Battle odds

[phoenix]

I throw this out for discussion, thinking in terms of how it might be improved on for later development of the game. Fantastic game. I'm really enjoying it. Thanks so much to Fredrik! My point is this - I'm finding that around 90% of the battles I end up fighting are basically decided by which forces the AI decides to put into the mix. This assumes a kind of basic competency with the battles, I suppose (I certainly have no more than a basic competency....) otherwise you might make silly errors and lose despite an advantage (as I do, sometimes...). But usually you drop into the battle screen and it's (obviously) either you have a disadvantage, an advantage or it's more or less even. Only when it's the latter, or a slight disadvantage can my fighting skills (poor as they are) really come into play. Sometimes the enemy has a very significant advantage and I just turn and run (and that produces a favourable 'draw' result), providing I can outrun the enemy or have a significant starting separation (a propos of which I have noticed that re-entering a battle from a save sometimes repositions you right on top of the enemy ships!) For me, at the moment, it feels as if the times when battles are even or I'm at a workable disadvantage are only 10% of battles, roughly. Maybe this is accurate, as a reflection of reality? Not sure. But I would like it to be a little higher, or have more control of what goes into the fight. As I posted over in the suggestions thread, it would be great when you go to war if it could be somehow run like the SAI and RJW campaign, where you monthly choose activations etc. But that's a complicated change and upping the chances of the AI selecting an even fight would be quicker. Unless there's only me noticing this? I might be suffering from a sample bias..... Peter

[phoenix]

Should add, I've only played GB really so far, and the nations I have been fighting - France and Germany, mainly - were weaker and so there has to be a better a chance that I go into battles, especially in the North Sea, at an advantage. And that works well, and I wouldn't want to change that. It may be that if I play smaller nations I will find I am mostly more challenged in the battles?

[ccip]

I've not played Britain, but I have to say, I've been more or less very happy with the way RTW generates battles, mostly because it's always struck a balance between meeting my expectations and throwing in an element of surprise. I haven't found them unfair and I like that they've placed limits on what I would be doing with all the benefit of hindsight and player expertise. I've always paid the price of thinking that I know how a battle is going to turn out. As I see it, an SAI style campaign would be a tradeoff - more complexity, but possibly for less payoff as the pacing of campaign would slow down by several times and rather than playing out encounters you'd be playing out operations that would take longer for what's likely to be less in terms of decisive result.

Now, that's not really a problem and, if anything, a play style preference. The real problem is that for the developers, that would mean basically building a couple of different SAI-style campaigns from scratch and making sure they're all playable and balanced against each other, and that'd be a huge jump in complexity for what might in some ways break the game a bit.

There's one nagging little issue in RTW: the game is really great at what it does and puts you in the shoes of a fleet admiral. The tricky part is that it places a lot of constraints on you and tries to make sure that you're playing that role in a very particular way, according to its rules, not yours. If you're okay with that or that's how you want to play to begin with, it's great and always throws in new challenges. But in a lot of subtle ways, it's also designed to take away your freedom to have a choice in certain things, and if that's what you're looking for, it can be kind of frustrating. I think this is sort of an example of that.

[phoenix]

Not frustrated with it, CCIP - I love it. It's just that so far, mostly, the battles have gone as I've indicated above. But it's early days yet for me. As I said, I've only properly played the strongest nation in the game (at start) so maybe I should expect that at start and for the first decade or so most encounters are stacked in my favour. The element of chance is nice too, of course, and builds tension, but I would expect better naval strategists than myself to quickly get complacent playing GB. If you haven't come across this pattern then I expect it's to do with playing a very strong nation. When I have, by far, the largest Navy in the game, then it's perhaps only correct that when smaller nations dare to take me on that 90% of the time they should be outgunned.

Peter

[cleveland]

My only quibble with this game (and it's minor) is that when at war turns should go to a bi-monthly scale while retaining the same pace of operations. Wars would be shorter (calendar time wise) and ship damage would be more important (ships would be laid up longer).

I do miss some of the administrative decisions that the SAI campaign had, but this game is still great fun.

[elouda]

Jul 24, 2015 8:04:33 GMT -6 cleveland said:

My only quibble with this game (and it's minor) is that when at war turns should go to a bi-monthly scale while retaining the same pace of operations. Wars would be shorter (calendar time wise) and ship damage would be more important (ships would be laid up longer).

I do miss some of the administrative decisions that the SAI campaign had, but this game is still great fun.

Agreed that 2 week turns would be awesome, maybe also for non-wartime.

I've thought about making a map-mod that would break out the regions a little more (seperating baltic and black sea for example), but the problem becomes that as it takes '1 turn' to move between any two areas, it will seem pretty unreasonable to take that long for some of the moves. A 2 week turn would allieviate this.

[ccip]

For 2 week turns though, I think we'd also need to have more map areas - while that's not a bad thing at all either, it probably would increase the game complexity.

One simple idea that I do really like: the possibility of editing OOB before entering a battle, so that you can give orders for role and formation, reshuffle ships in line, see what units will and will not be present, choose to keep certain ships out of battle, and even maybe choose initial speed/course. You can already technically do most of that after the battle starts, just that it's more complicated and finicky since you need to do it via orders.