gemini, about your ww2 scen

[BigJ]

gemini,

I was just curious about your ww2 scenario, if you have any idea when you will be done with it. I considered making my own, but I just don't have the time at all. I can think of possibilities to solve some of the thornier problems, like limiting a civ to a particular gov, but alot of work seems to be involved, not to mention finding enough sprites. Also if you want to give any details, like the scope of the scen (just europe, or the world), an idea of how you solved some of the problems like keeping civs at war with each other, and so on. But if you don't want to give any details yet I would understand. I'm glad somebody is still trying to make a ww2 scen, I have wanted one for so long......

Also I'm trying to do my part by posting here to keep this forum from becoming too dead.

BigJ

[gemini]

Hi BigJ, Well I quit promising dates on when it will be done but I think in the next couple of weeks, the only things I can think of that are left to do is give all the cities the proper names and fix the map up(which I am currently doing), add the proper sounds to all the units and go through the aips and adjust a few of the settings, and create the gl texts for the units, and a few other minor bug fixes.

Sure here is a few details on the background and what I have done to fix the crucial issues.

First off, setting the regard of each nation to other nations has been hard but has been accomplished through slic. There will be four paths the ai will take to conquer other nations, the main focus was on Germany and Japan for the four different paths of course since they are the two nations that really set the course of the war, but it a human player selects one of the above nations they won't be stuck with a path that I have programmed in the game, they can choose thier own path. But for example, let's say the ai player is Germany, there are four paths that dictate the war, first is a historical path, invade poland then denmark then the lowlands then france, the other three paths are fictional, for example I remember I programmed for an alternative path for Germany to invade spain after the fall of France and then conquer North Africa all the way to the southern boundaries of Russia and then invade Russia on two fronts!!! Another path involves Germany waiting to start war until 1945. So these are some examples. How I did this through slic was by setting regards depending on who was still in the war. For example, once poland is captured, the regard level of denmark and the lowlands is set to 0(angry), but only after a certain turn(if poland is captured in the fall of 1939 then the regard will change for denmark and the lowlands in the spring of 1940, but not immediately after poland is taken over).
Yes very time consuming to program all this, and I don't know how well it will work since I haven't playtested this yet. But I know you will not see something stupid like america at war will Canada.

Unfortunately, the diplomacy part of ctp is not used at all, you will not be able to form alliances through the diplomacy that was provided with the original game, this is due to the fact that there was no significant use for it with my scenario and you could not set how other civs like or dislike other civs based on thier nationality.

Okay, "The Government Problem", this is not an issue, I have set it in the fli's for each civ to pick the right gov. This was needed because the units are gov dependent. For example, italy has it's own gov and that allows it to only build italian units. There has also been four governments made for each of the major powers, the difference in each gov is the production coefficient. So the better the level of gov the better the production.

I want to say right now though, that both the above have not been tested but theoretically should work.

Now more on the background, This is a WW2 scenario on a global scale, the map is quite large, if I remember it is 120x240, there are 31 civs in the game.

The game is quite different from a normal civ game, first of all, there will be no improvements to build or wonders to build. There will be over 100 new ww2 units to pick from(I believe wesw has included some of my units in his recent mod). This is very much a resource driven scenario like it was historically. For example, all the terrain has no value, but goods, goods will have depending on which it is, 25 to 50 sheilds of production and also food. Some cities will have no goods so will be stagnat as far as resources and growth. There is no gold in the game. Research is done on a random basis(there is a random chance each turn that a new advance will be discovered).

As far as the units go, each of the major nations will have from anywhere to a max of 6 tank choices, 10 plane choices, 10 infantry choices, about 20 naval choices, also quite a few special units. And a few other choices.
Of course this depends on what civ you choose to play.

There have been alot of slic events that would take me forever to go through but here are a few.

Strategic Warfare plays a big role, for example, in the game I count how many u-boats germany has compared to how many destroyers the brits have and then adjust the unit hit points of each of the two nations.

If malta is controlled by the brits then all german units in parts of North Africa will have thier hitpoints reduced and at extreme casest thier movement reduced.

I have also got triggers that count the german fighter defence and the allied bomber force and reduce hitpoints and movement for the german units depending on the circumstance.

There is an inteligence trigger for planting spys and uncovering naval vessels of your enemies depending on what level of inteligence you have.

I have also programmed so that when capital cities like Paris are in axis control all of france will fall. The bad part about this was to implement this I had to destroy the cities and create new ones in german control so the names of the cities were all renamed but I have added a hot key, when pressed will display an effect of the city names so when france falls you can press the key and all the historical names will be displayed. I have also programmed for certain nations to have a random chance to join the axis, like Spain has a random chance and so does sweden. Romania and Hugary and Bulgaria will join as well when certain conditions are met. But not all nations will fall if thier capital city is captured, for example, russia will not fall if moscow is captured, but spain will fall if madrid is captured. Also a neat thing happens when france falls, there is a percent chance for each vichy state to either be free france or remain vichy and also a chance that germany might capture french naval assests.

Resistance forces have also been added.

I have also added a on map display of the date. Right now it triggers with a key press so it is not displayed all the time. Only when the user wants it.

There are many, many more things but I can't remember them all.

I hope this clears up why it's taking so long to make.

Also I haven't been as open with this scenario as wesw has been with his mod because of the fact that a few of my ideas had to be scraped already cos of limits with slic, but about 99% of the stuff I wanted in this is in. Another thing that takes a long time is all the bug fixing and problems I run into, there seems to be a work around for almost everything though. I'm persistent.

And also I like to work with my own ideas and not feel to pressured by other people to include, exclude certain things.

But I hope this scen, gets made soon, I've spent almost a year on it, but every minute has been a joy.

Hope this answers some of your questions.

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Gemini

[gemini]

I also forgot to say that, I'm unsure how long the playtesting will take.

I know what you mean by revitalizing this place, I've been trying to as well.
[This message has been edited by gemini (edited July 31, 2000).]