War in the Pacific: AE - Map Mod

[Hairog]

four

[James Taylor]

I've been playing these naval mods and have yet to see a bombardment task force.

What class are they?

[Elessar2]

Aye Hairog have fully digested your version notes. As you intimated, my philosophy here would run counter to yours, as the individual ship would be king, and cannot be replaced easily. But I am in general agreement about the silliness of the hit & run tactic.

The map here seems big enough to have all those ships running around (was inspired by World in Flames' Cruiser mod), tho I'm not sure about the CL's still.

In any event since I am currently redrawing many of the islands (both for accuracy & aesthetics) it will still be awhile before I move on to modding the mod itself. Because of the one hex per unit feature I typically have to ensure that most islands have 2 hexes (or two islands in close proximity), one for a ground unit one for an air unit.

[Hairog]

ORIGINAL: James Taylor

I've been playing these naval mods and have yet to see a bombardment task force.

What class are they?

First of all, I'm glad to hear that you are playing the mods. The more people play and hopefully enjoy the mods the better we can make them with your feedback.

The Bombardment Task Force used the old Dreadnaught slot. Like all the Task forces made up of capital ships, they are expensive and of limited use, just like real life.

Think of all the money, sweat, toil and tears nations spent on their battleships and dreadnaughts only to see them being used as floating artillery- batteries. In-game, they are expensive and slow to build. They are hard to justify and were not used very much in the stock game.

[jsbarker702]

Looking forward to the map and mod. Let me know when you need a play tester.

[Elessar2]

Right now seeing if I'll have enough free time (with this virus thang) to really play with it. Since I discovered how to make "atolls" out of lakes, it's been a slow slog to edit each island to my satisfaction. Also been farting with the Europe & global maps lately, trying some alternate design strategies; doing so made me notice an issue with the US CV build rates (they end up being the last unit the AI will build, virtually guaranteeing a Japanese victory).

[hyperstork67]

Hello all, I was hoping to play around with this map. The only upload I was able to find on this topic returned a "no such file" error. Is there a better link to it? Help appreciated!

[Elessar2]

I will likely be getting a Dropzone account in the next week, and I'll upload my revised version (ports added, names added to country lists of places). My latest playtest of World revealed all sorts of issues with the Pacific naval AI, where the bigger map here may not remedy, which kind of reduced my enthusiasm. The issue is that the basic operational/tactical ground AI is now pretty solid, but there really isn't any operational naval AI to speak of (tactical needs some work too), it's all gotta be scripted or they'll simply park their hulls in their home ports for the entire game. [tho subs will come out and move towards the nearest convoy routes]

Reducing turn lengths and thus reducing ship movement distances may bode well for human vs. human; right as the IJN now you can warp
your entire fleet to any trouble spot in one turn, two max (I may disable naval cruising as well for this reason).

[hyperstork67]

That's great, I look forward to it. I'm happy to just play a hot seat version, as-is, if that's what you have done so far.

Full AI would be awesome, of course. Right now I'm playing vanilla as Japan only, waiting through the European turns is getting longer and longer. And even in vanilla the US seems to mostly just send subs out.

So, I wouldn't mind just the map, if the AI is going to take a long time to troubleshoot. Thanks!

[The Land]

ORIGINAL: sPzAbt653

With the Edit Text Layer button, the same way you put 'United States' on the map. OMG, you have to go back over the entire map and add in the placenames ?!?!

There is also a tool in the Campaign settings to Replicate Resource Names to Text Layer which saves all this work!

[Elessar2]

Of course the OP here had all the text layers labeled, but not the actual resources-it must have taken me 6 hours to copy them all over...

Quick & dirty AAR [World Scenario, Crispy's] here in posts 86, 87 & 89.

[Elessar2]

Here ya go:

War in the Pacific AE pre-alpha

That way if my hard drive hiccups or something it isn't lost forever.

[hyperstork67]

Strange, dropbox keeps telling me "this file doesn't exist."

[hyperstork67]

Hmm, I can get the Fall Weiss mod just fine, but it says nothing is there when I try to download the pacific map.

[Elessar2]

I am a complete newb on this site, not helped by a goofed up interface which doesn't clearly explain the options available to you. It says the file is private, but there is no apparent way to set it to be public. It may demand 20 bucks a month for the privelege of making it public.

Trying Google Drive...

[hyperstork67]

That is a very cool map! Thanks for sharing.

[Elessar2]

De nada. [8D]

[steelwarrior]

Thanks man - would you mind making a map for the world wide campaign? That would be great...

[Elessar2]

Dood, I am currently artfully crafting the Euro 20 km map, a task that will likely take me close to a year just to get to the alpha testing stage. I decided to not make a scenario out of this one mainly because of issues with the AI & fleets would mean that it would pretty much be human vs. human only. I hated cheating the AI-only players out there (such as myself), but the amount of scripting that would be required to just give the AI a chance against a human's fleets would be mind-boggling. The Euro AI is much more "mature" and simply requires that they be copied over and adjusted for the new map coordinates & turn lengths.

The Pacific Map itself here however is much closer to completion-some islands need terrain/towns/ports, and while I've put the names in for many of the existing installations, some still need to be inputted. But someone who was motivated could probably get an alpha up and running after 2-3 months of work. If that was the case I'd happily collaborate with them on it.

I did use the pic ---> map conversion tool awhile back using a whole world map, but the resulting scale was still a bit coarser than the existing Euro map's scale; if I were to give that another shot I'd have to enlarge the Old World and shrink the Americas & polar regions, while also trying to decide whether to modify (junk) the Mercator projection that excessively distorts said polar regions.

Found an old thread where someone said they somehow got a map bigger than the default limits working-not sure how, nor if it could be loaded into the editor. He didn't elaborate, and the topic was quietly dropped. <shrug>

[steelwarrior]

Hey thanks for the feedback - really looking forward to the Europe map - much success and thanks for your effort...