Starfire Historical Mod

[Mithel]

Soapy, I've been thinking about your comments all night and realized I made an error in my unit values. I intend Med 50mm Tanks to be worth roughly four times a plain infantry division. I have the soft attack part correct but didn't realize the infantry when matched up directly against armor are actually at a roughly five or six to one ratio (depending on the anti-tank techs researched). I had thought that anti-tank techs would improve the ratio more but looking over it I now feel the anti-tank techs don't boost infantry's HA enough. With a few more tweaks (and I need to run some tests) I think I should achieve reasonable results where it will be foolish to build only armor.

Fiendix, correct, the adjustments won't be all that dramatic. I'm probably going to basically rework the anti-tank tech tree a bit. I'll probably add in one tech and possibly double the (HA) benefit of each existing anti-tank tech.

I need to do some testing to observe actual battle performance to see if my thoughts are going in the right direction.

Kindjal, those IC boost benefits are too much in my opinion. I don't really think they are "wrong" but they are generally "too cheap" (for the R&D cost) and in the HoI game engine they mess up the game system too much. I'm going to trim those down more.

- Mithel

 

[Crusher Bob]

I'm not sure if the IC bonuses for tech should be reduced that much, but I think there should be more techs that give smaller bonuses. With the current set-up it's a very have/have not system, you develop polyurethane (sp?) and share it with all your firnds to give then instant IC. Spreading it out to several 1 and 2% techs means that it might just be better to give them better tanks instead.

Also, adding some drawbacks to some of the industrial techs (maybe making mass production easier to get, but upping fuel and supply requirements to represent increased motorization?

I'm also still a bit leery of the relatively high fuel costs for self propelled arty and AT. They both up fuel consumption by around .5?, yet you can achieve the same effect by simply adding a brigade to the unit, without all that tiresome research. (Especially when so many fuel free alternatives are available, like AT rockets, doing the self mobile gun path seems to be mostly IC down the drain. Upping the benefits of these to around 1.5x what they currently are would probably make them a nicer alternative.

 

[Crusher Bob]

Hmm, can 'night move' be used as a way to represent the difference between an inf division + horses as opposed to an inf div + trucks? This allows divisions to be speeded up or slowed down by a tech.

 

[Mithel]

Version 0.99p is now available.

Major naval changes; manpower changed; techs changed - see website - this is another major change release.

- Mithel

 

[Heretic]

I'm seeing some slightly unusual behaviour with the 0.99o release of Starfire.
I'm playing SU, and being reasonably historical.
Germany attached Polad and the allies right on time, but it's now March 1941 and they still haven't cleared up the last three provinces. France managed to get as far as Koln, and is now held back on the Manginot line. I think I have a reasonable tech lead over Germany in some areas. SU and Germany are roughly equal in troop levels, although I have a couple more armour & motor units (which should make a big difference in this mod).
I sent as an expoditionary force to Germany a tank army of 9 divisions of the latest 50mm medium tanks, and then used the remnants of my control to point them towards Warsaw. Every time the date counter flicked over, the AI decided it was a really poor idea to attack, and stopped them. All the while they were massing troops on the eastern edge of Poland (my border). I draw the conclusion that the German AI had managed to forget it was still at war with Poland, and so wasn't bothering to finish off.

Incidentally, I get some errors on startup, it says the file DEF3.bmp and DEF9.bmp are missing from the GFX/palette folder. I can't find them, but the game starts ok without them, so it's not the end of the world.

Anyway, I would comment that this mod is certainly interesting, and seems to being some more balance to the game, by improving (increasing) the time it takes to conquer countries, and requiring a little more thought to army composition before you attack.

Heretic


note..
this was composed before i saw the thread updated..
I guess I will try 0.99p

 

[Mithel]

Heretic, I'd strongly encourage you to reinstall v1.05 and v1.05c clean and then install Starfire. It sounds to me like you may have something "corrupted" in your install. My mod doesn't touch the graphics stuff so there is no reason those should be generating errors.

I've never seen Germany fail to finish off Poland. Very strange!

Please do try v0.99p - I'd like to hear some feedback. I've got several ideas that I didn't get into v0.99p due to lack of time but it should be a very different experience from the previous versions!

- Mithel

 

[Heretic]

Thanks, Mithel..

Unfortunately I am working away from home at home at the moment and so am 300 miles from the CD..
This means I limp on with a dodgy install - and have more time than normal to play..
one of life's little ironies I guess.

Germany is still showing no sign of finishing off Poland.. perhaps it is an extended version of the Warsaw ghetto?

Heretic

 

[Ghost_dk]

Thanks, Mithel..

Unfortunately I am working away from home at home at the moment and so am 300 miles from the CD..
This means I limp on with a dodgy install - and have more time than normal to play..
one of life's little ironies I guess.

Germany is still showing no sign of finishing off Poland.. perhaps it is an extended version of the Warsaw ghetto?

Heretic

So you meen to say that you actually left your home without the HOI cd

You really should'nt be braggin about that. Stuff like that carries the death penalty around here dont you know

Ghost_dk

 

[unmerged(16031)]

I played as Soviets with the 0.99k version:
1. By 1940 I had a little over 200 divisions, and still I also had around 4000 manpower. Isn't this a bit too much? I wasn't even producing at full speed...I could easily get 300-400 by 1942, and by the end of game...who knows?

2. Germany started the war in 1940(happens in each of my games with this mod..)

 

[Orthank]

You've played the old one patch mode, try the new one and forget about 4000 mapower resereves .

 

[Crusher Bob]

The Vichy event gives French Indochina to Japan even when Japan is not in the Axis (looks like you are using an older verison of the event).

Also, looking at the research paths of the AI, they are researching all (gun) tank models. This causes the AI to waste a lot of research on the tank models (especially now that they cost more to develop).

Maybe make the tank gun techs deactive the 'lesser' tank models? this would save the AI a lot of work. (So researching the 30mm tank gun would deactive all the 20mm tank techs). This way the AI will only go after the 'best' tank that it has the tech for at the time and not all the obsolete models.

You'll probably want to take away the biased intellectual from Finland, they can give all their great starting tech to Germany, Italy, and Hungary for free really powering up.

Also, it looks like France's economy might have been near meltdown, taking Paris was hardly worth any loot. A loading of the game indicated that they had only about 1-2000 of each resource. It's possible that the French Navy used up a lot of oil and the AI did not manage the convoy system well.
I'll have to play as France as give it a try.

 

[Mithel]

Crusher, most of the events are stock vanilla v1.05c. I won't seriously look at the events until I have the fundamental elements of the game working well.

I reversed what Paradox did with the tank techs deactivating the others. I felt this was too restrictive to the human player. I've been improving the AI files one by one to prioritize so they don't research all tank types. Of course most countries can't field an armored division so it's a mute issue for all the but major powers.

France's economy does have some issues. I'm also trying to prevent each conquered nation from giving Germany full stockpiles.

- Mithel

 

[Crusher Bob]

Playing as Italy and watching Germany's tech research, they were researching all models of basic medium, and had researched all 'later' models of the light tanks. A quick look at England showed the same pattern. While the vanilla 'one tank per model' is very limiting, it does help the AI. The tank gun sytem I suggested will at least allow multiple tanks per model if you don't have the larger tank gun at the time. This will hopefull reduce the amount of extra research the AI does.

 

[unmerged(12303)]

France's economy does have some issues. I'm also trying to prevent each conquered nation from giving Germany full stockpiles.

- Mithel

Yea I got quite a lot of stockpiles.. maybe add an event after annexation.. like masses demand food: - 5000 supplies?? That would be a quick fix?

F

 

[Crusher Bob]

There's a few events in there already like 'Netherlands excess food rots' or something like that.

Am currently modding the tanks and artillery techs so that tank guns deactivate 'lesser' models of tank in the same class, will see how it goes (so 40mm tank gun will deactivate basic light 30, improved light 30, advanced light 30, and basic medium 30).

I'll stop the deactivation where the tank classes are across different levels of armor tech and have the 'better' class of tank deactivate the lesser instead.

You will always be able to build the 'best'of each class of tank'.

 

[boromir]

Germany gets very little supply wise from conquered countries stockpiles. Doubt if it even is in excess of 5000 from *all* captured countries. They also get very little steel (actually zero steel) from the captured stockpiles - the only exception is Sweden which has tons of it. Germany runs out of steel pretty quick if it doesn't get it from Sweden.

They get quite a lot of the other resources though.

 

[Crusher Bob]

Looking good so far, Germany is going to skip basic med MG and 30 mm, and most of the other power will skip the mg tanks since they have 20mm guns.

 

[unmerged(11703)]

I played a game as Germany vs. the AI and found that it is possible, even easy, to starve the UK ai w/ uboats. I had three fleets that I rotated starting at the outbreak of the war (Sept. '39) one of 9 VIICs and two of 12 VIICs. I researched some of the uboat techs but never went all the way to the long range sub.

I paid 500 IC per sub so the total cost to me was: 12000 IC and the supplies and oil to maintain them.

Here is the data based on my various save games for the UK:

September 1939:

Transports: 1632

Dec. 1939:

Coal Stockpile 99363.0
Steel Stockpile 99607.0
Oil Stockpile 9556.667
Agri Stockpile 99754.0
Supply Stockpile 2662.787
Transports: 1.9 <- In just 4 months ~1600 transports were sunk.

July 1940:

Coal Stockpile 99247.0
Steel Stockpile 79313.0
Oil Stockpile 3895.647 <- Running low on oil
Agri Stockpile 43002.5 <- Running out of agriculture
Supply Stockpile 6879.513
Transports: 2.2

November 1940:

Coal Stockpile 92559.945 <- starting to eat into coal stockpile
Steel Stockpile 62957.0
Oil Stockpile 510.518
Agri Stockpile 22.5 <- out of agriculture
Supply Stockpile 8529.224

June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa begins...):

Coal Stockpile 804.0 <- Virtualy out of coal
Steel Stockpile 88686.0 <- Steel back up due to reduced IC?
Oil Stockpile 62.467 <- no oil
Agri Stockpile 3.543 <- no agriculture
Supply Stockpile 15946.407 <- lots of supplies!?

When I did a fighter sweep in 1942 all air units were down to zero org and the RN was keeping to port and when it got caught at sea it also had zero org. AA fire was still muderous though. I attempted some strat. bombing to reduce the UKs coal income and my basic strat bombers were receiving 33% losses per sortie over territory w/ 4 AA in daylight bombing.

One amazing thing is that it took a full 18 months for the UKs stockpiles to get down near zero, this seems much to long considering the fact they were pretty much out of transports after the first few months. Also, dissent remained at zero the entire time. There should be some events to simulate the fact that the population would be starving at this point.

 

[unmerged(16031)]

Im I the only one thinking that Starfire mod should have it's own sub-forum?

 

[Mithel]

Flashblade, impressive! Ok, perhaps we've made it a bit too easy to knock out the UK transports (or the AI is too pitiful at dealing with it).

The way HoI is designed it's going to take a while for loss of resources to impact the economy as the stockpiles are used up. I think this is acceptable. There was a lot of stockpiling during WWII.

Let's hope v1.06 comes out soon so we can have a reworked naval game. It's not worth putting a lot of effort into naval just to redo it all when v1.06 comes out.

Crusher that's an interesting idea regarding the tank models. I might adopt that (deactivate tank models below the current (artillery) tank gun researched). Of course historically one of the mistakes Germany really did was "research" far too many tank models.

- Mithel