Dainichi Sekai Taisen - Available NOW

[kobayashi]

I am now playing the game that will create the save files for jumping ahead to 1940/41. So last call for comments, I am about to finish up on the final release of the 1.x series.

[AGRICOLA]

Please hang on and check your PM in a couple of hours. I'm part way through doing a somewhat lengthy write-up of my comments.

[kobayashi]

oh it won't be for a few days yet, so I'll be waiting.

thanks you've been a great help.

[kobayashi]

Yes, probably anyone who was going to play this has already had his fill but for completeness sake...

version 1.3, the final bug free, balanced etc. version is now available.

GO HERE TO DOWNLOAD FILES

note the sound zip is the same and there is no need to use the patch.

Changes made -

. a. Cost of Resources which was improperly set at 30 changed to 1
. b. Icon for P-38 lightning fixed
. c. 6 public schools added to Allied(E)
. d. One more Civil Defence unit given to Japs
. e. Expiry of certain Allied wonders changed to make AI build them
. f. Accelerated start allowed with new save files
. g. Road multiplier changed to 4, 3 railroads added
. h. More free U.S. cruisers, light carriers and merchant marine
. i. Pollution correctly renamed to fire storm
. j. Home cities of Chinese ships set to none
. k. New techs to distract pre-war Allies
. l. Misc text corrections and changes
. m. Improved the production capacity of several British cities
. n. British Navy starts off with a carrier
. o. SETI Wonder available to U.S. as 'Foreign Scientists'
. p. Copernicus Wonder available to Japan as 'Rikken Institute'
. q. Trigger European unit for Embargo event changed to flak
. r. Merchant Marine given attack of 1 so they will carry marines to attack enemy cities.
. s. Japanese(P) city reduced to one and garrisoned by immobile unit
. t. Several interior Russian cities given Army Reserve units
. u. Objective cities changed to include Guadalcanal and Surabaya

[kobayashi]

Unexpectedly, the story does not end here....

The turn of the tide in the Pacific is fine tuned based on my lastest version and even knowing how the upgraded scenario works to the last detail, I have been unable to keep the Japanese Navy from surcumbing to attrition by late 1944.

You may recall the discovery of the submarine transport with attack factor of 1. Alas, not nearly enough U.S. marines are boarding their transports and this is an imperfection I cannot live with.

I have even tried terraforming existing coastal cities into ocean (as units would be forced asleep and therefore board transports) only to discover that land units cannot be spawned on water even if there is a city there.

But my latest attempt appears to be working. I have been able to coax marines into transports by spawning them in cities on single tiled islands. And so my solution...for the time being anyway... are new staging depots on the islands of Maui and Tasmania.

Stay tuned...

[AGRICOLA]

Just a brief question about the many excellent changes that you have made. Is there supposed to be a break in the RR immediately north of Tokyo?

Although the two fast games are probably historically very accurate, IMHO most players would do considerably better, both in terms of the number, type and quality of Japanese units as well as the amount of territory conquered, if they started the scen in '37. To me, the fast games contain the ingredients for an early Japanese defeat.

I did run the Doolittle strategy to '44 without any trouble as long as the Japanese were careful to let sleeping dogs lie.

[kobayashi]

[Is there supposed to be a break in the RR immediately north of Tokyo?]

No. Did you find this in one of the fast saves? I had to manually put in the railroads, so which one is the break in?

[Although the two fast games are probably historically very accurate, IMHO most players would do considerably better, both in terms of the number, type and quality of Japanese units as well as the amount of territory conquered, if they started the scen in '37. To me, the fast games contain the ingredients for an early Japanese defeat. ]

Agree with you, that's the price you have to pay for fastforwarding - but then again...it would make victory even sweeter if you could some how manage it.

[AGRICOLA]

I had to manually put in the railroads, so which one is the break in?

The square immediately north of Tokyo has only a road in both fast saves.

Agree with you, that's the price you have to pay for fastforwarding - but then again...it would make victory even sweeter if you could some how manage it.

That's a very challenging idea. I'm going to have a hard think about whether it is doable.

[kobayashi]

Originally posted by AGRICOLA
That's a very challenging idea. I'm going to have a hard think about whether it is doable.

wait for the version with the landing force generators before trying

and after checking, yes the missing railroad in the saved games is an oversight. I'll have to play another set of saved games anyway....sigh!

[Kugelregen]

I've been playing DST for a few days now. First, I'd like to say that the scenario is very well done, with lots of unique aspects, making it a lot of fun to play. I do have a few criticisms as well, though...

In general, I feel as if the industrial development of Japan is a bit off at the beginning of the game. For instance, there is no city which can reasonably build a carrier or battleship (it takes 16 and 10 turns respectively). I'm not saying there should be cities able to build those units quickly. I'm just pointing out that the shields available to Japan at the beginning of the game seem too few. How did the Japanese build up an incredible fleet if the highest number of shields in a city is 18 (Tokyo and Nagasaki)? Even with the resource units coming in, I found the Japanese to have too few shields in my game.

More civil defense units!

I found the Japanese tanks to be almost useless because of their movement. The reason I say this is that a tank cannot move into position and then attack in the same turn without its attack factor being reduced. Infantry, however, are able to move into position and attack in the same turn without any reductions. I think this situation is very unrealistic and negatively affects gameplay. A movement rate of 2 without treat all as roads would be much better than the current rate of 1 with treat all as roads.

Another point on industrial development, is that it seems the home islands are too underdeveloped in terms of improvements. Shouldn't there be more banks, public schools, and military bases if Japan was able to militarize? To make the point more vivid, Saipan, an island outpost, has more improvements than Takamatsu, Sendai, Akita, and Sapporo, which are all main cities on the home islands.

Also, making the Kongo obsolete and the Nagato obsolete after the Yamato, means any further building of Japanese ships, other than carriers, will be of extremes. There is no real middle ground between cruisers and the huge Yamatos, something which does not seem realistic.

Lastly, and this has been mentioned before, I think the loss of the Long Lance cripples the Japanese navy. However, I am not really opposed to this. What I don't like, though, is that the Long Lance is lost after the first Nagato is destroyed, which basically means you lose the Long Lance once you attack the allies, let's say around 1941 on average, which I think is way too early for the navy to be made virtually immobile. Have you considered making the Long Lance obsolete via an event after a certain date? Losing it at the end of 42, beginning 43 might be better in terms of playability.

Alright, now I'm back to playing DST...

[kobayashi]

KugelR, Thanks so much for your comments, you are one of the few people who bothered to post at all.

Battleships

It actually takes maybe two - three years to rush build a capital ship in real life, not including training and shakedown, and your quoted figure of 10 to 16 turns is actually already too fast. As the war economy firms up, the industrial capacity actually builds up fast. I believe many of the major cities can potentially reach shields of 50 or more. I unfortunately cannot have the ships cost much more as there is the issue of negative cost for rush building so the best option is to initially depress productivity.

The ‘incredible fleet’ took twenty years to build and you start off with exactly the number of battleships Japan had for WWII minus two Yamato class (the only battleships coming into service in WWII) and any Nagatos you manage to build is a bonus. Same reason why Nagato etc become obsolete – to try to keep things accurate. There was no middle ground as the older ships were the result of treaty limitations.

Long Lance

The intention here is to deter you from using your battleships in operations where there is a significant chance they will be sunk – because they couldn’t be replaced easily in the real war. This is definitely true from the historical point of view. I have managed to prevent long-lance expiring myself late into 1943 by protecting them from torpedo bombers with air-cover and bringing them in for repairs the moment they are damaged. It is the way they operated, or else they would have used their battleships in many more operations.

Tanks

Unlike in Europe, tanks were not used as offensive weapons and infantry were used mainly for attacks, with tanks occasionally providing some support. Too much jungle and stuff and no open ground to speak of. It is my intention to remain true to this for the Pacific and thus the limitations for the tanks. There are not meant to be huge numbers of tanks and think of them as defensive units. When dozens of chinese units attack repeatedly in the second half, you'll appreciate your elite tanks. The best way to use them is is to park them outside an enemy city and fortify, then stack on top with artillery for a final assault + think of the marines as your blitzkrieg units, they do have 'A movement rate of 2 without treat all as roads'.



Infrastructure

As you can see from all my comments above, everything is designed to keep with the higher level realities of the Pacific War as opposed to the micro accuracies. From a historical point of view, your criticism of the lack of infrastructure in Japan is justified, however, from the angle of balancing different aspects of the scenario, it’s a tradeoff I’ve had to make. As its not an ‘all out fight to the death from the start’ scenario, I have not had the luxury of making things realistic at the micro level. If there were militaty bases, they would simply be sold off immediately because of the warrior culture wonder. Just think if I put a bank everywhere there should be one at the start, that would make Japan far too rich. I could of course rename banks to ‘$10mil in banking assets’ to make it micro accurate but …you get the picture. I will of course keep your comments in mind and if there is further tweaking required, I will change the names of some of the improvements to make them war related (warteffort donations? factory conversions? volunteer workforce?).

Thank you for your understanding, and I eagerly await any further comments you might have at the game’s conclusion.

[kobayashi]

Is there any way to change the terrain under a city without razing it? Some little utility that someone made maybe?

There is a city in Cambodia that is on jungle and river at the same time, a little oversight and overly difficult to capture.

[techumseh]

In the Rules, under @Terrain, change irrigate under Jungle from 'yes' to the type of terrain you want under the city, and set the # of turns to irrigate to 0. Add an engineer to the city and set it on "irrigate". It should change immediately, then delete the engineer. You should be in business.

[AGRICOLA]

Alternately, change byte 100,188 from the present 89 (jungle + river) to

00 Desert
01 Plains
02 Grassland
03 Forest
04 Hills
05 Mountains
06 Tundra
07 Glacier
08 Swamp
09 Jungle


Put an 8 in front of any number if you want a river (e.g. 82 = grassland + river).

[Eivind IV]

I use Mapcopy all the time for that purpose. It's a magical utility, extremely easy to use: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=112618

Used it extensively for my Mafia scen, and I'm currently using it to change terrain under cities in an update of Blitzkrieg 1942.