WITP 1.807?

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: Alfred

I think you are spot on and you will be surprised at how many will remain with WITP and not port over to AE. I suspect that many will quickly buy AE but then will return to WITP because

(a) will wait until the inevitable initial AE bugs are patched up
(b) may find that AE makes too much a demand on their hardware and therefore they they will wait until they upgrade
(c) may become disillusioned with some of the new AE features
(d) people who do not already have WITP will not necessarily buy both WITP and AE together, they may prefer to tip their toes into the water first by initially buying only WITP

Alfred

a) There will be bugs, and some people might take issue with some of our design decisions (some that will probably be reconsidered). There were also some things people don't like that just couldn't be changed. That said, AE has some advantages over a typical game 1.0 release. It was based on a system that was already working (though with issues), and the development time has been longer than typical for a game.

b) Not an issue unless you have 512MB of RAM or less. You can squeeze it into 512MB, but it's a tight fit.

c) This is a matter of personal preference. I've gone back to the original game to test some things and I don't think I will ever be able to play it again. Though some people may prefer the original game.

d) This may happen too.

Bill

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: herwin

Description: LCU morale is sensitive to whether the unit is disrupted. If it remains disrupted, the morale converges linearly over time to 0. If it is not, the morale converges linearly over time to 99. Units in the malaria or cold zones (Burma, Thailand, Taiwan, Manchuria, DEI, Malaya, Philippines) outside of a small number of designated hexes remain constantly disrupted and lose morale over time. A unit in garrison in those areas will drop to a morale of about 20 by mid-1943 and will continue past that to zero.

Severity: Show-stopper for land operations in those areas past the beginning of 1943. This makes it impossible to replicate the 1944 campaigns in Burma and the other areas.

Conditions for reproducing: Play a game into 1943.

Recommended solution: Morale should gradually return (exponential convergence) to an appropriate value for each unit. This should reflect the hex type, presence of malaria/cold, supply status, hex development, leadership, and troop quality. A random number draw will be needed to determine the number of morale points gained or lost each turn. The following algorithm is recommended. I recommend coding this internally in double precision arithmetic.

double limit = Compute_morale_limit(args); // the arguments should be anything that you want to affect the morale limit.
// Use Test Driven Development to show that the method provides appropriate values
double delta = limit - double(current_unit_morale); // positive if the current morale is too low, negative if too high
// now what you want is a random number generator that generates a poisson output.
// the boost library has one that implements Knuth's recommendation on page 137 of Volume 2
// you pass it a positive rate, and it returns an integer. The rate should be some small number times the absolute value of delta
// unfortunately, it uses a constant rate, but you can adapt the code so you call it with the current rate. This allows you to use
// a single RNG process to generate the pseudorandom numbers with multiple rates.
// you may well want to use this function with other parts of the system when you need to model a poisson process efficiently
// assume factor is a slow-down that you're using to reduce the rate of convergence
double factor = some_small_positive_value;
double how_fast = abs(delta);
int sign = (delta>=0)?1:-1;
double rate = factor*how_fast;
int change = poisson(rate); // RNG draw from a poisson process parameterised by rate
// now change is a positive integer. Be paranoid here:
if(double(change)>how_fast) change = int(how_fast); // round down
morale += sign*change; // and there's your result
return;

I haven't seen the code for the original game, but for AE I know for a fact that disruption, fatigue, and morale all improve in the housekeeping at the end of the turn. I don't think it has changed dramatically.

Morale improvement is very dependent on the leader's inspiration, as well as fatigue and disruption of the unit. If the leadership is poor, or the fatigue or disruption are much, the unit will not recover morale.

The actual code is much more complex and takes into account many more factors than what you have here.

Bill

[USSAmerica]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

ORIGINAL: khyberbill
It is not a problem to pull a unit out of the line for a period of time. However, is there a recommended period of time? In on of my games now, I have a few units that have had a lot of battle and thus have two or three planes and the same number of pilots. I gather from what you say, if I stand down these squadrons for two weeks, I might find that there are now 6 pilots and 3 planes?

Yes. I often wondered why I sometimes seemed to be "growing" pilots - but that isn't something one would grip about. But now I know the reason. If a good air unit gets beat up - pull it out and it will grow some good pilots back.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is my "learn something new about this game every day" fact for today. [8D]

[herwin]

I understand the problem has been addressed in AE. This is for standard WitP.

Also, the approach in the game produces opaque behaviour, probably making debugging a massive headache. This has the advantage of defining the problem to be an exponential convergence at some rate to a limit--which is what we see in these phenomena. All your variables either influence the rate or the limit.

[Q-Ball]

ORIGINAL: USS America

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is my "learn something new about this game every day" fact for today. [8D]

Isn't that true, you can't know everything!

I had sensed that was happening, but good to see confirmation. I always thought that it was WIA's returning to the unit, but I wasn't 100% sure. But I do see depleted units get some pilots back.

[khyberbill]

Pilot issue is under discussion - main issue is treatment of ongoing games. A "true" fix would mean 1.8.0.7 would only work for new games and would not be a "patch" in the sense that we have done to date. All the 1.8.x.y series of patches will work for ongoing as well as new games.

One thing you might be able to do is to show the wounded pilots that are still attached to the squadron. I am not sure if this could be done when one clicks on the pilots button, but I know that if I was down a few pilots and saw that 15 were on the wounded list, I would hesitate to add more.

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: herwin

I understand the problem has been addressed in AE. This is for standard WitP.

Also, the approach in the game produces opaque behaviour, probably making debugging a massive headache. This has the advantage of defining the problem to be an exponential convergence at some rate to a limit--which is what we see in these phenomena. All your variables either influence the rate or the limit.

As I said, I don't know how stock works, but what's there for AE can probably be dropped into the stock code without any modification. That section of code doesn't use anything new to AE.

Bill

[herwin]

ORIGINAL: wdolson

ORIGINAL: herwin

I understand the problem has been addressed in AE. This is for standard WitP.

Also, the approach in the game produces opaque behaviour, probably making debugging a massive headache. This has the advantage of defining the problem to be an exponential convergence at some rate to a limit--which is what we see in these phenomena. All your variables either influence the rate or the limit.

As I said, I don't know how stock works, but what's there for AE can probably be dropped into the stock code without any modification. That section of code doesn't use anything new to AE.

Bill

Sounds reasonable.

I was just stating a professional position on this problem. Wayne Hughes writes:

"During the 1960s, defense systems analysts suffered a foretaste of the ways complex
simulations inhibit imagination and creativity when they tried to solve problems by exploiting
the brute-force capacity of the computer by adding more and more inputs and making
more and more runs. They learned that too much detail for the sake of realism is
confusing and self-defeating."

There are two problems here. First, too complex a model will surpass the comprehension
of the users. Secondly, too good a model will teach the users to lean on the model too much,
so that when it fails, they have no foundation on which to construct their own solutions.
You've seen that with stock WitP. It came to be seen as the oracle that described how
the war in the Pacific was fought. Then some people with a knowledge of reality began
poking holes in it, and it was too complex to resist the hole-poking.