ORIGINAL: firepowerjohan
We are trying to make the game a challenge for everyone and that is why we have difficulty levels. The moment we make for example Subs too powerful ppl will post strategies where they were able to prevent D-Day and any convoy support by just buying Subs and placing them in the Atlantic and that the game is broken which actually happened early on before the patches. We changed WALLIES AI so that it is focusing alot more of its money into naval purchase especially in the mid-game and that is just the AI's choice of strategy.
Currently the subs are not way off, just need perhaps abit rearrange of their tech levels and their cost of purhase. As for the Atlantic, the size of it is shortened alot in game so the Atlantic sub warfare is a semi-abstraction that in order to not make the big map too big!
That said, I do not think we should be too conerned if a Sub attack seems to be near the US coast and not in the "middle of the Atlantic" since the Atlantic is altered. In the same way, movement rates are considerable lower than in real WW2 when it comes to crossing the Atlantic. If we were to make that more realistic we would probably have to make a turn represent 3 days instead of 10 days unless we want Navakl units to have movement=80 hexes or something. Whatever we choose it is always a trade-off and abstraction from reality unless we have a simulation based on hours instead of like now when one turn is 10 days [;)]
You can also argue in historical games that we know more than what they knew in 1939 so the Allied player knows that Subs can kill their economy and will be even more concerned building up destroyers. Same with USSR, Germany knows that USSR winter will kill them so will advance more cautiously, which in real WW2 they did not know exactly how the importance of certain factors would be...until too late [;)]
We also have to boil down issues into their cause whether it is strategies or a general problem since if the problem is not general then what we change to make the AI games more "realistic" might cause PBEM and TcpIP suddenly to become unplayable so therefore we aim to get as much info as possible to not overcoompensate. I woudl like to see some screenshots of the Sub wars if someone can post them [:)]
Those are acceptable responses. However, perhaps some accounting for the truncated geography of the Atlantic should be considered with regard to how easy that makes it for the Allied side to position "interception" groups that provide complete coverage of the entire route between America and England.
Furthermore the sequential nature of a turn based game is what is making it possible for ships hundreds of miles away from the sight of a uboat attack to automatically be able to pounce on the subs following the sub attack, who, in reality, would be long gone from the location of the attack by the time those "interceptors" ever arrived on the scene.
Perhaps a mechanism needs to be introduced whereby true "escorts" who are adjacent to the convoy when it gets attacked are the only enemy naval unist who can automatically find the sub and that enemy "patrolling" units moving multiple hexes to get to the attack location, as an after the fact reaction to the attack, have a very, very slim, but not no, chance of finding and attacking the sub.
After all, in the real world, as an "escort", in order to able to protect your "charge" from harm and destroy prospective attackers, you have to actually be "escorting" the convoy, not patrolling the general sea lanes hundreds of miles away.
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What if the axis had not wasted effort on their subs and surface naval - who knows how that would have effected the war. What if they'd put more in to subs and starved the UK? Maybe we'd all be speaking German!
