SITREP

[song]

Thanks for all your hard work Dave! Looking forward to this great update!

 

[Tommy.w]

While waiting for the CO2 update and new DLCs where is everyone else getting their enjoyment? For me I'm playing Gary Grigsby's War in the East 2..

 

[Rob]

While waiting for the CO2 update and new DLCs where is everyone else getting their enjoyment? For me I'm playing Gary Grigsby's War in the East 2..

WEGO Stalingrad for me.

 

[Le gac]

Gary Grigsby's War in the East 2, Graviteam tactics, Decisive campaign ardennes offensive. 3 good games for me.
Graviteam tactics mius front and tank warfare excellent for 3D with a very good AI.
But CO2 is the best for opérationnal level.

 

[john connor]

WDS (JTS) Panzer Campaigns and Modern Campaigns PBEM games. But they're all defective, for me...only my humble silly opinions, these.... The awful hexy maps, the turn-based gameplay - having to play PBEM (which I don't really like) because the AI is such a waste of time. I really really wish the new CO2 update was done. *sigh* It's been so so long that we've been waiting for the new update and BaB. I wonder how long it took Dave to actually code the original game, the original release, way back when, I mean the entire game?

I bought and tried the latest DC Ardennes and the AI - if you play as Allies - is utterly rubbish. I'm sorry to say it. I put it on the highest setting possible and played all the smaller scenarios through. It was a walk-over. I mean literally. And that game was flagged as having very good AI. It's possible it's good if you play the Axis, but I didn't want to do that, and none of the release material said it was rubbish if you played as Allies.

GG WitE2. Well, what can I say? The AI can be made to give you a totally silly and unrealistic fight if you give it cheats. That's how their AI works. You give it 110 morale or upwards and it gets to move without restriction so it can rebuild all its lines. If you don't do this then the fight is pretty easy, even without messing with manual air or manual depots and logistics. Plus, again, the turn based thing leads to silliness. You get basically a week to do what you want with a non-reactive opponent. This is the nature of turn-based games, I realise.

Graviteam? I have them all, all the DLC, and have really tried with this series. But the AI is full of awful spotting glitches (leading to many silly moments) and the battles are more like something from a Total War game. The losses are crazy, way higher than historical, and the developers (cudos to them for being in Kharkiv and continuing throughout) don't seem to mind this, no matter what is said, over many, many years. 'Tactics' for the AI seem to resemble a WW1 charge in a straight line at the enemy or objective. Mostly it's like that. Not always. Every now and then you see something that looks a bit clever, but mostly it's just basic. And since it's in (poor) 3D you can see it all.... So, not for me, or only in small doses, maybe....

It's the same with every other game I try. I could give a very very long list of games and criticism here. I've said for years, ONLY CO2 and Dave got the concept exactly right. But to be honest it's been difficult to play CO2 for a while because several of the things that are being improved or cured by the update in development really started to break immersion for me. The pathing issues around attacks, the support units in front. These things have got better over the years, for sure, but they still pop up, so like everyone else I've been longing for this present update for a very long time.

I hope this rant encourages Dave!

 

[Dave 'Arjuna' O'Connor]

No pressure then, hey Peter?

FYI Paul Scobell and I started the design of what became Command Ops in 1995. We started coding in 1996. It got released as Airborne Assault in 2000 or 2001 (it's so long ago I can't recall for certain!). So at least five years effort initially. So the last two years are a drop in the ocean, relatively speaking. I know its frustrating for you all. But it's doubly so for me as my livelihood depends on it. The one virtue this job teaches is patience.

By way of an updated SITREP, I have been working on meshing the complex attack with the basic attack this week. I have nutted out the design and started coding it up but will need this coming week to finish it off.

 

[Tommy.w]

Totally agree with JC's comments, the other games have glaring issues and are just time fillers for CO2.

Perhaps when the update is out we as a community could try bring attention back to CO2? - In order to increase sales for Dave and team, in order to fund further development?
I remember a while back News updates were being published on steam, i know they take time and effort and how do you measure your return on investment..

 

[john connor]

Yeah, sorry, Dave. But it's great you're still working at it. Thanks. I wish I had the money to slip a couple of hundred thousand euros your way, to hire a coding team and do all the things we would all like done in a faster time frame. But sadly, we'll have to wait!

Actually, one of my personal frustrations over the last couple of years, as a tester, is that all development in terms of coding has had to be concentrated on the new update. Which has meant that as I play and come across queries I just have to ignore them, when in the past I would have taken shots, saves and recordings and posted up a full report in the dev forum sure that one day it would probably be looked at. So, testing the pretty challenging Gremercy scenario (from BaB) again yesterday I again started looking at how the opponent AI makes ad hoc battle groups and was wondering what rationale was being applied to permit the AI opponent to depart from organic structure. I've noticed that it's very happy and quick to do this, as circs demand, much happier and quicker than I am, as the player. Sometimes its dispositions clearly arise from the battlefield chaos - so very often in Race for Bastogne, for example, I see the AI Axis organic structure almost completely forgotten by day 2, with the Axis forces recombined into 'ad hoc' groupings as a consequence of the traffic jam and combat chaos produced by trying to funnel massive, disparate forces down a few major roads to reach distant objectives and being blocked here and there and forced to re-plan. (I believe a coincidental effect of some of the impending update changes will be to ameliorate this because part of the chaos is produced by pathing issues that are being looked at.) But to come back to the Gremercy scenario yesterday, the AI Axis invented a weird battlegroup (KG Bake, it was, under the commander of that name) whereby it grouped about six towed AT units with that commander and infiltrated them through the Allied lines by night. Come morning, when they were visible, they were easy to kill off because the KG did not include any infantry or significant armour support. Again, part of the issue here was the pathing, I think, but aside from that I found myself thinking - why on earth did the AI create such an odd grouping, and should there not be a greater weight given to trying to maintain organic structure, perhaps? But since all time is being spent on the update, there was no where for me to raise the observation!!!! (And my frustration led to me posting this little report instead....)

I should say that it's still possible for me to play the game - certain scenarios - as it is and be beaten by the AI!!

 

[Arkadiy]

Thact’s a fun story! It’s almost as if the game became self-aware, googled “German WW2 battlegroups”, saw the results and decided to indulge in some role-playing

 

[jimcarravallah]

Yeah, sorry, Dave. But it's great you're still working at it. Thanks. I wish I had the money to slip a couple of hundred thousand euros your way, to hire a coding team and do all the things we would all like done in a faster time frame. But sadly, we'll have to wait!

Actually, one of my personal frustrations over the last couple of years, as a tester, is that all development in terms of coding has had to be concentrated on the new update. Which has meant that as I play and come across queries I just have to ignore them, when in the past I would have taken shots, saves and recordings and posted up a full report in the dev forum sure that one day it would probably be looked at. So, testing the pretty challenging Gremercy scenario (from BaB) again yesterday I again started looking at how the opponent AI makes ad hoc battle groups and was wondering what rationale was being applied to permit the AI opponent to depart from organic structure. I've noticed that it's very happy and quick to do this, as circs demand, much happier and quicker than I am, as the player. Sometimes its dispositions clearly arise from the battlefield chaos - so very often in Race for Bastogne, for example, I see the AI Axis organic structure almost completely forgotten by day 2, with the Axis forces recombined into 'ad hoc' groupings as a consequence of the traffic jam and combat chaos produced by trying to funnel massive, disparate forces down a few major roads to reach distant objectives and being blocked here and there and forced to re-plan. (I believe a coincidental effect of some of the impending update changes will be to ameliorate this because part of the chaos is produced by pathing issues that are being looked at.) But to come back to the Gremercy scenario yesterday, the AI Axis invented a weird battlegroup (KG Bake, it was, under the commander of that name) whereby it grouped about six towed AT units with that commander and infiltrated them through the Allied lines by night. Come morning, when they were visible, they were easy to kill off because the KG did not include any infantry or significant armour support. Again, part of the issue here was the pathing, I think, but aside from that I found myself thinking - why on earth did the AI create such an odd grouping, and should there not be a greater weight given to trying to maintain organic structure, perhaps? But since all time is being spent on the update, there was no where for me to raise the observation!!!! (And my frustration led to me posting this little report instead....)

I should say that it's still possible for me to play the game - certain scenarios - as it is and be beaten by the AI!!

Ad hoc Battlegroups bundling an ad hoc organization of armor and infantry under a brigade level command were SOP toward the end of the war on the allied side. It was driven in part by assembling more effective combined arms formations and more likely by reassigning surviving units out of organic forces to a new command after others in its organic structure suffered heavy attrition. The Widening the Corridor scenario starts with a number of armor battlegroup formations on the allied side.

I'd be interested in hearing what drives the AI to reassemble units, thinking it's probably warranted if it was designed to happen when the original organic formation suffers heavy losses in some of its subordinate units.

 

[Dave 'Arjuna' O'Connor]

FYI I have revised the AllocateForcesToTasks() and AllocateForcesToFormations() code several times while overhauling attacks. Inside these functions the standard Allocate() is called. This creates a set of requirements for each task or formation subGroup. It then determines the suitability of each unit to these requirements. There are various biases and special requirements thrown into the mix and some of these favour staying with your organic boss, subordinates and siblings. But I do acknowledge that sometimes these aren't strong enough. There's always scope to review.

 

[jimcarravallah]

FYI I have revised the AllocateForcesToTasks() and AllocateForcesToFormations() code several times while overhauling attacks. Inside these functions the standard Allocate() is called. This creates a set of requirements for each task or formation subGroup. It then determines the suitability of each unit to these requirements. There are various biases and special requirements thrown into the mix and some of these favour staying with your organic boss, subordinates and siblings. But I do acknowledge that sometimes these aren't strong enough. There's always scope to review.

I wouldn't worry about addressing it in this revision -- there's plenty of good in the work that should get into users' hands.

That said, the command and control bonuses and orders delay penalties would tend to drive units to stay within organic structures, but there are probably triggers that negate the importance of those attributes when addressing battlefield contingencies.

Perhaps the way to explore those is to get anecdotes from users when they find it necessary to cross attach units for a tactical purpose.

 

[john connor]

'Perhaps the way to explore those is to get anecdotes from users when they find it necessary to cross attach units for a tactical purpose.'

I was talking about the opposition AI behaviour though, Jim - which generally only the beta testers etc will be able to observe in this way because you can select the 'actual' view in the dev options. I'm talking about why the enemy AI sometimes ends up with a very 'chaotic' disposition of forces which doesn't serve any useful purpose that I can see. (I mean disparate units grouped under non-organic commands separated by huge distances, for example, or units grouped as in the example above into collections of support units that then lead off like point units, or just simply the total chaos of command structure that results from continual re-planning in traffic jams under combat conditions. About all of which my feeling is that the AI should be trying harder to stick to its organic structure, to planning around that, moving to objectives with that organic structure in place as the basis, and attacking in a co-ordinated fashion on the basis of that organic structure, otherwise the results are compromised and - at the very least - quite unhistorical. Both sides, in reality, made ad hoc KGs, as it were, to meet tactical needs, but they didn't make new ad hoc KGs over and over again every 30 minutes or so, every time an action had to be 're-planned'.) I could provide many examples with pictures and saves but, as I said above, there's no point right now because Dave is very much concentrating on the specifics at hand.

Thanks, Dave. It's interesting always to get glimpses into why the AI makes these decisions and how they can be fine-tuned. And great to know some of this has come up in the present revisions. The behaviour I'm talking about definitely doesn't happen all the time. In some scenarios and circumstances the organic structure gets preserved and acted on very well. So I think it's definitely a case of finding which specific triggers lead to some dysfunctionality. Maybe we'll get to that somewhere down the line...

I'll say it again - can't wait for this update to be ready to test!

 

[john connor]

Oh. Actually, sorry - I see what you mean now, Jim. That we could get info from users as to when and how humans feel driven into departing from the organic structure, then try to feed that into the AI routines, or, at least, compare it to what presently happens. Yes, I see.

 

[MarkShot]

Dave,


I still have and cherish my copy of RDOA, and all the titles we did over at Matrix.


Folks,


Dave is really a unique developer. I was asking lots of noob questions in the BTS RDOA forum. (CMBO was my first ground combat game; until then a prop head.) So, what does Dave do? He invites me to join the Beta Team. Go figure! I was a Senior Manager before retirement and did handle the beta team for AGEOD (investor). But Dave has a very unique talent for working with volunteers and seeing that their true talents are utilized. If you want to do indie games, you really need to study under Dave with regards to team building. He has stuff to teach that just isn't written down. (I was a beta for another team where I was repeated called a "click monkey". Needless to say, I was gone after 1 month. My connection to Panther is 20+ years; although, I am more alumni than active.)

 

[Agema]

I bought and tried the latest DC Ardennes and the AI - if you play as Allies - is utterly rubbish. I'm sorry to say it. I put it on the highest setting possible and played all the smaller scenarios through. It was a walk-over. I mean literally. And that game was flagged as having very good AI. It's possible it's good if you play the Axis, but I didn't want to do that, and none of the release material said it was rubbish if you played as Allies.

GG WitE2. Well, what can I say? The AI can be made to give you a totally silly and unrealistic fight if you give it cheats. That's how their AI works. You give it 110 morale or upwards and it gets to move without restriction so it can rebuild all its lines. If you don't do this then the fight is pretty easy, even without messing with manual air or manual depots and logistics. Plus, again, the turn based thing leads to silliness. You get basically a week to do what you want with a non-reactive opponent. This is the nature of turn-based games, I realise.

I tried the DC: Ardennes and I agree that there is a major problem with inadequate challenge unless you play Axis: but then this perhaps reflects the real life it is based on. The German target was utterly unrealistic, with a grossly optimistic schedule, ending in being vastly outnumbered. No AI can match a competent human, and (outside some scenarios) the advantage the Allies have should make it a cakewalk.

 

[MarkShot]

Personally, I found that unlike some war games, since the very first release of RDOA, there are many ways that you can cripple yourself with supply and reinforcements. And if that isn't a enough, you can intentionally sit for an hour and eat your pre-planned faster response time of the OODA loop.

Also, no one ever forces a commander to throw every man into the fight. Dave, has always said "keep a reserve". You could keep 50% as a reserve not for the current fight, but the next fight beyond the scope of scenario.

The point is to play and have fun. I believe in general there are enough options to do so.

---

All realistic war games face this problem. The Japanese were going to lose, because China tied up 50% of their ground forces and would have fought for 100 years. (Time scales of civilization is far different in The East, than what we envision for The West.) The USA was an industrial powerhouse which would flood the sea with Liberty Ships and Carriers. Eventually, you would be able to walk from San Francisco to the home islands.

The NAZIs were going to lose to the Red Army. The USSR also had tremendous production and resources. And they fully intended to avenge themselves in a very different type of war in the East than with UK/USA. And again, you had the USA's incredible industrial base pouring supplies into the fight, along with a bomber campaign that turned Germany to rubble.

So, either you end up with fantasy games (HOI4), or designers must be innovative to allow for play on the losing side and still a sense of accomplishment and victory.

 

[jimcarravallah]

Personally, I found that unlike some war games, since the very first release of RDOA, there are many ways that you can cripple yourself with supply and reinforcements. And if that isn't a enough, you can intentionally sit for an hour and eat your pre-planned faster response time of the OODA loop.

Also, no one ever forces a commander to throw every man into the fight. Dave, has always said "keep a reserve". You could keep 50% as a reserve not for the current fight, but the next fight beyond the scope of scenario.

The point is to play and have fun. I believe in general there are enough options to do so.

---

All realistic war games face this problem. The Japanese were going to lose, because China tied up 50% of their ground forces and would have fought for 100 years. (Time scales of civilization is far different in The East, than what we envision for The West.) The USA was an industrial powerhouse which would flood the sea with Liberty Ships and Carriers. Eventually, you would be able to walk from San Francisco to the home islands.

The NAZIs were going to lose to the Red Army. The USSR also had tremendous production and resources. And they fully intended to avenge themselves in a very different type of war in the East than with UK/USA. And again, you had the USA's incredible industrial base pouring supplies into the fight, along with a bomber campaign that turned Germany to rubble.

So, either you end up with fantasy games (HOI4), or designers must be innovative to allow for play on the losing side and still a sense of accomplishment and victory.

I was intrigued by the resource allocation for industrial production, long term planning and new research aspects of HOI2.

What lost me was the combat which to me was akin to playing Risk.

 

[GoodGuy]

The Japanese were going to lose, because China tied up 50% of their ground forces and would have fought for 100 years. (Time scales of civilization is far different in The East, than what we envision for The West.) The USA was an industrial powerhouse which would flood the sea with Liberty Ships and Carriers. Eventually, you would be able to walk from San Francisco to the home islands.

Hey Mark, nice to see you around.

No. United States Forces sunk or put out of action (for the duration of the war) 2,117 merchant vessels with 7,913,858 tons of Japanese merchant tonnage, where 1,113 merchant vessels (4,779,902 tons) were sunk by US submarines alone, according to the JANAC (1947) report. William P. Gruner jr. calculated in 1953 that a total of 8,897,000 tons of merchant shipping was sunk by US and Allied Forces, with 52,64% sunk by US submarines and 2% by Allied submarines.
So, US submarines played a major role there, they sunk 52% - 54,64% (depending on source) of the Japanese merchant tonnage sunk during the war. At the end of the war, the remaining total merchant tonnage pool had shrunk to around 1.3 million tons, where 70% of that merchant pool consisted of crappy war-standard ships (stemming from emergency or replacement programs), the rest consisted of old and unseaworthy ships. Beginning in July/August 1944, the vast majority of the remaining merchant shipping pool failed to make it to or past the Japanese homeland, because of the virtual blockade US subs from Guam and Saipain had started to impose against Japan. Few ships could enter or leave Japanese waters without being attacked or sunk by submarines for the remainder of the war.
With the blockade, Japan ran out of oil (for shipping), gasoline for aviation and tanks and steel and aluminum for the industry, plus they were cut off from Chinese iron ore, coal and food products.
US submarine improvements in 1943 had allowed US subs to up the pace, already, with the subs netting a total of 1.5 million tons at the end of the year. The same year, American subs started to put tremendous pressure on Japanese oil supply lanes, which increasingly hampered Japanese aviation and Navy operations.
((Comparison: In 1942, the Germans had sunk 6 millions tons of Allied tonnage (1,160 ships) already, but the US managed to replace lost tonnage within months, so that the losses inflicted on Allied shipping (~3,000 ships until 1945) amounted to less than 5% of the ships built during the war (iirc)).
1) Japan failed to protect vital merchant shipping tonnage and 2) the ship building capacity never reached a level where a sufficient amount of shipping tonnage could be rebuilt. Starting in 1943, an increasing amount of desperately needed resources failed to make it to Japan - they basically ran out of (almost) everything, eventually.
3) Plus they lost most of the carriers that were needed to secure islands with strategic value in 1943, and 4) their destroyer force was too small and lacked efficient ASW/radar equipment and oil to secure the vital merchant shipping lanes.
3 other major factors: 5) the tremendous loss of experienced pilots, 6) a half-assed pilot training program that didn't produce enough replacements and 7) the shifting balance regarding aircraft designs (the US fielded new/improved aircraft types while Japan didn't manage to field new/improved designs, at least not in sufficient numbers).
With the book "Shattered Swords" in mind, I guess it would be reasonable to rate the unfavorable Japanese carrier design as 8th major factor, as it may have greatly contributed to the carrier losses in 1943.

The ground forces pool tied up in China wasn't a main factor, as they wouldn't have been able to supply those forces if they would have moved large chunks of that pool to Guadalcanal (or New Guinea/other islands), for instance. They already struggled with having to supply the few thousand troops operating on those islands. Truk and Iwo Jima showed that a large garrison and major fortifications on an island could serve to bind some enemy resources (similar to the German garrison holding out in Brest until 1945), but that the existence/defense of such strongpoints would not change the outcome.

along with a bomber campaign that turned Germany to rubble.

The bomber campaign was not as effective as the Allies thought. The US Strategic Bombing Survey created after the war assessed that the moral bombing failed more or less completely, but also that the Germans managed to repair most of the targeted facilities until around May 1944, usually they got their refineries and plants back to like 60%-90% output, usually within weeks, sometimes even within days. The German oil production and distribution crippled as late as November 1944. Only the 1944 bomber campaign targeting oil fields in Rumania, refineries and hydrogen plants in Germany showed a lasting effect, because that campaign involved consecutive raids on those targets, where then the Germans did not manage to apply sufficient repairs, eventually. In between, most - if not all - refineries were repaired 1 - 3 times resulting in reduced output, but then stayed at a 0-15% output level, iirc, due to the power (and number) of the bombardments.

 

[MarkShot]

@GoodGuy,

It is nice to see you as well. You have always been there contributing with lots of history and good discussion.

No offense, but I will elect to neither discuss the last World War or the current. (just software engineering which I feel very comfortable with)

Be well.

@jimcarravallah,

I tried HOI4 for and EU4 (about a year ago with full DLCs at that time). Actually, the only current PDS title which I am impressed with is City Skylines ... probably because the team is not theirs.

As a retired software engineer it is blatantly apparent that Johan's driving engineering effort is to write the absolute minimum code possible with the greatest amount of reuse possible such that graphics can be hung on it to make it look like a given topic. Some quick examples of this:

* EU4 features fleet mechanics coded especially for player and released in a DLC; so PDS says. So, they worked hard to give you PATROL and EXPLORE. But any programmer would realize they need such modules for the SP-AI portion of the game. So, what you really paid for in a DLC was UI screen as a combo box UI which allowed you to communicate with the pre-written fleet routines.

* HOI4 every game will need some form of positional addressing scheme. Whether a transparent fine resolution grid of CO2 or a hex grid of WITE-2. HOI4, went with a network of region nodes which probably do maintain some properties with the nodes and arcs. Additionally, both for combat simulation/political simulation a zone/state/province framework was hung on top of that. So far, nothing has gone terribly amuck in the systems modeling process ... Now, here we go ... hang on tight ... Johan is going to derail the software process in the name of improved ROI:

** The air war is also built on the same political zones for movement and operations and combat. Is there any correspondence between aircraft and/or air war that would correspond to these zones? No. Absolutely not.

** The naval war is again built on such zones. Of course, the zones since they were constructed for ground war, must by definition be divided at the coast line. So again, we end up with behaviors that have no analogue in the real world of aircraft or air war. One cannot simply assign a mission of air superiority over near inland, beaches, and coastal landing craft waters, because these are in arbitrarily separate zones. Is there anything about this that corresponds to ships or naval war in zones? No. Absolutely not.

So, why do we have zones across the entire description of battle space?

(1) Regions was probably the first and most obvious piece of a project needed by "seat of the pants" designer ... Johan. Good designers spend months modeling. Poor designers will almost immediately jump to coding, and then, the entire project becomes an effort to retrofit the project to a set of atrocious assumptions already cast in stone in the code.

(2) The realization of the need for zones was not far behind.

(3) At this point, you've done quite a bit of coding about zones and ground warfare. So, what do you do? Do you go back and come up with something new for air and naval combat so they can be recast to be consistent with zones? Systems modeling be damned, no one is going to do any additional coding. You are going to make one code base for land warfare work three times for ground, air, and sea.

This is the PDS design process; minimal coding; maximal reuse; maximal hype; demanding maximum compensation from customers.

Now if we compare this to two actual world class designers/modelers: Dave O'Connor and Gary Grigsby, we will see that logical distinct systems in the real world receive distinct modeling and handling in the game world. The goal for both designers is accurate modeling which by definition will be complex while trying to keep the complexity manageable via the availability of clean and information rich UIs along with varying degrees of automation which the player may choose to scale for their desired level of hardcore involvement. Accuracy and NOT code reuse/hype-profits are the driving motivations of these two designers. This is why these games despite being complex merit the player time investment, because there is real sense of command and operations that you can learn from ... as opposed to a sandbox which requires suspension of disbelief so at best you can treat it as an RPG and story diary game.

(the above are my personal views and conclusions ... not those of anyone else)