Main Campaign End Date?

[Chad Harrison]

Is the main game still going to end on March 31st, 1946?

If so, can I make an argument for it not too. With all the new land units, planes and ships that we are going to be seeing late war, the temptation to try out Operations Olympic and Coronet is beyond tempting (invasion of mainland Japan).

Could it be treated like the auto victory funtion? Once you reach the end date a dialog pops up and tells you the scenario has ended, but asks if would you like to continue playing. If you choose to continue playing, there are no further reinforcements (outside of industry built items, ie. so no new ships, ground units, or new air units) so the dev team has no further work with adding more units. All that would have to happen is having the end date extended so the two players could continue playing with their current units. Close games, like Andy's and PZB's, would be a perfect example of having a need to play past the end date and still have a challenge. Im not saying that Andy or PZB would want too though [:D]

I have not played with modding before, but is it currently possible to extend the date of a scenario with the WitP scenario editor? Will it be possible with the AE scenario editor? Is the end date of March 31st, 1946 hard coded?

Thanks in advance.

Chad

[Terminus]

No hard-coding on the end date. Operation Downfall is not a good idea...

[herwin]

I did a professional study of battle termination data about thirty years ago. The best model was that the battle continues until one side is obviously defeated (i.e., an information collection process is involved), at which point it abandons the field. Historically, tied battles went on and on and on, producing the bloodiest results. No evidence for any difference between the attacker and the defender.

[engineer]

From my reading and travel in the region, I shudder at the IRL consequences of Olympic or Downfall.  The thing probably would have been a Verdun in the Pacific with massive casualties on both sides.  The Allies had lots of troops, weapons, and firepower.  The Japanese had lots of manpower (a distressing amount untrained militia "cannon fodder"), enough firepower, terrain and the advantage of defense.  Once you get past the Kanto Plain around Tokyo and some coastal plains elsewhere in Japan, the country is just up and down. 
 
A couple of other factors: 

• A war stretching into 1946 would have resulted in a campaign fought against a backdrop of literal famine in Japan. 
• Unless you make a "nukes didn't work" presumption, the US was making a couple of bombs a month.  Hanford had to shut down their reactors in 1946 while they figured out the "lithium poisoning" problem, but that's an extra dozen nukes that the US would have had on hand if the Japanese didn't surrender.
• The US had a point system where a lot of the experienced troops were being rotated home and their billets filled with troops from boot camp or transferred from Europe.  That would decrease US LCU experience. 

With the special militia units and such I would almost have to think the only way to do it justice would be special scenarios for Olympic and Downfall, but I wonder if so many men and units on such a concentration fits well within the basic WitP/AE engine. 

[Terminus]

It doesn't work well in vanilla WitP (I've tried). Don't think they're doing one for AE...

[Blackhorse]

ORIGINAL: engineer
With the special militia units and such I would almost have to think the only way to do it justice would be special scenarios for Olympic and Downfall, but I wonder if so many men and units on such a concentration fits well within the basic WitP/AE engine. 

You'll have a chance to find out. The reinforcements from Europe will be in AE.

Re: the 'point system' to discharge US/European War veterans first. The US ground troops arriving from the ETO in 1945 will have experience in the 60-70 range, while veteran PTO units (Japanese and Allied) can expect to have experience in the 90s by that period of the war.

[Chad Harrison]

ORIGINAL: Terminus

No hard-coding on the end date. Operation Downfall is not a good idea...

So we could quite easily mod a scenario to end whenever we wanted?

[engineer]

Original:  Blackhorse
You'll have a chance to find out.

That's interesting. 

I've seen in some of the threads that people report that local Japanese resources are enough to prevent a blockade from starving Japan, and it seems reasonable enough to me that strict rationing with a "damn the consequences" for the civilians would be enough to keep a lot of troops under arms even if production slowed to a crawl.  However, a lot of the militia forces amounted a "nation in arms" with shutting down food and industrial production as the by-product of mobilizing the militia.  Will a Japanese player or the AI be in control of that one-way consumption of industrial capacity for some military capacity?  I suppose that another way to do it would be within a scenario set-up where the industrial/militia trade-offs take place as part of the scenario set-up.

[vonTirpitz]

I am in complete agreement to not impose a hard coded end date, although I have on occasion played PW and WiR way past the point where the AI started to behave erratically. [:D]
 
Adding "random" events from late 1945 onward could both add interest and even allow the game to give the player opportunities to "wind down" the conflict in a more gradual and graceful manner as opposed to a blunt stop date based on numerical victory criteria.
Some thoughts might include Chinese Nationalists vs. Communists forces fighting each other (periodically or perpetually) in otherwise unoccupied regions, aggressive Soviet Far East movement (and interest in the Pacific) as well as increased hostility toward Allied forces after the German surrender, political or economic pressures forcing the reduction and/or redeployment of US forces to other commands not on the map, increased chances for political resolutions to randomly occur at higher levels such as conditional surrenders, cease-fires, etc. 
Of course, for the most die hard players, a fight to the bitter end with Japan is always possible until, of course, the Soviet Union become a bigger threat by using their own atomic and/or conventional weapons on the map (or elsewhere in the world) sometime after 1950.  [:'(]
In any case, combat units of all types that have not seen any combat in six months or a year should always lose some experience each month (down to at least regular training levels) in campaigns.
cheers. [8D]