Unwichtig wrote: ↑Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:25 pm
Good afternoon,
some additional, very interesting feed back from my main multiplayer opponent ´damient´ and me.
(We now played 5 games and made quite some observations, so sorry for long post.)
Nothing better than a detailed analysis to improve the game.
We both love the game and will continue to play it anyway, so once again nothing is urgent.
We both know its a hard and unthankful job doing all the changes for free without getting a salary at all.
If players enjoy the mod and give some feedback that's more than enough for me.
I just keep reporting things that i found strange, especially if my impression is that they can be fixed.
This time the feed back is heavily aiming on the endgame...so turns 45-60.
Been about time too, I guess.
I think its important because most of the games end between turn 30 and 40 and you hardly get any reports of the things that are happening 1918.
This was actually the first MP game that took us until turn 61 (!) to be completed.
What was the victory type of this match anyway?
I think we both optimized our way of playing and at the end literally every countries army was exhausted - The game was incredibly balanced for a very long time. The end sounds very strange, it actually was not that bad as it sounds. I expected a defeat anyway so i did not care so much. Is was just a strange sequence of events.
Very Brief summary of events:
I play Entente, my opponent strikes east first.
So any insights from this particular match must be taken with a grain of salt because of the non-standard initial situation.
I defend france easily but i dont attack further than the few german fortresses. Too many defenders, static trench warfare starts. My Serbian campaign is poor, austria cedes transilvania to romania, romania join cp as well.
I gave Ottoman a UK Dread to keep them out of war as long as possible. My French/UK priority was to max. prepare for war on ottoman and preemptively strike before they join to knock them out asap. Few turns before ottoman officially joins, i declare war and cause severe damage. Ottoman keeps fighting but never recovers.
Preemptive Strike on Ottoman triggers bulgarian-ottoman defense pact (never saw this before, did not expect this, its brilliant!). Bulgarian, romanian and austrian troops finish off serbia. Austria does not cede trento to italy, italy joins Entente. As romanian, austrian and bulgarian troops line up to attack italy, france stands tall and sends 50% of its forces to italy for support. Italy can be secured at the ´Mont Verona Line´.
However, france has no reserves to ouflank germany via belgium. The innocent passage is not played to force germany to declare war on Belgium first instead.
I'm confused about what event you are referring to. There is no such event that would force Germany to attack Belgium. Surely there must be a misunderstanding.
Italian front stays stable for 2 years, and so is the french - german front. Looks like 50-50, no side can capture any hexes or they keep shifting between fractions turn by turn.
To fill up italian manpower losses, more and more french are required to defend italy. Equally, more and more british are required to defend gaps in the french frontline.
Ottoman surrenders mid 1917, russia surrenders early 1918. (First time that russia has literally almost no manpower left. Russian army is exhausted, manpower dark red. Russian guerilla tactics work perfectly against germany causing a severe delay of surrender. Key cities are defended heavily, vast territory is used to delay and cut of german troop movements. This works excellent in the game.)
But: Germany get many convoys. The royal navy sufferes significant losses, the insane german submarine use inside the northsea and baltics make it, from our perspective, impossible to use the royal navy in any offensive way. Every offensive attempt is doomed to fail. I did the tactic against damient and won, he used it against me and won. At the moment we both have no idea how to deal with screening/shielding submarines. I dont go into details here, but we found some ways to cripple the royal navy without loosing a sub, it drives the entente player into madness. In all games UK looses morale and collapse points and is eventually knocked out of the war by the loss of their fleet whilst germany gets fluent, secure PP income. At the moment i can only recommend not to leave port with the RN and invest in airpower instead.
We discussed this before and I've already built in measures to counter this in the next update.
This works much better now as germany and austria can only build 8 fighers whilst italy, uk and france can have 12. So in the longterm, airpower shifts to entente which helps a lot and is worth the investment. (Thats kind off realistic actually as entente did have more aircraft at the end).
Final turns 50-60:
I could see that UK was about to leave the war. The Northseabloackade was not sustainable, too many ships lost (+350 ships plus 5 french light cruisers), Dreadnought collapse points, indian revolution, zeppelin raids on london (gott strafe england), a poor kill-casualty relation, the irish revolution etc. lead to a collapse of UK in mid 1918. Surrender could have happened any time.
Politically and morally incorrect, i deployed britsh troops at the very first frontline and kept attacking anyway. Even the german-austrian army were exhausted, so i was aiming to make it even worse and ´scarifice units of a country that surrenders anyway´. At the same time i kept french army coprs in the second line allowing them to dig in and defend france at full strengh and full efficiency later.
Italy was already defended by french.
Then: UK surrender! UK troops in europe disappear, but the hexes to the french border stay british! Germany cannot attack france - France is now shielded by unoccupied hexes. So positioning units of a surrendering country at the very first frontline blocks it, if the nation surrenders - that must not happen. This is a big problem for CP as the german french frontline is only 3 hexes wide.
Not if Germany went by the book and invaded Belgium. That's what you get when trying out "exciting" new strategies, I guess. But of course you are totally right that a surrendered ally should not keep any control over another ally's original hexes. Unfortunately the function that controls that behavior looks perfectly in order and should work correctly but doesn't. Looks like I'll have to add further checks at the start of each turn.
But: France suffers collapse points for UK surrender. Germany MUST re-declare war on UK, an attack on france is not possible if they do not. UK rejoins next turn...with 42 (?) collapse points and dark red manpower. Germany occupies the empty hexes, one turn later UK surrenders again, Germany refuses as we are worried that france gets more and more collapse points because of that.
No further collapse points would have been suffered anyway. I'm surprised though I did not ban re-declaring war on a surrendered nation in PBEM, as is the case in singleplayer mode. Re-declaring has a great potential to be exploited by a unscrupulous player in my opinion. Once the problem with the neutral hexes by surrendered nations blocking access to map areas is solved I will remove the ability to re-declare in PBEM too unless some good reason to keep it in is brought up.
We agree that UK will not be used any further in the war.
Every turn, 4-5 collapse points are added to UK ending the game with +60 cp.
Working as designed.
One turn later italy surrenders, trapping my french army in italy. French units cant move anywhere, are cut of supply, cant be decomissioned. But germany can still attack and kill them. So italy trapped all french artillery etc. and they die with no resistance. So france gets a penalty by rescueing italy for more than 2 years? Why whould italy not allow them to leave? Entire french army suffers a slow death. How can i prevent that?
Sounds like they did not have any source of supply left, probably all Italian cities turned neutral and the path to France was now cut off. If that was the case not much can be done about that.
Without half the french army and many extra collapse points, france was a hopeless case. (French manpower was black, they had 2 collapse points when this chain reaction started, italy was secured as well).
It is sad as germany and austria were equally about to collapse. Austria was having riots and germany many demonstrations and both their armies were exhausted as well. ottoman surrendered.
Sure. Normally a whole design studio would have tested such a complex game for years before release so such infuriating bugs would have been ironed out. Alas the player base for this mod is rather small and these days I simply lack the motivation for extensive testing so problems like the one you described are still a thing even more so if "unchartered territory" is entered by employing new "cunning plans". 
At the same time, i was forced to play the following two events despite the fact that ottoman surrendered earlier: ´Sabbotage Oriental Express´ and ´Arab Uprising´. They both started to appear after ottoman surrendered, i did not require them anymore but was forced to play them anyway to free up the event pool again. Suggest to discard them once ottoman it out.
I'm surprised those weren't discarded. They should have been removed after ottoman surrender. Strange.
Multiple unique events happened in 1918 that we have never seen before. I cant believe how much work you put into this creating events for late 1918 even though the game hardly reaches that far. So after many, many, many hours i saw the "Install Clemenceau", "Propaganda Campaign against Germany", "Ignite Finish Revolts", "Deploy Marine Korps at Dutch Border", "Bulgarian-Ottoman Defense Pact", "Berber Supressed" and many more events. for the first time. Amazing. Do you actually have an overview whats all included in the game?
No, only the guys in the Potzblitz creativity department do...and they are usually drunk.
Finally: An attempt to achieve the gallipoli raid by assembling ships in the aegis failed. I assembled a total of 6 french, british and italian units to trigger the gallipoli raid but again...austrian submarines did block the adria and caused equal losses like the german subs in the northsea. This is even easier as the entente med fleet consists of armoured cruisers and pre-dreads only which can not be upgraded with anti submarine weapons. If austria invests early in submarine tech and plays the adriatic sub event, they can easily get 4-5 subs by 1916 and sink the entente navy in the med as well. Advanced French Fleet was already supporting royal navy but also failed to do so.
Reduce AH submarine build limit to 1 and re-allow submarines for Entente also with build limit of 1?
It feels a bit like the way that entente players used to deploy subs in the baltic to sink german convoys, this has now shifted the other way around with german subs and austrian subs controlling the adria, eagis and northsea instead. German & Austrian fleet must never fear being ambushed as entente does not have subs...which makes offensive actions possible. Whilst entente ships, once ambushed, are surrounded and dead.
Clearly the way NOT to go would be to re-allow submarines for the Entente but rather make submarines more vulnerable.
Very hard to find a mechanism to make that work. I love the submarines and they need to be in the game.
But the key problem is: Subs can operate both offensively and defensively against ships while ships can only act defensively against subs. Offensive submarine warfare does not exist in the game.
Submarine vs submarine action is out of the question, this is not the Hunt for Red October.
I now think that a powerfull Entente "Q-Ship event" or an unexpected "Lost contact to submarine" event would help, causing significant damage to subs automatically and make their position public.
Maybe some damage by Q-Ships when attacking convoys but it must be a low chance or else subs will be even more discouraged from playing their historic role.
Killing subs outright via pure chance events feels too cheap.
My favourite solution would be: Once a sub has strenght 6 and lower, it cant dive anymore. It will be surfaced all the time and can be attacked. That would be both realistic and also allow offensive asw for entente. Why would a damaged sub dive? It would not...and when its surfaced its position is overt. That would be amazing.
How about making a revealed sub susceptible to attacks from any enemy naval unit, not just the unit that ran into or was attacked by the sub?
