The Vietnam War development thread

[McMonkey]

Good point Patine. I have not really considered that! Is it possible to increase the time it takes to build roads or is that only for building mines and transforming etc?

I don't like to make too many house rules so I will have to see how things go at the playtest stage. I suppose the point of the Airmobile is that they can get from A-B fast and do not need to be resupplied by road but as I have not tested it properly yet all I can say is ... I dunno!

Ps. Anyone know about hiding the strength bar?

[Patine]

There's a few on the Cradle of Civilization site, if you can find a working link.

[McMonkey]

Thanks Agri and Patine
I will have to have a work with Curt and get some tips. At the moment I have got enough on my plate with one dimention!
I am very pleased to have found a solution to the fire base problem now I just need to find out how to hide the strength bars! Anybody?

[Boco]

A square's movement cost dictates the length of time it takes to build a road. If your chopper/settlers' purpose is primarily to build cities, then turn off the Engineer capability in @UNITS_ADVANCED. If you make the chopper/settlers very weak on defense, and have lots of terrain with high mf costs, then you could discourage pavers without a rule. In addition, make the firebases so important and the chopper/settlers so scarce, that paving is a waste of precious resources.

Mercator wrote a utility, SpriteGen, that hides the health bar. Look for it at Mercator's Civ2 Site.

[McMonkey]

Thanks for the advice Boco. Your suggestions will have the effect I wanted without the need for house rules. It will also mean that it is essential to use combined arms to protect the Transport Helicopters (ie Scouts, defensive infantry etc).

I will check out Mercators SpriteGen as it will make landmines, barbed wire and artillery work as I intended.

Thanks

[McMonkey]

I have tried Mercators utility, SpriteGen, but could not get it work. I tried it at every unit icon height but nada!

Could the problem be the screen resolution I use (800x600)?



I'm always scared of technology and never believe it is going to work for me, someone help me out

[Boco]

Are your @UNITS_ADVANCED settings for sprite overrides consistent with what you're after?

[McMonkey]

@Boco

I'm not 100% sure I follow! I gave tried 00000000 and 10000000 override .SPR file for this unit: 1 - don't use .SPR, but still no luck.

If I cannot get it to work I may have to ask the (competent) person who is kind enough to do my hex editing to sort it out!

Me:

[McMonkey]

Commie hideout

Deep in the jungles of Laos and Cambodia secret communist base camps act as launching pads for NVA units headed into South Vietnam. The red line is the Ho Chi Minh trail (RR) which will be invisible in the playable version. The black and white border posts are impassable terrain for US ground forces, the NVA has no such hinderance. I love Paul Mutica's people but I think they need to be asianified a bit!

[McMonkey]

Vietnamization

I am toying with the idea of giving the US player Leonardos Workshop (Pentagon?) and setting all US land units to become obsolete with the Vietnamization technology. When this happens all US ground units will change over to an ARVN unit and only US support units, such as Helicopters and Aircraft will remain.

The ARVN units will be slightly less effective in combat and this will aid the Communists in the final stages of the game. The US player will obviously be in control of these ARVN units and will still play a part in the fighting but maybe not be able to build more ground units and will have to rely on Airpower to prop up the ARVN and the players bases in South Vietnam.

Any comments, critisisms or ideas?

[Case]

That's a good idea, but historically the US forces were gradually withdrawn from South Vietnam over several years. During this period they provided vital support and 'stiffening' to ARVN so withdrawing them in one lot would be inacurate and could cripple the later stages of the scenario.

[EZRhino]

Hi Case

Instead of just one Vietnamization technology you could have several that obsolete different American units. You could then stagger the technologies to simulate gradual withdrawl. Also in the unit files, if you have any extra space, you could have "doubles" of some units with the same picture and stats but slightly different name that wouldn't be obsoleted by the same technology. This way you wouldn't have all of your grunts magically turn into ARVN all at once

[Michael Daumen]

Re: Vietnamization

Originally posted by Werd100
I am toying with the idea of giving the US player Leonardos Workshop (Pentagon?) and setting all US land units to become obsolete with the Vietnamization technology. When this happens all US ground units will change over to an ARVN unit and only US support units, such as Helicopters and Aircraft will remain.

That's how techumseh did it in one of his first scenarios. The US units got gradually weaker.

[McMonkey]

A phased witdrawal of US ground troops would seem the best option. First the US infantry could hand over. Later on the Marines and finally the Airborne. Also the option to build extra armour may be taken away.

My original idea was to dictte the possition of US bases and then warn the player to evacuate them late in the game and destroy them with a change terrain event. This had several flaws so I abandoned it and think Vietnamization is the next best option.

[McMonkey]

Tech Tree Query

To save myself time and effort I decided to use the original tech tree as I am farmiliar with its layout and which techs are the bottlenecks!

All I have done is shifted about some of the techs with special effects to fit the game and worked out a huge list of appropriate tech names.

I intend to have sevearal branches such as Air, Army, Airmobile, Happyness etc... and an getting ready to put the new names on the tech.

My query is thus:
Is there a list somewhere showing the minimum number of techs required to obtain any one tech?

For example if you wanted to get Navigation above all other techs you would research: Pottery, Alphabet, Map Making, Seafaring, Astronomy, Mathematics, Mysticism, Ceremonial Burial and Navigation which comes to 9 techs.
Obviously to get to Rocketry or Espionage it would take many more techs.

I intend to make tech development fairly rapid. The scenario runs for 12 years at a month per turn. Therefore before trade is considered you would need to develop roughly a tech every 2 turns to get everything on the tree.
I would find knowing roughly how many techs are required for certain advances a very useful for placing my new techs on the tree!

I thought I had worked out a system this morning that would calculate this but it was totally wrong, after spending an hour doing it

If there is already such a list in existance or if anyone knows a simple way of working it out please let me know.

I have just realised I could have done it myself in the time it took to write this post