Admirals Edition Naval Thread

[jwilkerson]

ORIGINAL: Buck Beach

Man you are completely full of yourself and your importance, even to the extent of jumping WITP sub forums. Also, your childish attempts of "I know something you don't know" relating to your new found information about merchant shipbuilding [/b] and to keep it, if you will, secretly to the CHS mod-builders shows exactly what kind of person you are and why I feel your position on the AE team should be reconsidered.

Of course, this is only one man's not so humble opinion.

Buck Beach - you are warned. Personal attacks will not be allowed. Read and heed the guidelines.

http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/fb.asp?m=1649590


And BTW JWE is the announced Naval Team Lead for the AE expansion module, he has advanced degrees in multiple fields including technical fields (as do I), he has served in the US Army Field Artillery (as have I), he has worked for the NSA as an operations analyst (which I have not) and he is respected and by both former and active duty military for his efforts on their behalf (which I am not!). I believe he is qualified for his role on our team and I am honored to have his assistance in creating this product for the community.

[Feinder]

Thanks for response J-.
 
-F-
 

[Raverdave]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

he has served in the US Army Field Artillery (as have I)

Oh lord ! [X(] Not one but TWO drop-shorts ! [;)]

[jwilkerson]

ORIGINAL: Raverdave

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

he has served in the US Army Field Artillery (as have I)

Oh lord ! [X(] Not one but TWO drop-shorts ! [;)]

Must be one of dem mud crawlin' grunts!
[;)]

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Terminus

They work. Read that as "the functionality they were meant to have in WitP is now available in AE".

And for heavens sake, could you stop calling it WitP 1? That implies that the AE is a WitP 2, which it isn't.

This usage is implied by the official announcements there will be an interim AE and a later WITP 2.
I use it myself to say "the original Matrix WITP" to be clear. If you have a better term, it would be
most useful to share it with us. Since there is to be a WITP 2 - what else do we call the first one?
And why "for heavens sake" ? His usage should not have been exasperating for you - since it was
logical and clear and reasonable. What more can you ask?

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Terminus

ORIGINAL: el cid again

The manual says merchant ships and warships both cost 3 HI points each.

Can this be changed so it is cheaper to build a merchant ship - or more expensive to build a warship?

Many ships were built to merchantile standards because it was cheaper - not because it was better. And indeed, if we had soft control over this, we could make DEs warships but FFs merchant ships. Or certain categories could be hard coded that way. Or are they?

As far as I know, that's not in the cards (with the proviso that I haven't been Naval Team lead for a while)... The only way to simulate that sort of thing would be to mess around with Durability.

Everything is a compromise - but if durability is anything close to working properly - we need it to be relatively right to show the relative robustness (or lack thereof) of different classes. My suggestion is to "dilute" the cost of merchant shipbuilding points at the modding end of the process: if you want the cost to be about half, dump a number of merchant points per day = to the starting number of merchant shipyards. If you want it to be about a third (that is, 1 HI point per) then dump twice the starting number of yards into the pool each day. This has the disadvantage of not needing any HI points at all - and the "free" yards cannot be bombed, shelled or captured - but it can be rationalized. There are huge absent sectors of the economy in any case, and it really matters if you lose huge fractions of your production even if you don't lose all of it. But making the burdon for merchants/auxiliaries be identical to warships seems overly simplistic.

[jwilkerson]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

This usage is implied by the official announcements there will be an interim AE and a later WITP 2.
I use it myself to say "the original Matrix WITP" to be clear. If you have a better term, it would be
most useful to share it with us. Since there is to be a WITP 2 - what else do we call the first one?
And why "for heavens sake" ? His usage should not have been exasperating for you - since it was
logical and clear and reasonable. What more can you ask?

We have an existing WITP.

We have an announced WITP-AE.

We have a distant concept of WITP-II.

There is no official annoucement that there is to be a WITP-II. At least not that I have ever seen.

[el cid again]

New question:

can we have a way to say "This ship just appears" or "this ship needs to be paid for?"

It might be done by location - or it might be a field -

but there are many instances of ships which appear already built on the Axis side in PTO - and right now every one
of them must be "paid for" - never mind it is not being built in fact

A German raider (there are two in this period of the war) or tanker (there is one)

German submarines (depending on what counts - the area of operations may not include everything which entered the Indian Ocean -
but surely does include Malaya and Java - and even Australia.

Ships taken over - for example Aramis sitting at Saigon, or President Harrison, or the Italian Liner Conte Verde up in Shanghai (and for that matter gunboat Lepanto). These ships are not in Axis service when the game begins - but if you give them a date of service - they must be "bought" - never mind they are already built.

[jwilkerson]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

Everything is a compromise - but if durability is anything close to working properly - we need it to be relatively right to show the relative robustness (or lack thereof) of different classes. My suggestion is to "dilute" the cost of merchant shipbuilding points at the modding end of the process: if you want the cost to be about half, dump a number of merchant points per day = to the starting number of merchant shipyards. If you want it to be about a third (that is, 1 HI point per) then dump twice the starting number of yards into the pool each day. This has the disadvantage of not needing any HI points at all - and the "free" yards cannot be bombed, shelled or captured - but it can be rationalized. There are huge absent sectors of the economy in any case, and it really matters if you lose huge fractions of your production even if you don't lose all of it. But making the burdon for merchants/auxiliaries be identical to warships seems overly simplistic.

Lots of words here.

Durability in stock means too many things ...

Victory points,

Production cost,

Resistance to damage,

Diving depth (for subs),

And then there are modifiers ...


We will do the best we can with what we have available!!!
[:)]
But there are certainly challenges!!!

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: JWE

ORIGINAL: el cid again
The manual says merchant ships and warships both cost 3 HI points each.
Can this be changed so it is cheaper to build a merchant ship - or more expensive to build a warship?

There are many and various new data fields extant in AE that inform and define the parameters used in the game engine. Any reliance on the “names” and “effects” of the old WiTP data fields is misdirected, and will result in potentially fatal entanglements for the unfortunate.

WiTP is a computer wargame, it is a simulation, it is not a recreation. It is a commercial gaming product devised for enjoyment and that is the basis of the engine. We may tweak it, here & there, but certain fundamental principals hold.

There are multiple new fields that inform things like building cost, repair cost, conversion cost, upgrade cost, damage control parameters, and they are each, and independently variable, and controlled by editor values and hard coded data value tables resident in the executable code.

I am unable to give looks under the hood, but the values were developed by reference, by persons having a specific expertise in these matters.

There will be substantial differentiation between merchant vessels and commissioned vesels on the same design. However, the differentiation parameters will not necessarily relate to WiTP. They will be AE exclusive. They will depend on USN and shipyard records, where appropriate, and on established USN doctrinal imperitives, where data is unavailable.

The purpose of this communication is less than clear to me? It certainly is not an attempt to answer the question asked. This is a public forum discussion and it need never have been invited: since it was questions are germane; since we don't read the new code we will NEVER ask questions based on that - only what we DO know about. If you are forbidding us to ask in the context of what we know, there is nothing to talk about beyond generalizations: Matrix may as well have said "wait for it to come out - then comments are welcome (or even not welcome)." I don't think that is the intent here - so I am mystified. Nor do I assume that anyone in the development stream is ignorant or incompetent - except in the sense we all must be ignorant of a set of subjects so vast as is required to attempt this simulation game in the first place: meaning none of us can possibly be expert in all of these matters. I think the evidence is that the present effort is far better staffed than the original one was - and I am optimistic that many improvements must be forthcoming. I am also philosophical about why it was not done so well the first time: you always learn from what has been done before; without the first effort there could be no justification for capitalizing this effort; the present project must end up better off than any original one could have because of the much greater base of knowledge which has grown around the first product. In the long run this process will result in a better product - and there is a strong chance it is only a step in the direction of a still better one. Nothing about that dismays me. Not that I will ever be satisfied. I certainly don't think USN doctrinal imperitives ought to be the ones used, for example: it is critical to use IJN doctrincal imperatives and valuable to use RN ones, to mention significant others. But there is nothing whatever wrong with using the USN as a foundation for terminology and conceptualization - and that may really be what was meant (if not what was said). I am not dismayed - and I hope JWE is not either. I just don't think he and I (at a minimum) are communcating effectively in all respects. And this time at least (all the others might be my fault) it may not be my fault.

I also suspect an apples and oranges effect: I think a discussion on the WITP Forum was read as a discussion of AE - whereas even if AE was mentioned - the thread was about WITP as it is - for modders as they now are - and answers about what to put in present fields were certainly germane to that thread. It may or may not be that AE is identical with respect to this or that field - but it is reasonable to assume it is similar with somewhat more options folded in - and basic concepts are not going to change. Thus durability (if that is the issue unstated) is a function of more than just ship size - and certainly that will always remain germane to say - in whatever context. I do think that there is a difference between how things seem to landsmen and sailors - a difference difficult to even describe: if you lose a fight with a fire at sea you can not run out into the back yard or across the street - you are in deep - literally as well as figuratively if you are far at sea. The mind set of what makes a ship able to cope with various threats (and NO threat in a naval battle is greater than that of fire, which destroys most ships that are lost) or not is part of what being a sailor is about, and doubly so for one forced to study damage control in a technical sense. Engineering school is NOT about this sort of material - not even if it is theoretically part of the study of certain specalist marine engineers (and it is NOT part of the vast majority of programs): damage control school has you wading waiste high in flaming gasoline protected by only water fog - so you learn how to cope (or just breathe without breathers) in the event the ship has run out of chemical foam - and there are not enough (or not any) breathers available. We don't surrender the ship even to the worst of fires - and the really critical asset is number of men trained in how to fight - the next most critical being the sheer quantity of stuff available to those men to fight with - neither of which has the slightest to do with the hull per se (except it must be big enough to contain them). The reasons a greater number of teams make it seem the same hull is more survivable seem pale when reduced to words on paper - but they are a really big deal in real life situations. It might be wise to value the knowledge of people who have been exposed to this sort of thing - formally - and in real situations - instead of pretending one can know they don't have a clue - which is not going to improve anything.

[jwilkerson]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

is less than clear to me? It certainly is not an attempt to answer the question asked. This is a public forum discussion and it need never have been invited: since it was questions are germane; since we don't read the new code we will NEVER ask questions based on that - only what we DO know about. If you are forbidding us to ask in the context of what we know, there is nothing to talk about beyond generalizations: Matrix may as well have said "wait for it to come out - then comments are welcome (or even not welcome)." I don't think that is the intent here - so I am mystified. Nor do I assume that anyone in the development stream is ignorant or incompetent - except in the sense we all must be ignorant of a set of subjects so vast as is required to attempt this simulation game in the first place: meaning none of us can possibly be expert in all of these matters. I think the evidence is that the present effort is far better staffed than the original one was - and I am optimistic that many improvements must be forthcoming. I am also philosophical about why it was not done so well the first time: you always learn from what has been done before; without the first effort there could be no justification for capitalizing this effort; the present project must end up better off than any original one could have because of the much greater base of knowledge which has grown around the first product. In the long run this process will result in a better product - and there is a strong chance it is only a step in the direction of a still better one. Nothing about that dismays me. Not that I will ever be satisfied. I certainly don't think USN doctrinal imperitives ought to be the ones used, for example: it is critical to use IJN doctrincal imperatives and valuable to use RN ones, to mention significant others. But there is nothing whatever wrong with using the USN as a foundation for terminology and conceptualization - and that may really be what was meant (if not what was said). I am not dismayed - and I hope JWE is not either. I just don't think he and I (at a minimum) are communcating effectively in all respects. And this time at least (all the others might be my fault) it may not be my fault.

Lots of words ... lots of words ...

AE is an extension of WITP.

Our goal is to be better .... but not in all regards .. just in a few ... it will be up to the community to judge.

[Terminus]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

TO come to JWEs aid here - he has just recently taken over the Naval Team Lead slot - and may not be privy to all the changes (or even what doesn't work in stock). Either JWE needs to check with Don to validate - or Don needs to come here and tell us himself. But I do believe I have seen internal communications indicating the the bombardment vessels have been changed (to work) in AE. Let's await confirmation from JWE/Don on this.

I can confirm it; they were made to work fairly early in my tenure as Naval Team Lead.

[Mike Solli]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

ORIGINAL: Raverdave

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

he has served in the US Army Field Artillery (as have I)

Oh lord ! [X(] Not one but TWO drop-shorts ! [;)]

Must be one of dem mud crawlin' grunts!
[;)]

And is there a problem with that? [;)] [:D]

[Dixie]

Another Royal Navy question if I may.  Will the RN Fiji (Crown Colony) class cruisers be split into the Fiji and Ceylon sub classes (in a similar manner to the Town Classes and Counties for example)?

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: Raverdave

Oh lord ! [X(] Not one but TWO drop-shorts ! [;)]

Oh, Raver, my dear boy ... we never drop our shorts unless there's a reason.

I prefer to think of it more as being a 10-mile sniper.

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: Dixie
Another Royal Navy question if I may.  Will the RN Fiji (Crown Colony) class cruisers be split into the Fiji and Ceylon sub classes (in a similar manner to the Town Classes and Counties for example)?

There are too many sub-classes and inter-conversion options between and among the RN cruisers, for me to recall every detail, but ... there's '41 and '42 Fijis that can continue 'as is' or "convert" to '44 Fijis, of which the Ceylon enters as one. "Conversions" cost. They cost a lot. But they can be done. So I guess the answer is yes, but the split is fuzzy.

There's every mix imaginable; Swiftsures, Didos, Bellonas, 4 options off the C class, 4 off the Ds, Caledons, Ceres', Capetowns; woof, I'm getting the vapors just thinkin about it all.

We burned a good amount of little grey cells (c.f. Hercule Poirot) makin sure you Monarchist, Imperialists have something to play with.

[Dixie]

ORIGINAL: JWE

We burned a good amount of little grey cells (c.f. Hercule Poirot) makin sure you Monarchist, Imperialists have something to play with.

Good show old chap! [:)]

I also like the fact that there are C & D class options as well [8D] Normal CL and CLAA variants I assume [:)]

[Whisper]

ORIGINAL: Dixie

ORIGINAL: JWE

We burned a good amount of little grey cells (c.f. Hercule Poirot) makin sure you Monarchist, Imperialists have something to play with.

Good show old chap! [:)]
I also like the fact that there are C & D class options as well [8D] Normal CL and CLAA variants I assume [:)]

Yes. Variants within the CL groups, but mostly CL - CLAA variants. Off Chatham records and RN specs and TROMs.

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: Whisper

ORIGINAL: Dixie
Good show old chap! [:)]
I also like the fact that there are C & D class options as well [8D] Normal CL and CLAA variants I assume [:)]

Yes. Variants within the CL groups, but mostly CL - CLAA variants. Off Chatham records and RN specs and TROMs.

Jeremy is pretty much spot on. There were several conversions done to vessels in these classes, and the various conversions were planned for others. These others weren't done because of the 'yard' space and time/availability limitations on the RN during the war years.

"Conversions" in AE are possible, if , in fact, they were done irl, but the time frames and costs, will reflect the limitations. i.e., it might take you 6 to 9 mos to effect a conversion (since it did, indeed, take that long) and the number of specific "yards" available to perform that conversion will be limited (to say nothing of all the other conversions waiting in line). You will have the same constraints placed on you, as a player, as were placed on the Lords of Admiralty; now ain't ya just tickled - you're First Lord.

[Dixie]

ORIGINAL: JWE

ORIGINAL: Whisper

ORIGINAL: Dixie
Good show old chap! [:)]
I also like the fact that there are C & D class options as well [8D] Normal CL and CLAA variants I assume [:)]

Yes. Variants within the CL groups, but mostly CL - CLAA variants. Off Chatham records and RN specs and TROMs.

Jeremy is pretty much spot on. There were several conversions done to vessels in these classes, and the various conversions were planned for others. These others weren't done because of the 'yard' space and time/availability limitations on the RN during the war years.

"Conversions" in AE are possible, if , in fact, they were done irl, but the time frames and costs, will reflect the limitations. i.e., it might take you 6 to 9 mos to effect a conversion (since it did, indeed, take that long) and the number of specific "yards" available to perform that conversion will be limited (to say nothing of all the other conversions waiting in line). You will have the same constraints placed on you, as a player, as were placed on the Lords of Admiralty; now ain't ya just tickled - you're First Lord.

[:)]