Good news for the Russian navy

[el cid again]

I have reverse engineered its refueling problem. I will issue a final set of revisions for those RHS scenarios that use Soviet ships - and then issue the last RHS scenario - in the next few hours. I will NOT change the functioning of RHSCVO (or RHSRPO - the Russian inactive version of BBO)
- they will remain WITHOUT Soviet ships. This is mainly to humor anyone that LIKES the existing regime - by preserving it exactly as it is.
I never intended to play with passive Russians anyway - it makes not a whit of sense to me that:

1) Japan can start a war in the north ANY TIME it wants, but the Allies cannot;

2) Russia cannot move its troops - year after year - no matter what the situation;

3) Russia cannot control its construction - year after year - no matter what the situation;

4) Russia cannot supply its disconnected, distant posts, by sea;

5) The Japanese are free to strip the north of planes and ships - or even if they want of land units at a minimal cost - because the garrison rule is way too weak to be meaningful - so Japan gets to concentrate its forces when, in fact, it had to maintain its STRONGEST force in the north in every year of the war.

6) When the Russians DO enter the war, we just pretend there is no navy, and no ability to invade Hokkaido either (historically planned or not).

But no series of arguments has universal appeal. And what matters in a game is what you LIKE. If you like the game as is - but want more planes and more correct ships - and maybe the new map features or the economy in a more functional form - you get to have your Scenario 15 - as designed - with passive Russians, and no Russian fleet if they do enter the war.

[el cid again]

Later testing permits a minimialist solution:

we can preserve the Soviet Command, and assign all land units and air units to it - as well as any non-port Soviet city/location. This preserves many things - including probably some things we do not know about the hard code.

What we had to do is create a new command - which is historically named The Pacific Ocean Fleet. It reports to the Far East Command - so it is not an alien in that sense either. But in the Russian Active scenarios (RAO, BBO, PPO and not released EOS) there is no Australia Command because of the need for this one. The ONLY thing assigned to report to this command is the PORT cities of the USSR. IF they report to the Far East Command - they try but fail to refuel any ships.

The other thing we had to do was reflag the ports. The ports in Russian Active scenarios are French (which I chose for technical reasons, but it is interesting that IRL France is a traditional ally of Russia, and historically educated Russians usually spoke French better than any other foreign language). Being Allied ports, they integrate with the economy just fine - so it appears. They also refuel ANY Allied ship - which is historically and technically correct.

HOWEVER - note that the AI may not do well with these changes in some situations. In particular, an AI running the Allies (Joe thinks it is never able to do that properly anyway) may get "confused" and send, say, US subs to "French" ports in Siberia, Sakhalin, Kamchatka, etc. Because we did NOT do this reflagging in RHSCVO or RHSRPO (the Russian passive version of BBO) - it won't be a problem there. AI controlled Allied ships or subs must use these scenarios - or you live with any confusion the AI has. .

In the end, we have a set of scenarios that should work well for head to head and email games. As well, they should work as well as possible for an AI controlled Japan. But NO scenario of ANY origin - including Matrix - does very well with AI controlling the Allies. Our Russian active scenarios will probably be even worse than usual in that respect - while CVO and RPO should be identical to stock and CHS variants without Russian ships. I do not know if CHS will keep Russian ships or not - but the technical information of how has been shared with Andrew - with Matrix - and now with the forum.