Beta 1.040 bugs and potential enhancements

[Lebatron]

I'll kick off this thread with a few of the problems I have observed.

"jessie reports Leningrad should be "fort,2", and there is a problem with the perma-fort in E France (canceled if E France is attacked)."
Brian, if you recall an old email I sent you I discovered a workaround for the perma-fort in Eastern France. In fact the way the engine works now to handle forts is ideal. I wouldn't change a thing. Turns out that the number you use in the fort rule becomes the number of times that fort can change hands before the fort is destroyed by combat. Example Fort,9 means it can change hands 9 times before getting destroyed. So in the data files I have inserted large numbers for forts such as Leningrad so that even if they change hands a few times they will remain a fortress. When a rule such as the formation of Vichy France forces the fort to disappear in Eastern France, bumping the fort value to 2 is a nice trick to keep the fortress in place for one more fight. Fort2 become Fort1 from Vichy forming and so a fort still remains. Albeit a very temporary one.

Rafael had brought up this problem a week ago. It appears that due to the addition of the new option to show unit nation flags, when this option is checked it is no longer possible to tell when Kamikazes are selected unless you turn this option off. Perhaps you could add a new flag that would appear over the Jap flag. The Jolly Roger! Just kidding. On second thought that would be kind of cool.

There is an air proximity cheat that is easy to exploit. Move air within range of New Zealand, score your points, then undo the move. If during the time you score the points it put you at a new high water mark you get to keep those points despite the fact you undid your move.

There is a scoring error at the end of game. I give precise details here http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/fb.asp?m=2287262

When 2 or more transports share the same sea zone and you transport stuff over them the first transport does not use up its entire capacity before burning capacity on another transport. In instances where each transport should have 30 capacity I'm seeing cases where only half is being use before it spills over to another transport thus locking both down. This is very annoying when you know you should be able to move that second transport because you did not burn more than 30 capacity. This problem of transports not using all their capacity up before spilling cargo over to the next one forces unnecessary micromanagement. For some reason I do not recall this being a problem in the past. Did this recently pop up? A new side effect perhaps?

Now that windowed mode is supported it's the only way I play on my 19". My setting is 1280x970. The 970 may sound weird but you have to subtract some pixel height due to the windows taskbar. Anyway what I find odd is that each time I load the game it prefers to align itself to the bottom of the screen instead of the top like almost every program out there does. Which forces me to drag it up to the top myself. Not that it's hard, but I think there must be a window setting somewhere within the program to tell it to align itself with the top of the screen.

[Lebatron]

While playing a recent game an interesting new side effect of the flyover shortcut in the English Channel emerged. I will let Sean tell it in his own words.

"I think I have noticed a flaw in how straits function. In effect, they bypass the English Channel and the lower North sea. In the attached save game, it is possible for a german air unit to attack England directly from W France without being attacked or interdicted by air units on patrol over the channel / lower North Sea. I guess they are flying through the chunnel!! I presume the problem exists in the other direction as well (i.e.,with France if Germany were patrolling). Is there some way to disable the 'chunnel' if both adjacent sea lanes are being patrolled? Or, could they provide a measure of op-fire / interdiction? Second, I notice that paratroops are able to make their drop zone even if their bomber is destroyed. This is not only illogical, but is inconsistent (I think) with what happens with transports. If the transport is destroyed when doing an amphib, the unit does not make it ashore. (correct me if I am wrong in this)."

I though I would go ahead and leave in his second comment about para drops and see what others think about it.

What Sean did notice was wierd. 'Chunnel' that's a good one. Anyway, here was my email response which goes into details how I think this issue could be resolved.

"I tried this out using GG and discovered the problem there too. Save for GG included. I'm surprised this has went undiscovered this long. I was aware of a data error similar to what causes this fly through. Have any of you noticed that while you played GG or UV2.0 that extra resouces were coming from Spain each turn? Instead of a steady 3, you got 5 sometimes. These extra 2 were coming from the 2 Vichy resources in North Africa. I traced the issue to the strait of Gibraltar. It turns out that using a certain code number in the data files for all straits to enable the fly over shortcut is causing resources to trace over these regions. This should not happen but is because the flyover shortcut is using a data code that was never intended for this. What I did to stop the extra resources from coming through Gibraltar is I went and changed that code value back to the original one. But by doing so I made a trade off. So in this one particular spot there is no free flyover. But that's not much of con since it's uncommon that aircraft fly between Gibraltar and Spanish Morocco.

Currently we have a total of 8 different codes to assign to region adjacency's.  Code 8 was used to block land travel in areas like the deserts of Africa. What you would call prohibited regions. It was discovered that we could swap out code 4 for code 8 to allow air a shortcut wherever straits are located. This is what allows German fighters to enter England without needing range 2. And unintentionally this allows resources a tracing path too. Hence the strange effect of getting extra resources from Spain in GG and UV2.0. I was going to email Brian and suggest to him that a new code be added to the engine. Code number 9. Its rules could be defined to allow air free flyover but not allow resource tracing. This would fix the Gibraltar problem. However I'm not sure if it's possible to define it so that air in the English Channel would provide op-fire suppression. And if it could then we would have to debate if that should even be allowed if only one side of the strait had CAP. But if both the English Channel and the Lower North Sea had fighter cover then op-fire should definitely happen. IMO if Brian could and was willing to add this new code I would vote that both sides of a strait would need CAP to cause op-fire on aircraft going through the strait."

Well that about covers the problem with using code 8.

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