A few word about the philosophy of what I'm trying to do here. I'm a fan of wargames, history and science. That's one reason why I have an interest in WitW : it's as much an historical and technical encyclopedia as it is a game. You can always use it to learn new things about that period (and don't forget the editor and its database).
For the ground war, I read or played this theater for years, so I tend to use what I know about history to decide what to do in the game. In most cases, I find that what made sense in reality makes sense in the game. Things like don't invade outside of aircrafts cover, tanks prefer plain rather than mountain, artillery and engineers needed against an entrenched enemy, etc... Just feel natural.
For the air war, my pre-WitW knowledge is more like "ok, there were the british who bombed cities at night, then there were the americans who bombed other stuff during the day". I had no idea of the ideal altitude to drop bombs from a Lancaster, OBOE range or Luftwaffe night fighting capability. So here I use the game to learn about history. The problem is that I'm not always sure if what I find is something which was plausible, or if I did something the devs had not expected.
That's where the community and the contact with the devs here is really appreciated. After Helpless post, I found
this article about OBOE and H2, then went back to the manual and the editor to see how they were represented in game. Warspite gave a real good insight about what was or was not possible. Thanks for this !
As for the tests hypothesis, it's impossible to truly isolate one parameter in this game, because there are so many things at play at the same time. Look at weather effect here by example. I took the case of a smaller AI reaction to simulate a "surprise" attack instead of a continued campaign over the same place. We already saw what happens when 300 fighters come after you -> unsustainable losses if you don't have a big escort with you. But we always need to keep the context in mind when analyzing the results to try and find correlations between parameters and results.
This explains why WitW is so difficult to balance properly. Every change to one parameter can provoke hundreds of other changes and you can't test them all. Then with every change you have to look at the VP balance again. And for a proper VP balance, you need a lot of games running till the last turn -> lot of time devs and testers don't have. So I wouldn't pay to much attention to VP at this stage, and put more emphasis on "winning" on the terrain. Especially if you try new things the devs did non expect, like using BC during the day. Probability is that the VP system was never tuned to take that into account, and in this case even the bombing system was not tuned for this. So it's more an experiment to learn and make the game better than a way to win.
