Soviet 30,000 Squad Limit

[matt.buttsworth]

Is it true (I beleive it is) as I read in undocumented tips on Wir 1.1 that Wir 3.0 has a 30,000 squad limit on squads.
If so this should be publicised as the Soviet player must attack or completely waste the arriving squads.
If so, why have it? Why not get rid of it? As with the sudden fall in call ups in 1942 the Soviet reserve numbers soon fall causing a possible unrealistic manpower shortage in 1943.
I believe the Soviet player should be able to have as many reserve squads as occur without any artificial limit.
Removing it should require only the elimination of one line of code.

Matt Von B

[heiks]

Originally posted by Matthew Buttsworth:
Is it true (I beleive it is) as I read in undocumented tips on Wir 1.1 that Wir 3.0 has a 30,000 squad limit on squads.
If so this should be publicised as the Soviet player must attack or completely waste the arriving squads.
If so, why have it? Why not get rid of it? As with the sudden fall in call ups in 1942 the Soviet reserve numbers soon fall causing a possible unrealistic manpower shortage in 1943.
I believe the Soviet player should be able to have as many reserve squads as occur without any artificial limit.
Removing it should require only the elimination of one line of code.

Matt Von B

I find it more likely that this kind of limit would affect the squad pool instead of the total number of squads (I doubt that the system keeps track of this). Then the limit would be easily explained by the assumption that in the code only 16 bits are reserved for the squad pool, which limits the maximum to 2^16 - 1 = 65535, but if the value is interpreted as a signed value we lose one bit and get only 32768 which rounds down to 30000.

Just a thought. Wouldn't be the first time, though.

[Ed Cogburn]

Originally posted by Matthew Buttsworth:
Is it true (I beleive it is) as I read in undocumented tips on Wir 1.1 that Wir 3.0 has a 30,000 squad limit on squads.
If so this should be publicised as the Soviet player must attack or completely waste the arriving squads.
If so, why have it? Why not get rid of it?

If its as simple as changing a signed integer variable into an unsigned integer variable, then there should be no reason not to fix this, but I guaranttee it'll require more than just deleting one line of code.

The game may be using a standard "int" (integer) variable to hold the squad count. An int variable defaults to being signed. If you change it to an "unsigned int", there are going to be some, maybe many, places in the code that would need a little fixing as the the programming language used here (C or old C++), always assumes an "int" is signed. At every place you would have to "force" the compiler to recognize the variable is now unsigned when being compared to other numbers.

Its on the issues list.

[ August 08, 2001: Message edited by: Ed Cogburn ]

[matt.buttsworth]

I meant squad pool of course.
I did not know it would be as complicated as you said. It is another problem for Arnaud then but may be one way to help restored the pro-German inbalance feared by Ric in the new coming version.

[Ed Cogburn]

Originally posted by Matthew Buttsworth:
I did not know it would be as complicated as you said.

I don't know for a fact it will be complicated, it depends on how the code is written of course. We won't know until Arnaud changes the variable from "int" to "unsigned int" and then tries to recompile the game.

[RickyB]

I am fairly sure this is a hard-coded limit, possibly based on int limits. The squads will not go past 30k, so there must be something in the code that limits it to this, rather than 32k. Arnaud will definitely have to answer this one, but it may turn out to be quite easy. The game already uses unsigned 8 bit numbers for most things, so I would be very surprised that Grigsby would suddenly use a signed number here. The rail underflow back up to 64k is a perfect example of this. An odd limit, but maybe for play balance?

[matt.buttsworth]

would still be a good idea to try though. MRB