My comprehensive list of changes for EAW, v1.01

[Merlin]

After Multiple PBEMs, most in 1.01, Here's my condensed recommendations of changes, both listing what I believe to be bugs and general improvements which will add balance and fun to the game:

WAR PLANS
1. The NM changes for all plans across all factions need to be halved.
Right now, NM is the most precious asset players have. If we’re going to keep the current setup, at least make it so no one faction can have 20NM over the others right out of the gate.

EVENTS
1. Entry event for Hindenburg. Fires only if Russia does not enter German territory; activates in Late August unless Germany chooses Moltke, then activates in Late September instead.
It’s far too easy to just ignore Germany altogether and keep the best CP general out of the war. This flat out needs to change.
2. Armenian Genocide only fires if Russia takes its Caucasus objective.
I don’t see any better way to do it, since the incentive wouldn’t be there if Russia doesn’t advance. It would also (obviously) give Russia a reason to advance in an otherwise rather barren front.
3. Italian Concessions fixed to give regional, not diplomatic, RA to Austria, and 15% CP alignment to Italy.
Per the event tool-tip, and other reasons outlined below.
4. Italian War Goals gives 15% WE alignment to Italy. Concessions and War goals made opposing and if both are fired, the second is worth 5% less than normal. Since Concessions usually activates before War Goals, this would be interesting and encourage a more tense diplo game.
Right now there’s no pressure on either side to try to woo Italy. If the changes in 3 are coupled with the changes in 4, then the total alignment shift would be 15% CP to 30% WE for all Italian-specific events if the CP plays first. Currently, it’s 20% CP to 40% WE, no matter what, and since CP influence is 10% less than WE influence, there’ll be a larger interest despite the influence ratio remaining the same.
5. Lusitania changed to be random 2-3% chance per turn and cannot be activated before 1915. Subs and raiders do not affect chances and US alignment change reduced to WE 15%. The subsequent presence of subs and successful sinkings have one chance per turn to affect US alignment regardless of the number of ships sunk.
This and 6 absolutely need to change. Currently, as the CP you can just ignore the lost cause of Italy and drop your diplo in the US on turn one. So long as you keep your raiders (any bloody surface ships) and subs out of the Atlantic box, Lusitania will never, ever fire. Don’t fire Rape of Belgium, don’t send a diplo to Mexico, and stay away from the Atlantic Shipping Box like it has the plague. So, since the WE very much needs Italy, once they feel they can get Italy and shift their major diplo, you’ve already gotten US alignment over 90% in your favor. The U-Boat visit and election of Hughes (all but guaranteed) will keep the US out of the war until mid-1918 if they even enter at all. Both guarantee no significant US forces will ever see combat. Changing the event opens the Atlantic Shipping Box to CP raiders and subs, thus preventing an ahistorical and unintended concentration of CP raiders/subs in the Med Shipping Box. It also removes any CP incentive to delay box raiding/undersea warfare until 1917 or so.
6. Zimmerman Note has 2% chance per turn to fire regardless of CP diplo efforts in Mexico and cannot be activated before 1915. Reduced to WE 15% in effect.
Coupled with 5, this would open Mexico as a legitimate CP diplo target. The current implementation means Mexico has the Atlantic Shipping Box Plague. Understand this: I want the CP to be able to keep the US out of the war, but it should be a gamble, not a guarantee, just as it is with the Balkans and Italy.

RGDs
1. Fix Zeppelin Raids to give 1% RA to GB.
Simple bug, and needs fixing.

MAP
1. Mines get removed properly when all adjacent coastal regions are 100% MC for the occupier.
Again a bug. This was a specific issue with Calais in one of my PBEMs, but I won’t be surprised if there are a couple more. AGEOD and betas can’t check everything.
2. The CP mines bordering the two easternmost Italian coastal provinces need to be removed (Gulf of Venice sea region, I think). It's possible to surprise and destroy large portions of the Italian army in the first few turns after Italian entry and there's nothing the WE player can do to prevent it if the mines are left in place. Speaking from game experience on this one.
Self-explanatory. I just did it against the AI with traffic, so a very meticulous player could do it against another player.
3. Italy needs mines off western coastal regions. If they do go CP, you can land in Rome and deal a massive blow to the CP, not to mention other western Italian ports.
Again, self-explanatory. A CP Italy is massively vulnerable on the western coast.
4. Objective NM cities need to be introduced, worth 2-5 NM apiece. About six or so per major, one or two per minor (excepting Belgium when invasion war plans are chosen), all behind traditional fronts.
I really want to see this one. You can take half of France, half of Russia, hell, half of all the majors and all but a few key provinces of the minors and it doesn’t affect them one bit. Since articulating production for cities would be a major drain on AGEOD’s limited resources, I propose adding NM objectives to VP cities, just like CW2. An example for France would be Verdun, Sedan, Le Havre, Lyons, etc. The harder they are to take, the more they’re worth. I really think this would drastically change the way people play the game, and Russia would no longer be facing a strategic desert in Prussia. This bloody needs to happen, folks.

OOB
1. Aircraft need to be much less prevalent at start and cost much less in money and conscripts, as do their replacements.
Here’s what I’m seeing repeatedly in PBEM: One faction invests heavily in fighters, then those fighters shoot down everything in sight over the spring of 1915. It then becomes a series of compounding returns for the victor leading to 5 star squadrons which can easily hold their own against relatively equal numbers of next-gen fighters. I think if we cut down the number of targets while simultaneously increasing the accessibility of aircraft recruitment, we’ll see more aircraft, fewer 1915 Flying Circuses, and a more accessible and historical aviation game while retaining the current deadliness of air combat.

OTHER
1. Implement NM normalization events to prevent huge disparities OR remove the NM drain from war weariness. Factions should be more focused on diplo RA anyway.
I really want to see something here as well. Currently, players will do anything to prevent NM loss. Suicide-sallying from breached forts, refusing battle at any cost unless it guarantees a win, fleet-in-being tactics when they make no sense… it goes on and on. NM is the Most Precious Element in the Universe. All the while, RA gets ignored since the zero-sum game of NM simply requires you to reduce your opponent’s NM below the remaining number of turns and hold it there. Victory! In 1914! Never-mind the remaining 84 turns to get there, you just won.
2. Reduce the cost of unlocking generals.
Again, self-explanatory. SUP and MUN support units are expensive enough, not to mention the high cost of naval units from subs to destroyers to merchants, and that excludes point 3. We’ve already gotten more conscripts, so let’s smooth the curve of the single most limiting factor to army growth.
3. Fix the WE transport bug.
This is an old pet peeve of mine, but no one gave a damn when I made a thread back in 1.00. Guess what? The WE can’t do anything past 1917 because they have no transports, so everyone who ignored that thread can just give up their long-term games if they didn’t build transports. What happens is WE transports lost their entire capacity; entirely randomly, permanently, and for no known reason. I’ve tried relentlessly to track or narrow down the cause of this, but I’ve had zero success. Here’s what I know: 1) Random. Not tied to ports, nationality, mission, or destination. 2) I’ve never seen this with another faction. Knock yourselves out; I’m frustrated and give up, so fix it your damn selves, community.
4. Alter traffic rule to exclude naval units from traffic effects. This and the transport bug being fixed will free up significant WE naval assets for other uses and make the naval game more dynamic while still providing the CP with naval iniative.
I remember Pocus saying (or at least I think I do) the first is fixed, but the naval game needs a bit of love. Right now, almost every WE naval asset is tied to the boxes and there’s nothing left for patrols and interception. Fix the bugs and the naval game again becomes a contest.

[Kensai]

I already agree in principle to most/all of Merlin's suggestions. Some of his recommendations spur from our own PBEM game so I witnessed many issues first hand.

The single most important issue, in my opinion, (apart from the bugs that when found should be killed) is the NM balance. The NM is a potential game-stopper (no pun intended) as it skews too easily and in a very detrimental way. As NM affects cohesion, it affects everything. How the troops fight, when they will engage-disengage, how far they will march before getting tired, etc. A NM less than 75 is already too low to be historically accurate for 1915 and I can assure you it literally blows out of proportion any realistic marching time in less "civilised" areas, such as those around the Ottoman Empire.

I find it ridiculous I cannot march a single region in less than 15 days (even when it has a road!) and when I do it the troops have lost all their cohesion, literally arriving dead on arrival. This means that one cannot do battle in the Caucasus or the Middle East.

The other thing is indeed the fighters. The fighters are overpowered right now and in the way they accrue experience they self-reinforce their presence. The side that wins the first encounter will usually will all the rest as well (due to added experience). We need to definitely decrease the power of fighters and increase that of the reconnaissance planes. Perhaps make the air battles a little less deadly.

[Ebbingford]

Transports get changed to merchants if you send them into the shipping box. This is why they lose their transport capacity.......

[Merlin]

Transports get changed to merchants if you send them into the shipping box. This is why they lose their transport capacity.......

If so, it's neither reliable nor is it exclusive to the shipping box. I've sent transports into the shipping box to have on-station fleets resupplied and the transports didn't flip, and I've had transports elsewhere on the map lose their capacity as well.

[elxaime]

These all look like good changes and I hope AGEOD takes them seriously. I especially second this:

"1. Aircraft need to be much less prevalent at start and cost much less in money and conscripts, as do their replacements.
Here’s what I’m seeing repeatedly in PBEM: One faction invests heavily in fighters, then those fighters shoot down everything in sight over the spring of 1915. It then becomes a series of compounding returns for the victor leading to 5 star squadrons which can easily hold their own against relatively equal numbers of next-gen fighters. I think if we cut down the number of targets while simultaneously increasing the accessibility of aircraft recruitment, we’ll see more aircraft, fewer 1915 Flying Circuses, and a more accessible and historical aviation game while retaining the current deadliness of air combat."

That is exactly what happens. One side happens to build, then wipes out the other in a single turn, two at most. Or it is mutual destruction where one turn of massacre is replaced by many turns of rebuilding where little to no activity occurs.

Agree as well on leaders, not sure why this is made so restrictive. I think one way to balance lesser cost is to add more mediocre or even bad leaders to the pool so that your chances of getting the good ones go down. But you will find uses even for the mediocre ones.

[Altaris]

Absolutely good suggestions, I'll start looking into the ones already listed. This would be a good spot to consolidate findings/suggestions.

The Armenian Genocide unlock was a bug in the event code (it was checking for Russian troops in Russian-owned Armenia rather than Turkish-owned Armenia), I've submitted a fix for this.

I'll have to research the transport/merchant ship issue. May be an overlooked data error in one of the scripts/model files.

Regarding NM/RA discussion, it would be very feasible to increase the "bounce-back" of National Resiliency so that as NM gets lower, there's a higher chance each turn of it increasing upwards. This makes NM important but not an automatic downward spiral as the game progresses.

Another thing I'd really like to implement is the ability of launching "Grand Offensives" targeting a specific region via RGD (maybe allow one every 6 months or so) which makes the targeted region an objective worth NM. This would allow for heavily contested areas like Verdun where both sides would have a viable NM reason for wanting to take/hold it at the costs of horrid losses. This would be similar in vein to the Grand Offensives from WW1-Gold. However, to implement this, the ChgObjective command has to be modified to allow it to work on a targeted objective rather than a specified region as it currently stands. I'll check with Pocus on feasibility of this.

I also agree and have seen the issues with fighters, but this will take some testing to get right.

[Ebbingford]

If so, it's neither reliable nor is it exclusive to the shipping box. I've sent transports into the shipping box to have on-station fleets resupplied and the transports didn't flip, and I've had transports elsewhere on the map lose their capacity as well.

I have only seen this happen to transports sent into the shipping box. And every tranport sent there changes.
Please post a save if you see this happening with anything other than the shipping box so that the devs can check

[Merlin]

I'll have to research the transport/merchant ship issue. May be an overlooked data error in one of the scripts/model files.

Transports flipping in the shipping boxes was pretty common, but not entirely guaranteed. What I ended up doing was using dedicated transports in fleets on long-term stations, such as the blockade boxes, and then having a transport or two go on supply runs to the shipping boxes. I've had transports in the blockade boxes and elsewhere flip, and the ones bringing supplies to the shipping boxes not flip every time, so I didn't associate it with a mechanic.

Regarding NM/RA discussion, it would be very feasible to increase the "bounce-back" of National Resiliency so that as NM gets lower, there's a higher chance each turn of it increasing upwards. This makes NM important but not an automatic downward spiral as the game progresses.

Yup, this is what I want. Players need a reason to take reasonable risks, especially the CP.

Another thing I'd really like to implement is the ability of launching "Grand Offensives" targeting a specific region via RGD (maybe allow one every 6 months or so) which makes the targeted region an objective worth NM. This would allow for heavily contested areas like Verdun where both sides would have a viable NM reason for wanting to take/hold it at the costs of horrid losses. This would be similar in vein to the Grand Offensives from WW1-Gold. However, to implement this, the ChgObjective command has to be modified to allow it to work on a targeted objective rather than a specified region as it currently stands. I'll check with Pocus on feasibility of this.

That would be great fun and would work well with traffic, though I still think we need static NM objectives as well.

I also agree and have seen the issues with fighters, but this will take some testing to get right.

Agreed on the need for testing.

The big problem right now is cost. It's a bit difficult to justify the expense of a single unit which costs as much as an HA battery and an infantry division with some extra money on top, especially when you may very well have to pay the same price to build it back up a turn or two later. At-start recon units are, IMO, around 1916 levels. I don't see any reason they can't be knocked down to 2-3 per major. Coupled with much-reduced costs, I really do think players would build a lot more air units and we wouldn't see as much of the air-murder/rebuild cycle. If the expense of air units and their replacements were cut in half, players could reasonably build enough air units to double front coverage, they could take air units off line for replacements before they get wiped out, and the air war would sort of balance itself. I think it'd be much easier to tweak air combat from there.

I have only seen this happen to transports sent into the shipping box. And every tranport sent there changes.
Please post a save if you see this happening with anything other than the shipping box so that the devs can check

Now that I know how it's supposed to work and precisely where, I can keep a sharp eye on my fleets for changes and post a good number of turns when I'm certain I've got something, especially since I've got a near-new WE PBEM going. I do think a three-turn flip in the shipping box would be better, though. No at-sea resupply means you have too many light naval forces shuttling between the shipping boxes and the WE still has something like 90+% of its naval forces in the boxes or recovering cohesion to replace the stacks already there. It's kind of hard to patrol for raiders when everything is tied up in four regions.

[Merlin]

Agree as well on leaders, not sure why this is made so restrictive. I think one way to balance lesser cost is to add more mediocre or even bad leaders to the pool so that your chances of getting the good ones go down. But you will find uses even for the mediocre ones.

Sorry, I didn't see this. It did remind me of something, though.

First, I think $100/5 EP would be fine for generals. You have nothing else but the occasional event and twice yearly technology on which to use your store of EPs past 1915 anyway.

Second, France and Italy get just three yearly generals. Austria and the Ottos might be in that camp too; I can't say for Russia because I haven't played them in a while. Germany and GB for sure get at least six per year. Why not just make everyone get six? They can all use them, except for GB, which usually sees the WE player unlocking GB generals in the hope of getting the various Dominion and Indian commanders. Thus Germany, Austria, the Ottos, and Russia are often a few generals short, France and Italy are perpetually critically short, and GB often has thirty or more officers playing cards in London.

[Altaris]

Confirmed last night the Transports->Merchants was a bug where transports ending a turn in a Shipping Box converted to Merchants. I've submitted a fix file to AGEOD for this.

Also had sent them a correction for the Armenian Genocide trigger. Previously it was looking for Russian troops in Russian Armenia instead of Turkish Armenia, this has been fixed in the submitted file.

I began testing with fighters last night. One thing I'm perpetually noticing is that planes which have to go 2 regions to reach their target get mauled by interceptors. Still conducting tests here. I see your point on cost, my original plan on fighters was to have them be reasonably expensive in money cost but low in WSU cost (since WSU in this game is mainly representing high explosives/shells). The key thing for fighters in WW1 should be recon and artillery spotting capabilities.

[Merlin]

Confirmed last night the Transports->Merchants was a bug where transports ending a turn in a Shipping Box converted to Merchants. I've submitted a fix file to AGEOD for this.

Also had sent them a correction for the Armenian Genocide trigger. Previously it was looking for Russian troops in Russian Armenia instead of Turkish Armenia, this has been fixed in the submitted file.

Yes! Thank you!

I began testing with fighters last night. One thing I'm perpetually noticing is that planes which have to go 2 regions to reach their target get mauled by interceptors. Still conducting tests here. I see your point on cost, my original plan on fighters was to have them be reasonably expensive in money cost but low in WSU cost (since WSU in this game is mainly representing high explosives/shells). The key thing for fighters in WW1 should be recon and artillery spotting capabilities.

Here's what I see: Recon units pull interceptors, so if you keep the recon planes in the same region as the fighters, the resulting battles aren't so bad. Put your recon units forward of the fighters, and they're just so much XP for the opposing player. I'm okay with that, provided players know what's going on (particularly new players).

Right now fighters cost 265-52-90, and take 60 days. Recon costs 225-52-90, and take 90 days. Cut that to, say, 88-16-90, 60 days; 75-16-90, 90 days. Sea planes can be 115-16-90, 60 days. Replacements can be 1/4 the cost of units or whatever formula is in place for EAW. Remove all but 2-3 units of recon planes at-start in 1914. Now, you have a much more level playing field, where a player who has to sink a good number of replacements into ground units can still have a parity air force. We test from here, and if air combat is still too deadly, then it gets toned down until it makes sense. However, paying over 300-52-90 for an air unit at 12-14% inflation is a really poor choice. Generals give a better ROI.

[Kensai]

Just make sure the number of the now cheaper airplanes is not outrageously high. And I still feel that the air battles should be more of a gamble and less of a certainty, even when you have experienced fighters against inexperienced recon planes. The way it is now, the moment the first player wins, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The recons behind the fighters trick did not help me at all, Merlin, after I had lost the first batch of planes and I had to face your experienced ones once more.

[Merlin]

Well, I did generally have 2:1 fighter superiority for most of the game. Also, I shot down almost your entire air force over the course of the first four turns of major air combat. The same thing happened to me in a previous game before I realized just how slowly air units replace and the consequent benefits of immediately grounding everything if you're badly outnumbered. I think if air units were cheaper, you probably would've bought more fighters much earlier and the air carnage of 1915 wouldn't have happened quite the way it did.

[Altaris]

I'm doing a lot of tests with air power now. Merlin is right on the money, the problem is that currently air supremacy is won very quickly and then it's almost impossible to shift the balance afterwards. The biggest thing I'm finding is that AirCombat values need to be reduced quite a bit, which makes the losses much more balanced. It still needs to be enough of a gap between air models so that there are historical edges for differing sides throughout the war, but right now it's just too lop-sided.