What To Expect in the Patch

[David Heath]

Yes we are hard at work on the first patch. This is not a set list but will give you a good idea.

Items for Uncommon Valor version 1.01

1) Major rewrite of the Naval to Naval combat code. Results should now seem more realistic, when used with new data base.

2) Minesweepers will now clear friendly, offensive minefields. Task forces will avoid friendly offensive minefields, when determining shipping routes.

3) The mine warfare text message has been changed from “will MINE” to “will conduct mine warfare ops”.

4) Non-penetrating hit locations are now displayed in naval combat.


5) A bug that allowed the Allied player to see Japanese fleet dispositions during the replay in PBEM and hot seat games has been corrected.

6) Task Forces of greater than 10 or more ships now suffer an anti-aircraft penalty.

7) Graphics clipping for the bottom bar has been fixed and during the execution phase, the top line of the thumbnail map should no longer be visible.

8) The average pilot fatigue is now displayed on the air group screen, immediately below group morale.

9) A bug which prevented Japanese submarines from refueling to full tanks at bases has been corrected.

10) The code for laying, entering, searching minefields has been rewritten. Minefields placed anywhere other than a friendly base are now defined as offensive mines. These are not as well mapped or maintained as well and are much more likely to damage friendly ships.

11) Please note that the program will now run inside of a window, instead of full screen, if the command line parameter –w is used.

12) Air groups bombing ports now target significantly fewer ships in port. Port facilities, supply, fuel and base troops are now targeted more often. The greater the number of ships in port, the greater the chance that one or more will be bombed. Also, note that ships in port take a reduced amount of damage from being bombed.

13) The computer opponent strategic abilities and options have been extended.

14) Sub chasers (SC) may now train to a higher level, the level of destroyers, in shake down cruises.

15) Patrol craft attacking submarines will now always report the attack.

16) The program should no longer require 100% of CPU capacity.

17) A bug which allowed air groups to transfer to carriers, such as the long Island, not on the map has been corrected.

19) Text error, “Sub attackat X,Y” fixed.

20) A new number now appears immediately after the unit name on the ground combat screen. This number is the assault value of the unit or the number of artillery pieces being used in the battle for artillery units. That value can be reduced via bombardment, casualties, fatigue or disruption, during the combat phase. This should provide clues as to how the units are faring during combat. Note that units with no assault value or bombardment capacity, such as headquarters units, do not appear on the list. The units listed are considered to be in or directly supporting the front line. The player will first see text which tell which attacking units are bombarding and if the bombardment does any damage, the numbers for the defending player will be reduced. Counter battery fire may occasionally reduce attacking unit numbers. He will then see text telling which units are attacking. At this point the attacking unit numbers may be reduced substantially. This represents fire from the defensive fire phase. He will then see text telling which units are assaulting or providing support fire. These will come one at a time and the numbers for the defender will be reduced. This is the offensive fire phase. After all this, the player may see reductions in defender player artillery and other units not on the front line, that have been overrun. Finally, the player may see text saying that units, including non-combat units have been destroyed. These units have also been over run and captured.

21) Naval combat description has been enhanced. The player should now see more text items at the bottom of the combat screen, including the results of the maneuver attempts by the task force commanders, such as “Fletcher has crossed the ‘T’ “ or “Russell has dispersed task force and is evading”.

22) Pilot rotation for training, search and anti-submarine missions has been reworked to allow pilots with less experience to fly more missions. This should help relieve the problem of the best pilots flying all the missions and becoming very fatigued.

23) The Japanese auto-victory conditions have been changed. To achieve an auto-victory, the Japanese player must now hold one of the following: Townsville, Rockhampton, Brisbane, Noumea, or Luganville after January 1, 1943 with twice the supply needed to operate the base.

24) Movement on a major road should now be less fatiguing than before. And, no matter how tired troops are, they should now be able to move at least 1 mile per day, across any terrain.

25) An extraneous space was removed from the ship sighting message.

26) The land based combat screen now shows the Japanese forces on the top of the pop-out box and the Allied forces on the bottom. Icons for armor, infantry and any other forces assigned an attack mission will appear, to a maximum of 26 units for each side. Extra text messages describing the battle have been added.

27) New graphics were added for land combat and some improved aircraft graphics were also updated.

More in the works.....................

[Reiryc]

Looks really good so far =)

Reiryc

[Caltone]

Sounds great David. Your level of support continues to impress. thanks for the update.

[Hartmann]

Great so far! 8) I´m really looking forward to the patch. And I also love the "more in the works" part ... :):)

Hartmann

[Sinjen]

Just curious what the reasoning for this is. Right now I have a task foce with 2 CV 1BB 4CLAA 8 Destroyers. Which is right at the current limit of 15 before you get penalties as I understand it. To make a decent CV TF after the patch it would have to be something like 2 CV 3CLAA 5 Destroyers. This seems rather limiting....I would think that TF's with 4 to 6 CV's with escorts were not entirely uncommon. The Pearl harbor attack fleet had 6 CVs and escorts if I'm not mistaken. Also the Midway fleets had 4CV on the Japanese side and 3 CV on the american side with escorts.

Lets hear your thoughts as to why anti aircraft fire is being penalized in TF's of more than 10. I would think that a proper carrier TF should consist of atleast 15 ships.

I can see where after 15 ships you might not gain anymore AA bonus's but I really can't see any justification for penalizing TF's with more ships.

[Supervisor]

Just a suggestion here.

After reading a couple of the other threads about keeping carrier AGs when sending them back to Pearl Harbor/Truk to gain experience, I have quick-tested doing so. The AGs do stay around afterwards (as long as you transfer them off the ships first ).

The point that I'm thinking about here, is that there is no guarantee that the carriers will make it back to the theatre. The carriers could end up being needed elsewhere. So the point of stripping AGs off of the carriers would not be allowed (as a carrier w/o an AG is not worth a whole lot). So when a carrier is sent back I believe that the associated AGs should also be withdrawn along with the carriers.

Just a thought . . .

[Rob Roberson]

If I load the patch is my AAR dead. Some of the improvements/repairs are necessary for the game, but I would hate to start the AAR over because it doesnt support 1.00...

Rob

[David Heath]

We do not think it should effect your current game BUT back it up to be safe.

[dpstafford]

The list of fixes in the patch is impressive. But it would seem that you have ignored the biggest showstopper: the fact that in PBEM games, the IJN player sees the combat replay from the view of the US player........
....... blowing a rather big hole in the 'fog of war'.

Given the weak IA (understandable in such a complex game, can't you at least try to make the PBEM option workable?

[Paul Vebber]

A formation much larger than 4 ships in the center line with 3 in line on each side, gets spread ot to the point full mutual support may not be possible.

Could it be 13, adding a ship to each line? Perhaps. Or 16 or 9, but 10 works well in game terms.

IF you have 4 CVs and 16 escorts, 20 ships can't be cramed together woithout getting into each others LOS (you don't want the AA fire that misses landin gon the friendly ship near-by) or just being stretched range wise. Better to have to 10 ship TF's operating together bu not part of one big gaggle.

10 may be a bit arbitrary but makes sense from the 3-4-3 3 column formation (or a 2+8 screen kilo with 45 degree sectors for each escort) as an arguable limit for effective full mutual coordination of close in AA cover to the High Value Units..

[Paul Vebber]

5) A bug that allowed the Allied player to see Japanese fleet dispositions during the replay in PBEM and hot seat games has been corrected.

That blurb means the replay is fixed, David got the "who sees whom" backwards I think...

[dpstafford]

Originally posted by Paul Vebber


That blurb means the replay is fixed, David got the "who sees whom" backwards I think...

I sure hope you're right!
And that the programmer will take an extra few minutes to encript the passwords in the save game files.

[Sinjen]

OKay you have 4 CV with 8 cruiser\bb escorts and 8 destroyer escorts. 4 CV in center flanked by the flak cruisers 4 deep on each side...the destroyers on the perimeter providing an ASW screen....4 deep on each side.

My question is. What exactly is the penalty if you assemble the above TF with say 4 CV 4 CLAA 1 BB 3 CA 8DD.

Is the advantage of the CLAA, BB, CA flak support taken away? I can understand the destroyers not adding to the flak defense of the carriers, but each column should be able to support the columns running next to them. Thus the Carrier gets the maximum AA support from the two flanking columns of CLAA, BB, and CA's. This is realistic and an arbitrary penalty for any TF over 10 ships seems rather drastic to myself and my friends. Both sides historically had rather large TF's built around their carriers with the CA's typically providing flak cover for the carriers and the destroyers functioning as an ASW and perimeter AA screen.

[JohnK]

Originally posted by Paul Vebber

10 may be a bit arbitrary but makes sense from the 3-4-3 3 column formation (or a 2+8 screen kilo with 45 degree sectors for each escort) as an arguable limit for effective full mutual coordination of close in AA cover to the High Value Units..

Please define what "Penalty" means. I do hope that an 11 ship TF doesn't have LESS AA fire than a 10 ship one?

If it is a VERY gradual sense of diminishing returns (a 12 ship TF has more AA fire than a 10 ship TF, but not 20% more, more like 10% more, and as each ship is added it adds to AA fire less and less per ship) than that's fine.

If it's not a very gradual sense of diminishing returns, then this is TOTALLY at variance with reality; I can't fathom why the previous 15 ship break point was a "problem" needing to be fixed.

Task forces constantly got LARGER throughout the war, not smaller. A 1944 Carrier TF had at least 15 ships and as many as 20. Why is this change being made on the THEORY that larger TFs are less effective when we know historically that TFs of larger than 10 ships had MORE AA protection as they got larger? And they kept getting larger and larger as the Kamikaze threat increased.

The reason that the US was using 1 CV task forces in 1942 was that they didn't know any better; it turned out to be stupid to spread out CVs singly with small escorts (and even then, on several occasions, these ONE CV TFs had more than 10 ships) and they later decided to group them together.

So the question is, do you force a gamer to do something stupid just because that was what was done historically (in 1942)? This is a thorny problem; I suggest that artificially imposing AA penalties on TFs above 10 ships (again, much is dependent on what is meant by "penalty") when in reality larger TFs DID increase AA fire, is not a good idea. There's no way you can artificially keep the educated gamer from KNOWING that 1944 Carrier TFs had 20 ships in them and had MORE effective AA fire.

Perhaps one issue to look at is the ORBAT and whether the US really had ALL of the DDs in the SW Pacific that it very quickly accumulates even by July and August of 1942 in UV.

Also, how does this affect large transport TFs?

If people have to break their transports into groups of 6-8 with 2-4 escorts to have effective AA, you're gonna have the US having to have 8-9 different transport TFs just to land a couple of divisions and their supply and support units.

[JohnK]

Originally posted by David Heath
10) The code for laying, entering, searching minefields has been rewritten. Minefields placed anywhere other than a friendly base are now defined as offensive mines. These are not as well mapped or maintained as well and are much more likely to damage friendly ships.

What about the issue of laying mines in water too deep? Eliminating the 10% effectiveness business for deep water? And I suspect many of the mysterious "shallow water" hexes are 90% or more comprised of ocean floor far too deep for mines, too.

[von Murrin]

It's been what? Not even two week's since release? All I can really say is thanks for publishing such a great game, thank you again for getting on top of the problems in what I have to assume was just days after release. IMO, that's what makes Matrix stand out from the others.

[legio]

How about the replacement notice and quick save key board short cut?

[Joel Billings]

If it is a VERY gradual sense of diminishing returns (a 12 ship TF has more AA fire than a 10 ship TF, but not 20% more, more like 10% more, and as each ship is added it adds to AA fire less and less per ship) than that's fine.

My understanding is that the penalty is something like what you describe above. I was also told that the diminishing returns from 11-15 is less than what it has been (and still will be) for over 15 ships.

As for the minelaying in deep ocean hexes, I've picked up some discussions between Mike and Gary that sound like they will result in greatly reduced deep water minelaying. A lot of discussion and effort has gone into tackling the mine issue and I know the testers are on the issue along with the Matrix staff and Gary so I think you'll ultimately be happy with the results.

[Matto]

All changes sounds good ... hope to have your patch so early
Waiting Matto

[vils]

Please do, i am totally addicted to it.

Should be extremely easy, no?