spends +90% of its IC building TAC and BB's. A human France would give at least the shadow of an opportunity to put up a decent fight although it's almost too late already.

IMO this is a bigger problem than Bulgaria fielding 1918 infantry althought it's good if they can run their industry and this is fixed.

 

[unmerged(14210)]

Great start

hello guys nice reading your aar...seeing resources of course is the big issue in the start. hopefully i will be able to join when i get back from abroad where i am staying. ( i used to play on the norwegian all-stars back in hoi1 mp days and probably fougt some of you guys here). i like your rules here Madviking...that was what we were trying to do back in hoi1...espescially with alot of people "destroying" their own powerful nations by building only one military arm - or attacking a country far away to get some crazy ic benefit (but usually no strategic importance of all). i also remember the guy that went commmunist as the states in 1938...thats fixed with your rules...
ill be watching...good luck...

 

[unmerged(14035)]

hopefully i will be able to join when i get back from abroad where i am staying. ( i used to play on the norwegian all-stars back in hoi1 mp days and probably fougt some of you guys here).

Yeah, you did fight some of us folks back in the good old days of HoI1. I hear you're getting married, is your wife gonna let you play HoI2?

Would be realy fun to have you in one of our games, your countryman Stein is in our current game as the USA. Btw you should get in contact with those other Norwegians like Jan and DagL.

 

[unmerged(14035)]

Fun game today, despite the trouble getting started and a few incidents along the way. Some of the bad stuff that occured:

Difficulty joining: Jan (aka "the Janster") had difficulties joining, despite having the right version of both the official patch and the DEG scenario. The host turning off his firewall did not improve the situation. Does anybody know what could have caused this? Firewall on behalf of the client? Something else?

Crashes: I think we had 2 incidents where players crashed (or was it 3?), both involving USA. None of these occured directly after things such as annex/puppet, though they did happen quite soon afterwards (days). Do you guys realy think these were caused by annex/puppet? Something else, like a more or less random CTD?

Bugged Marseille: when Vichy event fired the Free French kept Marseilles, most likely with a large portion of their divisions strat deploying there. Vichy refused to join Axis, and Germany was more or less forced to DOW the Vichy in order to crush the Marseilles salient. Bad part for the Axis: Vichy is not annexed, thus creating quite a bit of TC drain for Germany/Italy, Axis don't get benefit of any Vichy divisions or ships (they are now part of Allies). Anyway this is a minor issue, we will of course win without the Vichy

Dissapearing German fighters: during one of the rehosts (I think 1st or 2nd crash by USA) 3 out of the 4 newly completed German fighters did not show up in the force pool after rehost. As this is quite an investment I would be very greatfull if this could be edited, Friedl suggested that we edit this as follows: put 3 fighters in the build que that finish in 1 days time, this will be much safer (from a crash point of view) then editing in units directly (they have unique ID numbers etc). 1 days build time for 3 fighters is no big deal, it sure beats 100+ if we were to build them from scratch

Bugged Croatia: Croatia is it's own puppet, something that is "normal" since the event that creates it is broken. No big deal since they totally suck anyway. If possible I guess we could edit it so that they instead are Germany's puppet.

Things that arose during game and need to be discussed:

1) Liberate puppet: Germany liberated the nation of Flanders, some players voiced concern about this calling it gamey or equivalent. This was in no way meant as an exploit, since they are our puppet and part of the Axis they may of course be freely invaded by the Allies. The reason behind this is simple: we only get a fraction of their IC and resources, but they themselves get 100%. For manpower the difference is of course 0% vs 100%. They are not sending us anything but energy (no rares or metal), in fact they have a shortage of these two resources. They also have some decent tech teams and a few good defensive leaders, the whole point is thus for them to contribute to their own defences. Keep in mind that Germany gets less base IC from this, and thus less TC (around 20 TC with max tech). I find it highly unlikely that we will see large quantities of Flanders' super heavy tanks rolling around in Russia, or anything similar

2) German landings in Suez: 1 German para division took Suez, and a follow-up force of some 8 German infantry landed by ship. Some players thought it highly unrealistic that 9 full infantry divisions could be supported there without the aid of a big harbor (something I am inclined to agree with), even though the game mechanics make this possible. What would the alternative be to not allowing this? Putting a max cap on the number of divisions allowed on a non-port beach? Only allowing amphib assaults into provinces with big ports? Keep in mind that the Allies will eventually make landings along the Atlantic coast, and the problems there will be the same.

I guess one reasonable solution to this would be that no forces are allowed to proceed further inland unless you own a large port, thus the invading force would be confined to follow the coastlines (in both directions if they want) until they control a large harbor, before being allowed to push inland. This is a rather simple rule, what do the rest of you think of this?

3) Convoy raiding broken? I'm not realy sure about this since I have not tried it very much, but according to some data it seems that raiding convoys doesn't work properly (or at all?). Unfortunately this is something that is hard to fix. Has anybody so far actually sunken a lot of convoys anywhere?

4) Next session when? In normal cases if 1 player can not make it we find a stand-in for that person, however next week it seems as if 3 players won't be able to make it: Holmberg, Juv (=the host) and MadViking (=me). It's bad enough to have 3 players missing, it's even worse to have the host missing, and it's still more worse to have me missing I suggest we actually postpone next weeks game, and play next session either in 2 weeks or on some other day, if this is possible.

Well that's about all I could think of, if you can think of anything post about it and we can discuss it.

Also please write a bit on the AAR (link in my signature), I'll be putting up some more screenshots and pictures there, feel free to do the same.

 

[unmerged(21817)]

Difficulty joining: Jan (aka "the Janster") had difficulties joining, despite having the right version of both the official patch and the DEG scenario. The host turning off his firewall did not improve the situation. Does anybody know what could have caused this? Firewall on behalf of the client? Something else?

He said he had problems with his firewall, I can think of nothing else really since noone else has any problems connecting to Juv.

Crashes: I think we had 2 incidents where players crashed (or was it 3?), both involving USA. None of these occured directly after things such as annex/puppet, though they did happen quite soon afterwards (days). Do you guys realy think these were caused by annex/puppet? Something else, like a more or less random CTD?

We crashed at least 3 times, First I then the US then I think the US again. All of these crashes came immediately after annex or puppet, so I think it is safe to say that once this issue is fixed we will have a truly stable game. (Besides there isn't too much left to annex except the SU and England of course)

Bugged Marseille: when Vichy event fired the Free French kept Marseilles, most likely with a large portion of their divisions strat deploying there. Vichy refused to join Axis, and Germany was more or less forced to DOW the Vichy in order to crush the Marseilles salient. Bad part for the Axis: Vichy is not annexed, thus creating quite a bit of TC drain for Germany/Italy, Axis don't get benefit of any Vichy divisions or ships (they are now part of Allies). Anyway this is a minor issue, we will of course win without the Vichy

Also annoying is that France got to keep some 30 divisions, however I am quite Ok with this since I think the Vichy event is wrong anyways (for those of you that don't know France normally lose ALL troops stationed in Mainland France, which in this case would have been I think every single division).

Dissapearing German fighters: during one of the rehosts (I think 1st or 2nd crash by USA) 3 out of the 4 newly completed German fighters did not show up in the force pool after rehost. As this is quite an investment I would be very greatfull if this could be edited, Friedl suggested that we edit this as follows: put 3 fighters in the build que that finish in 1 days time, this will be much safer (from a crash point of view) then editing in units directly (they have unique ID numbers etc). 1 days build time for 3 fighters is no big deal, it sure beats 100+ if we were to build them from scratch

It seems by far the easiest way.

Bugged Croatia: Croatia is it's own puppet, something that is "normal" since the event that creates it is broken. No big deal since they totally suck anyway. If possible I guess we could edit it so that they instead are Germany's puppet.

We could if I find the trigger, of course it is a shitty country anyways so it won't make that big a difference.

1) Liberate puppet: Germany liberated the nation of Flanders, some players voiced concern about this calling it gamey or equivalent. This was in no way meant as an exploit, since they are our puppet and part of the Axis they may of course be freely invaded by the Allies. The reason behind this is simple: we only get a fraction of their IC and resources, but they themselves get 100%. For manpower the difference is of course 0% vs 100%. They are not sending us anything but energy (no rares or metal), in fact they have a shortage of these two resources. They also have some decent tech teams and a few good defensive leaders, the whole point is thus for them to contribute to their own defences. Keep in mind that Germany gets less base IC from this, and thus less TC (around 20 TC with max tech). I find it highly unlikely that we will see large quantities of Flanders' super heavy tanks rolling around in Russia, or anything similar

I was surprised to hear releasing puppets is considered gamey, I have a very limited MP experience though, so I have no idea how people exploited this in HOI 1 and such. The main reason for releasing Flanders as I saw it is that the belgian provinces are counted as "occupied" which is a huge TC drain for us. Also some extra inf divisions to help coastal defence will be nice.

2) German landings in Suez: 1 German para division took Suez, and a follow-up force of some 8 German infantry landed by ship. Some players thought it highly unrealistic that 9 full infantry divisions could be supported there without the aid of a big harbor (something I am inclined to agree with), even though the game mechanics make this possible. What would the alternative be to not allowing this? Putting a max cap on the number of divisions allowed on a non-port beach? Only allowing amphib assaults into provinces with big ports? Keep in mind that the Allies will eventually make landings along the Atlantic coast, and the problems there will be the same.

I guess one reasonable solution to this would be that no forces are allowed to proceed further inland unless you own a large port, thus the invading force would be confined to follow the coastlines (in both directions if they want) until they control a large harbor, before being allowed to push inland. This is a rather simple rule, what do the rest of you think of this?

I freely admit that I did not consider the unrealisticness of the landing when I planned it and that it in hindsight might have been a mistake. However I would like to point out that even without supplies Rundstedts 8 infantry divisions with varied brigades would be more than able to handle the lone Iraqi divisions stationed at tel aviv and Alexandria.

It would perhaps have been better if we had dropped beside one of these and then promptly taken the ports. OTOH had we considered this before we would simply have developed air supply and used the 3 transport airplanes at our disposal to air supply our units. (I think lvl 2 air transports are normally capable of supplying roughly 3 divisions a piece, even more with a logistical wizard in command - Rommel -).

Also we did not land Guderian with his panzer hordes. They were however not landed for supply reasons (pretty much 70% of all german convoys are now employed in supplying the troops in suez)

Edit: On even further consideration, this is by no means worse than the fact that the UK troops are still in supply, we own Gibraltar and Suez and this will cause the UK no problems what so ever in supplies. So while the situation may be wrong, there are things that hurt us at least as much.

3) Convoy raiding broken? I'm not realy sure about this since I have not tried it very much, but according to some data it seems that raiding convoys doesn't work properly (or at all?). Unfortunately this is something that is hard to fix. Has anybody so far actually sunken a lot of convoys anywhere?

This is definatively a problem, I'm curious though I have never had any problems sinking convoys in SP. Juv you said you were using French subs, could it possibly be a problem with millitary controlled units not performing properly? Have you tried it with your battle fleets?

4) Next session when? In normal cases if 1 player can not make it we find a stand-in for that person, however next week it seems as if 3 players won't be able to make it: Holmberg, Juv (=the host) and MadViking (=me). It's bad enough to have 3 players missing, it's even worse to have the host missing, and it's still more worse to have me missing I suggest we actually postpone next weeks game, and play next session either in 2 weeks or on some other day, if this is possible.

I can play pretty much any time this week and up until tuesday next week, I'm with other words fine either way.

 

[unmerged(40103)]

Crashes: I think we had 2 incidents where players crashed (or was it 3?), both involving USA. None of these occured directly after things such as annex/puppet, though they did happen quite soon afterwards (days). Do you guys realy think these were caused by annex/puppet? Something else, like a more or less random CTD?

I can hardly imagine it was a coincidence. The pattern was too obvious, so let's hope a future patch will fix this.

1) Liberate puppet: Germany liberated the nation of Flanders, some players voiced concern about this calling it gamey or equivalent. This was in no way meant as an exploit, since they are our puppet and part of the Axis they may of course be freely invaded by the Allies. The reason behind this is simple: we only get a fraction of their IC and resources, but they themselves get 100%. For manpower the difference is of course 0% vs 100%. They are not sending us anything but energy (no rares or metal), in fact they have a shortage of these two resources. They also have some decent tech teams and a few good defensive leaders, the whole point is thus for them to contribute to their own defences. Keep in mind that Germany gets less base IC from this, and thus less TC (around 20 TC with max tech). I find it highly unlikely that we will see large quantities of Flanders' super heavy tanks rolling around in Russia, or anything similar

Like Friedl I'm not an HOI1 veteran, but I was also surprised that releasing puppets could be considered gamey. I think the conqueror has the privilege to choose how the newly acquired resources are going to be used. If you look at the bigger picture it's more a matter of finetuning your economy. It's not that Flanders or Tunesia are going to be the driving forces in certain theaters and they can be attacked by the Allies as any Axis country.

2) German landings in Suez: 1 German para division took Suez, and a follow-up force of some 8 German infantry landed by ship. Some players thought it highly unrealistic that 9 full infantry divisions could be supported there without the aid of a big harbor (something I am inclined to agree with), even though the game mechanics make this possible. What would the alternative be to not allowing this? Putting a max cap on the number of divisions allowed on a non-port beach? Only allowing amphib assaults into provinces with big ports? Keep in mind that the Allies will eventually make landings along the Atlantic coast, and the problems there will be the same.

I guess one reasonable solution to this would be that no forces are allowed to proceed further inland unless you own a large port, thus the invading force would be confined to follow the coastlines (in both directions if they want) until they control a large harbor, before being allowed to push inland. This is a rather simple rule, what do the rest of you think of this?

I think the point considering realism is not so much the size of the harbour in Suez, but more that Britannia rules the waves in the Mediterranean. If Italia would rule the waves, resulting in no enemy fleets in the Mediterranean, it's not as unrealistic that big Axis convoys sail to Suez as it would be now IMHO. As MadViking points out, what are you going to do when the Allies want to invade France? It wouldn't be unrealistic if they would choose Caen as a target, even though it has a small harbour. Are we going to make a rule preventing an invasion there? Are we going to make a rule preventing an invasion there if Germany would be the master of The Channel? Both options wouldn't make sense and I think rules have to be the same for invasions all over the world.

3) Convoy raiding broken? I'm not realy sure about this since I have not tried it very much, but according to some data it seems that raiding convoys doesn't work properly (or at all?). Unfortunately this is something that is hard to fix. Has anybody so far actually sunken a lot of convoys anywhere?

In the first session none of my convoys were sunk. In the session yesterday I lost ships on one occasion, IIRC sunk by the French. So it's apparently not totally broken, but I admit that my losses are a little on the low side. Although with my limited experience in MP convoy raiding in the Atlantic doesn't normally produce such unrealistically low figures.

4) Next session when? In normal cases if 1 player can not make it we find a stand-in for that person, however next week it seems as if 3 players won't be able to make it: Holmberg, Juv (=the host) and MadViking (=me). It's bad enough to have 3 players missing, it's even worse to have the host missing, and it's still more worse to have me missing I suggest we actually postpone next weeks game, and play next session either in 2 weeks or on some other day, if this is possible.

I could play Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday next week. The weekend wouldn't suit me very well.

 

[unmerged(15723)]

Like Friedl I'm not an HOI1 veteran, but I was also surprised that releasing puppets could be considered gamey. I think the conqueror has the privilege to choose how the newly acquired resources are going to be used. If you look at the bigger picture it's more a matter of finetuning your economy. It's not that Flanders or Tunesia are going to be the driving forces in certain theaters and they can be attacked by the Allies as any Axis country.

I think it's more of a question of realism and if it gives unrealistic advantages. Imo the problem is that Belgian IC and resources is to less use for Germany than e.g. Norwegian or French IC.



Happy Easter on you DEGers!

 

[unmerged(40382)]

We crashed at least 3 times, First I then the US then I think the US again. All of these crashes came immediately after annex or puppet, so I think it is safe to say that once this issue is fixed we will have a truly stable game. (Besides there isn't too much left to annex except the SU and England of course)

I recall that another of german players crashed once same time with USA player?

I also CTD once as Japan I was configuring production when I CTD so I dont know if that was the cause. I recall I made non-aggression pact with Soviet and some trade deal as part of deal. Then I started to move production sliders then CTD happened.

 

[juv95hrn]

I only had to time to check that Tunisa and Flanders joined the axis, thus making the vulnurable to invasion and not serving as uninvidable security buffers which removes my fears of the HOI1 syndrome of releasing puppets in the route of an invader to inflict DOWing dissent.

Regarding the invasion in Suez my one regret is that as a single UK/French/CW player I didn't have the time to organize a proper beach defence at Suez although I have no problem with the actual manouver. I think the system itself should prevent supplying of such troops since its totally unrealistic. All the small ports are the for the benefit of the AI that would otherwise never be able to launch invasions. UK will have to lower speed next session to deal with the intrusion into Egypt.

I sure hope the convoy raiding system works next session. In that case you will experience some problems getting supply through to Suez but I fear the system is broken.

About France the Axis had some disadvantage regarding this but remember that the divs saved were mostly 30% strength 1918 infantry that France never will be able to upgrade or reinforce. The Vichy forces were doomed at the time of its spawning and that France fell earlier with no chance of saving any forces over to England a la dunkirk so Im ready to say that this bug evens out in the wash.

Another French/CW/UK player would be appreciated next time we play. It was a fun session but severely stressing for me.

AAR to follow soon...

 

[unmerged(21817)]

About France the Axis had some disadvantage regarding this but remember that the divs saved were mostly 30% strength 1918 infantry that France never will be able to upgrade or reinforce. The Vichy forces were doomed at the time of its spawning and that France fell earlier with no chance of saving any forces over to England a la dunkirk so Im ready to say that this bug evens out in the wash.

All in all I agree with you on most points, even though I must say that I do not agree that this particular bug evened out .

Contrary to the normal solution which includes the elimination of all French troops in mainland France and some 15-20 Vichy divisions joining the Axis, now 30 French (albeit sucky low level ones) joined the British with the Axis losing 20 Vichy ones.

I have no problem with reinforcements and strengthening for the UK since I totally agree that they are understrengthened, but I don't think that in this particular instance the bug evened out, since the grand total is an offset in balance of about 50 divisions .

About the Suez manouver I must admit I was scared to death having the elite of german infantry in Italian Transports protected only by a few cruisers.

 

[unmerged(21817)]

Just confirming that there is no game this thursday right?

 

[unmerged(14035)]

Nope, since many players (3?) are away for Easter holidays we won't play this week. Next session is March 31 at 18.00 CET. Be there, and bring your helmet....

 

[unmerged(40382)]

Btw. I have evening shift week on the work and I can’t play next week Thursday.

My schedule is 2-3 weeks day shift then one week evening shift while I can’t play at evenings.

 

[unmerged(21817)]

I am assuming that everyone else will be able to make it in time for the session March 31.

We need a sub for Jakerson and preferably someone to help Juv, who has a great deal to micro.

If Janster or anyone else who want to sub for that matter wants to try settings and such contact me on ICQ and I should be able to help out, by hosting a game and whatnot. It is normally better to try things out before a session than during.