My Next Project: A Poll

[Patine]

Cool, tanelorn! That could certainly work. I didn't know you could delay turns in ToT. That may change things for other planned scens as well. Thanks!

[Patine]

I've considered a few more issues, lately. I think that all UN units except the ROK infantry that's actually buildable will be made non-disbandable (after all, they wouldn't cannibalize high-quality Western unts for poorly-trained infantry), but all events-generated units will have a 'NONE' home city, and thus won't need support. The three Communist nations will be separate but allied civ's, I think, mostly to keep them building their own infantry in their own cities, and so China and the USSR need to be potentially each triggered into the war (each will start in a no-negotiation 'alliance' with the UN, so that only events can trigger aggression, and each will start with all their units having a move of '0,' changed by a files swap made right after they're triggered). BTW, is anyone up to making infantry for this? Typhoon's Brits earlier are great, and those pictures make a good model. And, Curt, are you still willing to change this thread's name (and possibly end the poll)?

[tanelorn]

Nah, leave the poll, it's good publicity.
To the point:
A quirk that really messes up a lot of otherwise great scenarios is that non beligerent civ units tend to wander around across their eventual enemies borders. Like Soviet tourists in France during the blitzkrieg, Americans in Okinawa and Japanese in California before Pearl Harbor and the like. If the Chinese/Soviets are given a free hand to roam around Korea and position themselves south from the start, even before they declare war, you have no scenario. If AI controlled McArthur ends up having brewskies with the Ruskies in Siberia instead of running up and down the peninsula, the same.
In other words, the Sino-Korean border and the Chinese coastline has to be made inviolable at least until the PLA initiates hostiliies.
You have a number of options:

1- As you said, making CCF (Chinese Communist Forces) and the USSR immobile, mobilised through a rules file change (with a batch file?). There are some problems with this though:

a) If you have a human UN player, the element of surprise is lost
b) If you have a human CCF/USSR player, he/she has absolutely nothing to do up to that turn.
c) Even if you set a house-rule about the human UN player not crossing the Yalu before your choice event, the AI UN may stroll to the outskirts of Beijing unopposed, cut off Antung and the like.

2- Bocco's solution for reinforcement withdrawal, from the "Cities in unpassable terrain" thread, with a twist:
Set up a city somewhere (owned prefferably by a non-playable civ, if you can spare one) and home a number of immobile, disbandable, zone zontrolling units along the border. When the event time comes, change terrain at the city location, all of the border blocks dissapear, Chinese can surge south, UN may charge north.You may do the same with a separate city for the Russians.
Problems:
a) There is a limit to how many units you can home at each city, even if you assign multiple cities to this,there's no saying when the owner civ will start disbanding these because of shield shortage.
b) The usual event city issues. Isolate them with impassable terrain or sea terrain.
c) You may waste a good number of units towards the unit total on these barriers
Solution: If you make use of an events civ (as in Favflight's LOTR series) and make it unable to produce anything, it won't outproduce its shield allowance. You dont have to to home them if it's a separate civ ("nature?") just make the barriers NONE-homed and use the:
DestroyCivilisation
whom= Nature
command to get rid of the barriers, no upkeep problems attached. Problem is, you ll' waste one or two civ slots for that to work.

3-The really complex& untested-off-the-top-of-my-head-way:

i)Take a terrain slot. Make it impassable. Place it along the Yalu and the Chinese coastline (no premature Inch'on landing no2's)
ii)No UN/Red units can pass through eitherway. Chinese can build-up at ease and research invasion tech.
iii)Assign duplicate unit slots to Chinese regular units, to represent Chinese Volunteer units or something, for
Inf/armor/Migs with the same unit cost that can cross impassable.
iv)Give Leonardo's Workshop to the Chinese ("Mao's Vision" or sth) from the start
v)When the invasion tech is reached, give the volunteer unit's prerequisite technology to the Chinese. These are now buildable and the rest of Chinese army transforms into volunteers that can now cross down the Yalu. To battle!
vi)No UN units can cross into China's territory/airspace, which is historically correct, and enables the re-creation of the "Mig-Alley", the area covered by China's untouchable airfields, like Antung, just across the Yalu.
Problems:
a)Russian involvement?
Partial solution: Give them the option to research and build volunteer units that can cross impassable after they intervene, (or event-give them some) to represent their limmited intervention: Superior volunteer WW2 veteran Mig-pilots or "Honchos" as the UN pilots called them,maybe even speculative use of ground forces like IS-3's and Red Army volunteers (cross-impassable).
b)UN escalation option?
It is well known that McArthur urged to nuke China to the stone age. So:
After the previous condition of Chinese intervention is met, give the UN the option to research UN resolution/nuclear strike and give them nuke-capable B-50s (no ICBMS yet) and the option to build units that can cross impassable terrain, into China/USSR. If the weather in Korea is hard, imagine what northermost Manchuria and Siberia is like! So, it makes some sense
to have USA re-equip/re-train (rebuild) its units beforehand (ROK),or receive them via events (US). Do the same for the Russians (give them the tech to research nukes -the Tu-4 is the Nuke-capable copy of B-29) and you have WWIII. Oh no!
c)Taiwan (National Chinese) issue:
Ciang-Kai-Sek and Mao would still be chaffing for another round of their civil war, so if a randomturn invasion of Formosa occurs, subtract a monetary amount from China per-turn after this happens. "After" means use of the trigger flags in the macro sequence. I haven't tested any of this though.
d)Graphics:
-Use of extra unit slots
Phew! Hope this wasn't too much

[Patine]

Some good ideas there, certainly! Two problems with using impassable terrain, though: 1)It doesn't actually block air units I've discovered, whether they have the 'cross impassable' flag or not, and 2)I plan to use that quality of terrain for mountain/rocky/broken terrain so armor and other vehicles can't traverse it, but infantry can. A 'barrier' civ that's killed upon the triggering of that player, however, is an option I'd consider, as currently I only need four civ slots (UN/ROK, CCF, USSR, and DPRK), thus even one seperate 'barrier' civ for each of China and the USSR still only brings it up to six slots; issue is, covering those whole borders will take a lot of units. As a note, I also plan to have the barbs allied with the UN, then put an immobile barb 'Japanese Occupational Force' unit in each of the Japanese cities on the map (which will be UN cities), so that the UN can't build South Korean infantry (their only buildable unit) in them, though UN units triggered in Japan will just appear in the cities' outskirts and then be ferried across the Strait of Tsushima.

[Timor_Leste]

Well, I love history and all, but I think there are too many history-based scenarios out there. That's why I voted for the Solar Revolution. But, judging by how the vote and discussion thread are going, it looks like I'm out.

[fairline]

Originally posted by Patine
...BTW, is anyone up to making infantry for this? Typhoon's Brits earlier are great, and those pictures make a good model......

look, use space-fillers for the moment - their are plenty of WW2 units out there. Once you have a working scenario ready for playtest I'm sure you could ask again

[our_man]

Right, here's my tuppence now that I've had a long hard think.

Save yourself some bother and leave out direct USSR intervention. Yes it sounds cool, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't fit in with the scenario. How so? If the USSR were to become involved, the theatre of operations would not simply be limited to the Korean theatre. The conflict on the peninsula would become nothing more than a small sideshow to the global conflict that would be raging - ergo, the player has failed in his mission.

[Patine]

@Timor_Leste: Fear not! The Solar Revolution isn't dead, it's just currently sleeping. I plan to one day finish it off. (Thanks for that update on it's thread, BTW).

@fairline: I know there's good and plenty infantry for the Yanks and Commonwealth; I'm a bit worried about finding anything resembling Korean (North or South) or CCF infantry, though. Groan. I'll see what I can dig up.

@our_man: You might be right about that. Still, it might be fun to somehow represent Soviet interference. Even if Korea was a sideshow, the player could carry on with it while poppup text detailed war in Germany, the Balkans, the Middle East, the North Atlantic, the Arctic Circle, Scandinavia, what have you. That may also be going overboard. I'll have to carefully consider.

[Timor_Leste]

Originally posted by Patine
@Timor_Leste: Fear not! The Solar Revolution isn't dead, it's just currently sleeping. I plan to one day finish it off. (Thanks for that update on it's thread, BTW).

@our_man: You might be right about that. Still, it might be fun to somehow represent Soviet interference. Even if Korea was a sideshow, the player could carry on with it while poppup text detailed war in Germany, the Balkans, the Middle East, the North Atlantic, the Arctic Circle, Scandinavia, what have you. That may also be going overboard. I'll have to carefully consider.

Depending on how quickly my cepha scen goes (i'm closer to comprehensive testing than I thought), I might be able to lend a hand with the Revolution...

I love the idea of using popups to create the sense of a wider war while keeping the player's focus on the region. The player could be cast as the UN commander, tasked with repelling the North's assault. Attempting to carry the war into China or USSR, while logical, would be ill-advised. Doing so would change the events, leading to less spawned American units to simulate them getting funneled to other theaters.
You could also change the rules to add flavor: for example, give all Chinese cities hi-def, no move units. If UN units attack, rules change alters Chinese behavior to aggressive, perhaps also changing aspects of civ specific units to make PLA more formidable.

In response to our_man, perhaps you could give a potential out to the aggressive UN/US player: if you trigger WW3, you would be tasked with taking the Siberian province of USSR. Greater success in this campaign could increase the number of US units spawned to you, or perhaps give the player a tech that give them the ability to build a number of US reinforcements, simulating special requests by a victorious general. Alternately, getting thrashed but still managing to hold on (ever so barely) on the peninsula could give you a 1 in x chance that Nato successes in other theaters will mean veteran reinforcements'll get spawned in.

[fairline]

Originally posted by our_man
Right, here's my tuppence now that I've had a long hard think.

Save yourself some bother and leave out direct USSR intervention. Yes it sounds cool, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't fit in with the scenario. How so? If the USSR were to become involved, the theatre of operations would not simply be limited to the Korean theatre. The conflict on the peninsula would become nothing more than a small sideshow to the global conflict that would be raging - ergo, the player has failed in his mission.

O-M is exactly right - do you want to produce an accurate Korean War scenario or a rather speculative Third World War scen; if it's the latter then Korea would have been a sideshow in such a Global conflict.

[fairline]

Originally posted by Patine
@fairline: I know there's good and plenty infantry for the Yanks and Commonwealth; I'm a bit worried about finding anything resembling Korean (North or South) or CCF infantry, though. Groan. I'll see what I can dig up.

As soon as you have a working scenario I might be persuaded to have a go. Just use place-holders for now.

[Patine]

I have La- and Yak- series graphics; there was little external difference between a Yak-3 used in WW2 and a Yak-9P used in Korea, and the same goes for La-5's and La-9's/11's. I think the main N Korean attack aircraft were the Sturmovik, Tu-2 and Pe-2, which I also have gfx for. I'll repaint them all in post-war VDV light blue when I have time.

@fairline: Where are these aircraft? I can't find them (or maybe don't recognize them). Filler infantry should be easy enough, though. And, about the 'WW3' scenario, you're probably right (but it's like a scab I have to pick at; I'll just have to show more discipline).

[Patine]

Progress: Got frustrated with the map, so turned to unit stats on the Rules.txt. Am about halfway through this. it should present a good list (and the locations of) the units I need for the Units.bmp. This one should go faster when I finish a few personal items taking up my spare time.

[Patine]

Two more questions. What were the main vehicles for any motorized infantry used (were they still on M5's, or was it something else)? And, did any of the era's spec ops (British Commandos, Devil's Brigade, possible clandestine Soviet units) see any action? Though the latter wouldn't be big enough to qualify for full units (they were usually at the company level, at the biggest), I had other ideas to use them, if they actually were involved.

[Case]

Originally posted by Patine
Two more questions. What were the main vehicles for any motorized infantry used (were they still on M5's, or was it something else)?

AFAIK, the only vehicles used by the UN forces to transport infantry in Korea were trucks. No mechanised infantry units were deployed due to Korea's terrain being unsuitable. I don't think that the North Koreans or Chinese had any half tracks or APCs either.

And, did any of the era's spec ops (British Commandos, Devil's Brigade, possible clandestine Soviet units) see any action?

Yep. These units included:
* The British 41 Independent Commando (which was a small Royal Marine battalion). 41 Cdo made a number of raids before being disbanded in 1952.
* Each of the US infantry divisions formed a Ranger company during the second year of the war. These companies were used for raiding along the front line before being disbanded before the end of the war - they seem to have been regarded as being a failed experiment.
* I'm pretty sure that USMC units from the 1st Marine Division were occasionaly used as raiders (though this meant moving these units from the front line).
* I'm also pretty sure that both North and South Korea had raiding units (including ROK Marine units). The NKs also had a large guerilla force operating in South Korea throughout the war.