Garaco vs me v 1.2.17

[Khornish]

Garaco and I played several years of a 1792 scenario via tcp/ip this morning.

He was France and I was England.

France seems to be about right balance wise, but I think England is gimped economically. I usually play as France or Prussia myself, so I've not noticed this before, but when France is making a lot more income than England within the first couple of years, there's definately some gimpage here.

Yes, I upgraded my banks as often as I could, I micromanaged my provinces to provide me what I needed to do so, and I dropped my feudal level, etc. Still, France was on par, if not slightly above me, even without having huge territorial gains.


That being said, there were several problems we had during the course of the game.

Twice my orders failed to be picked up by the server and we waited several minutes for them to go through. We ended up quitting and restarting from the previous save.

Once I did not get the message that Prussia had surrendered to France. I didn't see it as an event, on the screen as a message or as a pop up.

4 times in a row I got France's message from the Papacy asking France for money. It popped up and disappeared very quickly, almost a flicker, but it shouldn't appear for me at all.

As Britain I made 3 different treaties for loans out to my erstwhile friends, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Each agreed to accept 120 money for me in return for paying it back at 10% interest. Well, each of them got away with paying me 9 money for 12 months for a total of 108 money paid back to me, instead of 132 each. I checked their glory and NML history and none of them received any penalty for failing to pay up properly.

In detailed battles, the AI is just plain stupid sometimes. I watched France fight an Austo-Prussian army. The allies troops concentrated on garrisons and virtually ignored the advancing French troops. I do think the AI needs to be tweaked in such a manner, that it will ignore garrisons and go after enemy formations when they become visible. As it is, I really think garrisons are overdone.

I'd like to see British fleets get the same kind of bonus as French corps, a size bonus.

I also think we should be able to have Fleets have an attached leader who could provide a combat bonus to the ships in the fleet. This way you could have Nelson do his thing until he gets killed.

I've a lot more thoughts on this, but most of it goes beyond 1.2.17 and would be more for a sequel or for a final, feature-adding, patch.

[garoco]

Good report, I would add that speed is fine, the communications between both pc were record like never before I had seen.
The message to each player is a need siege, surrender, only the server can looks.
Certainly the IA attack my garrisons suffers losses that I had exploited more later with my units of army.
I forget the status diplomats was goodwill only, they don´t work fine for now.
Any questions?

[ericbabe]

ORIGINAL: Khornish
France seems to be about right balance wise, but I think England is gimped economically. I usually play as France or Prussia myself, so I've not noticed this before, but when France is making a lot more income than England within the first couple of years, there's definately some gimpage here.

Do you remember what your merchant income was? The intention was to give Britain an enormous economic advantage, but only if the merchants are deployed optimally. There was a problem with too many privateers (esp. from the North African minor countries) which we tried to fix by increasing privateer cost, and which we may have to address with a cap on privateers and by giving an "anti-privateer" operation to frigates.

Twice my orders failed to be picked up by the server and we waited several minutes for them to go through. We ended up quitting and restarting from the previous save.

We use the "confirmed UDP" mode of Microsoft's Direct Play -- it claims that packets don't get dropped, but I have seen some packets lost over internet play. In my experience this hasn't happened that often, but I'm considering ways to allow the server to re-start everybody in the event of a synchronization error.

Once I did not get the message that Prussia had surrendered to France. I didn't see it as an event, on the screen as a message or as a pop up.

Was it on your event list / political report?

4 times in a row I got France's message from the Papacy asking France for money. It popped up and disappeared very quickly, almost a flicker, but it shouldn't appear for me at all.

It does appear for all players, as do most prompts, albeit with greyed-out menu options. In a multi-player game we allow some penetration of FOW in this way to try to minimize the amount of time players spend looking at an inactive screen... if you're waiting for someone to make a decision about funding the papacy, at least this way you know what you're waiting for.

As Britain I made 3 different treaties for loans out to my erstwhile friends, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Each agreed to accept 120 money for me in return for paying it back at 10% interest. Well, each of them got away with paying me 9 money for 12 months for a total of 108 money paid back to me, instead of 132 each. I checked their glory and NML history and none of them received any penalty for failing to pay up properly.

I don't remember this being reported before. Does it happen in single player as well? Since all this is resolved server-side, my initial hypothesis is that it shouldn't be an m-player specific problem.

In detailed battles, the AI is just plain stupid sometimes. I watched France fight an Austo-Prussian army. The allies troops concentrated on garrisons and virtually ignored the advancing French troops. I do think the AI needs to be tweaked in such a manner, that it will ignore garrisons and go after enemy formations when they become visible. As it is, I really think garrisons are overdone.

I tweaked this AI response to garrisons in the last patch, but I think some more tweaking could be in order.

I'd like to see British fleets get the same kind of bonus as French corps, a size bonus.

They do get a bonus to size -- is it not working in your games?

I also think we should be able to have Fleets have an attached leader who could provide a combat bonus to the ships in the fleet. This way you could have Nelson do his thing until he gets killed.

This was part of our original design, but it turns out to be a lot of work (AI/interface/game attachment logic) for a relatively small improvement to game-play, so we scrapped it. We had strongly considered making a "Nelson" bonus for the fleet named after Lord Nelson, and may add this to a future patch.


Thanks for the feedback!

Did you experience other m-player issues reported before: diplomats' not moving, treaties' being lost, or labor allocations' being reset?


Eric

[Khornish]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

Do you remember what your merchant income was? The intention was to give Britain an enormous economic advantage, but only if the merchants are deployed optimally. There was a problem with too many privateers (esp. from the North African minor countries) which we tried to fix by increasing privateer cost, and which we may have to address with a cap on privateers and by giving an "anti-privateer" operation to frigates.

I had decent income, in fact we were playing a continuation of the game earlier today. My income was over 150.

However, privateers were killing my potential, especially those of my allies. I had two really good merchant fleets, one at 83 and one at 67, so they provided the bulk of my merchant income. My other three fleets were getting less than 20 each , two of these were below 10 income, due to not being able to do anything vs the privateers beyond breaking an alliance and declaring war.

Not an optimal choice.

[/quote]

Was it on your event list / political report?

[/quote]

No. This happened again today with an Austrian surrender to France, but that was on the event report this time.

I don't remember this being reported before. Does it happen in single player as well? Since all this is resolved server-side, my initial hypothesis is that it shouldn't be an m-player specific problem.

I've not looked at it via solo as yet as I've just been ignoring such requests anymore. I'll have to check in my current solo game.

I tweaked this AI response to garrisons in the last patch, but I think some more tweaking could be in order.

If you can just give them a target priority of going after troops in the open they can see before selecting to go after a garrison they can see, it would do wonders.

They do get a bonus to size -- is it not working in your games?

Uh, I've not noticed this, but it is easily possible I missed it. I'll check again.


Also, after playing with Garoco, with myself as Britain and he as France, I've determined that we need Squadron containers for naval forces. It takes _way_ too many costly fleets to blockade France, when in reality this would have been done by smaller, more mobile forces.

Also, I defeated a combined French fleet as they ventured out of a port I was blockading. Since the French lost, they should have bolted back into the very same port, but they didn't they went into another port in the same sea zone.

Additionally, is there a modifier to gaining the weather gauge for a blockaded fleet attacking the blockading force? France got the gauge in our battle, not that it helped him much.

This was part of our original design, but it turns out to be a lot of work (AI/interface/game attachment logic) for a relatively small improvement to game-play, so we scrapped it. We had strongly considered making a "Nelson" bonus for the fleet named after Lord Nelson, and may add this to a future patch.

Why not just give command bonuses to fleet containers? If you add squadron containers (not saying you will, but if you do) then the apparent advantage to being in a Fleet container will be obvious for combat, but less so when wanting the freedom of action of a squadron.

Did you experience other m-player issues reported before: diplomats' not moving, treaties' being lost, or labor allocations' being reset?

I didn't have any problems with diplomats. I did have a treaty problem, but that was likely due to the connection issues resulting in the game crashing twice.

Labor allocations were a problem, we saved and restarted after each of the first two turns.

The diplomats being limited to goodwill certainly wasn't something I was happy about, especially with two of the crappy diplomats that Britain starts with.

[Russian Guard]

I've been playing England alot this last week or so and thought I'd chime in here.

v1.2.17 "General" level difficulty - 1805 campaign

It may be different somehow for non-solo games, but I have had no problems at all with England having a full coffer, always in the $2000+ range. The only time, after the first year or so, that my treasury ever dropped below around $1500 was if I had a lengthy sea-supply line set up, and these were short-term dips.

I build one additional Merchant vessel and after clearing the seas of enemies, I placed them in locations I felt comfortable protecting, although I'm not sure they were optimal, but they did produce well enough.

I had one merchant fleet near Copenhagen (sorry can't remember the sea zone names), it produed in the 80's in terms of gold, on average. I had 2 others in the baltic areas and they each produced in the high 20's to low 40's depending on the presence of bandits (er, Privateers). I placed the 4th one in the Adriatic and it was churning 40+ gold per turn. My average merchant income was approx $180 monthly.

I set tax rate at 25% initially and then bump to 27% after it settles in. I didn't start to reduce feudal levels until taxes were set and NML max'd at 1000.

I was routinely dumping $200 to $400 monthly into subsidies at times (usually a neutral Batavia and/or Portugal), otherwise I was losing that income to "waste" - my treasury never went above about $2300 regardless of what I did, so I spent any overage.

I did not build a very large British Army; I had 3 full Brit Corps plus the Dutch (Batavian) Army (full), plus 4 troops in each of the British Army containers. This was more than enough for me to campaign.

[Khornish]

I really talking more for multiplayer and for the 1792 and 1796 scenarios as that is what I've been playing MP.

Being that a player's actions are going to be more robust in scope then the AI, you can expect that your own experience as Britain solo will not the same as Britain in a game vs one or more human opponents.

This is especially true if the one player is France and the other is England, in a two player game. Or Sweden/Russia, France, and England in a three player game.

Britain was the economic and industrial powerhouse of Europe during this time, true, it probably had less high end potential to exploit, but at the beginning of the period being covered, I don't think we're seeing anything equatable.

I've not run the numbers, but I expect the cost of maintaining Britain's army and navy is taking up a higher percentage of their GDP (to borrow the term) than it should, meaning their GDP should actually be slightly higher.

Look at the evidence of what Britain did during this time, they spent millions of pounds in direct subsidies of not only minor countries but financed significant portions of the war effort of nearly all the major powers at various points in time.

Not only that, they provided for a small expeditionary army as well as the home guard on top of their colonial commitments.

Looking at their import/export numbers, even after the Berlin decrees and the implimentation of the continental system, Britain hardly suffered. Even their food shortage, due to poor crop yields, in 1809-10 wasn't too hard. Napoleon even sold them grain during this time.

I just don't see that early lead as much in the 1792 and 1796 scenarios. Now granted, I think France had the great potential, if not the will and determination, to overcome much of the economic and industrial gap.. This is where the player gets to make those kinds of guns vs butter vs tools to make the guns choices.

Probably what needs to be done, as Eric mentioned, is to take a look at privateering. This would help out everyone, but especially Britain (at game start) as they have a greater merchant fleet.

At the very least, having privateers causing problems for your allies should have political consequences, the same for neutrals. Maybe a glory penalty.

I think also that Britain needs to start with slightly higher docks in London and Plymouth, perhaps just a single advance in each. As docks influence the profitability of merchants, then this would help a little. Perhaps Britain could also have her merchants already in place, so they don't waste turns moving at the start of the game.

Please keep in mind, I prefer to play as someone other than Britain in this game. Although I am not a fan of the France of today, I am very much a francophile regarding the France of 1792-1815. Thus, I want to see a better, overall balance, to the game as it would enhance my own play experience both solo and MP.

If we could tweak the scenarios enough to make changes to the provinces, unit positions, then I'd just do that, if by doing so I could play MP without causing my opponents a lot of trouble to match my settings.

[ericbabe]

The attacker is more likely (66%, I believe) to get the weather gage than the defender. There isn't a modifier for the blockading fleet to get it, but that would make some sense.

[jimwinsor]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

The attacker is more likely (66%, I believe) to get the weather gage than the defender. There isn't a modifier for the blockading fleet to get it, but that would make some sense.

Since prevailing winds almost invariably blow from offshore to onshore, a blockading fleet should have the weather gauge 100% of the time, I would think. Thats the way the board game EiA handles it too, IIRC.

[Khornish]

During our game today, I noticed a real problem in the detailed battles that Garoco fought the AI while I observed.

I watch him smash a russian army, that advanced stupidy and route the army. I watched half of the russian army rout to the top of the map while the other half surrendered.

Unfortunately, the battle wasn't over, as the half of the army I saw hit the northern map edge was actually still in the middle of the map getting itself surrounded. I kept watching the french shoot at units adjacent to them, but on my map were 12 or more hexes away.

Then, in one of my battles, I caused a Turkish army to rout away, their units started to disappear, but then I'd see outlined hexes show movement (meaning there was supposedly a unit there, but there wasn't a graphic). Ultimately we had to force quit out of the game because I'd passed the turn over to the Turks, but the game got hung up.

Also, there were a number of other issues that I feel need addressing, so please check out my wishes for COG II thread.

[Khornish]

Oh, a couple of other things.

The AI is doing too much of its infantry combat while in column formation. Rarely am I seeing AI units form into line when on the attack.

Also, the AI is not covering its artillery, but using it in a manner that allows it to be easily charged and captured.

If we could at all possibly allow other human players operate the AI's armies during a MP game, this wouldn't be much of an issue. But as it is, this just allows a human player to easily dominate especially when he has multiple artillery units that can 1 shot kill an enemy infanty division.

[garoco]

And if doesn´t exist a player human that wish fight that battle because is allied of another human opponent or strategy´s reason?