NF The Longest Battle - quick review

[joezayko]

I just played this scenario, at least the first 10 days.

I love this unique scenario and think it also deserves more love from the community. (Maybe if more people could run it...) It feels like a step towards a different Command -- a borderline strategic level of play using rarely seen functions like refueling ships while concentrating your extremely dispersed resources with a single, overriding objective: get your ships across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, it keeps you involved with the story with events like the USS Supply coming through, reminding you of the slugfest going on above that no-nav zone.

A few notes, though.
SPEED, of course, has to be at the top. This may be a Command problem as a whole -- a multithreading issue? -- but my pulse times at max speed were about 160ms a few days in, with the AU count nearing 4000. That's an absolute grind for a theoretical 30 day scenario (setting aside the issue of micromanaging refueling the herds of merchants). I have a pretty capable system and none of graphics, RAM, or CPU was maxed out, so I'm not sure it's a hardware problem on my end.
There has got to be a better way to alert the player that a ship has unloaded, or at the very least to give them more information when it happens. When the first one did in my game, I didn't see an event, and the score log did not mention anything about which one or where it was. That was what ultimately made me call it quits, having run the scenario more or less in the background for the last few evenings. I simply would not make an Excel sheet to keep track of hundreds of merchants.
FF 1084 McCandless and FF 1088 Barbey still spawn in as biologics. That TAGOS down south doesn't have the fuel to make it to the North Atlantic and no way to refuel either.

SPOILERS for anyone who wants to try this scenario out beyond this point, more notes:

The various strike missions you have planned for the neutrals don't seem to have triggers, so all of those planes never take off. Are they just a response to violations of neutrality? Do they have a chance to fire at some point regardless? Especially Argentina; it would be nice to have a payoff for the work you're putting in to ferrying units down there.
All of those subs south of the Azores seem like kind of a waste to me. I understand the desire to drag attention and assets away from the fighting up north, but the shipping lanes are so dispersed and thinly traveled down south--even in the Brazil-Africa "chokepoint"--that those subs never saw anything to attack... so I never needed to use assets to deal with them. Of the 30-odd subs north of the Azores, I'd left just two undamaged after ten days (guess that's what 6 VP squadrons on Lajes buys you), but most of the southern ones were intact.

Wrapping up, thanks for putting this scenario together and please consider giving it another look!

[Gunner98]

joezayko

Thanks for the report. Man it has been a long time since I looked at this one!

Although I'm not sure what to do about the game speed issue, I acknowledge your other points. I built this one after the Devs asked for a large scenario to test the game on and there have been many improvements since. The use of Lua in more ways would improve the mechanics of the scenario to a great degree as well.

On a side point, I wanted the treat of Argentinian intervention to be real but had not planned on a conflict there.

This one does deserve another look, but I cannot say when that might be. Have lots on my plate at the moment.

Cheers.

B