I can't understand in 10th scenario we have Grouchy forces?
There's a chance for non-historical variants to keep the player guessing, and to provide replay value. What is fun about knowing exactly how the battle will play out every time?
mcaryf - If you're going to be editing the scenario, you can remove Grouchy all together if you like. I can show you how if you are willing.
Nevertheless, I'm thinking of decreasing the chances of his arrival in the next patch. For him to show up twice in a row for you is too much for comfort.
Last edited by Little Powell on Fri Jan 29, 2016 12:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
I can't understand in 10th scenario we have Grouchy forces?
There's a chance for non-historical variants to keep the player guessing, and to provide replay value. What is fun about knowing exactly how the battle will play out every time?
mcaryf - If you're going to be editing the scenario, you can remove Grouchy all together if you like. I can show you how if you are willing.
Nevertheless, I'm thinking of decreasing the chances of his arrival in the next patch. For him to show up twice in a row for you is too much for comfort.
Thank you for your offer to help with advice on creating a variant scenario.
I have actually created one with a reasonable although not 100% accurate OOB. I have made it so that Grouchy appears in the SE rather than NE so it is easier to ignore him if that is what you want to do he also only appears 50% of the time.
Unfortunately my lack of experience with modding SOW games means that I made quite a few mistakes particularly in my cobbled together OOB resulting in a lot of CTD's. I am hoping that I have fixed most of those now by reading the log file from the Editor. However, my latest variant has had a CTD after about 2 hours game time. I notice in the SOW log that there are enormous numbers of Language tag not found IDS resting reports and perhaps the game got overwhelmed by these. Can you advise what fault or omission is causing this?
If the scenario eventually works you would be welcome to have it as an alternative to the historically weak standard one.
A couple of other points - whilst the AI in theory is supposed to benefit from owning objective points such as LEFT and RIGHT as far as I can see it makes no great effort to earn points thereby. An assiduous human player on the other hand can build up tens of thousands of points by occupying Objectives. I think this needs to be changed in the scenario and I am experimenting with a wider radius and smaller troop values for LEFT and RIGHT. I am not sure how to tell what points the AI has earned - is that reported in one of the dump or log files?
In an earlier thread you or someone told me that building damage is accumulated based on the maximum kills value for artillery. I understand the logic of that but it does not entirely work because the 12lb cannon is only given a maximum kill of 2. The logic I suppose being that the Allies typically used two rank lines so one cannon ball takes out 2 men and the muddy ground prevented ricochets. One of the big mistakes that Napoleon and his generals made was their failure to use their heavy guns to batter down the walls and gates to buildings such as Hougoumonmt. You have effectively enshrined that error into the game and made Howitzers effectively the weapon of choice versus buildings. It is what happened but not what should have happened!
Are there any plans to make a restricted zone where reinforcements are due to arrive? Whilst I was experimenting with my mod I had both Grouchy and Ziethen's 1st Corps arrive in the same area (historically right for Ziethen but wrong for Grouchy of course). The net result was an almighty skirmish with all the troops intermingled on arrival! I had also pushed Lobau further East as many historians think he should have gone, IRL he waited for 2 hours for the expected Prussian arrival! The Prussians also arrived in the middle of my Lobau deployment!
I must say I have really enjoyed my first go at modding your scenario and I hope to get better at it. I think Battleground's "Prelude to Waterloo" was the first commercial war game I ever modded so I have fond memories of Napoleonic OOB's.
Prelude to Waterloo was a great idea and it linked into the Battlefront game Waterloo so you could preserve the surviving OOB's between the two games. The graphics were of their time and the AI passable. I worked with another modder who called himself Marbot to try to create something like the Campaign Game we have in SOW. SOW is of course massively superior in terms of visual image and the ability to get into the code. I have been having a very interesting few days playing around with the various files that come with the editor. I do think the game is fantastic and you can have a lot of fun with it already but substantial areas covered by the files do not appear to be implemented yet. For example I played around with Fatigue values in the State spreadsheet because I wanted to prevent artillery from firing all day without penalty. I found adjusting some values made absolutely no difference so I assume those entries are just place holders for some future coding.
A more serious weakness particularly for the British is that the Shrapnel Routines also seem to be absent or ineffectual. However, I am working on a way round that using some of the elements that do work. I will not say more about that as I am hoping to release a scenario that might give those wanting to play as the French a bit of a surprise!
I have been testing my all day battle scenarios with a much more accurate OOB and I hope to publish that within a few days but I would like people to use my Artillery Mod with it so I need to finalise that first.
If I remember the original announcement of SOWWL, they were going to try and have some flavor of the full campaign. I envisioned QB, Ligny, Waterloo and/or Wavre.
Perhaps Ligny will be a future release and the SDK for map making would allow us to create the smaller battles like QB and Wavre.
Or better yet the full operational area is done in the campaign engine that shipped with SOWWL.
Either way it would be fun to play QB and Ligny, on the same map (that might be too large for the game engine or memory constraints) and then port those results to Waterloo and Wavre.
If I remember the original announcement of SOWWL, they were going to try and have some flavor of the full campaign. I envisioned QB, Ligny, Waterloo and/or Wavre.
