SoWWL HITS Battle at Regular GCM Time

Everyone,
A number of regular GCM players have purchased SoWWL, but relatively few seem to have had a chance to get into it much. To stimulate interest in both the game and the new KS Napoleon Mod II, I am taking a stab at scheduling a coop battle on Thursday afternoon (U.S. time) at the regular GCM game time. The first battle will feature Kevin's recent Brit v. AI French scenario. Hopefully, we'll get a few more players excited about the mods and style of play.

Particulars
Start Time 5:15pm U.S. Eastern Time (or 22:15 BST).
Place: GCM TeamSpeak/Waterloo channel
Background: Brit Orders/OOB/Starting Locations may be downloaded at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/devwp5b5fig8qyw/AABE2x_Obm0G3p17kNUvhCQoa?dl=0

Of course, our group of KS HITS players are more than welcome to join the fun!

Best,
Ron/Palmer

PS Thanks to Kevin for the scenario and background files!

Excellent initiative Ron!

Hopefully, we'll get a few more players excited about the mods and style of play

May I suggest the team plays as the French, In that scenario they are clearly a much better army, I wouldn't say it is a balanced battle.

Well done Ron. I had recently noticed that no-one seemed to be in the WL lobby other than the KS crowd. That needs to be fixed.

Will you go for a higher camera view? I have no issue at all with that but would like to know beforehand.

As Pepe says the French in that scenario are quite a bit stronger. An alternative is the French vs Brits we did last week when I wasn't there. That has the advantage of using a WL map and so would alleviate possible delays with players having to set up the Cold Harbor lsl files, etc.

Iberalc wrote:May I suggest the team plays as the French, In that scenario they are clearly a much better army, I wouldn't say it is a balanced battle.

Good points, Pepe. Unfortunately, the Brit map positions have already been posted and I probably won't have time in advance of today's battle to make adjustments for a new map. Ideally, the battle should be challenging for the humans -- but not hopeless. Do you think we can at least make it competitive? Also, I wonder how well the AI British would perform in an attacking posture given their weaker position and the rather complex goals Kevin set out?

Mr. Digby wrote:Will you go for a higher camera view?

What have we been playing with in our weekend matchups lately? I have no problem going to 10 rather than 2, if that's what we've been doing. Might also be a bit easier transition for an inexperienced GCM crowd.

Thanks for the suggestions, gents!

If you play the battle at the normal GCM camera height and with instantaneous communications, you will stand a good chance of winning as the British. With a 10 yd. restriction, which is what KS uses, then it will be a tough fight. The AI is much improved.

One thing players will notice is that troops become exhausted before the battle even begins. This is due to the game engine preferring to have troops run whenever they get close to another friendly unit. It is not due to the mod.

At this point I'm leaning toward a 10 yard camera view and using couriers for all comms (i.e., the KS settings). It will be tough given the improved AI and our relative inexperience. We may well crash and burn. But it also means it will be all the more glorious if we can pull it off    One item that might work in our favor is having enough players (hopefully) so that command sizes remain small and therefore nimble.

On a somewhat unrelated note, last time I played it was mentioned that sometimes couriers bearing orders to one's battalions were not only not visible, but the units began responding immediately to the orders, well before a courier could have arrived. I've noticed this too, even after confirming that couriers were set to operate at brigade level. Is this an anomaly or am I missing something?

On a somewhat unrelated note, last time I played it was mentioned that sometimes couriers bearing orders to one's battalions were not only not visible, but the units began responding immediately to the orders, well before a courier could have arrived. I've noticed this too, even after confirming that couriers were set to operate at brigade level. Is this an anomaly or am I missing something?

The only time I see this is if the battalions are already in motion, such as marching along a road and the brigade commander is given new orders. The battalions will start to march to the brigade commander even though they have not yet received new orders from a courier. This bug is also in the old game.

I started an MP game with you guys the other night (it was the Austrian one attacking Uffenweiler ?sp) and my whole division began marching the instant I clicked on the command map. Even the battalions belonging to my brigade commanders. It was a very weird event. I mentioned it at the time but we had no way to examine the issue.

That sounds like a bug in the game. The movement by command map function does not check to see if couriers are being used. It's not part of the code that we can mod and correct.

Did a quick experiment in a scenario. Couriers are set at brigade level in Options, but direct point & click movement commands to battalions (from me as a brigade commander) seem to be executed immediately w/no delay regardless of distance from me. On the other hand orders transmitted via menu lists head off via courier per usual. I'm guessing there's another special host setting I need to adjust? This also resulted in my entire brigade heading out as soon as I entered a command map movement order for myself, consistent with Digby's experience in the Austrian scenario.

The instance I mentioned above is the only time I've seen this. In the rest of all out KS HITS games things have behaved normally.

Did you set the courier level in the host options?

The only change I made was in the default.ini file: "mpcourierlvl=4" (changed from 0)

Go to staging and change it in the host options menu. The value is set in two places in the ini file. Once in the custom section and another in the variables section: #optmpcourierlvl=4. It may be that you only set it in one place.

Ah, that did it.

Good game today guys. I was a little disappointed when we had the crash and it ended early. Plenty of action, now I need to see the replay.

It was fun and ran quite smoothly -- right up to the point when it didn't. I suspect the work of French saboteurs here.    Personally, I think we would've prevailed in the end given Soldier's staunch defense on the left against those cuirassier fellows, and the French generally being very badly cut up and out of position as our center and right advanced, but who knows for sure?

Here's a link to the replay file that Kevin captured at the end: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qbeuyzf05253jru/AAAGpIY7lHO3gwkLpkFFiQqPa?dl=0
If you don't yet have Kevin's replay viewer, it can be had from this forum post: https://kriegsspiel.forumotion.net/t1282-sow-replay-viewer

Sorry I had to drop out. My computer was acting funny. I couldn't use the mouse or the keyboard and it would freeze up. I got pissed off and shut it off and called my neighbor who came over. We found the problem. . Turns out I broke a wire holder when I was moving my desktop and this wire ended up directly on the power and melted partway. So it will be fixed by tomorrow and I should be up and running. Sorry guys

Evidently that's why my computer just stopped as the games sounds caused my computer to studded as it kept getting connected and disconnected

Thank you Ron for arranging this initiative. It went well and it was great to see some GCM faces who haven't been around for a while in HITS games.

I had some horrible freeze-frame moments, almost continuously from when the action got serious on "Picton's Ridge". The game would run for a few seconds then freeze for 2 - 3 seconds, then jump again. It made commanding very tiring. I had this problem in the Valladolid battle a few months back. I think my PC has its limits with numbers of sprites in SoW. I need to upgrade but right now cash is tight.

It was a very good game nonetheless. Apart from being surprised when Harmon and I met a French division at the Corps rendezvous instead of Stedman and the unsightly scurry to get back across the river to some nearby useful high ground, it all went well. Harmon did an excellent job in holding together my division's right but having no skirmish-capable troops in Vinke's brigade I had to be creative with my hussars to keep the voltigeurs from slowly ripping my line to shreds. Enemy skirmishers when you have none are a massive pain which I think is an excellent feature of the mod - it works far better than those useless split units of the vanilla game.

The "Allied Breakout" at the end was really fun, with units streaming pell-mell across France to capture Paris and wrap the Germans up in a mini Falaise pocket.

Kevin - any thoughts on why we had another Bad Frame? Could we raise the number of couriers again? What would 50 or 100 achieve?

very nice replay... I hope you all thanked little mac for holding things together when the entire army was about to be flanked! - Well done there!

Thanks Ron for running the battle. It was a very enjoyable game. We only had a half hour left before the game crashed, so I don't think we'd have had enough time to defeat the French, if that was even possible. Soldier did a terrific job of keeping the enemy at bay while the rest of the corps maneuvered to destroy that isolated division. Personally, I felt terrible marching past him as he sallied forth to screen the corps at Chalons. As is well known, my inclination is to always come to Soldiers aid when he is engaging the enemy. It was only with the greatest reluctance that I followed Ron's explicit orders and moved away form him.

any thoughts on why we had another Bad Frame? Could we raise the number of couriers again? What would 50 or 100 achieve?

I think the last couple of crashes may have been due to slow computers in the game. They eventually get out of sync and the game crashes. It may have been Mark's computer meltdown that did it yesterday. The OS may have been having real problems dealing with the shorted wires.

Unfortunately I think that was probably me, I tried warthunder two nights ago and I guess I was brining the entire server down lol. I'm just glad we found and fixed the problem. Sorry guys.

It's already being fixed and I should be operationally as soon as I go home and pick up my pc from my buddy.

Again, apologies. I guess when you knock over your desktop so many times on the sauce........

No problem. You found the issue and fixed it.