Historical Accuracy vs Playability

Bernie · Post by **Bernie** » Fri Oct 24, 2003 4:34 am

Charles_22 wrote:Berine: Sheesh, you spelled it wrong too. It's Scheib.

Take a look: http://earlscheib.com/default2.asp

They may have upgraded in recent years and it's certainly been a while since I seen his face.

Dang these dyslexic fingers!

BTW, you spelled Bernie wrong, so we're even.

Bernie · Post by **Bernie** » Fri Oct 24, 2003 5:06 am

Charles_22 wrote:So my question now is this, since I don't have SPWAW installed at the moment. Can someone start a campaign and abort the 1st battle, and then get into deployment for the 2nd battle and see if preferences is available and will then let you override the enemy point total (like changing the XXX to 1000)? I'd appreciate an answer.

I just happen to have the game running a campaign in a different window. Give me a minute to end the turn and I'll check for ya.

Okay, the answer is YES, it will let you do that.

Charles2222 · Post by **Charles2222** » Fri Oct 24, 2003 7:10 pm

Bernie wrote:Dang these dyslexic fingers!

BTW, you spelled Bernie wrong, so we're even.

Yeah I noticed that later, but I thought since you mis-spelled such a great man's name wrongly when you thought it was rightly, that I might as well leave it as a comeuppance.

Charles2222 · Post by **Charles2222** » Fri Oct 24, 2003 7:13 pm

Bernie wrote:I just happen to have the game running a campaign in a different window. Give me a minute to end the turn and I'll check for ya.

Okay, the answer is YES, it will let you do that.

Goody. Now all that's needed would be a way to tell the number to be generated between one total and another, unbeknowest to the user what it settled on. Thanks.

Bernie · Post by **Bernie** » Fri Oct 24, 2003 10:16 pm

Charles_22 wrote:Yeah I noticed that later, but I thought since you mis-spelled such a great man's name wrongly when you thought it was rightly, that I might as well leave it as a comeuppance.

I did get it right! It was my fingers that got it wrong!

Paul Vebber · Post by **Paul Vebber** » Sat Oct 25, 2003 2:11 am

Yet unless a lot of us have been imagining things, I think even within the life of just SPWAW itself we have seen quite a duration variance between infantry smoke at different times.

There was a deliberate effort to make infantry smoke less effective - I think it may only block LOS the turn it is deployed, and somtimes not even then. I forget exactly...its been a while.

I CL infantry smoke is much less plentiful and NEVER provides 100% concealment.

Charles2222 · Post by **Charles2222** » Sat Oct 25, 2003 4:01 am

Paul Vebber wrote:There was a deliberate effort to make infantry smoke less effective - I think it may only block LOS the turn it is deployed, and somtimes not even then. I forget exactly...its been a while.

I CL infantry smoke is much less plentiful and NEVER provides 100% concealment.

Are you saying that V8.0 is making the deliberate effort? Because if not, at least V7.1 was the 8 turn nightmare.

Charles2222 · Post by **Charles2222** » Sat Oct 25, 2003 4:08 am

Bernie wrote:I did get it right! It was my fingers that got it wrong!

It twas my fingers, that ended up unwittingly, unwittingly to my brain that is, becoming instruments of comeuppance, in the same fashion yours did, by virtue of intermingled characters.

K62_ · Post by **K62_** » Tue Oct 28, 2003 5:55 am

Vathailos wrote: And it'd be hard to have more losses than you against Gary, since I've never played him once. So that would be your record of 5? (more? less?) losses to Gary vs. my 0 losses to Gary. I would be inclined to believe however that we both have the same win record against the Bean Counter.

Say what?!

Charles2222 · Post by **Charles2222** » Tue Oct 28, 2003 6:12 pm

Some bad news (at least for me). I suspect SPWAW is the same way, but there's more indication that to change the preferences to what I thought was a sum, during preferences, as we spoke of earlier, is in fact an 'addition' instead. I can't confirm this, since for some dumb reason SPWW2 isn't allowing me to surrender (whilst playing a campaign with or without the 'addition'), but I decided to put a 300 in the force value for the AI.

The first turn I was bombarded during a meeting engagement with quite a bit of artillery, indicating, more than likely that the 300 'added' to his force instead of 'limiting' him to 300. I played the same exact game without the 300 and I didn't see any artillery, which to me means the AI took the 300 and bought artillery with it.

I'm starting to wonder if campaigns will allow any deviation from the AI working off your force value. In other words, if my force is 3000pts. and I'm meeting him, where he'd normally get 3000pts. too, will he get only 1000pts. if I input that before I've picked my core the first time, even then, as undesireable as that may be, or is it all futile? I have the sneaking suspicion that battles are hard-coded to work off the player's value, and that all the player can do to alter the AI force is to add to that hard-coded value.

Another thing: I noticed that the AI force value won't go negative, which means that it won't let me cut into his force that way (understand that I'm always looking to boost or cut into the AI force, not my own, since I have a solid core). I mention all this only because as you might remember, I'm looking to see if there's a way to get beyond the rigid force values you see in this battles (3X for the attacker in assaults for example). Oh well, I guess there's no way to do it, even if one was willing to play without a hidden-value random force generator for the AI.

Bernie · Post by **Bernie** » Wed Oct 29, 2003 12:01 pm

You have tried the "medium battle" button on the purchase screen, right?

Charles2222 · Post by **Charles2222** » Thu Oct 30, 2003 6:34 am

Bernie wrote:You have tried the "medium battle" button on the purchase screen, right?

No Bernie, I'm sort of hybriding this discussion. What I mean by that, is that I'm playing SPWW2, while I'm trying to talk across to SPWAW too, because there are many similarities, most particularly in such a shadowy area as this, that someone would want odds from generated battles that were not only beyond the rigid force totals settled by the mission type, but that also that the AI force size would be unknown to the user.

I 'had' SPWAW, but I've found that as things stand I prefer SPWW2, so when I bought a new computer I simply didn't install SPWAW on this XP. I'm currently waiting to see what differences I hear about from V8.0, to warrant downloading it all over again.

BTW, SPWW2 doesn't have the 'medium' type battle you refer to. I do recall what you're talking about, as I often varied the AI force to not only have the AI force advantage, whatever that was, in addition to playing some as medium battles as some as the largest battle you could give the AI force.

Bernie · Post by **Bernie** » Thu Oct 30, 2003 7:50 am

Ah, okay, that explains why I wasn't able to follow you 100% (not being able to run SPWW2).

Frank W. · Post by **Frank W.** » Sat Nov 01, 2003 6:06 am

Charles_22 wrote:Perhaps you're talking about mine? I was talking about the cost of the force you're facing, not their individual costs. Knowing the individual costs, as easy as that is to get, and knowing how many points they have to spend, makes things a lot more evident as to what the enemy has than you would expect any commander knew. Shouldn't the style of attack not be so rigid as to be so predictable? If I'm fighting a meeting engagement and the enemy is 'unknown' shoulf I really know it costs in total just as much as mine (In other words a basically even match)?

i think there are still some ( much ? ) unpredictable things in the game even with forces at the same cost.

Frank W. · Post by **Frank W.** » Sat Nov 01, 2003 6:30 am

K62 wrote:Say what?!

mhh. say what ?

gary and you are on my to play list :p