Another build out for the weekend (fingers crossed), after
Balthazor & I noticed some issues.
The #1 change will likely be reconceptualizing Motor Torpedo Boats as Destroyer Escorts. I realized I almost certainly will have to do this after he said he would be buying some for anti-sub warfare purposes. I'll have to admit that I have not paid much attention to them, very rarely bought any in vanilla, and simply envisioned their use in my scenario as some budget combatants which might be able to favorably swing a surface battle a bit here or there.
It was only after Balthazor indicated that he would be springing for some that I checked the editor, and saw, to my shock, that they have a 3 ASW default attack rating! But only a 1 Naval/Carrier attack rating (3 vs. Transports tho), and 1 Sub defense rating. I had assumed they were modeled after the American PT boats, which were most useful softening up opposing surface ships. Never dreamed that they were that optimized for ASW. Now, the PT guys would typically bolt on any weapon that they could scrounge up, including rocket launchers, mortars, anti-tank guns, Bofors 40 mm AA guns, and yes an occasional depth charge. But they certainly weren't optimized for ASW in any capacity.
So I could either mod them to be most effective against surface ships, or vs. subs. Except that in the editor they get +1 vs. subs per level of ASW tech, a value which is greyed out (hardcoded), and thus unchangeable. So they'll become DE's. I'll now have to change all of the names around for each country that had them. In combination with that, there will be more subs AND they'll have a default dive % of 40% (which is what Crispy changed them to). Another option would be to disable ASW for them completely, but we likely will have an issue where there may not be enough fleet destroyers to go around when the big battles become joined.
They'll likely be 1.5 ASW to start (level 0), vs. regular DD's which are 1.0; both increase 1 Sub Attack per level, tho I'll likely cap their max levels in Naval Weapons and AA below that of DD's. Speed 18 vs. subs which can go 16, Destroyers 25 recall...
The rest of the changes are going to be bug fixes and various little optimizations: fix Vancouver Island to free the Canadian Navy; flip a few places to Japanese control, check whether artillery needs to be a bit cheaper (default 200 right now), lower Indian income and starting land forces, increase surface ship spotting ranges a bit (IJN +2 over that), lower Russian starting readiness to 10%, and some unit swaps and adds. Good news is that I saw a radar-equipped US sub evade an air attack thanks to its radar (since it apparently doesn't work when a surface ship attacks a sub, I'll likely raise the evasion % there).
Appreciate the bug reports.
I somehow missed this post by
Bill:
ORIGINAL: BillRunacre
A great list of changes!
On making Australia a Major, the quickest and simplest method to do so in the Editor is:
With the campaign open, go to Campaign -> Edit Major Country IDs data
Select Australia, add it to the list of Major Country IDs, and then edit the exact order to ensure that the correct countries are Allied or Axis.
You can also select its Bitmaps here. The UK uses 1, India 7.
This doesn't require any flags or other localization to be changed, it's simply a way of designating who is a Major and who is a Minor in a campaign.
Sigh. Wish I knew that before I changed it all around (not blaming you! I looked and looked for a way to do what you say here, to no avail, assumed the top 8 countries were all hard-coded). Welp it will take me about an hour to reverse all of that, but no big deal.
