Iron War - Official Thread

[Hepps]

@black_elk What I heard is.... the best opponent is ALWAYS a human opponent.

[Black_Elk]

Doubtless, though I still think its worth exploring ways to tweak things so its harder pull a fast one on the machine haha. If only because the map is still pretty engaging for a solo, and my impression was that it was designed to make at least some use of the AI. A head to head match with all nations under human control would almost certainly look totally different than any of the saves posted above, but even then I could picture scenerios where a concerted bomber spam vs destroyable factories might undermine the production scheme. That's why I was thinking maybe a class of factory that can't be bombed or destroyed, which spawns infantry at the capital/VC might be interesting. I guess then you'd have 2 ways that units enter play, heavy equipment (the stuff that uses resources) requires factories to spawn, whereas regular infantry would just require control of one of the large population centers represented by the VCs. Feels kind of realistic and might make sense for a minor nation like China or Balkans where you could limit the roster based on the kinds of factory territories they have access too.

[General_Zod]

@Frostion

A nice way to fix weaknesses in AI play is to create a feature that knows when a nonhuman is playing a given nation.

Then the very well known areas where AI is weak, can be patched. ie. Stronger AAguns which are built into AI owned factories. Stronger or cheaper units for AI. Change the values of key territories on AI turns via triggers, so AI sees them as more important even can go so far as change the territory into a capital if you want to ensure AI values it.

And many other ways to give the AI help.

[General_Zod]

@Frostion Btw, I'm wondering if your gonna switch fuel models once the things are sorted in that department?

[Black_Elk]

I could see that, although I think part of the appeal of these A&A style games is how the mechanics are all basically transparent. So that even if you give the computer a buff (like with an income bonus) at least the player still knows what they're up against. Long as the player has a way to pop the hood and find out what's going on underneath it. That said, some way to prioritize target territories for the AI would be cool. Or to somehow set sz or land tiles with a marker so that the AI treats it as a seriously do or die spot to hold/take, the way British/American players might treat Berlin (or the batlic sea zone that borders it) in traditional A&A maps.

[redrum]

Yeah, improvements for the AI on AA gun management and per map settings are on the list: https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/105/ai-development-discussion-and-feedback

In terms of whether AA vs strat bombing is balanced, its hard to say without playing a few full games. Looking at the numbers it appears the following is the summary:

• AA gun (7 PUs) - defends 1/10 @ 1 air unit for strat bombing
• Bomber (30 PUs) - SBR @ 1-3 damage
• Factory (25 PUs) - 5 bombing HP, destroyed on max damage

So unless the enemy stacks at least a few AA guns to guard a factory, usually 3 bombers will kill a factory and 4 would all but guarantee it. Probably in most cases you can reach at least 2 factories with bombers given the 6 movement so for 30 PUs, a nation can either buy 1 bomber or 4 AA guns (say 2 AA to defend 2 territories). Scaling that out for 4 bombers (120 PU), then enemy could buy 16 AA guns (8 AA per 2 territories). With 8 AA guns, that pretty much is gonna kill 1 bomber but the other 3 would probably kill a factory (30 PU vs 25 PU).

So from a PU perspective its probably reasonable but the issue is once you get to a certain bomber threshold, you can probably replace 1-2 bombers per turn and keep destroying the factory every turn. Its probably a bit overpowered given that countries like Germany/Italy only have 2 factories to start. I'd probably say bombing AA could use a buff or the bombing damage or HP for bombers/factories be adjusted. And yeah against the AI it would be devastating especially since it doesn't understand that AA can stack.

My gut says that air units in general are overpowered for their cost. Being able to buy a fighter or dive-bomber for the price of 2 infantry seems too cheap.

[CrazyG]

I would consider moving the bombers to 5 movement. This map doesn't have that many territories, especially in Europe, so bombers can easily reach everything

[Frostion]

@all
I just uploaded the new version of Iron War, and the changes are identical to the ones in the “beta” xml posted earlier.

v0.2.1 to v 0.2.2:
• Trondheim-Narvik is now a 1 PU territory, not 2.
• Norway is now a 5 PU territory, not 3.
• Norway is now True-Neutral.
• Norway is now a VC and Irkutsk is no longer a VC.
• Removed 1 British Patrol-Boat from Celtic Sea.
• Removed 1 British Oil-Barrel from Egypt.
• Added 1 German Fighter to West Germany.
• Replaced 1 French Battleship with 1 French Destroyer in Bay of Biscay.
• Change the unit start setup at the USSR-Japan border.

@Black_Elk
I hope to see the AI at one point learning when it HAS to build a factory to survive, and I also hope to see the AI one day defend its high PU value territories better. Overall in Iron War one can see that the German AI is willing to go eastward, fighting for 1-5 PU territories, but at the same time not really putting an effort into protecting its own 30-50 PU main German territories.

But I don’t think I want to add infantry spawn points at capitals as an effort to counter the AIs shortcomings here. And I would like not to make special AI units or AI unit purchasing prices. I put my faith into the AI development instead

@General_Zod
The plan is that fuel in Iron War should go from being a maintenance/build limit thing to a movement cost thing when the AI supports this a bit more. Most crucially the AI controlled planes must not go on attacks that they don’t have the fuel for and therefore crash on the return flight.

@redrum
With your cost/effectiveness calculations, don’t you think that if the AI would consider stacking AA guns at factories, plus if the AI could use fighters to intercept bombers, then the balance would be a lot more reasonable?

I actually think that Iron Wars Fighter and Dive-Bomber prices are well adjusted. The prices allow for very mixed armies and navies. Fighters are low cost enough to be used in land attacks, where they actually raise the win chance. In land defense, Infantry is still much cheaper and effective. Fighters are low cost enough to be strong against/alongside navy ships. This motivates to build carriers and also it thins out the many cheap ships on the map. They are low cost enough to also be considered as anti-bomber defense (if they intercept). So I think the low cost brings a lot of dynamics to the map, forcing players to take air units into consideration. And still, players can’t win land territories by air alone.

@CrazyG
The bomber needs to be at least 6 moves, otherwise bombers cant depart from England to bomb Berlin. A lot of other moves would also be problematic with only 5 move.

[redrum]

@frostion As a human player, I probably wouldn't build AA guns to counter bombers. Fighters are probably a much better option as they have much more flexibility. Thinking about Berlin for example, I'd rather stack say 4 fighters (80 PUs) than 12 AA guns (84 PUs) as the fighters can help pose a threat to either Russia or against the UK navy where as the AA guns are pretty much just gonna sit there. The problem becomes if the Allies can match or have more fighters than my fighters become useless since I'm not going to intercept into suicide. I really do think AA guns need to have either a higher AA attack or be able to hit multiple planes.

Maybe we are thinking about it differently but besides some fodder units, I don't see much of a reason to build anything besides fighters and dive bombers. They are only a bit more expensive then tanks but have much more flexibility and range (as you point out). Also are better for trading territories. I guess trying to compare land units cost to air units cost on other maps, usually air units are 3-4 times more expensive than the base land unit (usually infantry) and 2-3 times more expensive than stronger land units like tanks.

Also, if anyone is interested I'd be open to playing a PBF game of Iron War to help test the balance out.

[Black_Elk]

I don't know, its always hard for me to get excited about buying AAguns regardless of their cost/abilities, probably owing to their long history of sucking in A&A lol. Although I admit I definitely prefer them in Iron War to A&A, since at least here they can move during the combat phase and take territory.

An AAgun (or Cruiser) might make me think twice when it blocks a critical flight path though. So if I know I have to make 2 passes over an anti-air unit to reach a target and return, I might forego the flight plan. I guess in that sense they might be useful to set up lines of defense along desireable flight paths. But with the production slots usually pretty limited, I don't think AAguns would ever top the list for me, even if trying to create a buffer like that.

Fighters and Bombers are definitely my favorite units in Iron War. As Redrum pointed out, they overpowered enough to make most of the other units seem kind of irrelevant, but I dont really mind that for the era. Feels somehow appropriate that the air war would totally dominate and push everything else into the background. When you have this many nations spamming aircraft though, it does leave things a bit open for turn order exploits. Like in that earlier all bomber game I posted, just a few turns spent transiting aircraft to a hotspot like Leningrad or Egypt and you can make it almost unassailable. Even bombers (weak on defense as they are) can put up some pretty kick-ass hitpoint walls that push a territory out of reach rather quickly. Since on defense you can usually have like 3 or 4 nations stacking air hitpoints as a group, whereas the attacker needs to set up a series of 1-2 punches with huge numbers to break through. Some of this is probably unavoidable when we have so many player nations on the board, unless you want to start pulling air units from the purchase roster for minor nations, but then I think they'd become a lot less interesting to play. In A&A style games the can opener play, or the rush air defense play, are usually the only plays that a tiny nation can use to have much impact on the broader game, so nixing their air and its almost like they might as well be neutrals.

I find that after Fighters and Infantry fodder, (+ critical ships/factories to move them around the map), most of the other purchase options are just to spend a remainder. Like if I buy all my desired fighters and infantry and wind up with 13 PUs left maybe I'll buy a tank destroyer, if its 16 PUs I'll get a medium tank etc. Or sometimes its just for flare or showboating, like buying 5 heavy tanks just because you can hehe.

I kind of like the cost structure you have going, even if the fighters a steal, though I guess if the fighter spam seems like an intractable problem you could always create a ceiling on it with pilots as a maintenance resource. Since you already got them in the table for kamikazes and such. Sometimes the endgame can lose its charm when the big dog nations all have double digit aircraft stacks buzzing around. It can start to really limit the playpatterns, so might be worth putting an upper limit on it somehow?

[redrum]

@black_elk Glad to see you agree on air units being somewhat overpowered. Personally, I love seeing a well balanced unit set so you see lots of variation. If anything I'd rather see tanks be overpowered since "Iron War" has always struck me that it should be about acquiring and managing your iron resources. Also the tank images are great and seeing more tank battles would be more interesting than mass air stacks moving around the map. I'd be interested in seeing most non-iron units be not cost effective so that its really about the battle to control the iron deposits and pump out tanks.

[General_Zod]

AAguns are ruined by LL, imo. They are ok as psychological deterrents for humans though if using dice.

In fact many units are ruined by LL. ie subs or any other unit with special abilities. LL should not stack these categories of units but keep their rolls individual. Future feature request ;).

[CrazyG]

@general_zod
You are currently able to set different combat features as LL or not independently, including AA style attacks

Against AI its not that big of a deal because your enemy probably has bonus income. But in a human vs human game, usually if I manage to get one big swing battle, I win. And much of the time this just comes down to a battlecalculator mistake, which is really easy to make if your opponent has a ton of bombers from different countries all over the place. I think its actually a solid strategy to just spread your aircraft out on many maps, solely because it makes figuring out how many can reach what territory really difficult to figure out (especially if there is the possiblity of smaller nations capturing a landing zone), so even a really good player can easily mess up their positioning.

[Black_Elk]

Just in terms of the PUs, for the most part I really like how the purchasing structure in Iron War departs markedly from traditional A&A by basically making infantry really fucking expensive relative to every other unit haha.

So in A&A you have a baseline of 3 ipcs per fodder hitpoint entering play and every other heavy-hitter is somewhere between two to six times as expensive as that fodder infantry. In Iron War the baseline is 10 PUs per entry level fodder-point, and all the heavy hitters at least on the ground are cheaper than 2 for 1 compared to infantry, so if you go heavy-hitter rather than basic fodder you end up with at least some remainder to inform the next purchase candidate. I think the psychology of the remainder purchase is such that most players will prefer to spend every PU rather than save their pocket change, so this can be used to encourage a more diverse purchasing pattern over the course of the game, once the production limitations come into play. After that its just a matter of getting the most bang for your buck based on the resources you have available. Right now fighters are the best purchase because there is no cap on how many you can buy, and because of the movement advantage, but they still can't take land. I think if you had a pilot limit it would probably force more of the money onto the ground or into the water, rather than the air without having to change too much else.

Pilots would probably be a more interesting resource than fuel for aircraft, so we wouldn't have to put aircraft into such direct competition with tanks and ships (since you'd probably just end up with the same situation all over again otherwise, e.g. players choosing to spend fuel on aircraft rather than tanks or ships.) Maybe a large nation like Germany or Russia has 20+ pilot slots, but a small nation like China might have only 1 or 2? I don't know, but something to put a cap on it. It would help with the whole dark skies situation that becomes kind of unavoidable in a high economy game that continues for a dozen or more rounds.

I still think it would be interesting to see a unit that used fuel but not steel (the inverse of the current artillery unit.) I think mech might make sense there. Then maybe increase the power of SP-Artillery so that it is more distinct? Right now I feel like SP-Artillery is kind of overshadowed by Mech, with the later being more useful generally. But yeah, some way to spend excess fuel the way you can spend excess steel might be cool.

Another way to encourage more tank buys would be to just up the baseline amount of fuel from a minimum of 1 per turn, to 2 per turn or 3 per turn. Most of the big dog nations (especially the ones that need to maintain a large navy) will go dry after the first couple rounds, so they get stuck only able to purchase 1 fuel unit per round. Right now the whole fuel-maintenance thing is still a little confusing, so more of a cushion might help to keep the purchase phase from becoming overly stale. I think that's probably simpler for now to just increase the minimum amount of fuel per round, than it would be to introduce a more complex fuel sharing scheme, or some way to exploit/develope existing oil fields to increase the total haul (which would have been my other suggestion to make fuel units more accessible.)

[General_Zod]

@crazyg

I can make AAguns LL, in a dice game. But not the other way around. Also there are serious limitations on what values can be used for attack/defend. It does not work as POS2 describes. I forgot the exact details but I vaguely recall it had something to do with never getting over 50% to hit. No matter what values I entered.

I thought I made a note somewhere, but can't find it. Probably would have to retest it to remember the exact behavior. Regardless it did not function as described.

Ah, I found it, offensiveAttackAAmaxDieSides must be divisible by offensiveAttackAA without any remainders, this results in nothing higher than 50% to hit for LL or dice. Although I guess it might work if the quotient is 1 which equals 100% to hit.

[General_Zod]

@crazyg Yeah, theres a couple guys that seem to either spread their units out purposely or coincidently. Either way it's a pain in the ass to search for them and then accurately calculate them. Especially for LL.

[Black_Elk]

For kicks I tried a German solo where I didnt buy any aircraft just to see how it played out.

I had to put most of initial fuel into the water, to make sure my fleet could contend with the British and deter the FastAI Allies from making an early landing. Did this mainly with cruisers and destroyers. Afterwards I put all the remaining fuel and steel into tanks and mobile ground for the invasion of Russia. So far seems to be holding up alright...

0_1520033786753_2.2 Elk Germany vs FastAI Allies No aircraft round 12.tsvg

To Redrums earlier point, it does feel a bit more epic when most of the cash is used for tanks and ships rather than aircraft. After playing like this for a few rounds I can see how fewer early air stacks might help. I wouldn't raise the cpst in PUs, but just cap the totals available at purchase with the existing pilot resource.

I think it would make sense for Aircraft to require this pilot resource at purchase much the same way that the SS resource is handled for the black tanks. So basically more powerful or advanced attack aircraft would require more pilot points, the way that the SS Heavy tank requires 25 resources, instead of the regular SS infantry's 20. Usually you have to save up to get that black tank, so basically do the same thing with bombers or jets or whathaveyou.

That would stager the air builds somewhat, as players would then choose between spending their pilots each turn or saving them to buy better aircraft. It would cap the air spam overall and model the idea that experienced pilots are needed before you van fly all those fighters and bombers around.

Would pace the air war similar to the way the heavy ground/naval game is paced by oil and steel, without upending stuff too much.

Other than that I think all we need is a way for the AI to recognize the value of the factories so it will priorities those territories, and the map play pretty enjoyably for the single player.

[redrum]

@black_elk I think the only challenge with making something like pilots a resource is its starting to get to be too many different resources which becomes extremely difficult to balance.

If you have a particular save game that shows the AI choosing not to defend a factory where it clearly could have please let me know. It should in general try to defend its factories within reason though I'm sure improvements can be made.

[Black_Elk]

Yeah, although it is already listed in the resource table, so least the space is available if we wanted to do something more with it. Right now I'm pretty sure pilots are only used by Japan for their kamikazes.

I think the air spam is kind of problematic in a lot of A&A style games, especially with air vs naval and bombers running amok, so seems to me that using a resource to cap the total number of those units in play would probably serve game balance in the end - or at least give the designer some control over how quickly they are introduced. Would be pretty straightforward to increase/decrease the starting resources as needed once we had an idea of how much they might cost.

Just guessing based on the SS thing but maybe something like...

Air Transport 20 pilot points
Fighter/Dive 25 pilot points
Jet Fighter 30 pilot points
Bomber 40 pilot points

Where an average nation might be pulling down like 50 some odd pilot points on average per turn?

Least that way they couldn't just blow it out on the air spam, dropping massive bomber stacks or fighter stacks for globe trotting nightmares haha. I don't know, just an idea. Maybe stick the pilots at the capitals or something to keep it simple?

Will look back over the saves, or see if I can grab one on the next game. I think the issue is not so much that the AI backs their factories when they have a chance to defend overland, but more getting caught with their pants down on amphibious landings.

[CrazyG]

Like Black Elk said earlier, its nice to have a map where infantry are not dominant. I don't its an issue of air being strong compared to infantry (this is refreshing and fun to play), its air being strong relative to tanks. I think just a small cost increase could help out alot