Credibility of the events

[vonfriedman]

1 - The admiral in charge of the USN, which has a large part of the fleet in the Caribbean, is proposed to try to take control of Cuba. He replies yes, but instead Cuba ends up in the hands of the Japanese, who apparently don't even have a single ship in the area.

2 - Since the first months of the war, the USA landed in Tonkin and then annihilated the entire French South Asia fleet. The enemy asks for peace, which is granted, despite the contrary opinion of the USNavy, without border changes: not even Tonkin is therefore acquired by the USA.

Are these two cases of bugs?

[mapron01]

Not really. The game just needs to improve it's peace deals and events, imo. It is entirely possible to ccomplete crush every last fleet your enemy has in a war and still got not get more than a mere 6 points in the peace deal.

[dorn]

The peace treaty is not only between your and enemy navy but between you and enemy nations. As land combat is practically abstracted completely, you can get nothing even if navy is victorious. This simulates a lot of things included that navy is can be not enough important in some wars.

[vonfriedman]

For a game event to be credible, an analogous historical event would be required.
In case 2 I didn't find any. The failure of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915-16 might seem similar, but in that case the Allied fleet had suffered heavy losses and - unlike Case 2 - there were more important fighting fronts elsewhere.

[abclark]

Sept 5, 2022 0:19:24 GMT -6 vonfriedman said:

For a game event to be credible, an analogous historical event would be required.
In case 2 I didn't find any. The failure of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915-16 might seem similar, but in that case the Allied fleet had suffered heavy losses and - unlike Case 2 - there were more important fighting fronts elsewhere.

There are a huge amount of "almost" instances in world history. Just because something didn't happen doesn't mean it couldn't have.

If Hood hadn't blown up, any time a wargamer revisiting the battle of Denmark Straight had the (in OTL) historical result they would say "Oh, well that didn't happen to a single capital ship in WWII, so that's not a credible result."

Some of the in game events come out rather far fetched, but they really just need refining, not total replacement.

[vonfriedman]

Even if the Hood had not blown up, in WWII it was still credible that battleships could blow up (see Barham after torpedoing or Roma hit by two remote-controlled bombs)

[jwsmith26]

Sept 4, 2022 0:58:07 GMT -6 vonfriedman said:

1 - The admiral in charge of the USN, which has a large part of the fleet in the Caribbean, is proposed to try to take control of Cuba. He replies yes, but instead Cuba ends up in the hands of the Japanese, who apparently don't even have a single ship in the area.

2 - Since the first months of the war, the USA landed in Tonkin and then annihilated the entire French South Asia fleet. The enemy asks for peace, which is granted, despite the contrary opinion of the USNavy, without border changes: not even Tonkin is therefore acquired by the USA.

Are these two cases of bugs?

Regarding situation 2, from the description provided it does not appear that Tonkin had been captured by the USA when the war ended. An invasion that is still ongoing at the conclusion of a war is simply ended with the original owner retaining control.

This seems like the correct way to handle that situation, after all the game does not know if you have one battalion desperately holding onto a tiny beachhead or if the enemy is almost completely defeated. Either way, if you have not wrested complete control of the possession from the enemy by the time the war ends the enemy retains control.

The first example does seem strange enough that it could be a bug.

[vonfriedman]

I do not understand, however, why "my" government agreed to conclude the peace by withdrawing its troops from Tonkin, when the French colonies of the Southeast were now isolated from the motherland and the US fleet dominated that sea.
I understand, however, that this game cannot be asked for more than it can give and that it is already very, very satisfying.

[cwemyss]

Sept 10, 2022 10:57:49 GMT -6 vonfriedman said:

I do not understand, however, why "my" government agreed to conclude the peace by withdrawing its troops from Tonkin, when the French colonies of the Southeast were now isolated from the motherland and the US fleet dominated that sea.
I understand, however, that this game cannot be asked for more than it can give and that it is already very, very satisfying.

Could be any number of reasons.... leading industrialists were losing profits and pressured the government. The army got its ass kicked somewhere. French spies threatened to expose the president's illicit affair. Congress changed hands. You name it.

There's literally a thousand different explanations that make your fleet's dominance of the South China Sea irrelevant.

[vonfriedman]

"Thinking badly makes you sin, but often you get it right", as an Italian Catholic politician of the twentieth century used to say.
In this vein, after several games played as the USA, I'm starting to think that the game simulates a "politically correct" USA, always tending towards peace, quite different from the one that ended WW2 asking for unconditional surrender of its enemies.

[TheOtherPoster]

I share vonfriedman frustration at the lack of explanations for an unexpected and illogical bad peace deal. As cwemyss said there are 1000s of possible reasons we could think of. To me it would make a more enjoyable experience if, after a bad peace deal is signed by our politicians, we receive a message in the lines of "French spies threatened to expose the president's illicit affair" or "leading industrialists were losing profits and pressured the government into agreeing a peace deal with the enemy"

Maybe RTW having a list of these kind of events and showing one of them at random when the bad peace deal is agreed?

Just a thought

[JagdFlanker]

i'm sure most people don't like/feel guilty for doing this, but i always save before going to the next turn, and if i don't like how the turn resolves (bad peace deal, badly generated battle or bad result) i close the game and re-do the turn since each turn is completely randomly generated

treat this game like a sandbox and have fun with it and you'l enjoy playing the game in the long term

[golingarf]

Individually, events like this can be rationalized - just like the weird battle setups, the random losses to mines at the end of a battle, and the senseless peace deals. Things like that can happen and do. Collectively, because there is no real way to control the probability of weird events, and because those events are often (usually?) decisive to the outcome of the game, there is no sane way to play RTW without save-scumming. (And I'm very sorry to say that because I deeply hate save-scumming.) It's like it gives you the illusion of a strategy game, but what really matters is the random number generator and there's not anything you can do about it. You are just building ships and watching random events which have a tenuous connection if any to what you did in the game. It's not a bug per se, it's just how the game is.

[dorn]

As it is real life even today, just look at Russia and Ukraine.

Game simulates in abstracted way a lot of changes which historically were done. Some events may seem less appropriate for certain nations however it does not mean impossible.

And a lot of battles you face seems you are put into impossible odds however this was not completely uncommon in real life too. From 1944 almost all battles (probably all) Japanese faced has impossible odds, still they fought.

[golingarf]

Sept 22, 2022 11:38:39 GMT -6 dorn said:

As it is real life even today, just look at Russia and Ukraine.

Game simulates in abstracted way a lot of changes which historically were done. Some events may seem less appropriate for certain nations however it does not mean impossible.

And a lot of battles you face seems you are put into impossible odds however this was not completely uncommon in real life too. From 1944 almost all battles (probably all) Japanese faced has impossible odds, still they fought.

Except it does not simulate those events. Let's at least be frank about what it does: it pulls random numbers. Yes, all the events and battles can be rationalized as plausibly occurring. What I am saying is there's nothing connecting what you do in the game (or even what's going on in the game world outside of your control) to whether such events occur. So it's not a "simulation."