WIP: How Few Remain

[Eivind IV]

*Downloading*

I'm just looking at it right now and I love it. I'll probably have more time to get into it tomorrow

[Sarsstock]

Hmmm... well it looks good from the get go. I'm not sure I like the fact that the mormons are green.

[POTUS]

Downloading

[AGRICOLA]

@ our_man

Please take a look at your PM.

[our_man]

OK Agricola, thanks for the feedback. You've made some very good points, which I believe the other playtesters will also comment on.

The background. I agree; it is quite hard to read the writing. I'll consider changing it to something more suitable. WRT to resources inside the city, I've never had much of a problem. What do the other playtesters think?

I'd just better state this before I go any further; I still have to finish off changing the rules.txt and game.txt to make the in-game text more appropriate. So, when you do pop a hut, think of it as sending in a surveyor to the village, who finds that it is now large enough to be considered a town. I will include an altered cities.gif in the release version to fit in more appropriately with the milieu. What's everyone elses opinion on the huts? Are there too many of them? Should I get rid of them altogether?

Movement. I raised the road value from 3 up to 4, but obviously it still isn't fast enough. What do you think would be a suitable road multiplier value? I'll make the engineer a move 2 unit anyway.

Agricola, the problems you outlined for the CSA will also affect the USA, as I tried to make the two sides as balanced as possible. If everyone else is having the same problem, I'll change the caravan units to have a shield cost of 50, and lower the tech paradigm from 20/10 to 15/10. I tried to err on the side of caution while making this scenario. Caravans are incredibly powerful units so I wanted to prevent the player from relying on them too much.

I know that unit cost in the scenario is high, but this is because I would like players to think about conserving their units rather than wasting them. Hopefully they'll be left with tough decisions about whether to strike quickly at a lightly defended region and suffer casualties or proceed more cautiously and allow the defences time to build up.

Thanks for the great feedback. That was a great deal of useful information for me. And you haven't even started to play yet!

[AGRICOLA]

@ our_man

Please take a look at your PM.

BTW, I believe that Control Panel/Edit Profile lets you change your e-mail address to make it current.

[our_man]

To all playtesters, I have changed my e-mail (thanks Agricola!) so you can now e-mail me via apolyton. For future updates I'll probably e-mail the files, so could you please PM me your addresses, as at the moment I only have Fairlines and Agricolas.

Agricola, very impressed with your success. I think that it shouldn't be too hard to make it a bit tougher however by giving the cities you captured coastal fortresses and city walls.

[our_man]

OK guys, I've just read through Agricolas excellent report on how his game went as the Confederates. I'll list some of the gameplay changes that I'm thinking of making to make this a more challenging scenario.

- Changes to research and trade (mentioned in previous posts)
- Increase the number of cities on both sides with Coastal Fortresses/City Walls
- Increase the size of the United States Navy
- Reduce the attacks of both artillery units by 1
- Prevent the player from building forts until he has researched a new advance

Hopefully this will make for a tougher human game against the AI.

Please let me know how you're doing in your playtests and whether you agree with the proposals outlined above.

[POTUS]

skrprod@earthlink.net

[AGRICOLA]

By how many % will reducing the tech paradigm to 15/10 actually reduce the number of flasks needed for a tech advance? IIRC, at the beginning of the game, the Rebs needed 9 turns for a new tech, a very long time in a 50 turn scenario.

As I see it, the problem is that a good unit like the Cruiser needs 5 or 6 tech advances. Advances have to be much faster to ensure that the unit is still needed by the time it becomes available. In my game, in part thanks to the powerful British navy, the war at sea was effectively finished before the end of 1881. Doing further research to obtain cruisers would have been pointless.

Traders that cost 50 shields may still be on the expensive side. IMO a CSA city would have to have at least 25 trade arrows to make it worthwhile to build a Trader and set up the transportation needed to deliver it to Port-au-Prince. The Rebs don't have many cities that fit that criterion. It comes down to a value judgement, does a player want ~250 shekels or, for 10 extra shields, another vet artillery.

Ooops, as I was checking the above numbers while writing this post, I noticed that the Pedia says that a Transport has a Mv=13. Is the Pedia wrong or do you think that the poor quality of the coal available to the Confederacy is the reason why their Transports have Mv=10?

No problem with any other of your ideas.

IMHO you have a very interesting scenario. The main map is absolutely perfect.

[our_man]

The move 13 in the pedia is a bug. It's best to ignore this for movement values; it also lists Jeb Stuart as having a move value of 4.

I've made a lot of changes, and will e-mail you the new zip files tonight. I only have e-mail addresses for Fairline, Agricola and POTUS at the moment however, so Sarsstock and Kobra, could you please let me know your e-mails so I can send you the file.

Again, thanks for the help guys. I want to let you know that my final exams are coming up in a months time, so I won't be making any further updates for at least 6 weeks. By all means continue playtesting and letting me know how you're getting on, but just don't be too put out if I'm not able to address your concerns immediately.

[AGRICOLA]

Sorry, but I was trying to make smarta** joke about the transport movement.

Catfish posted the following explanation for the discrepancy

Originally posted by Catfish
Defence Advisor displays raw MF values. The Pedia, on the other hand, uses this formula:

Road Multiplier/3 x MF

Therefore, when the Road Multiplier is 4 and the MF is 1, the Pedia displays 1 (1.33 rounded down). When the MF is 3, the Pedia displays 4.

in Case's "Appeasement and Aggression Released" thread in this forum.

Best of luck with your exams.

[our_man]

File sent to playtesters.

[AGRICOLA]

Got it. Thanks.

[Heresson]

I like the terrain graphics, the yellow colour. Don't know why.