this is a sequel to the Gizmotron user-mod for Axis and Allies. featuring new types of weather & terrain. new, larger territory maps in skirmish mode. new experience ranks and bonuses (regiments improve up to 2000 exp points). 100+ special ops, new water-based units like cruisers and submarines (with torpedo attacks). nations included are Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, Communist China, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, India (Allied), Indian National Army (Axis), Iran, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Mongolia, Nationalist China, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovak Republic (Axis), South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, the United States, Yugsolavia, and the Yugoslav Partisans more nations and territories available for WW2 mode, see images for details.
just did a test run of a revised Midway mission for Japan. it's been a pretty difficult slog just getting started. now that we've changed the battleship code it's possible for US battleships on every corner of the map to bombard anywhere on Midway Island. to make matters worse artillery bunkers are now capable of long-range bombardment as well.
my first Corps disappeared quickly to a combined artillery bunker/battleship barrage. I had to send out a half-dozen recon flights to figure out who the offending enemy ship was. then I'd concentrate all of my destroyers, cruisers, and battleships on killing off the offending enemy vessel. this process repeated itself several times.
by the time this screen capture was taken I had just killed off my third enemy battleship. the AI is much better at using long-ranged naval gunpower than I expected. although it's not too eager to bombard enemy ships-- the AI will gleefully reduce your Corps HQ and division tents to smouldering ash piles. these screen shots are intended to show the new great increased striking range of battleships. JPN easily has the most powerful battleship in the game. it can strike with 260 points of blast damage per turret and reach out an incredible 420 range units.
naval cannon gun ranges are calculated by the simple factor of maximum range in kilometers divided by 100. rate of fire is based on historical figures as much as I could find.
Sounds like one hell of a battle! I am liking that naval ships have longer ranges. Will make them more useful in providing support inland.
By the way, speaking of naval ships... Will you be including Coastal Batteries in this mod? I really liked them in your previous mod and really appreciated them being able to fire on naval ships.
yeah, the coastal batteries are still there. I'll be adjusting their attack values and ranges. will be using the same basic formula that I've been using on artillery units.
originally I tried using the same method for battleships that I had used for regular artillery-- but then I found that the Yamato had attack values of 2600 for each turret-- and things gut ugly really fast!
I had to tone down the naval guns to make the game more playable. it wasn't really fair to have the battleship flatten a Corps HQ with a single volley. yeah, it's plenty believable--but it makes for a lot of very short and unsatisfying games!
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Great! Glad that your balancing out the Naval Guns, Would not want them too OP.
By the way what's that small island to the right of the main island on the minimap? looks like a heavy enemy presence is there.
this is just a revised version of the original Midway SP campaign map. the islands of Midway consisted of a larger island and a smaller island. there's actually a much larger enemy presence on the larger of the two islands-- it's just I 'discovered' the enemy presence on the smaller island first. I had to find that first battleship-- and it was sunk to the east of that smaller island.
Question. What do you guys plan to do to make each nations naval units different? From my reading and research, the russians should have the worst ships with the germans close, the britsh having better AA, the japanese have powerful but very fragile ships.
I'm surprised you would think the British would have better AA after all of the ships they lost to both German and Japanese airpower.
I never said that better aa meant aircraft wouln't be able to sink them, just that the armaments of their ships had marginally better weapons to defend against planes. Besides, Even 4 torpedo biplanes managed to sink the bismark without a single loss.
work in progress. open to suggestions.
the problem is coming up with something universally applicable. I can't use the same formula on battleships that I use on cruisers or destroyers... at least not yet. the naval units truly break the power curve of the game if I make any sort of attempt to be systematic.
we obviously don't want the Yamato having an attack value of 2600 per shell. (this is what the attack value would be if I used the current artillery unit formula).
the problem then becomes if all naval units are scaled in relationship to each other some units become worthless. namely destroyers. so battleships require a bit of 'nerfing' in order to make the game work.
I'll have to produce a spreadsheet with all of the naval units in the game first. then I can produce a min/max set of values and build everything around that. (this is what I did with aircraft speeds)
this will definitely NOT happen before the open-beta test patch gets released. right now, the project is big enough, where I feel like we need some eager beta-testers to help us sort out some of the ugly details. with 20 factions and thousands of units to look over-- it's more efficient to get more people in on the testing process.
for better or worse, I'm determined to post our incomplete mod online by the end of the month. the final version is still ideally going to get released next fall.
Personally I think the yamato shouldn't have been the main jpn BB in the game in the first place. Considering balance, I think fire control should be added in if not already. IRL, the US and Britian had fire control systems that allowed them to accurately range in and fire against targets while the other nations had to fire a range shot first before firing a battery. This could be put in the game as ROF. I'l write more on carriers later.
some of these should be simple fixes
rate of fire can be adjusted by giving certain turrets longer reset times... in addition to the usual rate of fire.
ranging shots aren't built into the game mechanics-- so can't really do that. I took a reskinned Bismark and it's standing in for the Nagato class. the idea was to only have the Yamato for the best upgraded armies in the WW2 game. can't say that I've implemented that change just yet-- but that was the plan.
Might be cool if you made it a tech that could be researched on the battleship.
Simple fix to that, assuming that all of the battleships have a large attack value like that using the arty formula, would be to divide by a set factor (20 or 40 would be best) or to find a way to 'nerf' their accuracy, smaller splash damage, EXTREMELY low rate of fire, or possibily creating a new type of damage (not sure if this is possible in the coding world) and have units resistant to it (to represent how inaccurate precision bombardment is, most of it is guess-work.
Weather penalties, I think you've said before(?) would be nearly impossible to implement. Though it would be nice if, say it were raining, you could make the seas 'choppy' and reduce the accuracy of the ship's main guns.
the insane accuracy of artillery has always bothered theharkonnen and I. about two weeks ago I noticed that in the Projectile tgi files there is a category named "ProjectileComponent". it has projectile speed, projectile type, and projectile spread.
I changed the projectile spread on rockets to 10. this produced animation effects where rockets dispersed over a much larger area than in the original game. some of them even sailed wildly off target. unfortunately, I don't have any concrete evidence that this influences attack values. it has taken rocket trucks noticeably longer to destroy enemy buildings and units-- so I think we managed to find a solution.
creating new types of damage is possible-- but I'd have to change all of the unit templates for something like this. I created a 'blade' attack so that bayonets could no longer destroy bunkers.
as far as making 'choppy seas'-- that would be a specific terrain property. creating a 'rough seas' terrain is something I could do after the test patch gets released. we've changed Dense Jungle terrain so that it inflicts sustained damage on all units-- it means you can't leave your units in dense jungle for very long or they lose most of the health. leaving them in jungle indefinitely could kill them.
we could do the same thing with rough seas-- maybe even have it so that there's a health penalty and that certain stretches of water prohibit amphibious landings because of the health penalties. so, yeah, I might be able to do that later this spring.
And I would be more than happy to help test the mod. Maybe release among a select few people first (email the file to them?) and have them look for bugs that way you can post about what to expect to the general public downloading it from this website. Would possibly reduce the amount of gray hairs you'd get from reading the comments about things you already knew about and have yet to find a way to fix.
in compressed form the mod is about a gigabyte... so posting it here seems more realistic than trying to email it to a bunch of people.
I've found that people tend to not read other people's comments and say stuff that's already been said. I'm pretty acclimated to that.
I didn't realize that the Gizmotron Mod only worked for the English version until about 10 months after release-- because nobody knew what the problem was! I didn't even think about international versions.
current plan is to post a series of pictures here and include the URLs in the Read Me. people can paste the URL bug report link into their browser and make comments as needed.
there would be one link for infantry, airborne, mechanized, armor, buildings, regiments, maps, etc. this way people could report specific types of bugs at specific locations. doubt people will actually get on board with that. so I'll check the comments section at the download page as well.
I had hoped to use the Axis & Allies forums as I did with the Gizmotron Mod-- but we didn't get a lot of feedback there-- and those forums are on half-hearted life support right now-- which is too bad, because it was tremendously helpful for us early on. we still have a lot of our mod discussions online there for people who want to try doing their own work.
And - totally unrelated sorrynotsorry- have you heard any word about people buying the servers or at least paying to have them back up? I know a few of the veteran players like Ike and Horse were talking about it on the AA forms, but the conversation just ended abruptly without anyone giving a definite answer as to if they were.
Now the related bit - *if* and a very large *IF*- the servers do come back up, can players with the mod player with those without? You've said you weren't sure about LAN gameplay early on in the mod's announcement and I dunno if you'd tested it (somehow) or found another way to confirm if or if not.
I've never played Axis & Allies online so I honestly do not know. I do know that one of the players who gave me feedback on the Gizmotron played the game against his brother on LAN servers (in Europe, I think Romania, it's been awhile). so, based on that, I'm pretty sure people can play it on LAN against each other.