BP convoy lines to the USSR

[WarHunter]

CW naval move done from a combined impulse.

BP convoy lines to the USSR. From USA to USSR and India to Red Sea.

Feel free to attempt any changes you can come up with. I dont see how a factory can be defaulted to be sent over a convoy line. Maybe i missed the FAQ.

If anyone can change the BP route so that all 3 USA BP's use the convoy line to Vladivostok. And 2 BP are coming out of India to the USSR. Post how it is done for the benefit of everyone.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: WarHunter

CW naval move done from a combined impulse.

BP convoy lines to the USSR. From USA to USSR and India to Red Sea.

Feel free to attempt any changes you can come up with. I dont see how a factory can be defaulted to be sent over a convoy line. Maybe i missed the FAQ.

If anyone can change the BP route so that all 3 USA BP's use the convoy line to Vladivostok. And 2 BP are coming out of India to the USSR. Post how it is done for the benefit of everyone.

The program is correct. It has optimized the number of build points that can be sent.

The changes I made last week now show the lost build points (1 lost by both the US and the Commonwealth).

The reason more build points can't be sent from the United Kingdom is that the Arctic is iced-in, so only the port of Murmansk is available. The rail line from Murmansk south has been cut by the Finns, so the only place to store the BPs is in Murmansk itself and as a minor port, it can only store 1 BP (for being a city in the USSR home country) - which is what the program is doing.

There are 3 BPs being sent across the north Pacific to Vladivostok, 1 from Montreal and 2 from Washington D. C.; that taps out the convoy capacity of the north Pacific for the Allies.

The reason the BPs in India can't reach the USSR is because Port Said is adjacent to only the Eastern Med, which means you need convoys in the eastern Med to get the BPs from India through to Port Said and destinations in the USSR farther north. Having the convoy pipeline only reach as far as the Red Sea does nothing for transferring BPs to the USSR.

[WarHunter]

You're good at seeing what you want to see.


The point of this bug report was to show the USA could not send 3 BP's from the USA to the USSR. The CW always hijack some of the convoys.
We pick what nations send BP's. We cannont tell the program what convoys to use. That means our choice becomes no choice.

The convoy line into the Artic is known. Its not like i did not know the rail was cut to murmansk or the weather prevented any BP's from going from the north. It seems obvious the route from India to the Red Sea to the port of SUEZ was a way around this.
But of course the CW is using the convoy line the USA created to Vladivotok which means the indian Factories dont send to South USSR.

You are telling me the convoy line into the Red Sea cannot off load resources into the port of SUEZ which shares the same RR as Port Said?


Will this get a fix?

[WarHunter]

Maybe this will help shed some light.

[paulderynck]

You probably meant 1 BP to Murmansk, since it looks like Archangel is iced-in. Although that BP can't go anywhere else (the RR line is cut going south), by the rules for Lend Lease, getting it to Murmansk is sufficient for Russia to get the BP for production.

And since Syria is Free French, Suez should work for the BPs from India. Going north through Turkey is the most direct route from Suez.

[WarHunter]

Look, its pretty obvious to me what is not getting attention is my initial post.
So let me high light the main point and go from there.

If anyone can change the BP route so that all 3 USA BP's use the convoy line to Vladivostok.
And 2 BP are coming out of India to the USSR.
Post how it is done for the benefit of everyone.

Ok there we are.

I would hope to hell it would be clear the convoy line in the artic was in place
before there was weather that shut it down.
The convoy line into the Red sea was a last impulse fix the CW did to send BP's
to the USSR knowing only 2 would be sent.

The convoy line from the USA was there for only the USA not the CW.
I know there is no way for the program to read my mind.

There is also no way for me to force the program to send BP's along a convoy line of my choosing.

This is the core problem.

The program is not smart enough to use the convoy in a way the player wants it to be used.

The whole "oh look you cant send stuff into the arctic" is nonsense.
The convoy line that needs to be looked at are the ones from the USA and from India.

The program is correct.
It has optimized the number of build points that can be sent.

This is a false statement. The program has optimized the number of build points it thinks it can send.

It is not optimized to what the player who sets up the convoy line wants.

So if this is not a bug. Be frank and say so.
Otherwise engage us in dialog and tell us what you plan to do to fix this. If you plan to fix it.

[WarHunter]

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

You probably meant 1 BP to Murmansk, since it looks like Archangel is iced-in. Although that BP can't go anywhere else (the RR line is cut going south), by the rules for Lend Lease, getting it to Murmansk is sufficient for Russia to get the BP for production.

And since Syria is Free French, Suez should work for the BPs from India. Going north through Turkey is the most direct route from Suez.

If you look closely I wrote "My prefect BP transfer for this particular setup would be the following."

Meaning no bad weather. But the matter of the arctic has become the focus when it should not be. Just the plain transfer of BP's.

As it is right now. Any transfer of BP's is not working as the rules are coded.


We players have no input into how the convoy lines are being used other than putting points out there for the Program to play with.

[paulderynck]

Pardon me for agreeing with you.

[AxelNL]

We are all not happy with the convoy routing GUI - but it looks like Steve is going to fix production and convoy bugs first before thinking about improvements in this area.

[joshuamnave]

Steve seems to be happy with it and has consistently argued that it is fine as it is. So long as that is his public position, threads like this should come as no surprise.

[Larry Smith]

I get the feeling that when the program looks for BP's or resources to fill trade agreements, it begins by tagging the ones that are "at the top of the list". I say this, rather than assuming it takes the closest ones, because whenever I have the CW send 1 oil and the US send 1 non-oil to China, the oil comes from Canada, while a resource from the continental US is tagged. Meanwhile, the oil in Burma is sitting there, connected to the Burma Road by an all-overland rail route [and not even being used for production], while The Philippines resource sits idle, 1 to 2 CP away [depending on whether Hanoi can be used as an entry port]. Once I had the French send a resource, thinking the one from Hanoi would be automatic - nope! The program tried to ship one from France. I can understand the need to ensure trade agreements are met - it's in the rules - but how can that possibly be doing it optimally. Bad enough that even from the initial turn, resources are shipped to Australia to Melbourne, rather than one of the three in-country being used.

The program will try to force things through it's way, even when another path has been specified. Try setting up a path for the resources in British Guyana and Dutch Guyana [if you have that yet], and use the default route form [described on p. 233 of Player's Manual Vol.1] to tell those resources to go to the CW by way of the Central Atlantic, North Atlantic, and the Faeroe Gap - then watch as it continues to much up the line coming up the coast of Africa by sending the resource into Cape Verde. You'll be in for a fight. I think the only way to force the default is to make certain you have used ALL of those CP's [in Cape Verde]. At the time, I was trying to start diverting the convoys in preparation for the fall of France. The program put up a heck of a fight, and I had to RTB my extras to take away the route it favored. It should have gone as dictated, however.

On the whole, the convoy system is working far better than it was with the earlier computer WiF program. With that, I would play via the editor, and teleported the CP's back to port, then relaid them where I wanted them, just to force the program to stop being so damned stupid. The only to really improve this would be to allow resources to be tagged as being the first choice for trade BEFORE setting up the trade agreement, as currently you can't do it until the agreement is in place. Also, if we could do the same with BP's - assign a factory to provide the BP, since a human mind can more quickly determine a valid route than the computer. Might save on a lot of CPU cycles. Even better if we could tag resources - either trade or otherwise - to go to a particular port before trying to get into a convoy route. Another area the human mind would be faster. If the human makes a wrong pick - meaning the computer discovers it can't fulfill the job - then have it notify the player, and maybe even [at that time] suggest alternatives for the human player to pick.

Right now I feel like I spend too much time fighting with the program to get things to work more smoothly. I may take flak for saying this, but perhaps if the program did less thinking of it's own and took more direction from the human players, it would feel more like the program was helping us play, than... being a fascist about the rules. That, or if it just stopped trying to do its own thing when it's been told to follow another way.

On the other hand, this convoy management system is working a lot better than what I used to play with. Chis wasn't joking when he warned that using the editor too much could destabilize the program. Most of my games back then ended from unrecoverable critical errors, and not even reloading a save would correct it, since the instability was still there... waiting. It may have been sleep deprivation, but I swear that one time, the counters on the screen all merged together to form the shape of a fist, and then it flipped me the bird right before crashing [this was with CWiF, not MWiF].

I'll be happy as long as work is done on what bugs there are. Happier still when I learn its not a bug, and that I'm just doing it wrong - took me a week to figure out what was meant by the "Default Form" for assigning defaults to resources. I'd seen it soo many times, but never thought of it as a form.

[paulderynck]

ORIGINAL: Larry Smith

Even better if we could tag resources - either trade or otherwise - to go to a particular port before trying to get into a convoy route. Another area the human mind would be faster. If the human makes a wrong pick - meaning the computer discovers it can't fulfill the job - then have it notify the player, and maybe even [at that time] suggest alternatives for the human player to pick.

Right now I feel like I spend too much time fighting with the program to get things to work more smoothly. I may take flak for saying this, but perhaps if the program did less thinking of it's own and took more direction from the human players, it would feel more like the program was helping us play,

No flak here, I agree completely. If the player controlled all the allocations, we wouldn't need the complexity currently existing in the form with the switching between Compute, Default and Override. Any "AI" doing production could then be left for the "AI" version of the game.

I wonder how many others feel the same way?

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

ORIGINAL: Larry Smith

Even better if we could tag resources - either trade or otherwise - to go to a particular port before trying to get into a convoy route. Another area the human mind would be faster. If the human makes a wrong pick - meaning the computer discovers it can't fulfill the job - then have it notify the player, and maybe even [at that time] suggest alternatives for the human player to pick.

Right now I feel like I spend too much time fighting with the program to get things to work more smoothly. I may take flak for saying this, but perhaps if the program did less thinking of it's own and took more direction from the human players, it would feel more like the program was helping us play,

No flak here, I agree completely. If the player controlled all the allocations, we wouldn't need the complexity currently existing in the form with the switching between Compute, Default and Override. Any "AI" doing production could then be left for the "AI" version of the game.

I wonder how many others feel the same way?

warspite1

I would like to see a "manual" solution.

I fully appreciate that what MWIF does is to take a lot of the admin stuff away from the player, and that is GOOD [:)]

But I do not understand why convoys are automated like they are - and certainly given the complexity. My reasoning is, I hope, straightforward.

With WIF I get to choose, as supreme warlord, what my strategy is, what I build, what goes where, to attack, to defend etc. These are my assets and I choose their use.

I do not see that resource routing should be any different. The war against merchant shipping was vital in WWII - both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. I WANT to be in control of placing my convoys. Its not a drag - it is part and parcel of this wargame as designed. Just as I get to order the 47th Panzer Corps to take part in an attack on Leningrad or whatever, so I want the ability to place my convoys where I want, to transport what I want to where I want.

Just my 2 GBP.

[Larry Smith]

They may well have to do something akin to that, since they'd have to give the AI lists of options to work from. Maybe for each AI, the easier accessed resources could be listed, so the AI could request of the players - or the other AI's - resources from specific countries to help with it's own production. For example, a French AI could request of the CW player/AI resources that are already being shipped past French ports - anything transiting the Med, or coming up through the Bay of Biscay - rather than being assigned the physically closest ones in the UK, since that would require MORE CP to ship AGAINST THE FLOW of the pipeline. Then the preferred resources could be tagged from the start of the trade agreement. It could even be a part of the AI's reasoning - "Does the request require more CP to fulfill, or can the present system merely divert?" - with the AI more likely to agree if the request requires only diverting, rather than establishing more pipelines.

Though it wouldn't surprise me if the answer is that what appears simple and efficient to a human mind is highly complex to a program relying on algorithms for it's decision making processes. I thought programming was complex back when I was learning languages such as Cobol, Pascal, Fortran and, of course, BASIC [and I've forgotten all but a few BASIC commands]. I guess it depends on what works with the current programming.

[Centuur]

To my opinion, the production planning is too difficult and thinks too much for the player. Now, if things were working 100% OK (that means that it optimizes the results for each major power involved) than things would be better.

Note the word: "better". I don't say: "good", since especially for overseas transport of resources and build points, one might get into a different view of opinions between for example a French and a CW player in a multiplayer game, where the program says that it's best to send a resouce to the CW, while the French player doesn't want that to happen and wants to reserve his convoys for a resource which goes into France. To change such things is very, very difficult (too difficult).

Now that's the main problem with the interface...

[michaelbaldur]

steve is working on this right now..

so let us see how it functions without those 20+ bugs.


it really hurt me to say this (now 8 month after the release) but we should give steve time to fix the game

[WarHunter]

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

ORIGINAL: Larry Smith
Even better if we could tag resources - either trade or otherwise - to go to a particular port before trying to get into a convoy route. Another area the human mind would be faster. If the human makes a wrong pick - meaning the computer discovers it can't fulfill the job - then have it notify the player, and maybe even [at that time] suggest alternatives for the human player to pick.
Right now I feel like I spend too much time fighting with the program to get things to work more smoothly. I may take flak for saying this, but perhaps if the program did less thinking of it's own and took more direction from the human players, it would feel more like the program was helping us play,

No flak here, I agree completely. If the player controlled all the allocations, we wouldn't need the complexity currently existing in the form with the switching between Compute, Default and Override. Any "AI" doing production could then be left for the "AI" version of the game.
I wonder how many others feel the same way?

+1
Agreed

[michaelbaldur]

most of the fighting you are doing is because of bugs. when they are fixed the production planning will run smoother

the production planning issues have really had a low priority, and I have always agreed with that.

as I understand it, it is the last area of the game that need fixing, before we continue on.

so before you know it, we will be working on netplay or more options (not sure what have priority)

[WarHunter]

Yes!
I have been fighting with the program since getting it.
I have also been playing as it should be played, against another human. Its why these bugs are getting found.

Steve should be glad some of us are actully playing the game as it was meant to be played.
Instead he dictacts that all is fine, nothing to see here, move along in a drive by post.

When the designer admits to not playing the game in the last 8 years.
I don't exactly have alot of faith he is looking at the game from a players point of view.

Steve can't even be bothered to confront the player base in the forum.
If actions speak louder, i expect a bug free patch/update. Only i am not so naive.

Fact is you have to think on your feet for those impluses weather or enemy action can screw you up.
The AI has no feet.


When the bugs are fixed.
Will i be able to send 3 BP from the USA to the USSR without the CW Hijacking the convoy because they are sending 3 also?

Currently as the game stands, I don't need, want or desire a babysitter AI for the convoy system, thank you.

[Centuur]

ORIGINAL: michaelbaldur


most of the fighting you are doing is because of bugs. when they are fixed the production planning will run smoother

the production planning issues have really had a low priority, and I have always agreed with that.

as I understand it, it is the last area of the game that need fixing, before we continue on.

so before you know it, we will be working on netplay or more options (not sure what have priority)

Michael: you are too optimistic... Look at the naval combat bugs. That's next before netplay and supply still has some major issues...