The Spanish Civil War (McMonkey vs Jerec)

[Jerec]

Well, considering that you've taken Bilbao, Madrid, Cartagena and Valencia, you've won according to the conditions. I know for a fact that I don't have the capacity to retake any of those. So if this is becoming too much of a slog, we can call it quits now if you like. Or you can punch holes in my lines 'til the bitter end.

If only for the sake of shortening the turn, I agree that the number of units should be decreased.

No news on the frontlines.

[McMonkey]

If you want to call time on this scenario that's fine with me. I think we have enough data now to make the final adjustments. It is clear to me that the scenario is out of balance in favour of the Nationalists, but I don't think it would take too much adjustment to strike a good balance. I think the Nationalists should have a bit of an advantage, but the Sun Tzu wonder is way too powerful. I would also like to add more defendable terrain and pre placed trenches from the start to make building defence lines a lot easier. I think that reducing the quantity of event produced units in big lumps (such as the ones in Burgos that allowed me to take Madrid) would help. Thanks for you excellent input and ideas, it really has been invaluable. Until you play you just don't know how things will pan out. If it is Ok by you I will take a look through your saves to see what you were building etc... Perhaps when we next play we should swap sides. I promise not to beef up the Republicans too much to give myself an advantage

[McMonkey]

I have found a problem. It doesn't look like I can change the terrain underneath cities using the cheat menu. It may be possible via hex editing, but that is a big ask for someone. I experimented with using the airbase terrain as stackable, but this will only work in pre flight scenarios. I don't want to have to destroy every city, change the terrain and then replace it. That would take forever! Any ideas?

Do units with the Ignore city walls ability also ignore fortresses? I'm wondering if I should remove the ability and increase stats a little to compensate.

[McMonkey]

I have also found another MASSIVE mistake. It appears that the Republic was missing most of its events generated units from the events file! No Tanks and no International Brigades!!! I don't know how I missed this. I thought I checked everything before the playtest. Might explain a few things about the balance of play!

I think I will keep the ground units at the same levels and half the amount of aircraft.

[McMonkey]

Right then. Techumseh has explained to me how to change terrain using engineers. Should have thought of it myself really!

I was thinking about the system to use. My initial thought was:

Trenches +100% terrain bonus & +50% fortress bonus = +150%

Cities with rivers +50% have trenches +100% =+150%

Cites without rivers use a new city terrain (replacing the Farming terrain) which has +150% terrain bonus

The only problem with this is it will make cities the prime defensive position as they can also have the AA Battery improvement, whilst trenches outside will not have this advantage. Do you think this will lead to most troops moving into fortress cities? Should trenches still be 50% better than cities?

[Jerec]

Sorry about vanishing for a day or two there, RL is squeezing me more and more frequently as summer rolls on; I hadn't checked back since your first post about agreeing to call it quits.

According to the civilopedia, fortresses double defense.

So our baseline is grassland, giving a 100% defense bonus.

We've already discussed terrain bonuses and the implications a bit here.

Very interesting idea, suggesting that trenches in the open should have a better defensive bonus than cities. In my thinking, this is comparing the effectiveness of entrenchments dug by professional Engineers to that of urban sprawl.

Going by this, I would say small cities should be equivalent to grassland in defense. No extra advantage because there's no significant extra cover for troops to hide in.

But as soon as you hit a certain city size, there's going to be house-to-house fighting, like in World War 2. And the casualties in a large city could be astronomical in terms of ground gained if both sides were stubborn. Stalingrad, for example. So I would suggest picking a certain city size (6? 8?) and giving anything above that a small defensive bonus to reflect the difficulty of rooting out hostile infantry house-by-house. The victory-condition cities like Madrid should be given a slightly higher defensive bonus than ordinary larger cities because of their significance to morale and their sheer size relative to all other cities.

In relation to trenches out in the open, I would say the all city bonuses should be less than the trench terrain bonus, except for victory-condition cities, which should have an equal bonus.

Just my two cents.

[McMonkey]

I agree with all of the above. I still want trenches to be the primary defence terrain when protected by AA Cannot, but cities should not be sitting ducks and the AA Battery improvement will make it more difficult for bombers to annihilate the defenders.

I have started making some of the changes, but I am pretty busy at the moment. My mother has been visiting for the past few days, then I'm off to Snowdonia to take part in a competition called the Three Peaks of Wales where my team and I will climb Snowdon, Cadair Idris and Pen-y-Fan in a day and when I get back from that I have quite an intensive job interview to do on Tuesday. I can go for weeks with nothing much happening and then everything arrives at once! Hopefully I hill have some free time to relax and work on this project from the middle of next week onwards!

[Jerec]

Good luck with it all!

[McMonkey]

Jerec,

I'm just putting the finishing touches to the updated version of SCW ToT multiplayer and I would like to start a new playtest. All the changes we discussed have been implemented, plus a lot of new ideas. Would you be interested in a rematch? No pressure if you are too busy

[Jerec]

Afraid I have to say too busy. Free time to any large degree is nil, between college classes and scrambling keeping up relationships IRL. I simply wouldn't be able to do you justice in how quickly I complete a turn, especially on the scale of SCW.

[McMonkey]

No problems. I thought I would give you first refusal as per our past games.

Would anyone else like to play me?