Teleporting Units

[Firebomber47]

I was playing the 43-45 campaign game in the June 1944 time period. I had concentrated my forces in Italy, aiming to thrust up through the mountains into Germany from the south while the AI kept most of its forces poised to repel an invasion in France. I had managed to cut off the Axis forces in central Italy with an amphibious invasion south of Venice and an armored thrust through the Po River valley emerging at Spezia, but when the encirclement of the main body of German formations closed, the following turn many units mysteriously teleported out of their encirclements during the AI's turn as the German and appeared in the mountains blocking any move into Germany. These units included three that were completely surrounded in Bologne (Allied units occupying every hex). Just to make sure, I went back to an earlier save when the encirclement had just been completed and did an inventory of German units trapped inside the pocket, then reloaded the latest turn to find that many of the more powerful units, including several panzer and mountain divisions, had magically teleported out of the pocket, moving hundreds of miles to the north into the mountains. Is there an updated patch kit to fix this problem?

[Joel Billings]

We fixed several AI warping bugs in the first patches after release and thought we have most of those fixed as of the latest official version (can't remember if there were more in the public beta version). Once isolated, they should not be able to warp out. If they have a connection to a port and aren't isolated, then all bets are off. If you have a save game just before the units warp move, please attach it here or email it to 2by3@2by3games.com. Let us know what units you are seeing warp away and if we can get it to replicate we'll try to fix it. Thanks.

BTW, these things usually happen because the AI has many routines that move units, and sometimes Gary forgets to check their isolation status in a particular routine. For example, a routine that grabs certain Panzer divisions to act as garrisons in cities used to grab units without checking to see if they were isolated, so in some cases they would suddenly warp out of a pocket. Gary has already fixed this and several other cases of warp moves, but there could be others that lurk in the code.

[Firebomber47]

Hi Joel. I've attached the before (turn 55) and after (turn 56) turns - the first shows them surrounded, the second shows their displacement to the mountains above the encirclement. Escaped units include 5th Mountain Division, 334th and 92nd Infantry, 2nd Fallschirmjager, and, of particular interest, the 200th Security Regiment (137,226), 26th Pz (129,224) and 16th SS PzGrenadier (128,223), which escaped from a tight encirclement around Bologna where every hex was occupied by a stack of Allied units. There is no way you could fly out panzer divisions even if a historically non-existant German fleet did somehow miraculously transport numerous divisions along the Italian coast to safety (plus how could they go by rail to the embarkation point, travel by ship to a friendly port, then go by rail again to the mountains where they ended up? 5,000 strategic movement points per unit??) Hope you can figure out what is going on and provide a patch. My version is 1.00. Thanks.

[michaelm75au]

Do you have a save before the attack where all the hexes are occupied? The save Turn 55 is at start of turn (air phase), so it does not reflect the true situation for when the attacks happen.
Have you tried this again with the more recent patch (1.21) as it has moved on since 1.00.

[Firebomber47]

Hi Michael. You can see how the German units teleported out of the encirclement in Turn 55 by looking at their positions in Turn 56, even though it's only the air phase. I never executed any attacks in that turn because of the relocation of so many German units. I couldn't find any patches on the Matrix Games patch site. Where can I find the 1.21 patch?

[Seminole]

When you open the War in the West menu from the shortcut it has a button named 'Check for update'.



That will get you the latest production release.

For the latest beta look here.
You have to register in order to obtain it.

[michaelm75au]

ORIGINAL: Firebomber47

Hi Michael. You can see how the German units teleported out of the encirclement in Turn 55 by looking at their positions in Turn 56, even though it's only the air phase. I never executed any attacks in that turn because of the relocation of so many German units. I couldn't find any patches on the Matrix Games patch site. Where can I find the 1.21 patch?

Yes, but to actually see what happens we need to be able to replay the battle to see why it happened that way. I suspect that it may not have happened with a later patch. Check the 'whats new' file when you get the patch to see all the items that have been corrected or changed.[;)]

[Joel Billings]

Ok, I was able to run your turn 55 save using my most recent version and the units did not warp out of their positions. We fixed many warp bugs in the early patches, so my guess is that by 1.00.21 (the current official patch), this was already fixed. It's possible a few rarer cases still existed until 1.00.29 (the current public beta patch), but I can't really be sure. I suggest that you update to at least 1.00.21 and then rerun your game from turn 55.

However, I have to warn you that the AI has also been improved since release and it does not want to be in the situation you have it in. Since it has access to ports and rail lines out of the Tuscany area, it pulls out its troops. It clearly pulls them out faster than a human could because it uses different movement routines. In order for it to avoid really bad cheats, we've got it quicker to pull out than it used to be (and better at realizing when it's going to be cut off. We also improved it so that if it has to move through a zoc to pull back, it won't do any of its cheat moves and will have to march out. Unfortunately in the turn 55 save, this is not the case and it has access to a port so it moves many of the units out of the southern near pocket. It does not move all the units out so you will be able to kill quite a few tardy units, and the ones you surrounded that you pointed out in the original report have not moved. Overall, you will be better playing with the latest update.

I see that you ignored high commands wishes to open up a front in Northern Europe and took the 1000 victory point hit. Were you aware of that? Although you're going to kill quite a few units in Italy, it will be hard to make up that VP hit. Thanks for posting the saves and good luck in your game.

[Firebomber47]

Okay, I applied the latest patch (1.00.21) and it seems to have prevented the Germans from escaping the main encirclement. However, the three units in Bologna still escape to the mountains to the north even though they're completely surrounded. Oddly enough, the 26th Panzer appears as three regiments northeast of Venice. Could this be some glitch with breaking down units into regimental size because the 16th SS PzGrenadiers are also broken down to regiments scattered across the mountains?

[Firebomber47]

Hi Joel. This is my first campaign, so I was unaware of the 1,000-point VP hit. I was more interested in trying the Italian gambit just to see if I could attack Germany from the south rather than from the west, coming up through Austria and Bavaria as it were. I also wanted to see if I could draw off the panzer divisions in France, opening the way for the invasion of France with fewer panzers to worry about.

Two problems with naval movement occur to me. There's no way the Germans could evacuate units from the northern Italian ports with Allied dominance of the seas. They did it in Courland on the Eastern Front because of the lack of any Russian navy, but with the Mediterranean dominated by Allied sea power, historically they couldn't have done it that way.

The other point is on the way the game moves units from the UK to the Mediterranean. Why is everybody disembarked to land in North Africa rather than kept aboard ships? In real life, the troops wouldn't have been disembarked at Oran if they were bound for Italy, they would have stayed on the ships until they reached their destination. So why does everything transferred to the Med end up landing at Oran, which then needs to be reembarked from far fewer major ports along the North African coast? When I moved the second wave of divisions from the UK to northern Italy for the encirclement, it took forever to reembark all those units at North African ports. Thanks.

[Joel Billings]

Will the warp moves out of the surrounded hexes didn't happen for me, so I'm betting that the public beta version that is available at the member's club has this fixed. I see in the 1.00.29 notes at least one warp situation that was fixed. I'm using something even later than .29, but AFAIK there haven't been any other AI move changes since the .29 public beta version. If you don't mind playing a public beta version, I suggest you try that.

As for the naval moves, I'm not sure why Gary did it the way he did, could be for ease of coding, could have been because he wanted it to take a long time to move to the Med.

I wend ahead and ran the game using a 1.00.29 exe and the units did not warp out of the surrounded locations so I'm fairly confident this has been corrected already.

[Firebomber47]

Where do I get the 1.00.29 beta patch, Joel?

[Joel Billings]

You have to join the Matrix Member's club and then register WitW there, and then you have access to public beta downloads.

[Firebomber47]

Thanks Joel. That fixed it.

[Firebomber47]

Hi Joel, here's another note on naval warfare in regards to the beta patch. Whereas in the 1.00.00 version I didn't really lose that many transports while moving units through the Mediterranean, with the beta patch it seems like I'm losing a transport every 5 hexes of movement. Once again looking at historical records, there simply weren't that many transports lost in the Med by this point in the war. I think you need to tweak the beta version to fix this.