Where are the fleets?

[Random]

Hi
Started a new 4-Person game as France when lo and behold, noted that virtually all Entente capital ships had vanished and the navies consist solely of a handful of light forces.

See attached screen shot of the entire British Home Fleet in the Early August military phase; HMS Iron Duke and three destroyer units. This is the only battleship on the Entente side, all others have vanished.

Early August save files are attached. No capital ships arrive in August or September turns either.

Any insights as to what's happening will be welcome. Thanks in advance.

[calvinus]

Never seen that before!
Have you split the fleets into smaller stacks???
I'll see your save, but I really have no idea how you got such a result!

[calvinus]

I examined your save and I can say that also most of German naval squadrons have disappeared. They are physically not present in your save. The only reason could be thay have been destroyed/sunk...

What happens if you start a new game?

[calvinus]

I see you are in the Military Phase of Early August of 1914, so no battle could have take place. So I started a 4-players campaign twice. The first time I did not delivered the ships to Turkey, the second time I delivered. Nothing happaned irregular, the fleets never disappeared. Now I'm really puzzled!

[Random]

Also, from the save you can see that the French and Italian fleets are also decimated the same way. The save was filed before any movement or player actions of any kind.

Just as a test I started a new 4-Person game as Germany and the German fleet consisted of Von der Tann, Blucher and destroyer units only.

Something must be corrupted somewhere but which file I wonder?

All the armies seem fine and the air units are where they should be so what is seen here is really odd.

Thanks for looking into this.

[Random]

If anyone cares, problem found. Made a couple of minor changes to a few ships in the units.csv file and the result is the elimination of most (but curiously not all) dreadnaughts, battleships and cruisers. This included ships with modded data fields and those (the vast majority) without.

This is not the result of a formatting error since what was done involved merely changing data within the existing fields using M$ Excel.

Have sent a detailed PM to Calvinus on the issue.

It would appear that the .csv files in the data folder cannot be edited by owners without succumbing to the hated Laws of Unintended Consequences in unforeseeable ways.

[calvinus]

The file can be modded for sure, we changed it hundreds of times!

Perhaps you did some mistake when saving the CSV format (wrong column ';' separator, wrong CR/LF row separator...).

This made the CSV file corrupted........

[Random]

The file can be modded for sure, we changed it hundreds of times!

Perhaps you did some mistake when saving the CSV format (wrong column ';' separator, wrong CR/LF row separator...).

This made the CSV file corrupted........

Pretty sure it wasn't a seperator error since these generally seem to result in a CTD during loading. Perhaps it was the older version of Excel (from Office 2000) that I used and maybe M$ WordPad from Win XP might have been better?

Thanks for looking at this.

[calvinus]

It's better you try modding the file using a text editor, provided the infos are not corrupted.

[Random]

That worked, thanks.

Using WordPad as text editor I edited the units.csv file successfully and it works so M$ Office 2000 Excel was corrupting the file somehow. I still find it odd that the errors extended to units that were not edited but still prevented them from appearing in the game.

As an experiment I modded one ship attribute using Excel and doing so eliminated virually all battleships from all nations when starting a new game. Strange.

Anyway from my end this problem is solved and a very public Thank You Very Much to Calvinus for your help and advice.

I have attached the edited (and corrupted) units.csv file if you are interested. There is no edited .xls file since Excel saves in .csv format - supposedly.

C-

[calvinus]

I used WinDiff to check the differences and I see that you Excel totally corrupts the names between quotas...

Examles:

"GER_name" becomes "Ger_name

The closing quota is missing!

That's why the file is "corrupted".

[Panama Red]

A question: Just what did feel that you needed to edit in the naval files to improve the game ???

[Random]

A question: Just what did feel that you needed to edit in the naval files to improve the game ???

Fair question.

Small things but the devil is in the details and interpretation of history, particularly on the technical side is subjective.

Some spelling errors in RN ship names, WW1G names vice accepted English spelling:
Eirin vice Erin, Ducan vice Duncan, Queen Elisabeth vice Queen Elizabeth, Bellorophon vice Bellerophon

A few issues with how guns were rated so for example the 8 x 15" on Hood are rated as 11 but exactly the same main armament in the QE's is rated as 10. There are a couple of similar gunnery anomolies.

If I could I would remove torpedoes from everything larger than a light cruiser, as it is I have modded the torpedo table so that they are essentally useless at medium range in the hope of reducing the seemingly inflated strength of battleships. It remains to be seen how this works out and I am keeping an open mind.

Overall, given the scale of the game I have very few issues with the values of the naval units themselves. However, I still believe that overall the naval combat system is flawed in that it places too much wieght on the big-gun and not enough on the mine and torpedo (except for the exaggerated effect of battleship torpedoes at medium and short ranges on combat results).

Please do not misunderstand, those aspects of the naval war in the game that I dislike are based upon my interpretation of machine-age naval warfare; the developers merely assessed the available data differently and came to different conclusions, as was their job. Nothing here game breaking but still potentially irritating to one steeped in a particular viewpoint of WW1 naval technology and doctrines.

Cheers

[Panama Red]

Are you going to post your modded naval files in the the WW1 mod section once you have them where you want them ???

That way everybody else can use them if they want these items "fixed" too.

[Mowers]

Are you going to post your modded naval files in the the WW1 mod section once you have them where you want them ???

That way everybody else can use them if they want these items "fixed" too.

Yes, please share them once you are done.

[Random]

Of course I will be glad to share but there are still issues and hopefully the next official patch can correct those nagging spelling errors noted above (and below). For some reason correcting the spelling of some ship units work while editing those of others causes them not to show up when a new game is started. I do not know why and have not yet discovered a fix.

For example correcting the Ducan old battleship unit to the correct Duncan results in the disappearance of the entire unit when starting a new game. Same thing happened when changing Brittania to the correct Britannia although correcting Bellorophone Bellerophon and Zeelandia to Zealandia worked fine.

None of my edits have been extensively tested and thanks to the laws of unintended consequences I suspect correcting the name of Queen Elizabeth will need to be carried over to all applicable scenario Reinforcement.csv files for the ship to show up later but again, this has not been tested yet. There may well be other issues with editing unit names that I might be missing.

I am reluctant to post edited files that might do others more harm than good but if anybody wants them as is send me a PM and we'll work something out. Otherwise I will post no modded game files in the Forum until I am happy that they should not break anything in other peoples installations.

C-

[Panama Red]

Thank you. This is why I said "when you get the files where you want them".

At this point, it sounds like the files are not quite where you want them, and still need to work on them some more.

[calvinus]

Of course I will be glad to share but there are still issues and hopefully the next official patch can correct those nagging spelling errors noted above (and below). For some reason correcting the spelling of some ship units work while editing those of others causes them not to show up when a new game is started. I do not know why and have not yet discovered a fix.

For example correcting the Ducan old battleship unit to the correct Duncan results in the disappearance of the entire unit when starting a new game. Same thing happened when changing Brittania to the correct Britannia although correcting Bellorophone Bellerophon and Zeelandia to Zealandia worked fine.

None of my edits have been extensively tested and thanks to the laws of unintended consequences I suspect correcting the name of Queen Elizabeth will need to be carried over to all applicable scenario Reinforcement.csv files for the ship to show up later but again, this has not been tested yet. There may well be other issues with editing unit names that I might be missing.

I am reluctant to post edited files that might do others more harm than good but if anybody wants them as is send me a PM and we'll work something out. Otherwise I will post no modded game files in the Forum until I am happy that they should not break anything in other peoples installations.

C-

DO NOT CHANGE the unit TAGS. They are the unique indentifiers used throughout all the game, so if you change the Tag, the unit disappears. Change the names, not the tags....

[Random]

DO NOT CHANGE the unit TAGS. They are the unique indentifiers used throughout all the game, so if you change the Tag, the unit disappears. Change the names, not the tags....

Ahhh! Thank you for this.