I would be much more open to modifying the game settings (logistics, morale etc) if their effects were firstly better understood (it's been a while since I've read that part of the manual, so I could be misremembering) and perhaps most importantly you can adjust the settings on the go. I believe you can do this in single player scenarios?Joel Billings wrote: Wed Nov 01, 2023 11:12 pm I agree that balance is different for H2H versus AI play. With the AI, players can and do adjust the difficulty to come up with their desired play level. For H2H it is tougher. But it is possible to use a bid system to balance the game to the levels that you believe your H2H players are at. One way if you don't care about side is to bid for side using morale help as the factor. Basically, the player willing to give up a higher morale help level gets to pick the side. Players can also come up with adjustments to the victory conditions to incentivize players to act a certain way, but if the issue in your games is that the German player can't make it as far as you think he should be able to in 41, then you probably have to balance with morale help. This could be combined with adding some extra VPs to certain objectives that you'll only add on for the Germans, so as to encourage them to push further in 41/42, but this would have to be done offline.
We try to balance the game for H2H and AI, but it's near impossible to do that (and that isn't even accounting for skill levels of the players, so it's really a multi-variable problem). It used to be that we assumed 90%+ of the games played were AI games, so clearly getting a good AI balance is important. IIRC, we may have seen stats that as many as 30-40% of the players play some H2H, although the numbers that only play H2H once they learn the game are probably around 10-20% at most. I don't think we can solve this for all situations, so I encourage those of you that play H2H find house rules or other edited changes to get a game of your liking. One thing is that we hope we're no longer making changes that have a big impact on game balance (like some of the earlier versions did). So you should be able to make adjustments based on recent experience and they should continue to apply.
Part of the issue with your otherwise reasonable suggestion, such as adjusting morale for a handicap, is that it's entirely static for the next however many months of play. So if the soviets get a morale boost handicap, that might work really well for 41 and 42, but after that it could mean that the soviets are then far too strong as the game naturally boosts their NM and they get guards and whatnot.
If we were able to be given more freedom to adjust these settings on the fly, I think H2H matches could be a lot more enjoyable as handicaps can be offered to keep the game competitive. Perhaps the Germans do really poorly in 41, but instead of giving up players agree on settings changes and from that turn onwards the game implements them. Then by 43 if things are more closely knit, we remove the handicap. Stuff like that.
Even if said functionality was entirely relegated to non server PBEM, I think that'd be a great step in giving agency to players.
So 123 in game is a blank spot.
