Bomburs GD Mod

[Jeffrey H.]

Hi - I've been playing this mod again, just downloaded last week. It's a fun mod, but you have to be prepared for it's peculiarities. It's dead slow to play, because it takes so long for the AI turns. But I use that to keep all the other balls in the air that life requires me to juggle. Those of you who are familiar with any of the Bombur mods or the 1938 mod by Ernie S. will immediately get the feel of it.

That being said, its a rewarding game in many ways, you just can't be in any kind of hurry about it.

Minor nit to pick, this time I'm playing Japan, the other two times I played this I was China. There is a city on an island called Karafuto. It starts out as Japanese AFAICT but I can't control production. I initially thought I needed to establish an HQ there, because this was the case with several ore mines in the island chain that Japan starts with. But after express shipping an HQ over it didn't seem to matter and my HQ began to starve as if it was on foriegn soil without a port. I moved it back out and sent it to a different island between Iwo and Taipei. That island had an engineer unit which is pereptually dark as if it is out of supply. We'll see what happens with it.

Japan has this massive fleet which requires so much supply it can draw down the entire nation for a few turns. Also, lack of oil means Japan must import every drop it needs and during a war, that stuff runs out fast. As a result I've taken an upgrade the cities approach and taken Korea as my first conquest. After many turns of stockpiling I'm going to try and take Indonesia from the Beneluex, unfortunately, I believe the British have declared war on them. SO now the rush for the oil is on. Also the British have declared on Arabia which is the biggest concentration of oil in the world.

Part of the fun of the game is to watch the small countries of little overall significance randomly declare war on each other, every turn brings a new surpirse.

More later.

[Jeffrey H.]

Anyway, yeah I was thinking of posting a game in the opponents wanted forum, on the notion that things could be sped up a bit by having another human in the loop, because not so many AI will have to process for each player. But the fan club for this mod seems to be a little thin. I dunno. It could be fun.

Last turn I've noticed that there are some oil wells in the island I share, (sort of) with the Russians and there is a city up there under Russian control named Okha, which IIRC is Japanese for "Cherry Blossom". Sounds liek a good enough reason to go to war the Russkies. I'm pretty sure I can blitz them out of a few cities and fall back into stalemate for a while. Hopefully. I need to think about that one a bit more.

[Bombur]

Good to see that this scenario still have some players. I gave up its development because it was resulting in some overheating of my CPU (I fixed it by putting my computer on "undercloking" but then the game is slow...). A turn takes about 15min in a i7 with 8GB RAM, this increases to almost 30 minutes by putting the computer in underclocking.....the other trouble I see is that the AI is too slow in developing techs, and they seem not to research some of them at all. In the future, maybe, I will come back to this mod, if there is enough interest....

[Jeffrey H.]

I'm in the 30 minute per turn category, from past experience with this mod, the British naval units soak up enormous processing time. Once you hunt down all their cargoships things speed up noticeably.

The AI turn time isn't that big of a deal for me. I just work around it, keep moving around the house, work in chores and meals. If I leave the house I make sure to get a turn going before doing it that way when I get back, it's ready for another. Again, that by itself is not a big deal.

The thing that seems a bit out of whack is the time-distance-movement scaling. I made a not to myself to study the turn interval for the time length between turns, of course, I always forget when it comes to doing it, what is the time interval between turns in the mod ?

[Jeffrey H.]

Oh and the city build up is a great improvement, especially for a small nation against larger AI nations. One thing I noticed though is that the city names get washed out when upgrading. Not a big deal but it seems like it could be avoided ?

[Jeffrey H.]

I recall that Vic made an improvement in the way the AI uses the AIRole scores, (I think it was broken before and not being used) when ATG came out. Maybe that's a way to get the AI to develop techs. ?

[ghoward]

I think your Karafuto problem is because it is only a village. If you start a new scenario and look at russia, they have one like that too. I have been playing the original (at version) of gd and enjoying it. I didnt tumble to the fact that bombur had upgraded it to atg and made it AI capable. I will try it next, but I play at the speed of drool, and I have most of russia yet to conquor.

[Jeffrey H.]

Yeah, that's it. I just conquered that island this last turn and I jumped off it immediately and sent the forces down to Vladivostock, booted the engineering garrison there and took it over. Part of the first turn surprise attack was a naval fight which caught the Russian fleet in port and sank every last one of them. Dastardly yes but very effective.

Now I'm gonna try to get some engineers up there to beef things up so I can get the oil out of there.

[Jeffrey H.]

One thing that's a bit odd is that shore bomberdments by my fleet use ore from my national stores, shouldn't it just consume supply from the fleet storage ?

[Bombur]

Early ships use coal, so I made them to spend raw materials. And they soend their "fuel" both in movement and combat (like bombardment)

[Jeffrey H.]

The tech bleed feature is working well I think. I got ships i for a big discount. The AI has become much more aggressive at research, or at least it seems that way. The Chinese have infantry I and artillery I which takes quite a bit to get. I was startled when they lined up some of these units against me. I'm not at war with them yet.

[Jeffrey H.]

Strangely enough, Costa Rica was on a tear and conquered Mexico. The US was at war with Mexico, then the US declares war on Costa Rica.

[Jeffrey H.]

Back to the time-distance-movement-scaling thing I harped about previously. The actual distance between Vladivostok and Tokyo is something like 663 miles. In the game map that distance is covered in 10 hexes. Now, I know that map distortions are inevitable when trying to convert a spherical surface to a flat one, using only uniformly sized hexes. I'm ok with that. Plus it's a game and a fun one so no problem with approximations.

But in this example, each hex would be about 66.3 miles across. Not really, but sorta. Again, it's a game and a good, fun one. The turn length is roughly 90 days, (my last turn was Oct 25 1912 to Jan 23 1913). My small cargoships were able to travel 7 hexes across open waters last turn. So, that means roughly 464 miles in 90 days time. An equivalent miles per hour of 0.215 miles/hr. Now that's dead slow, even for an old turn of the century steamer. My cavaly ran 3 hexes in open terrain, again in 90 days for an equivalent m/hr of 0.092 miles/hr. A snails pace.

A man can walk an average of 3 miles/hr or so the interweb says. 90 days is 2160 hours. If we chop off 12 for humans and animal transport. That leaves us with 1080 hours. If we chop that even further for rest and breaks, say to 8 hours a day, 90 days gives us a time basis of 720 hours for travel. IN that time a man can walk about 2160 miles. In the rough hex scale I mention above, that's about 34 hexes. Currently, an infantry unit can get about 3 in per turn.

It always felt a little odd that units were moving so little in such a long timeframe. I think this is why.

[Jeffrey H.]

Update: I was prepping a small invasion fleet to declare on the Beneleux-ians in Indo, when the stinking Chinese declared on me and immediately attacked my Korean peninsula border. I was able to hold them off just barely and still hold the cities I stole from the Russians. I ran into a serious set of logistic problems, not enough ore and very limited Sea Cap for moving troops from Japan into China and Korea.

It seems that a dedicated troop transport doesn't come along until "Warships II" so I'm using small and mdeium sized cargo vessels for the task. I can't move engineers via land to my ore holdings so I must use ocean transport and there simply isn't enough Sea Cap to move the quatity of engineers needed to upgrade the ore mines and keep the Chinese at bay.

Fortunately, I am whipping the Chinese on the ground and the AI left Bejing relatively weakly defended, so I took it. But now I'm again finding the limit of my ability to conquer a country to be restricted by my ability to have engineers in adeqaute numbers building roads for supply.

Holding on a few turns to get the PP's needed to get the troop transports so I can move large amounts of engineers over to my ore mines and to build up the Chinese roads to finally polish off the remaining part of China.

[danlongman]

Can somebody give me a hint on how to properly install
the Bombur mod into ATG latest incarnation? Just the
Bombur mod not the 1938. It worked fine on the old ATG
and was my favourite. I am missing something on the update.
It keeps telling me I am missing various graphic files so
I must have installed it improperly, or do I have to do something
special with random games? Thank You.

[Jeffrey H.]

I had the same problem with the random game Bombur Mod, I passed over it and played the GD mod instead.

[Bombur]

ORIGINAL: danlongman

Can somebody give me a hint on how to properly install
the Bombur mod into ATG latest incarnation? Just the
Bombur mod not the 1938. It worked fine on the old ATG
and was my favourite. I am missing something on the update.
It keeps telling me I am missing various graphic files so
I must have installed it improperly, or do I have to do something
special with random games? Thank You.

Send me a list of the missing graphics and I will try to fix the file to you.
my email is afenelon@terra.com.br

[Vic]

The patch did not come with less graphics than the previous version so technically it could not be the cause. So maybe its because you did a clean install and bomburs mod uses some graphics from other mods?

best,
Vic

[Tac2i]

I'm not certain if it this mod but I do remember a Bombur mod that used a special character in the filenames of a couple of ships that when installed on a US/UK machine did not translate and therefore were reported as missing graphics. To solve that problem I typed (inserted) the special character in Microsoft Word and then copied it to the clipboard and then pasted it into the filename.

[Jeffrey H.]

Playing on, the Chinese have launched and incredible steamroller on me which has caused me to lose all of my Chinese holdings, and forced me into a defensive line at the Korean border. Eventually even that will crack but it will give me some time to plot an amhibious invasion in the wake the human wave that heads towads the Korean border. It seems that the AI has left Bejing lightly defended again and I may be able to cut off this huge army and starve it by taking Bejing behind them. Bejing is only two hexes from the coast and the coast is clear. Next turn I'm going to give it a try.

If it doesn't work, I'll lose Korea and be sent back to the home islands.