Patch 06 - Public Beta - Build 1108r9 updated 21 January 2012 (2nd part)

[castor troy]

I may have missed something in all this discussion, but shouldn't the total firing passes as this is called here ONLY be related to the available fighters, means fighters that got ammo, fuel, no severe damage and enough time to intercept? [&:] So the number of fighters should be the basis, not a hardcoded number of firing passes because no matter how that hardcoded number looks like, it would near always be wrong.

[Chris21wen]

Michaelm

Has the TF Auto refuel system been changed in anyway recently? I'm continually getting TF arriving in port and not refueliing ,even though set to full refuel, where originally they did.

[michaelm75au]

Not that I am aware of.

[Chris21wen]

Latest Beta

I've just spotted a ripe and apparently undefended level 4 port, 5 A/F for my SSTs and the Aus 2/9 Cav Cdo Bn (commanded by Col Blackburn VC). When I load a SST it will only do so in' strategic' mode. Surely the SST should load in 'combat' mode ala fast transports. This got me thinking about all those dot bases that the computer refuses to occupy. How can an SST land a unit on them?

[Chris21wen]

ORIGINAL: michaelm

Not that I am aware of.

OK, thanks.

[michaelm75au]

ORIGINAL: Chris H

Latest Beta

I've just spotted a ripe and apparently undefended level 4 port, 5 A/F for my SSTs and the Aus 2/9 Cav Cdo Bn (commanded by Col Blackburn VC). When I load a SST it will only do so in' strategic' mode. Surely the SST should load in 'combat' mode ala fast transports. This got me thinking about all those dot bases that the computer refuses to occupy. How can an SST land a unit on them?

Sub transport need troops to be in Strat Mode, unless marked as Parachute in which they can load in Combat mode.
I traced some threads that spelled that out.

[michaelm75au]

ORIGINAL: castor troy

I may have missed something in all this discussion, but shouldn't the total firing passes as this is called here ONLY be related to the available fighters, means fighters that got ammo, fuel, no severe damage and enough time to intercept? [&:] So the number of fighters should be the basis, not a hardcoded number of firing passes because no matter how that hardcoded number looks like, it would near always be wrong.

The upper limit was to stop the random selection process from continuing on until infinity if no flight was picked to engage another.

[Speedysteve]

Have recently installed 1108r9 and entered this into the target box of the shortcut ("C:\Matrix Games\War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition\Beta2\War in the Pacific Admiral Edition.exe" -fb -px1600 -py900) and yet I can't get AE to run in full screen (I have 1600x900 resolution on). Any ideas?[&:]

[michaelm75au]

Is it -fb or -fd?
The 'fb' doesn't exist.

[Speedysteve]

Edit - all is fine when I load up a save. Strange. It's just on the menu it doesn't fill the screen!

[michaelm75au]

Not sure if it fully blacks out the area around the fixed image of the menu screen.
At one stage it didn't do it at all.

[Speedysteve]

Hmm. Odd.
 
Thanks for all your hard work on AE Michael[8D]

[Buck Beach]

ORIGINAL: Speedy

Have recently installed 1108r9 and entered this into the target box of the shortcut ("C:\Matrix Games\War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition\Beta2\War in the Pacific Admiral Edition.exe" -fb -px1600 -py900) and yet I can't get AE to run in full screen (I have 1600x900 resolution on). Any ideas?[&:]

I run this: -f -px1920 -py1080 -altFont and my start screen is exactly like your but when I start my game it goes to the larger widescreen view.

Buck

[witpqs]

Speedy, ditto what Buck said. Now go re-read Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy*.

* Sage advice: 1) Always bring a towel. 2) Don't Panic!

[:D]

[BigDuke66]

ORIGINAL: michaelm
The upper limit was to stop the random selection process from continuing on until infinity if no flight was picked to engage another.

In that case shouldn't a limit per flight instead of a general limit be used?
So every flight can have his chance(or chances) and if they screw it it's over. With the general limit like it's now a lot don't even get a chance in those big fights.

[Nemo121]

rader,

To be honest I don't care too much about what replaces it. I'm sure the community can come up with a reasonable model -- whether that's something which kicks in with a new algorithm as numbers rise or if that's breaking combat into portions less than 200 planes per side or whatever is up for discussion. Right now though it seems that the 200 interception limit is still beign stuck to so discussion of what could replace it seems a bit ahead of itself to me.


I'm more interested in establishing a sort of community view as to whether or not limiting interception firing passes to 200 is realistic.... why? Well, in my game I'm definitely going to try to mass strike aircraft on the basis that if I can get 600 to attack at one time 400 of them are guaranteed to get through no matter what the USN does.

I'm going to make some tests over the weekend of Japanese strikes vs multi-thousand fighter CAP so we can get some proper data with which to discuss this. With some proper data we can put this on a bit of a rational footing and explore the issues with the benefit of controlled, reproducable conditions.

This is also clearly what happened with some of your strikes vs Greyjoy and clearly points the way forward for you in that game.

[GreyJoy]

ORIGINAL: Nemo121

rader,

To be honest I don't care too much about what replaces it. I'm sure the community can come up with a reasonable model -- whether that's something which kicks in with a new algorithm as numbers rise or if that's breaking combat into portions less than 200 planes per side or whatever is up for discussion. Right now though it seems that the 200 interception limit is still beign stuck to so discussion of what could replace it seems a bit ahead of itself to me.


I'm more interested in establishing a sort of community view as to whether or not limiting interception firing passes to 200 is realistic.... why? Well, in my game I'm definitely going to try to mass strike aircraft on the basis that if I can get 600 to attack at one time 400 of them are guaranteed to get through no matter what the USN does.

I'm going to make some tests over the weekend of Japanese strikes vs multi-thousand fighter CAP so we can get some proper data with which to discuss this. With some proper data we can put this on a bit of a rational footing and explore the issues with the benefit of controlled, reproducable conditions.

This is also clearly what happened with some of your strikes vs Greyjoy and clearly points the way forward for you in that game.

But the new exe made my micheal doesn't already fix this issue? Am i wrong?

[beppi]

ORIGINAL: GreyJoy

ORIGINAL: Nemo121

rader,

To be honest I don't care too much about what replaces it. I'm sure the community can come up with a reasonable model -- whether that's something which kicks in with a new algorithm as numbers rise or if that's breaking combat into portions less than 200 planes per side or whatever is up for discussion. Right now though it seems that the 200 interception limit is still beign stuck to so discussion of what could replace it seems a bit ahead of itself to me.


I'm more interested in establishing a sort of community view as to whether or not limiting interception firing passes to 200 is realistic.... why? Well, in my game I'm definitely going to try to mass strike aircraft on the basis that if I can get 600 to attack at one time 400 of them are guaranteed to get through no matter what the USN does.

I'm going to make some tests over the weekend of Japanese strikes vs multi-thousand fighter CAP so we can get some proper data with which to discuss this. With some proper data we can put this on a bit of a rational footing and explore the issues with the benefit of controlled, reproducable conditions.

This is also clearly what happened with some of your strikes vs Greyjoy and clearly points the way forward for you in that game.

But the new exe made my micheal doesn't already fix this issue? Am i wrong?

No not really. It seems that there is a limit on the attack runs a defending CAP can do. For example if you have a 1000 planes on Cap and you face a 500 planes strike you are in serious trouble.

I had a similiar problem in my ongoing PBEM which is currently in 11/44. Faced similiar problems with my carrier CAP with may more than 1500 planes and it was impossible to defend against a 600 planes strike with 50% fighters and 50% bombers. Thought that the problem had to do something with fatigue, bad luck or just the CAP was not big enough. But if there is a hardcoded limit you run into late game problems. Btw. my game is a Scen 1 game and even there if the japanese just husband their planes for 2-3 months and then do a big strike you have a serious problem.

@Michaelm
Anyway Michaelm do you think it would be possible to use a player option (old style CAP / late game compatible CAP)
to have actually what the players want ? I understand that every early game player fears that any changes on the CAP system changes something drastic but currenty there is a problem late game. And i understand that usually most of the tests and optimizations are done for the first 1 to 2 years of the game. But now as quite a lot of players reach the lategame were the CAP sizes grow bigger and bigger it is not optimal.

[Nemo121]

GJ,

No, the new exe your game and mine is using helps tremendously in the fighter vs fighter round but it appears that as we've looked deeper we've uncovered a hard limit on the number of firing passes vs bombers. Basically whether you have 100 fighters on CAP or 2,000 you only get 200 firing passes vs bombers.

What this means for your CV TFs is that if you have 2,000 fighters on CAP and 800 unescorted bombers come in to attack you may well shoot down 200 of them ( assuming each firing pass results in a kill ) but the other 600 will be unintercepted because of the hard limit on firing passes. Those 600 bombers will then proceed to attack your CVs without being intercepted or fired upon by fighters. This explains why a lot of late-war scenarios were seeing devastating attacks on USN CV TFs in which large Japanese raids would continually "get through" no matter how much CAP the Allies had in the air.

Basically it is a simple numbers game. If Japan sends 800 planes to attack without any escort 600 of them are GUARANTEED to break through CAP and attack US shipping. That's simply the way the code works. This is why ( in your game and others ) when rader ( or others ) have attacked in large numbers so many of the planes have gotten through ( I'm sure you can think back to a few attacks where you had huge CAP but the bombers still got through --- that was probably in large part due to this hard limit on firing passes ).


I think the game has improved hugely over time and recently but sometimes this is the way things work.... As time passes and you fix one thing you actually uncover something else. That's not an attack on the game or anything, its just part of the process of iterating it to make it better with each iteration.


The reason Da Babes etc aren't seeing the problem is that most of their games appear to be early to mid-war games where you just don't see these large attacks. Your game and mine are late-war games in which masses kamikaze and massed normal strike group attacks are the norm and so that's why we've uncovered this. A few other late-war games ( based on postings here and elsewhere ) have also noted the problem but until now didn't know the reason why.


At present, for Japan, this changes the way you should play the late-war game. At present it totally makes sense for Japan to save up bombers and strike aircraft in order to launch massive raids over a single day such that they flood the defensive CAP with more than 200 strike craft. By doing that a large portion of bombers will always get through and it only takes 4 or 5 bad days for the USN CV TFs for them to be halved in number. For Japan giving the USN 4 or 5 bad days in 1944 is an eminently achievable goal (IMO of course ).


beppi,
I'm not sure we need a player switch because that would be open to conflict where one player might think switching to the new model was valid at a given time and the other wouldn't. I could foresee lots of disagreement. I think that, perhaps, all we need to do is scale the number of firing passes vs bombers based on the number of fighters intercepting.

What do I mean by that?
1. If you have 200 escorts and 200 bombers and 400 CAP fighters then the game would see a 1:1 ratio and use the current hard CAP of 200 firing passes on the assumption that 200 CAP fighters would tangle with 200 escorts and 200 would go for the bombers.

2. If you have 200 escorts and 200 bombers vs 800 CAP fighters then the game would assign 200 CAP fighters to tangle with the escorts and send 600 vs the bombers - yielding 600 firing passes.

Obviously those figures are just pulled out of the air but it shows how a system which compares CAP fighters to escorts + bombers could easily enough yield some sort of dynamic sliding scale where more CAP yields more firing passes.

I'm sure someone else can come up with a far better model though. I'm just using that to show how a dynamic model could be iterated towards.


Of course if anyone thinks a 200 firing pass hard limit is historically defensible then they should feel free to pipe up. It is important to consider all sides.

[GreyJoy]

Oh...that's more than scary nemo!

I will try some tests....[X(]