Dainichi Sekai Taisen - Available NOW

[kobayashi]

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD FILES

Comments are welcome.

Some advice. The game starts in Jan 1937 and no doubt some of you (the kill kill kill players) will immediately proceed to attack the Allies immediately. Let me say here that the only way to win is to wait till everything is prepositioned and execute an almost simultaneous attack on all the objective cities within the span of a 18 months or so. So play strategically.

[kobayashi]

This is the final version of the alternate cities.

And it just occured to me, would there be any problem downloading the files from civfan's server if you haven't registered?

[kobayashi]

A bug that escaped the testing process has been identified requring a Patch. To reduce explotation of the bug, the nature of the problem will remain undisclosed. The patch can be applied directly to existing games.

[kobayashi]

Finally got to play a game in its entirety myself without making any changes halfway.

Here I am in late 44 getting kicked out of Indochina. Already lost Haiphong and Bangkok and never made it to Mandalay to cut the Burma Road. Earlier I made the mistake of going straight for Rangoon without going down the Malayan Peninsula first.

[kobayashi]

And further south, never managed to get to Port Moresby and didn't managed to ship enough troops down to lock down captured cities, had to rely on air units for garrison. US marines are landing everywhere and I've lost most of my capital ships to attrition while attempting to sweep westward across the Indonesian islands.

[curtsibling]

That map area is always treacherous in WW2 global games!



When I get a spare moment from tweaking my own scenario, I will give this epic a whirl, kobayashi!

[kobayashi]

someone suggested including a saved game from early 1941 as part of the game files. What do you think?

[curtsibling]

It will keep the kill-kill players happy, I say go for it!

[kobayashi]

one last screen shot in case anyone still needs convincing to try DST out.

And yes, a save file from early 1941 will be included in the next release.

[AGRICOLA]

Congratulations on turning out a very intricately plotted scenario. Prior to attempting to play it, I've looked it over carefully and come up with some general comments.

A. It appears that the scenario plays at a very slow pace. Both naval and ground units seem to be extremely slow moving. For example, Japanese ships start off with Mv=5 or 6 but that drops to 3 or 4 when the Long Lance Torpedo wonder expires, probably in 1942. In practical terms, the fleet will become almost immobile and much too slow to respond to enemy forces that suddenly appear. It will take 8 months just to move a BB from Nagasaki to Singapore and 10 months to move a Freighter.

B. Another puzzling item with naval units is why everybody's cruisers as well as modern US and British BB's can attack aircraft in flight but Yamato class BB's cannot.

C. To somewhat fix what I perceive to be a very slow moving scenario, I have made the following mods that affect ground units:

- The road from Sapporo to Nagasaki has been replaced by a RR that bypasses both Japanese (P) cities. In my judgement, it should not take 7 months to move an Artillery unit a distance of less than 1500 km from one end of the Home Islands to the other.
- I've added a RR from Pusan to Harbin because such a RR existed in 1937. I have added no RR's in enemy territory on the assumption that they will have been pillaged before the Japanese can capture them.
- The road multiplier has been increased to 5 just to speed things up a bit. I'm wondering what to do about the apparent inconsistency of Japanese tanks which can move 1 square while footslogging Imperial Marines can move 2 (this is also true for the other civs).

D. No enemy city has fortifications (city walls). This is certain to cause some interesting problems if Japanese attacks have to be made from land squares. The razing of a number of Chinese and other landlocked cities appears inevitable. This would be no problem if the Japanese could have more than one settler who can rebuild missing road sections. However, with a single slow-moving unit, it's going to be difficult to rebuild roads. It seems a bit odd and pointless that a nation of 80 million has to manage with a single such unit.

E. When a Resource at full strength attacks one of the Japanese (P) cities, the defending Flak seems to suffer about 50% damage. This means that the defender can be accidentally killed unless a player ensures that the Resource attacks at less than full strength.


The strategy that I’m going to use is:
1. Disband Infantry, Jeans, Claudes, Destroyers and Cruisers to RB the Bettys, Artillery and Zeros needed to capture all Barbarian cities and overwhelm the Chinese civ as quickly as possible.
2. Max out Research to get the Betty and Zero techs within 8 months.
3. Set up the presently Barb cities of Bangkok as the staging point for attacks on Malaysia and Burma and Munda for an attack on New Guinea and Australia.
4. Disband all older BB’s to IRB Yamatos when the latter become available. There is no point in fighting with obsolescent units which have a high likelihood of being sunk. Although they will be too slow to chase after enemy naval units, the Yamatos might do some good in defending cities with dockyards.
5. The inevitable loss of the Long Lance Torpedo wonder will have the result that, excepting Yamatos and subs for local defence, the scen will be played primarily with air units except in India and Australia.

DST looks like fun with lots of scope for innovative play.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

[AGRICOLA]

@#%&$ double post when Poly said that page unavailable. Most profound apologies to all and sundry, and a well-deserved middle digit to Poly.

[Justinianum]

hi kobayashi. It's good to see you back in action. I've always loved your innovative ideas

[kobayashi]

Reply to Agricola, who I am very grateful for his comments -

Eivind made a point about the slowness of ships in the beta and the release version already has ship movements upped by one. I'm aware of the 'takes how long to travel from where to where’ point of view and did consider adding more move allowance to the ships but decided against it. This is really just part of the long-standing micro-accuracy verses macro representation argument.

I suppose if each turn were a day we could have ‘realistic’ ship movements. But each turn is a month and giving them the accurate range makes interception at sea impossible. Now if you bumped into an enemy ship and they could fire at you before you moved the next step, well that’s another matter but they can’t. Also, ships become invulnerable to air attack since they can zip from port to port without ever being seen. The same argument can be made for aircraft – i.e. how come they can only fly one sortie every two months? The answer is, the game is not meant to be (and could never be anyway) totally accurate at the micro level, just representative. Ships need to travel in zig-zag patterns, wait for orders, stop for repairs, rendezvous with supply ships and subs, slow down in bad weather, whatever. I also need to take into consideration how many times a BB can attack in one turn and make sure a BB cannot zoom past any aircraft screen and sink carriers at will. Also, the neutralization of Long Lance needs to have a strong impact. In any case, the reality is there were only a few major naval battles and the game is representative of this.

Attacking aircraft is a power granted to AI ships to prevent air-ship stacking by the human. It is not entirely accurate but the best compromise.

Railroad is ok I suppose if limited to the locations you suggested. Increasing the road multiplier is a viable modification too. Will look into both for the next release. BTW, tanks can move three, not one as they have AllasRoad. At the time in Asia, men (either on truck/bicycle) could probably move faster and further than tanks.

There is little need for city walls in China at the start. I would hazard to say that they probably weren't prepared for all out war in 37. I didn't even come close to razing any cities in China in my games. That is more likely in the East Indies and Indochina. The Chinese don't have that many troops to start off with and they very quickly build up walls by themselves.

To summarize, if you could just play the scenario as it is without worrying about the micro-accuracy, your comments might be different at the end of the day, then again maybe not. I don't think your strategy will work out well....as you will see. No point spoiling the game for you.

Ah..and if you could coment on my choice to objective cities to represent Japan's intended outer-defence ring, that would be nice.

[Kugelregen]

Are the Japanese supposed to not be able to build any infantry units at the start of the game???

[AGRICOLA]

THE %#@& SCEN BLEW UP ON ME

My tale of woe goes thusly.

T'was the merry month of May, 1937 (turn 5). A small Japanese task force of battleships and a transport was peacefully en route from Formosa to Bangkok. Its humanitarian mission, fully sanctioned by the League of Nations, was to free that sorely oppressed city from Barbarian warlords.

The vanguard had reached Bangkok and was fulfilling its task of keeping a route open for the main force. The main force was SW of Saigon, well offshore and beyond any ZOC so as not to pose any threat to Saigon’s belligerent European masters. The day was beautiful as the ships steamed SW through the calm, blue waters of the South China Sea.

Literally like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky, European (probably the perfidious French enslavers of the people of Indo China) ships appeared over the horizon, sank a venerable Kongo class BB and damaged several other ships. An Imperial radio intercept station on Saipan picked up the following message "SNEAK ATTACK BY THE EUROPEANS". So much for the first part of my sad tale.

Being a completely naive fool, I figured that this was the best thing to happen to Nippon since sushi. This was an out and out case of blatant, unprovoked aggression. In such instances, the Civilization II Honor Code calls for allies and friends of the aggressor civ to stay out of the conflict. Right? No way, Yamamoto!

There was an instant labelling of Japan as the aggressor, an oil embargo was imposed and sundry other nasty things started to happen. How do I know? I may be naïve but not completely out to lunch, so I used the FIND function to search EVENTS for “Europeans”. Well, waddaya know, this scen rewards unprovoked and random aggression by an AI civ. Methinks that sucks just a mite.

After reloading, I tried various workarounds such as managing to sneak the naval force past the French, and capturing Bangkok. The result was an immediate sneak attack. Taking it a step further, I was delighted that I could actually get the Americans to declare war on the Europeans (Roosevelt came real cheap at 200 gold), This could have been a real hoot to watch but I didn’t want to waste the time. However, unable to satisfactorily solve the problem, I finally gave up and went back to January 1937. This time I am concentrating on capturing Barbarian cities in China, where no one seems to give a damn.

Going back to the discontinued game, in May '37 there were Japanese forces sitting off Barb bases at Ulithi and Munda, patiently waiting for both cities to reach size 2. This bit of action was also sanctioned by the League of Nations and will be repeated in the present game. I’m really curious whether capturing them will cause the Americans and British on nearby islands to pull sneak attacks. If so, I would seriously suggest that the designer get rid of all Barbarian cities outside China. They create unwarranted pitfalls for opportunistic players.


@Kugelregen
Yes. But a few are doled out now and then by the powers that be on Mount Fuji.

Also, get used to the idea of playing the scen with 1 settler as your one and only engineering unit. Don't ask why.