This is sort of a rant, but I've been pretty patient. But today my patience ran out. I can't play this game any more until 1.03, and only then if 1.03 fixes what are in my view the most annoying bugs.
First, there's the save & reload, lose your R & D and intel techs. This is annoying, but hey, I want to play, so I don't save and reload. I leave the game running all the time, in the background when necessary. Lucky I have a system that can do that.
Well, the CTDs certainly suck, because I have no save game to go back to, but they don't happen often, so I'll live. Oddly, they seem to happen whenever I tactical bomb or dive bomb Denmark (Kolding in particular), but what hell, Denmark isn't worth much, so I let the Danes keep it.
Then one game I lost a huge fighter airforce. I had it intercepting the French airforce, and it kept chasing them into France until it just landed, and got taken out on the ground. I had not ordered it to land, it just decided to land way behind enemy lines and *poof!* it was gone. If I had any saved games, I'd go back to one and recover my airforce. But I can't save any games because I don't want to lose the techs! So no dice there. So I searched the forum, and find that this is a known bug or issue or something, and that in order to avoid it you have to be very careful with your air units; every time an air battle is over, you have to manually direct your planes back to their base. This is a lot of micromanagement, but it's better than losing an entire airforce, so I say, what the hell, and manually redirect my squadrons to base after every air battle.
Then I start to notice that my air battles are going nowhere despite overwhelming strength and superior technology on my side. So I do another search, and learn how important weather is. Sure enough, it's raining where I was trying to fight an air battle. So I wait for the rain to clear. And I wait. And wait. And it NEVER clears! To stop the rain, I have to start another game. What's more, I notice that the longer the game goes on, the more rain I get, until it's raining pretty much throughout the entire world. This happens more or less every game. I read about how the AI "falls asleep." Maybe the weather falls asleep too, I think. If I save and reload, maybe the weather will "wake up"! But I can't save and reload because, well, see above.
So I decide to focus on the ground war. That's the real fight anyway. But I'm having trouble getting attacks timed right. A lot of the time, I can't get the timing box to come up at all. And about half the time that it does, it has no effect on the unit's attack time. I select "August 9, 8:00 hours" in the box and click "OK" and the unit says it's going to arrive at August 8 at 22:00. Headstrong corps commander! I don't know what causes this, but it means certain of my units are always getting ahead of other units and into battle before the main force arrives, often to get chewed up. So I try to keep only very large corps together, as this way they generally have sufficient strength to mount an attack. This reduces the amount of precision planning I can do (which really is where a lot of the fun comes in) but what the hell, I can still fight.
Next I'm getting strat bombed to within and inch of my life by Britain. I had good AA in my original provinces, but none in the newly conquered low countries or northern France. I scatter some fighters, and they do intercept, but they do no damage at all to the bombers because the weather is so bad (solid rain from Lisbon to Moscow, Vardo to Athens). And the bombers just keep coming. After a while they get smart enough to avoid provinces where I have fighters, and go for the undefended cities. Getting frustrated, I decide to take out the problem at the source. I mass an airforce of 9 fighter squadrons, base them in Lille, and go for Enlgand. There's the Royal Air Force, in all its glory, parked in Coventry, Portsmouth and London. Lots of bombers in Coventry, so I attack there, selecting "intercept." And my fighters do intercept. But, again, because of the weather, nothing happens. An air battle ensues that goes on for hours and stretches into days, with no side taking any casualties or taking any loss of org. The damned weather again. I should have known better. So I call off the attack. But it orders my planes to Sheffield! The game is paused so they haven't left yet, but it says they're going to Sheffield. I click every button I can click, and every home province I can click. No dice! The numbskull air general wants to take them to Sheffield. No matter what I do, I cannot get them off this notion. I can't even leave them in Coventry to restart the battle. As soon as I unpaused the game, the fighters duly went to Sheffield, duly landed, and duly disappeared. *Poof!* In any other game, I would have reloaded my last save, but, well . . . see above.
And that was that.
I can't play again until this stuff is fixed. It's just too frustrating. I'll go through withdrawals to be sure, but my hope is that it will just make playing all the more fun when the patch does come out (assuming it fixes all of the above).
You might not be able to tell from this post that I love this game, I really do, but sometimes love means knowing when to spend time apart.
First, there's the save & reload, lose your R & D and intel techs. This is annoying, but hey, I want to play, so I don't save and reload. I leave the game running all the time, in the background when necessary. Lucky I have a system that can do that.
Well, the CTDs certainly suck, because I have no save game to go back to, but they don't happen often, so I'll live. Oddly, they seem to happen whenever I tactical bomb or dive bomb Denmark (Kolding in particular), but what hell, Denmark isn't worth much, so I let the Danes keep it.
Then one game I lost a huge fighter airforce. I had it intercepting the French airforce, and it kept chasing them into France until it just landed, and got taken out on the ground. I had not ordered it to land, it just decided to land way behind enemy lines and *poof!* it was gone. If I had any saved games, I'd go back to one and recover my airforce. But I can't save any games because I don't want to lose the techs! So no dice there. So I searched the forum, and find that this is a known bug or issue or something, and that in order to avoid it you have to be very careful with your air units; every time an air battle is over, you have to manually direct your planes back to their base. This is a lot of micromanagement, but it's better than losing an entire airforce, so I say, what the hell, and manually redirect my squadrons to base after every air battle.
Then I start to notice that my air battles are going nowhere despite overwhelming strength and superior technology on my side. So I do another search, and learn how important weather is. Sure enough, it's raining where I was trying to fight an air battle. So I wait for the rain to clear. And I wait. And wait. And it NEVER clears! To stop the rain, I have to start another game. What's more, I notice that the longer the game goes on, the more rain I get, until it's raining pretty much throughout the entire world. This happens more or less every game. I read about how the AI "falls asleep." Maybe the weather falls asleep too, I think. If I save and reload, maybe the weather will "wake up"! But I can't save and reload because, well, see above.
So I decide to focus on the ground war. That's the real fight anyway. But I'm having trouble getting attacks timed right. A lot of the time, I can't get the timing box to come up at all. And about half the time that it does, it has no effect on the unit's attack time. I select "August 9, 8:00 hours" in the box and click "OK" and the unit says it's going to arrive at August 8 at 22:00. Headstrong corps commander! I don't know what causes this, but it means certain of my units are always getting ahead of other units and into battle before the main force arrives, often to get chewed up. So I try to keep only very large corps together, as this way they generally have sufficient strength to mount an attack. This reduces the amount of precision planning I can do (which really is where a lot of the fun comes in) but what the hell, I can still fight.
Next I'm getting strat bombed to within and inch of my life by Britain. I had good AA in my original provinces, but none in the newly conquered low countries or northern France. I scatter some fighters, and they do intercept, but they do no damage at all to the bombers because the weather is so bad (solid rain from Lisbon to Moscow, Vardo to Athens). And the bombers just keep coming. After a while they get smart enough to avoid provinces where I have fighters, and go for the undefended cities. Getting frustrated, I decide to take out the problem at the source. I mass an airforce of 9 fighter squadrons, base them in Lille, and go for Enlgand. There's the Royal Air Force, in all its glory, parked in Coventry, Portsmouth and London. Lots of bombers in Coventry, so I attack there, selecting "intercept." And my fighters do intercept. But, again, because of the weather, nothing happens. An air battle ensues that goes on for hours and stretches into days, with no side taking any casualties or taking any loss of org. The damned weather again. I should have known better. So I call off the attack. But it orders my planes to Sheffield! The game is paused so they haven't left yet, but it says they're going to Sheffield. I click every button I can click, and every home province I can click. No dice! The numbskull air general wants to take them to Sheffield. No matter what I do, I cannot get them off this notion. I can't even leave them in Coventry to restart the battle. As soon as I unpaused the game, the fighters duly went to Sheffield, duly landed, and duly disappeared. *Poof!* In any other game, I would have reloaded my last save, but, well . . . see above.
And that was that.
I can't play again until this stuff is fixed. It's just too frustrating. I'll go through withdrawals to be sure, but my hope is that it will just make playing all the more fun when the patch does come out (assuming it fixes all of the above).
You might not be able to tell from this post that I love this game, I really do, but sometimes love means knowing when to spend time apart.
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