This upgrade focused on a review of China and France gameplay. These are the two most challenging countries to play, but I think they are in a state where you can have good success with them, with patience and clever play. Giving France the ability to reject Vichy, when offered by Germany, gives them a much better position, but still a very difficult one. I recommend only playing these countries after you have gained experience playing other countries. :)
A few observations on the current gameplay:
- Infantry and militia factory costs seem too high. Expect reductions in costs.
- Air power seems a little too strong against ground troops, this will probably be tuned back a bit.
- Air-to-Air combat doesn't seem deadly enough. This will probably be increased some.
- Naval interception chance seems a bit too low and will be increased a bit.
- AI use of Navies is not where I want it to be. After air/ground gameplay is more tuned, expect the AI to make better use of their navies
- AI is producing too many air units vs. ground units.
Note: These are things that I'm aware of and will be tuning. But expect them to occur over several updates
In this Update:
New Functionality:
- Upgrade All Units. Before, you could only upgrade one unit at a time. You can still do that, but when you click the Upgrade Button, there is a new checkbox on the confirmation message box that you can "check" to upgrade ALL eligible units in the selected army, air fleet or naval fleet (if sufficient resources are available).
- The German player was always given option to create Vichy, but the French player was not. Now the player is always given a choice whether playing France or Germany.
- When convoys are successfully attacked, the attacking country is now identified in the message.
Tuning
- Increased Free France factory capacity slightly
- Increased German AI aggressiveness against France
- Reduced number of factory points to build new factory
- Adjusted food production rates further
- AI will cancel trades if it is short of resources it traded.
Changes:
- Previously, if a battle contestant had very low morale, the battle would end before it actually started. Now, at least one round of battle will be fought before combat can break off.
- Units with low morale can no longer initiate an attack. The average morale of a stack must now be at least 50% to attack.
- Convoys with no coal or fuel now can move 1 region per turn (like ships can) and incur some damage. Previously, they could not move. In low resource situations, this was very difficult to recover from.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed mouser hover and unit selection in Information Panel Unit List. Sometimes selection did not pick up the correct unit.
- China not allowed to move into UK Territory as a planned move until UK and Japan officially at war.
- Game would let you build a Naval Base in an inland (no sea access) region. Game now checks if the region has sea access before allowing you to build a base there.
- AI Patrol Logic was sometimes stealing ships being sent to other theaters as reinforcements.
- Manpower was not getting populated correctly for Vichy France or Free France when Vichy is created.
- France started with 1 too many espionage teams active
- Fixed bug with colony regions not all transferring properly to Vichy or Free France
- When convoys ran out of coal, the shortfall was not shown in the Production Screen Usage Row, so you couldn't tell how much more coal you actually need to resolve the shortage. The shortfall amount is now included in the usage row.
- Estimated usage was being double counted in some cases, on the Production Screen Resource Grids.
- There have been some reports of the game crashing when screen resolution was changed in the Options Screen. I believe this was caused by not exiting the game when changing resolutions. The game did warn you to exit but didn't force this. The game will now warn you that a resolution change will require you to restart the game, and after you acknowledge the message, the game will exit. The new resolution should be used by the game when you start it again. I think this will resolve the issues that have been reported. If you still have an issue, please use the bug report link to report it.
- Surrendering countries' trade deals, espionage, production and research weren't being cancelled properly (except for Vichy)
- Unit Report didn't show your country's units when they were located in allied regions in some situations
- Fixed bug where AI was trading for resources it didn't need