Updated Graphics

[Ormand]

Chuck, Thanks for trying it out, and reporting issues.

I uploaded new versions.

Issues addressed:

1) On the people thing. I don't think I can do anything about this. This seems to be a problem only with 1 town start, where the extra units get put in the capitol. Those were the armor, engineer, and air units. In a normal start, they have the right people. I can't find anything in the rulevars that would control this, so I think it is an issue with the set up. On top of this, I noticed that if you chose stone age start, you would have infantry units with technology that isn't discovered yet. I don't see how to affect this. So, I kind of punted, and got rid of the extras units, and went back to three infantry and an engineer unit in each city. On top of this, the infantry has only infantry in it, so if you used stone age, you won't have units that you don't have tech for (this can be edited easily).

2) The self-propelled artillery problem should be fixed. There were three issues I found: a) unit upgrades were pointing to the wrong units; b) more serious, in the research list, after I removed some techs, the prerequisites shifted OK, but the blocks did not, these are fixed now; c) the name self-propelled artillery is too long, so the I, II, III, IV doesn't show in the production list correctly. I changed the name of the item to "Self-prop. Artillery N" so that it will show up with the number in the build queue. But, I kept the full name for the sft-type. BTW, the AI seems to love SPA.

3) Heavy artillery mobilization. I am guessing that the carry capacity of a unit has to be greater than the weight of the unit. Meaning that it has to be able to carry at least one. I made the halftrack so it could carry a weight of one, and the heavy artillery has a weight of two. Thus, as it currently stands, it seems that halftracks can't tow heavy artillery. But, trucks can (good thing I reduced the weight of HArty to two). This is an interesting design question. I am not sure halftracks were used to tow heavy guns. The US predominantly used trucks for arty, while the Germans built artillery tractors, which were heavier than the halftrack. I am open to discussing this, but of course, it stinks to discover it in the middle of the game that you can't mobilize the unit with the units you add. I thought the carry worked the way you did, but it does make sense this way too. How should we design it?

4) The horses were probably left over from the original unit, where I had the garrison units have horses to pull infantry guns and AT-guns. (By the way in DC, artillery units move by foot, so they don't slow everything down). I am not sure the AI mobilizes very well. Especially, infantry and tanks (it may be confused that tanks can't carry).

5) Fuel. Webizen asked about fuel usage, and I went back and looked. I thought I based fuel usage on the relative production cost. But, it looks like I more or less took it from DC without thinking about it again after I got them all in. I went back and renormalized the fuel cost for units by scaling it production cost as compared to the original. The two units for which I have a question are halftracks and trucks. These are smaller units than in ATG, and they will use more fuel to move the same items, especially troops. I think my first attempt had halftracks consuming too much fuel, so I cut this in half for movement. The extra fuel by halftracks is somewhat offset by the air units using a bit less fuel. I played a game where I was struggling somewhat to keep my mechanized army moving, and had to upgrade some of the oil fields to level 3. This will be a bit better with the halftracks cut down, but I am curious how it goes. Halftracks matter now because a good mechanized unit will have of the order 15-20.

6) I reduced the cost of horses by 50% to 50 (I forgot to do this after I made them have a carry capacity of one), and increased the cost of halftracks by 50% to 150. In the game above I had more halftracks than I knew what to do with.

7) I will still have to look into the auto-upgrade issue.

[cpdeyoung]

Thanks so much for addressing all these points.

I suspect the auto update issue was artillery related.

I will pull my artillery with trucks, thanks. In other versions I build my own SPA with halftracks, but as you have SPA already no problem.

Chuck

[Twotribes]

Mobile flak upgrades to light flak. Please remove that upgrade path as it means one can not use auto upgrade without removing all their mobile flak.

[Tac2i]

I've just looked at Ormand's latest two files for Divisions and Regiments (v1 and v2) and the research path looks correct. Mobile Flak I first requires you research Flak and Medium Tank. Thereafter Mobile Flak II requires Mobile Flak I, etc. Maybe something is amiss with the auto upgrade routine. Ormand would have to look into that.

ORIGINAL: Twotribes

Mobile flak upgrades to light flak. Please remove that upgrade path as it means one can not use auto upgrade without removing all their mobile flak.

[Twotribes]

On regiment one game I just manually changed it it had the upgrade path as light flak for all 3 levels of Mobile flak.

[Twotribes]

Actually it just dawned on me we are talking about two different things, you checked the research side I am talking about the SFT flags. If you go to SFTs and check you will see when you upgrade an on board mobile flak 1 it upgrades to Light flak 2 and so forth and so on.

[Tac2i]

You are correct. I've made the correction to my local copies of Divisions and Regiments as well.

ORIGINAL: Twotribes

Actually it just dawned on me we are talking about two different things, you checked the research side I am talking about the SFT flags. If you go to SFTs and check you will see when you upgrade an on board mobile flak 1 it upgrades to Light flak 2 and so forth and so on.

[Veni]

I uploaded new versions.

Ormand, pardon my ignorance, but where is this new set uploaded to? I don't want to download the older set. Thx!

[Ormand]

YAU (yet Another Update)

I uploaded to the AT site an updated version of the at2 files (4Seasons AT2 scenario files). When I update, I put it there. I believe it should keep track of a version number.

Thanks Two Tribes for finding a fairly large problem. Many of the upgrades in the sft got messed up. I have NO idea how this happened. While some of my units were incorrect, there were several that I didn't touch that got corrputed, but also many. many were just fine. So, I didn't see that there was a problem. Possibly, this was caused by my moving the sfts to put them in some order. This made things easier to edit the sfts, but apparently caused some order problems. I think they are partially an object with a pointer, and in some other lists not.

Anyway, there were probably some 20 units that had an upgrade problem in both divisions and regiments files (again, I have no idea why).

On top of this I made several other fixes (there are so damn many pieces of data to keep track of).

Here is the full list of fixes:

1) Fixed upgrades. Hopefully, I got them all.
2) Fixed fuel usage for self-propelled artillery (when I did tanks, I forgot this one)
3) Fixed fuel usage for mobile flak (ditto)
4) Fixed movement type for mobile flak II and III (it was set to artillery - you would have killed me for this one)
5) Fixed supply usage for mobile flak and light flak III.
6) Set both self-propelled artillery and mobile flak to vehicles (in the production item). They will be produced under the vehicle slot. (This was true for SPA in divisions, but not regiments, and not for mobile flak at all). My thinking is that the chassis makes it more of a vehicle than artillery. (edit) So they can be produced in tank factories, and not gun factories.
7) Adjusted fuel, supply, powerpoints, and recon for jeeps.
8) Reduced landcap for halftracks from 250 to 50 (250 is not right for them as they are to be used now)
9) Gave paratroopers hidepoint=1. The idea being that after a paradrop there should be confusion exactly where they are. Of course, this is on all the time, so it is a kludge, much like marines and beaches. Note that machinegun, mortars, and heavy weapons have hidepoint=1; the idea being they are more ambush units.
10) Adjusted symbol weights for armor. I found that I was having the halftrack symbol being used much of the time, when I was using a more historical unit. Tanks should have more weight now.

(edit) As a side note I adjusted the weights so that infantry will dominate in an infantry type unit. What I mean is that I am sure you noticed in AT/ATG when the infantry dropped a little and you had machinegun and mortar units, this symbol would take over. I made infantry have twice the weight as those, whereas before they had a greater weight. So, now infantry will be the dominant symbol to display on the map.

Sorry for these several glitches. I am surprised by just how many places things have to be checked. I hope this is the last of the big ones, but ...

I can't thank you guys enough for trying it out, and putting up with the glitches, and reporting back!

(edit) I will have until the end of this week to keep fixing things, and then I'll be mostly off line for four weeks. I have business trip to the east coast next week for a long-range planning meeting and I am on a review panel for a program. Then, I have three weeks of much need vacation (not from this, but work). When I get back, I hope to make two scenarios with this distribution; one historical and one fantasy. Although, experience shows that fantasy tends to work better than history with AT.

[Ormand]

A design question. While walking to a meeting, I got to thinking about halftracks, infantry and motorizing infantry. I was wondering if in the divisions file if it wouldn't be better to explicitly have mechanized and motorized infantry. That is, replace the halftrack with a unit that combines infantry and halftracks, kind of a grenadier. And possibly the same for infantry and trucks, to make motorized infantry. Since these work with armor, I would give them, and not regular infantry the ability to protect tanks from infantry and AT weapons. It would reduce the sft-types and simplify the job of making tank divisions. I am not sure if the AI would use them, but right now, I don't see the AI using halftracks either. One possible downside is how halftracks prevent hits on infantry. Thoughts?

[Veni]

First, thanks re update info.

I've been playing around quite a bit with your new set, and I love it. Helluva lot of good work. Incidentally, I've frequently used your original graphics set you put up some time ago.

A few observations/questions:

01. Re halftracks: I think making discrete Panzergrenadier/Motorized Inf would play well, akin to what you've done with Heavy Weapons; it would streamline unit formation & reduce micromanagement. Overall I enjoy the "transport" SFTs & unit design, but it's been a bit awkward with your scale when it comes to incorporating halftracks, esp given the 1:1 transport ratio (you did just fix the armor weighting, which helps). Alternatively, increasing their carry cap to 1:2 might alleviate that as well as retain their transport and infantry protection mechanic functions;

02. The spring low mountain graphics are not blending into the sea;

03. I don't recall you mentioning it, but what prompted you to increase the supply production cost from 3 to 4? On smaller maps, the few cities quickly have to convert to supply production;

04. This may only be in Webizen's alteration, but what happened to the Crates option for random game setups? Also, probably related to the shifting you mentioned above, the mercenary bases in earlier games I played were producing Cavalry III;

05. I really dig the new light/heavy/mobile flak options, but in terms of game play, what is the practical advantage of light flak over heavy (which has a 1-hex range [vs 0] and yields a much higher AA bang for the buck)?

Cheers,
Veni

[Tac2i]

Re Crates: there is a 'nocrates' attribute in the txt file located in the mods folder. Remove the attribute and you get crates.

[Tac2i]

**deleted - obsolete**

[Veni]

Thank you, sir!

[Ormand]

Sorry for the radio silence. I had to get to work early today, and I got home late.

Anyway. YAU! Put up just now at 7:43:20.

Thanks Veni for observations.

I fixed spring low and high mountains in all the at2 files.

I fixed the Mercenary base problem in divisions v1 and v2 (I think it was the sift in items).

Supply: Looking back, when I first started making the units, I was basing them on those in DCCB. So, I also used fuel and supply from DCCB assuming it was OK, and I didn't go back and look at the consequences. Mistake! I already looked at the fuel usage and I think I fixed all those already. For the most part, the supply usage for many units was less than in standard ATG, so I thought that increasing the cost of supplies would balance it out OK. In the end, while armor and most other units were using less supplies, the main drag is almost certainly infantry units, so you probably saw a drain from the fact that your total usage was probably a bit lower due to the armor etc, but the cost was 25% higher. I have gone back, and renormalized all the sft supply usage. And, like fuel, I tried to scale it from the basic game by the difference in production cost. And, I reduced the cost of supplies back to 3. There are a few exceptions. Artillery is a little less than basic, and airplanes use about 50% less. Looking at them, they seemed high to me, so I felt the should be reduced. But this is open to testing and how things work, so feedback is welcome.

Flak: This is a really interesting question, and again the starting point was units in DCCB. Being historical, there isn't much need to model the advantages/disadvantages. Doing some research, I think my original thinking that heavy flak is better suited for high-altitude planes is correct. I read that in general, flak was a layered system. It is fairly intuitive that it should be harder to track low-flying, fast moving planes with the big guns of heavy flak (although if you get hit, its all over). So, I reworked the sft so that light flak is more effective against fighters and divebombers than heavy flak (but only slightly). In addition, I made light flak act somewhat like "machineguns" against infantry (defensive, but not quite as effective). Light flak uses half the supplies of heavy flak, and having much larger guns (much like artillery), heavy flak has 5 stack points, as opposed to the standard 2. So they take up more space in the stack. They are better suited defending valuable targets from level and strategic bombers. But, to make your decision a bit more complicated, I gave heavy flak artillery capabilities. But not quite as effective as regular artillery. My thinking is, of course, the dreaded 88mm Flak 18. For this reason, heavy flak also has good AT capabilities. I also modified mobile flak. Originally it was made to look like light flak, but mobile. The same question comes up: why use this instead of light flak plus a truck? Looking it over, many of the towed light flak have just one barrel. But, with a halftrack or tank chassis, it is pretty easy to have more guns. So, I made mobile flak I a more powerful AA platform than flak II. These give some flavor and choice that I think are reasonably realistic in the sense as to why these different capabilities were introduced historically. I am willing to rethink fighters/divebombers with heavy flak though.

Another modification is introduced to make raids with cavalry a little easier. I made cavalry capable of carrying two turns of supply.

I put up mod files for all the at2 files, including A New Dawn (basic and v2) and a version of A new Dawn with a few new units, like Mountain Troops, Para II, III, IV, etc. I forgot about these, which would simplify using them if you want. I haven't tested A New Dawn v2 too much. I just saw that it would make new models, etc.

[Tac2i]

Updated my mod of the mod using Ormand's latest 7/9 files: 4aSeasonsModWeb

[Tac2i]

Started a new game with the latest Divisions file by Ormand.

[Twotribes]

Not enough manpower, how does one change the amount?

[Ormand]

I'm not sure what you mean. The only resources are ore and oil, no manpower limits that I know of. Form what I can see, items produced can only cost ore. As in the vanilla game, production is done at cities, capitals, and factories that you can build expending political points, supplies and ore (and engineer points).

Manpower is something that could be implemented, which would be a natural break on production.

[Tac2i]

The following turn Moscow fell to Englandic Empire forces.