Mod: MEGA Pacific - Most Realistic Yet - v3.1

[mdsmall]

[ I have figured out a way to script events where Japan can "convert" an in-game Battleship unit (removing it from the board) to a carrier (adding it to the board), just like they did IRL. Or "Would you like to launch a third wave on Pearl Harbor?"

Hi - I spotted this intriguing comment. How did you manage to script replacing or converting one unit into another? I have been trying to come up with something similar in my SC mod. Don't hesitate to get technical in your reply!

Cheers,

Michael

[Nginear]

Hi - I have been taking an initial look at Version 3.0 of your very impressive mod. As a mod designer, I know how much unseen work goes into these things.

Misery loves company

I have an initial very basic question: what were your reasons to use Elissar's super large War in the Pacific map? Was there a particular geographic area you wanted to have in greater detail? Or were there combat reasons why you wanted a smaller scale map?

Elessar somehow imported the WaitP Admiral's Edition map, so that is where the distortion comes from and yes you do get used to it after awhile! This AE map has 12,384 more hexes than SC:Pacific.

One of my favorite games of SC was on Elessar2's Pacific Mod (that AAR is here). When Pacific came out, I was excited but then disappointed after a few games. SC:Pacific had a lot of good ideas, but still too small for the scale of the Pacific. The first 10 Allied turns are frankly boring; there just aren't enough units on the board to do much. Allied airpower can't even outnumber Japan's until mid-late '43, and the ranges limit there usefulness anyways.

In short, I went with what I thought was a more fun experience as the starting point for adding my own ideas. After creating my Guadalcanal 1:1 scale mod and map from scratch, I was not about to create another map!! Of course I did do an extensive amount of changes, mostly to terrain and islands, but still easier to start from existing.

- Why is the Bering Strait filled in and there is now a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska?

It's there in the original map so I just went with it. The area in the bottom left (south Australia) is completely empty, but I have long range ideas for putting a Madagascar battle area down there.

-[Misc Comments]

I'll take a look at each one of these. But a quick search on Brunei reveals it was a small fiefdom - didn't know that!

- why did you narrow the Malayan Peninsula to make overland access to Singapore so limited?

That's pretty much how it was in the AE map. Technically it is to scale (35-40 miles per hex, 2 hexes across, SIngapore is 50 miles), but I have altered plenty of islands to make them more "land-battleable."

Thanks for the feedback! I have not forgotten about the suggestions about the nuclear bomb victory conditions either. Just have to implement stuff a little bit at a time as I get feedback.

[Nginear]

Hi - I spotted this intriguing comment. How did you manage to script replacing or converting one unit into another? I have been trying to come up with something similar in my SC mod. Don't hesitate to get technical in your reply!

I was wondering who would be the first to ask about this! You'll need to grab some coffee and notepad for this one, it took me a long time to write with many different scripts coordinating with each other...

To permanently remove a unit from the game:

It is a LOOP script ramped up to 100 turns delay.

That's it!

The game only goes 80ish turns, so the unit reappearing won't be a problem. Then a regular UNIT script to add the "converted" unit based on the decision of the player (place a battleship on the hex, a DE asks "scrap/yes or convert/no?" then a second DE pops up if "no" asking if you want a CVL or new BB). Conversely you could do this without a DE and just have the unit pop up.

All joking aside, my immense trouble with implementing it actually came down to making the script events type=1, not type=2, and using a dud country to activate/stop the conversion hex. Apparently linking TYPE=2 DEs, especially when linked with other scripts such as RESOURCE or LOOP, causes more problems than Type 2 Diabetes. I contacted Bill, and to summarize his trouble shooting response: "...it's something to do with TYPE= 2 being a bit weird..." This is also why I have not been fully able to implement engineer's "building" airfields and ports that will likely flip ownership. I have had to limit it to areas that will not be captured before activating.


Once the light bulb came on to try a 100 turn delay on the LOOP script to remove the unit, I ran into two problems that needed to be solved: delaying the UNIT appearance and limiting the number of times you could convert a ship.

MRY mod is based on realism, so obviously I wanted the battleship conversion to take time (it took Japan 6-7 months to convert them into the hideous carriers they would become). But alas, it is not possible to directly cause a time delay when there is a randomly dated DE. Since I cannot know when the player will place a battleship at the specified hex, there is no way to automatically** have the UNIT script activate 6 months later after the conversion is chosen. In the end, I gave up the idea of delaying the conversion, as receiving the unit immediately wouldn't break the game.

**Technically you can create dozens of DECISION and LOOP type=3 scripts, each corresponding to a precalculated week or month of the game when a ship could be placed in the hex, and then have an equal number of UNIT scripts corresponding to each DE but with +6 months activation date. This would give the 6 month conversion delay, but it's not worth the effort!

The other problem was limiting the number of battleships. At first I wanted all the Pre-war BBs to be convertible, thinking type=2 events would do the trick. Once I couldn't get it working properly, and Bill said linked Type=2s are gremlins (for example: one problem encountered was the initial DE's yes/no value was not resetting each time, it was keeping a value stored and thus not repeatedly firing. Another example is it wasn't cumulatively deducting the MPP's for each decision), he suggested using a dud country.
If you played vanilla Pacific as Allies, you have already seen how this works: it is how the Doolittle raid icons and action appear and disappear.

At the appointed date, a "dud" country [Scrap1] mobilizes 5% with MOBILIZATION_3 towards Axis (since Japan is doing the conversion). That activates the POPUP script, which is linked to Scrap1 being mobilized towards Axis. The date also activates the DE, LOOP, and UNIT scripts, which are all type=1 events and are read top down by the computer.
NOTE: You have to have a set of scripts for each unit that can be converted!!

Each time the Japanese player moves the specific Pre-war Battleship unit to that hex, it triggers a new set/series of DE/LOOP/UNIT scripts, plus adds 5% mobilization to Scrap1 with MOBIL_3. Once the last unit is converted, I use the final DE# to demobile the country (5% initial +5% first conversion=10%, so I would demobilize 10% back to Neutral on the second conversion. If you allow more than two units, add up the total calculated %). I could have allowed more Pre-War BB's to be converted by adding more scripts and mobil%, but I was tired and just wanted to push out the update...plus historically they only converted two anyways.


Hopefully that is clearer than mud! Feel free to DM me if I can help and save you some pain based on my experience.

[mdsmall]

Thanks for the very detailed explanation! There are only few people who are going to care how you figured this out, but as you said above (mod) misery loves company. So let me reciprocate with a solution to a problem you have encountered which I recently figured out.

...But alas, it is not possible to directly cause a time delay when there is a randomly dated DE. Since I cannot know when the player will place a battleship at the specified hex, there is no way to automatically** have the UNIT script activate 6 months later after the conversion is chosen. In the end, I gave up the idea of delaying the conversion, as receiving the unit immediately wouldn't break the game.

In my Icarus mod for World War One, I wanted to write scripts to model conscription which would generate one new US corps every turn for ten turns, starting on the turn after the USA had entered the war. The problem was: the exact date of U.S. war entry is not fixed; indeed it is a key strategic variable in the game. And one of the oddities of the SC system is that it is very difficult to script events based on time elapsed relative to other events.

My solution was somewhat similar to yours: I introduced a dummy country in a far corner of the map (I used the country ID for Panama for this purpose). Panama starts as a pure neutral and I removed it from the diplomacy menus so neither side could sway it that way. As soon as the US enters the war, that triggers a Type 2 Mobilization #3 script which increases Panama's mobilization by 1% per turn. And presto, that gave me a turn counter. Then I could write scripts for the arrival of new units that have a VARIABLE_CONDITION that Panama has reached a specific mobilization level (e.g. 10% mobilized which happens ten turns after the U.S. has entered the war).

You are quite right, there are lots of gremlins with linking other events directly to TYPE 2 scripts. But you can link to the effects of a TYPE 2 script. And in this case, the mobilization level of country as specified by a VARIABLE_CONDITION is highly granular, and thus lends itself as a proxy for the passage of different amounts of time.

Good luck!

Michael

[Elessar2]

As the previous modder of this map, I'll address the map concerns.

The main advantage as Nginear indicated is the finer scale works better with the units involved, esp. ships. I was actually toying with taking another 6 months to do a brand-new map with an even finer scale, but I had switched to my Euro map at that point, then the devs told me that the kludge I was going to use to go beyond the default map editor limits (255 x 511) would likely break a bunch of things. I did think about redrawing all the coastlines like I did in Euro because there were some definite problem areas, but again it wasn't a huge enough priority.

The main issue with smaller maps is that the ratio of move rates to scouting distances becomes too great (25 is the max ship move distance, 50 when Cruising, and IIRC land-based air scouting distances began at 12 hexes, expandable via Long Range Air tech of course, but for carriers is was c. 7 before tech), so fleets could warp into a combat zone pretty much out of nowhere, with minimal long-term planning required if the map is too small and no chance to intercept or even know they were coming until they materialize.

With an even-bigger map the hope was turn lengths could be short enough to lower ship movement rates to approach carrier scouting distances, but then air could get free shots at incoming amphibs, something playtesters indicated was a major pain, tho maybe amphibs should be targetable, meaning local air superiority would need to be achieved first. The tl;dr is that there is not necessarily some "magic" map scale for a given game or mod, there's always tradeoffs.

Yes the polar projection takes some getting used to, but the distortions involved with vanilla's Mercator projections are much more worrisome when it comes to realism.

I almost took a couple of days to redraw the Arctic Ocean with permanent sea ice in the weather subroutines, but since nobody is going up there either way it simply wasn't a priority. Again that was an artifact of the previous mapmaker's efforts, samspackman, as is Australia's bocage tiles. Note the terrain you see could have different combat effects than those seen in vanilla, and used here for aesthetics.

Again, playability vs. realism tradeoffs: at its narrowest the Malayan Isthmus is indeed just 40 miles wide, 1 hex at this scale. Queenstown itself works perfectly fine where it is (16 miles from the coast), as cities in SC don't allow ships access, just ports do. The distance to the mainland is 160 miles, exactly 4 hexes in the game. Taz's max width is 180 miles so maybe the northern coast could be stretched to 5 hexes. <shrug>

[inbello]

Hey there,

The Mod looks absolutly amazing. Is there anybody up for a MP game. I dont care who plays which side.

I got a solid amount of SP experience and some MP Experience. Just DM me or anwser in this Threat.

Cheers.

[Tanaka]

Hey there,

The Mod looks absolutly amazing. Is there anybody up for a MP game. I dont care who plays which side.

I got a solid amount of SP experience and some MP Experience. Just DM me or anwser in this Threat.

Cheers.

You should play the next versions of the mod with the author of the mod when he is ready again! AAR!

https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopi ... eabd8a73e1

[OldCrowBalthazor]

I almost took a couple of days to redraw the Arctic Ocean with permanent sea ice in the weather subroutines, but since nobody is going up there either way it simply wasn't a priority. Again that was an artifact of the previous mapmaker's efforts, samspackman, as is Australian's bocage tiles. Note the terrain you see could have different combat effects than those seen in vanilla, and used here for aesthetics.

Honestly and with all due respect, I wish the Bering Sea had the seasonal sea ice and or blue water. I agree the polar projection is way better.
This is not a critical issue but more for aesthetics if nothing else.
Cheers

[Nginear]

Hello folks! Back with another update/improvement. Thanks to the feedback from mdsmall, I focused on Australia and New Zealand. While reevaluating all things down under, I was reading about their Citizen Military Force and decided "ya know, garrison would be better served as militia." That little thought brought about an unplanned rework of all things garrisony and lots of research. Interesting stuff!

But then I was faced with the problem of what should Japan use since their "militia" did not come around until 1945? How about the Kempeitai! Japan now has a unique unit and I have some big ideas on how to make garrisons for Japan more interesting (one idea is that Kempeitai will stop active partisans from forming, a military unit would not). Buuuut that's for another update I didn't want this update to get bogged down in scripting. For now, I felt there was enough changes to push out a small update and remember, your feedback helps greatly to make this mod the most realistic yet!

And in other news...be on the look out for a new v3.1 AAR

Change log v3.1:
-(Bug) Fixed popup error about dropping the Atomic Bomb

-(Map) Brunei relabeled as British North Borneo (mdsmall)
-(Map) Revisions to Tasmania (mdsmall)
-(Map) Australia/Queensland revised to be less developed (mdsmall)

-(Game) Fortifications now provides +1 soft/hard/artillery/Strat Art defense bonus to most land units.
-(Game) Several pop up info boxes edited and updated.

-(Unit) Large Naval Gun base naval spotting lowered back to 1.
-(Unit) "Garrison" unit changed to "Militia," and adjustments made to all countries according to their use of citizen style militia.

-(USA) Lowered construction time for Fleet Carrier
-(USA) Some changes to mainland starting land units.
-(Australia) Starting land units, build limits, all redesigned.
-(Australia) Special unit: Can build Dingo (recon unit)
-(New Zealand) Starting units and build limits redesigned.
-(New Zealand) Militia: Manpower shortage. Militia strength max 5 points.
-(China) A few +/- changes to various Chinese units.
-(China) Added a couple more "Survivors reform at __" scripts

-(Script) Pre-war BB Colorado will now arrive either on the West Coast if Japanese ships are nearby, or deploy in California in August '42 (historical).
-(Script) Australian resources in Queensland will develop April 1, 1942.
-(Script) Redesigned all the "enemy is close" home guard activation scripts for militia units (USA, Japan, Australia, British Raj).
-(Script) Revised the creation of Japanese Home Guard (Militia). Dates, cost, and units, and available dates all changed.
-(Script) Japan no longer gets 10 garrisons or free AA units from a decision.
-(Script) Japan gets a DE to choose Fortified Position or Coastal Defense Batteries.
-(Script) Japanese shells the West Coast: if Japan has a submarine within 10 hexes of the mainland USA, USA NM will experience a one time drop of -600NM.
-(Script) Japan can now have one or two units east of Hawaii without morale penalties.


Country Changes:

-Japan special Unit "Kempeitai" - basically it takes the place of Garrison, but it excels at soft attack and moving fast to attack Guerillas. I plan on expanding this in later versions.
-Australian Citizen Military Force: Australian Militia have a +1 soft/hard defense, can add Supply Depot, is reformable, and strength of 7. More expensive to build. At war's start the CMF was motivated but ill-equipped. It far outnumbered the regular army on the continent.
-Australia's Corps are not full size due to limited manpower (Corps will be represented in Division size unit). As the war progressed, the number of active units actually decreased.
-USA National Guard: Federally trained militia: +1 soft/hard attack, Strength of 8. Increased cost and production time.
-Japan Kokumin Giyū Sentōtai: Japanese "Volunteer Fighting Corp" was created in 1945 as a last defensive effort. While numerous, the units were often only equipped with only swords and bamboo spears.
-Japanese militia not buildable until 1945, -0.5 hard defense, -1 vs armor, and weapons upgrade not as good.
-USSR Narodnoe Opolcheniye: No unique characteristics for soviet militia. They were used in the eastern theater, primarily near the big cities.

[Tanaka]

Hey there,

The Mod looks absolutly amazing. Is there anybody up for a MP game. I dont care who plays which side.

I got a solid amount of SP experience and some MP Experience. Just DM me or anwser in this Threat.

Cheers.

You should play the next versions of the mod with the author of the mod when he is ready again! AAR!

https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopi ... eabd8a73e1

My wish came true! Hehe

[samthesham]

Interested in looking this over. I am an old WITPAE vet.

I unzipped this and placed it in

D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Strategic Command WWII - War in the Pacific\Campaigns

The campaign folder looks happy among the stock campaign folders and the cgn and dat files sit next to their peers as well. But.... when I run the app, I do not see this scenario listed when choosing a scenario

Please advise.

Apparently, I cannot attach a screen shot

[Nginear]

Interested in looking this over. I am an old WITPAE vet.

I unzipped this and placed it in

D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Strategic Command WWII - War in the Pacific\Campaigns

Close! But wrong campaign folder. That is the folder for official scenarios. Extract the mega folder and *.cgn file to:
Documents>My Games>Strategic Command WWII - War in the Pacific>Campaigns>(Put folder and .cgn file here)

Inside the MEGA Folder is player notes, change logs, etc.

Hope that helps and thanks for checking it out!

I actually just recently bought AE on sale cause I'm a sucker for logistics. Tried loading and was glitchy. Saw I have to download "Seebee" or something, but haven't gotten that far.

[samthesham]

If you like logistics, AE is logistic heaven.

[Tanaka]

If you like logistics, AE is logistic heaven.

Or logistics hell!

Love WITPAE the beast that she is!