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25 June 1944 – the as-yet missing day Two ships captured by the Germans in the Mediterranean get written off today: torpedo boat TA-22 (ex-Italian Giuseppe Missori) crippled by USAAF air attack at Trieste and ex-French destroyer Bison (now a hulk used for deploying smokescreens) rammed and sunk by a friendly submarine at Toulon. In the Channel, frigate HMS Goodson takes a homing torpedo up the shafts from U-984 and, though towed to Portland, not repaired. 26 June 1944 Anglo-Italian frogmen sink the German-held Italian cruiser Gorizia at La Spezia using explosive charges.
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Jun 27, 2018 02:18
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| # ? May 21, 2024 01:30 |
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   Good morning Buna!  Destroyers are a menace.  So this feels good.  This, however, was suicide.  The number of C variants is increasing.  More troops die to my guns.   A poor showing over Mandalay.   It's a shame I can't bomb Buna ever day.  Those are some nice kills. (Order sorted)
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Jun 27, 2018 04:45
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Ever get the feeling of deja vu?
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Jun 27, 2018 05:01
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Greyja Vu
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Jun 27, 2018 05:46
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JCVD and the Timecops working overtime in this thread.
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Jun 27, 2018 06:16
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What is Grey hiding? 
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Jun 27, 2018 08:01
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The fact he edited the last post to put the 25th in then created a new post for the 26th?
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Jun 27, 2018 08:36
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Should I be afraid at how a cloud of two hundred fighters can only bring down one bomber?
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Jun 27, 2018 09:33
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Grey Hunter posted:The fact he edited the last post to put the 25th in then created a new post for the 26th? Oooh, he speaks about himself in third person! He's a ROYAL Croctopus.
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Jun 27, 2018 17:48
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habeasdorkus posted:Oooh, he speaks about himself in third person! He's a ROYAL Croctopus. I think you mean IMPERIAL Croctopus. Grey obviously overthrew the emperor a year or so before the game began.
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Jun 27, 2018 17:57
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RZApublican posted:I think you mean IMPERIAL Croctopus. Grey obviously overthrew the emperor a year or so before the game began. So THAT's why he was saving so many Political Points...
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Jun 27, 2018 18:00
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Link to previous update for the lazy https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3754889&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=318#post485457986 terrenblade fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Jun 27, 2018 |
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Jun 27, 2018 18:23
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Coups don't come cheap you know.
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Jun 27, 2018 18:23
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Zeroisanumber posted:I.... honestly don't remember what happens when the Allies lose oilers. I'd guess that they get replaced, but I don't know how quickly. Like pretty much everything else, they eventually end up with a ton of oilers. In my game it's February 1944 and I have more oilers than I know what to do with. The Japanese player would have to kill a lot of oilers to make a real dent (which I think Grey has done).
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Jun 28, 2018 02:10
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wedgekree posted:Should I be afraid at how a cloud of two hundred fighters can only bring down one bomber? IIRC the bombers are flying above the optimal performance altitude of the defending fighters so it is extremely difficult for them to make contact, let alone shoot one down.
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Jun 28, 2018 04:20
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  BURN!  I take my own hits as I send more troops into Manus.  My planes commit suicide again.  Down goes another Liberator.  Two suicide missions in a day. I can't stop these, as it would stop my planes from hunting other targets.  Good sub.   My subs score another kill.  Wake is populated by our friends from the 7th division again.  The Air is theirs, the land is mine.  As is the sea.
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Jun 28, 2018 04:22
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So, how many Allied troops are on Manus, Truk, and Wake if you had to make estimates?
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Jun 28, 2018 04:26
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sending up 146 fighters to own the lib(erator)s
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Jun 28, 2018 04:40
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It's almost surreal that as simplified in every way as Hearts of Iron is compared to this game you can directly order your planes in Hearts of Iron to go somewhere and have them both bomb and sweep it 100% of the time without loving up and flying halfway across the map in the wrong direction.
zetamind2000 fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Jun 28, 2018 |
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Jun 28, 2018 04:54
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RZApublican posted:It's almost surreal that as simplified in every way as Hearts of Iron is compared to this game you can directly order your planes in Hearts of Iron to go somewhere and have them both bomb and sweep it 100% of the time without loving up and flying halfway across the map in the wrong direction. As it turns out complexity and detail for the sake of complexity and detail is not always good game design! Usually the opposite, in fact.
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Jun 28, 2018 04:57
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In this case it works pretty well, I think, in simulating the difficulties in enemy ship misidentification, scouting comms issues, and how hard it was for strikes to stay coordinated and not hit the wrong target. Sweeps and land based attacks are quite accurate, you specify a target hex. It's naval attack that has all this ambiguity and chaos, which feels right. People screwed up all the time But yeah, you can't say common sense stuff like, "do not attack ships to the East, only West," which you could have done in reality. That can be frustrating.
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Jun 28, 2018 05:17
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Yeah I wouldn't say the complexity and detail are the problem so much as the UI. The minute detail can be maddening but it also shows how small decisions thousands of miles to the rear in your logistics chain or in terms of target selection on the front lines can add up to a huge difference in the war effort over time. It's when you combine that level of detail, which I do appreciate, with the terrible UI that things become frustrating. To use the example discussed recently, it's realistic that an operation to sweep/suppress/bomb an enemy airfield should be difficult for the pilots and ground crews to coordinate. What sucks is that on top of the unpredictability of the mission, it takes dozens if not hundreds of clicks to set up an air mission like that. And then when something doesn't go to plan, it's very hard to know if it's because of the simulation (fair, poo poo went wrong all the time irl) or because your bombers were set to fly at 15,000 feet but you inadvertently set your fighters to 13,000 feet so they didn't coordinate as well as they could have (bullshit).
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Jun 28, 2018 16:29
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It's definitely the lack of feedback that I find frustrating with these kinds of games - there's a dozen different settings to change, and another dozen "soft factors" that you can't directly control, and when something doesn't go the way you wanted it to, it's difficult to peg exactly what caused it.
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Jun 28, 2018 16:38
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And it's not realistic. Any real operation like that would have a whole group of command staff to plan and execute it from the commander giving the orders to his staff to the pilots getting briefed. There's no way a mistake like "We want this to be a coordinated assault, but everyone should go in at different heights for no reason" would make it through a briefing. Likewise for all the logistics and supply stuff that is so tedious. There's an entire branch of the service that would be devoted to managing that. While I understand the appeal of letting the player manually control all these things because they want very tight control of the detailed simulation, there needs to be 1) A UI capable of providing the feedback necessary to make informed decisions as efficiently as possible 2) Either default order sets or the ability to delegate the specifics of an order to the commanders. You should be able to set a command like "bomb this airfield with the available bombers at this base with fighter cover provided" and have the details execute if you don't want to specify further.
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Jun 28, 2018 17:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:sending up 146 fighters to own the lib(erator)s No operational losses for the Japanese on that turn, the 146 fighters have learned how to go up and safely land so the experience is valuable. Next they'll learn how to not get creamed by Lightnings. Maybe.
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Jun 28, 2018 19:07
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Cantorsdust posted:And it's not realistic. Any real operation like that would have a whole group of command staff to plan and execute it from the commander giving the orders to his staff to the pilots getting briefed. There's no way a mistake like "We want this to be a coordinated assault, but everyone should go in at different heights for no reason" would make it through a briefing. Yeah. And you should also definitely be able to say something like "do not enter the Australian-controlled airspace over New Guinea" and expect that order to almost always be followed. It's not like the pilots could get confused like they might when determining which island among a wide atoll to bomb, during a thunderstorm. And the excuses for not providing this kind of capability aren't credible. It would not be difficult to allow the user to select a particular pattern of hexes in which they want to do naval attack, for example, and then have the aircraft performing naval attack missions adhere to that grouping of hexes, with occasional groups slipping over into one neighboring hex during bad weather or whatnot. But never wandering eight hexes west of where you want them to, just because they have the range and you included an area eight hexes to the east. But the biggest failure is as you said the basic philosophy of hiding game mechanics from the user. Given that the dedicated user base is eventually going to reverse-engineer your game's mechanics anyway, all you accomplish by hiding mechanics is frustrating your players; you do not actually improve the game experience or something. Worse, you remove a huge potential source of QA for your game, something which directly helps you financially; making it very difficult for your users to discover mechanics that are not working as intended mostly means those mechanics will work not as intended for years. There's really just no excuse. This is part of why I've never felt tempted to buy this game (the other is the insane pricing). I'm delighted to let Grey Hunter deal with the pain and frustration and just enjoy his LPs, because I don't think I could last more than two or three days before feeling like murdering its devs for their obstinate refusal to adopt modern game development practices in the face of huge profit potential for doing so, just because. 
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Jun 28, 2018 19:21
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shockingly WITP is a bad game
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Jun 28, 2018 20:08
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27 June 1944 HMS Pink, a corvette, suffers the now-familiar homing torpedo to the stern, surviving it but not being repaired.
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Jun 29, 2018 01:20
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This game is a paramount example of 'more copmlicated does not make better' all the time. And lack of documentation, feedback, and output make it worse. Why aren't my fighters upgrading? Why aren't my airstrikes going? Just the ability to sort through thigns and figure out where teh issue lies so you can resolve it or at least quickly cross reference things readily wihtout a massive amount of tedium would probably make this game a lot, lot easier. As near as I can determine from this thread, upgrading an airframe requires you to produce X engines of specific type and Y bodies of said plane. Then ship them to an airbase/appropraite facility. Then fly in the air grou pto said appropriate facility to be upgraded. Then rebase them elsewhere. Repeat for every airgrou pfor each upgrade taht's not already based out fo somewhere. Rearming a submarine requires a matching sub HQ at a base big enough to handle it. etc. Having to manually set patrol paths for everyset of planes, two hundred ASW units, convoy escorts, etc. While I can -see- the appeal of this type of game it seems more likean exercise in.. Ongoing frustration, really of just sorting and tedium even when things are working.
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Jun 29, 2018 02:47
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  Things continue to explode off Wake.  Bloody destroyers.  Guess who's heading to Buna?  I still have work to do there.  I mis read that as Blenheim, and thought, “Whoo, that's going to piss Churchill off!”  Oh look, the Escorts killed something.   I did it! Time to mass move planes and people and start levelling this city!  Planes working in China! Who would have thought it possible! 
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Jun 29, 2018 04:17
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Woo! A new chapter opens - the Chungking chapter!
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Jun 29, 2018 04:38
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wedgekree posted:As near as I can determine from this thread, upgrading an airframe requires you to produce X engines of specific type and Y bodies of said plane. Then ship them to an airbase/appropraite facility. Then fly in the air grou pto said appropriate facility to be upgraded. Then rebase them elsewhere. Repeat for every airgrou pfor each upgrade taht's not already based out fo somewhere. To be clear: 1. Your factories have to produce the airframe for the aircraft 2. A different set of factories then have to produce the engines for the aircraft. There are multiple types of engines, though some are common across multiple aircraft, and some aircraft need more than one engine 3. There's still a third step in which your industry mates the airframe with the engine to produce a whole aircraft, and then sends the completed thing into your Aircraft Pool 4. If you're the Allies, skip directly to this step, because you don't control production, and instead whole aircraft are simply delivered into your pool at certain times, rates, and allotments 5. In order for a squadron to be able to draw aircraft from the pool, they must be placed in a base that has in excess of 20,000 supply points, or be within ferry range of an airbase that does have that many supplies. If all you want is to replace planes, then you're done by this step. 6. If you want to upgrade planes, then you need to set Player Defined Upgrades to "On/Yes", go into the squadron, and then pick the new plane type, and then order the upgrade to go through. The game at least does not make you ship the replacement/upgrade planes all the way from the factory to the front lines - the "pool" can drawn from as if it existed "everywhere", as long as you have those 20k supplies within reach.
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Jun 29, 2018 04:50
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Cool! Thanks for explaining hte process to someone who's only knowledge of this game is watching Grey's LP of it. Appreciate much! Also congrats on finally getting to hit Chunking! And you in a position where you can also bombard it with your arty or not Grey?
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Jun 29, 2018 04:57
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simplefish posted:Woo! A new chapter opens - the Chungking chapter! Chunking Chungking choice: Charnel chapter chosen
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Jun 29, 2018 05:17
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The fundamental issue with extreme level grog games like this is that ultimately in the end you are wearing a few too many hats.
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Jun 29, 2018 05:34
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wedgekree posted:Cool! Thanks for explaining hte process to someone who's only knowledge of this game is watching Grey's LP of it. Appreciate much! Yeah, I'm bombarding every day and causing 200 casualties for 70 losses a day. It still takes forever to process and I don't bother showing it.
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Jun 29, 2018 05:58
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Grey Hunter posted:Yeah, I'm bombarding every day and causing 200 casualties for 70 losses a day. It still takes forever to process and I don't bother showing it. Cool, thanks! Good luck with slowly stopping the infinitely respawning hordes.
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Jun 29, 2018 06:11
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Wake is going to be a loving spectacular diving spot in this TL. Largest artificial reef in the world and all that.
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Jun 29, 2018 19:07
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28 June 1944 The German torpedo boat Kondor, last seen damaged by bombs 15 June, is scuttled at Le Havre. USS Archerfish torpedoes escort No. 24 near Iwo Jima.
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Jun 30, 2018 00:47
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| # ? May 21, 2024 01:30 |
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Does the Yamato have enough ammo left to do any action in Buna?
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Jun 30, 2018 13:05
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