CORE 0.60 bug reports

[jhhowell]

Apologies if there's already a thread for this somewhere - I couldn't find anything. No major bugs so far, but there are a few issues, some of which at least are easily fixed. This is all from the perspective of a CORE novice playing USA.

1. Malin Craig retirement event - the US got a couple of Stalinists as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Army Chief of Staff (Hans Amlie and Oliver Law, respectively). Putting Marshall in both offices as part of Craig's retirement event would be the surest fix. Note, the only ahistorical thing I've done was enforcing the Neutrality Act against China and Japan - elections have been historical, DP sliders are reasonably historical (I've pushed Free Market twice and Interventionist once). No idea why the game chose Stalinists to auto-fill the offices.

Also, looks like there's some time variability in the event since Wikipedia says Craig retired in Sept. '39, I got the event in March.

2. Spelling error - CL-49 was the USS St. Louis, not USS Saint Louis.

Other issues I've mentioned to Hagar in another thread, copied here for completeness:

3. Admiral Stark had the Logistics Wizard trait.
4. Some warship types (BB, BC, maybe others) had min positioning > max positioning.
5. (Possibly WAD, not sure) The '37 heavy bomber tech does not activate the '35 heavy bomber model and obsolete it immediately the way most other air unit techs do. So if one skips the '35 heavy bomber tech the starting '30 heavy bombers have no upgrade path.
6. CORE is extremely unfriendly to alt-tabbing. Sometimes doing so results in striped and unreadable tooltips, more often one simply can't get the game back on the screen once finished with whatever you're doing on the desktop (checking event or tech files to figure out what's going on, checking forums, email, whatever ). Unmodded AoD does not have this problem, and I haven't seen it with any other Paradox games either.
7. The manual is not completely up to date regarding some parts of the tech tree, and particularly in the appendix listing what naval builds are given by event vs. constructed in-game.

 

[jhhowell]

A few other items I noticed -

The '39 Marine tech does not obsolete the '35 Marine divisions, unlike the rest of the Marine techs.

Sea forts in provinces with no beaches - I've noticed Scapa Flow, Gibraltar, and the NW province in Spain (forget the name at the moment), but there might be others. Are these intended as historical flavor representing obsolete shore batteries from the 18th-19th centuries?

The event for the Iowa class battleships, granting the improved fast capital ship brigade, fired several months after the tech was completed. I ended up editing the save file to put the correct brigade on the Iowas I had already laid down, but ideally the event would fire almost immediately so that the correct brigade would be in place when the ships are started.

 

[Blecky]

A few other items I noticed -

The '39 Marine tech does not obsolete the '35 Marine divisions, unlike the rest of the Marine techs.

Sea forts in provinces with no beaches - I've noticed Scapa Flow, Gibraltar, and the NW province in Spain (forget the name at the moment), but there might be others. Are these intended as historical flavor representing obsolete shore batteries from the 18th-19th centuries?

The event for the Iowa class battleships, granting the improved fast capital ship brigade, fired several months after the tech was completed. I ended up editing the save file to put the correct brigade on the Iowas I had already laid down, but ideally the event would fire almost immediately so that the correct brigade would be in place when the ships are started.

As to 1: I´ve noticed that one too; don´t think it´s WAD.

2: AFAIK sea forts also help reducing the effects of port attacks by CVs.

3: Never knew there was such a brigade since I never bothered to research them. Can´t they be built separately or do you have to include them when starting construction?

 

[jhhowell]

2: AFAIK sea forts also help reducing the effects of port attacks by CVs.

3: Never knew there was such a brigade since I never bothered to research them. Can´t they be built separately or do you have to include them when starting construction?

Neat, never knew that about sea forts, I thought they only affected amphibious landings!

The fast capital ship brigade from the Iowa event has to be included when starting construction. It's non-consecutive with the previous version of the capital ship hull brigade, which prevents one from upgrading existing North Carolina/South Dakotas under construction (or serials, in the case of the first few to complete) to proper Iowas. And as I understand it hull brigades can't be built separately to add to existing completed units. Though I could be mistaken on that point. From what I've seen so far CORE seems to use fewer naval brigades than AoD so I haven't looked at brigade-adding refits nearly as much (unlike the long serials of capital radar brigades one does in AoD, for example).

 

[jhhowell]

Another US admiral with the logistics wizard trait - Rockwell.

Attempting to select the "carrier strike on port" mission is another guaranteed method of crashing the game.

Something weird can happen with low strength, zero supply divisions. Context - the South Africans, French, and Belgians gave me their troops as expeditionary forces so apparently it's my job to mop up the Italians in Ethiopia. The Italians have been out of supply for ages and have very low strength, so this is not difficult in terms of combat. However there's something annoying going on such that I get multiple popups for a battle initiated and a battle won in Gonder (one of the provinces I'm marching towards at the moment). That's multiple such popups every hour, for about a week on end. The carrier port strike crash bug has kept me from seeing the end of the Gonder popups yet. When I loaded the autosave as Italy, one of the corps retreating to Gonder from an adjacent province I'm also marching towards had zero divisions in it, so although that one vanished after I clicked on it I wonder if some of the other corps on that retreat end up having their divisions evaporate from out of supply attrition and become "present" in Gonder enough to trigger battles, but since they don't actually exist they end up not retreating and thereby triggering these constant fake battle messages. At least that's my guess. Not sure there's anything to be done about it, unless there's a way to tell the AI to just disband land units with no supply and strength less than say 10%...

 

[Blecky]

Never had any problems with carrier strikes on port, playing USA, UK or GER.

One thing that´s annoying is that ITA divisions in ETH have very limited supplies. After valiantly advancing into British territory - southwards! - they end up with no supplies and are annihilated by three advancing UK divisions. If there´s no way to supply them, why bother to garrison the area at all? Why aren´t they advancing north in an attempt to reach the other troops that are advancing into Egyptian territory? ITA AI seems ignorant on that part of Africa.

 

[jhhowell]

Never had any problems with carrier strikes on port, playing USA, UK or GER.

One thing that´s annoying is that ITA divisions in ETH have very limited supplies. After valiantly advancing into British territory - southwards! - they end up with no supplies and are annihilated by three advancing UK divisions. If there´s no way to supply them, why bother to garrison the area at all? Why aren´t they advancing north in an attempt to reach the other troops that are advancing into Egyptian territory? ITA AI seems ignorant on that part of Africa.

Further research on carrier port strikes - the trick is to order the mission via the target province, not by selecting the mission in your fleet window. The latter will instantly crash the game before you even get a chance to choose a target. This seems to be a general feature, since I got identical behavior when I loaded as UK to see if it was the extremely large mission efficiency value the game was barfing at (USA has researched port strikes, UK has fallen behind on their carrier doctrines). This is a CORE issue however, since when I load up unmodded AoD I can order carrier port strikes from the fleet window.

Italy/Africa issues are rapidly becoming my pet peeve with AoD. Even in CORE the UK just doesn't defend Egypt effectively, so the vast majority of the Italian army gets sucked south into Sudan and Ethiopia. Apparently Italy ran out of convoys since they should otherwise have been in supply either from the Red Sea or just overland from Alexandria. The UK AI managed to take back the latter, but retaking Suez was extremely recent (AI Canada handed me their army, and Suez seemed the place to send them). End result is an Italian mainland that's extremely poorly defended. If only the RL Brits had known that they'd have everything so much easier just standing aside and shipping the 8th Army off for a few months R&R somewhere rather than fighting so hard at El Alamein...

 

[Denniss]

Do you have the proper game checksum and play with english language?
Do you have a savegame to share for investigation? EDIT - not required - crashes for me as well as USA.

EDIT2: I believe I have found the cause, waiting for response from other devs.

 

[Denniss]

Ok, here's an unofficial quick fix for you to test. It contains two files to be placed into the mod-CORE2 folder, replacing the existing version.
The .csv goes to \db and the .tbl file to \map (not into vanilla AoD!!).
Checksum of my test installation changed to NSHC.

Please backup the original files first just in case it's not working as intended !

http://rapidshare.com/files/1281186337/CORE 060 quickfix 1.rar

 

[jhhowell]

Ok, here's an unofficial quick fix for you to test. It contains two files to be placed into the mod-CORE2 folder, replacing the existing version.
The .csv goes to \db and the .tbl file to \map (not into vanilla AoD!!).
Checksum of my test installation changed to NSHC.

Please backup the original files first just in case it's not working as intended !

http://rapidshare.com/files/1281186337/CORE 060 quickfix 1.rar

Very nice, so far that fix works perfectly! Though I do have the original files handy as backups if needed.

Thank you very much!

 

[Tegetthoff]

Please give a definite feedback when you are sure it works, I can then post the link on the 0.60 download page.

 

[jhhowell]

No problems finishing my US game, another 3-4 months play after the carrier port strike incident. And I made a point of checking after each autosave that indeed I could still order various carrier groups to strike a port somewhere, using both user interface methods. To the extent that normal gameplay can confirm that the fix works I'd say it has. Thanks!

One other comment - the Admiral Darlan North Africa events should probably have some sort of reality check clause in the conditions. Only fire if Italy still controls Tripoli, or at the very least if Italy still controls Rome. In this particular case the US controlled Leipzig at the time that the event chain fired.

Not sure about some of the Japanese AI events either - they only landed two divisions on Luzon, so never came close to conquering the Philippines. They got the other islands, and made a couple of hopeless attacks on Manila. But it seemed like the "AI Japan: NEI" etc. events may have messed it up by convincing it to send divisions to Borneo and Java instead of finishing what it started.

 

[Blecky]

India cannot SR its GAR because they can´t research logistics 1932 (tech id 1120). They seem to have the prerequisites, i.e. tech id 1110 (large inf div org), yet the tech is greyed.

 

[Denniss]

The countries economy setup doesn't match the tech requirements. With the current economy setup they would be eligible for 1932 combat but that's deactivated. We'll look into this.

 

[jhhowell]

There's something I don't understand about the start of the war. Playing UK, Sept. '39. All events historical thus far. Germany invades Poland - and nothing happens for me. I'm not automatically joined into the war, and the "declare war" button for Germany is still gray since they have 20 belligerence and my interventionism still requires 24. It's not clear that the guarantee of independence does anything (maybe because Germany initiated the war via event rather than by clicking "declare war" on Poland?) - according to the manual the guarantee is supposed to bypass the belligerence/interventionism constraint.

From my previous game obviously AI UK has no difficulty entering the war, but I don't know how it does it...

 

[Denniss]

AI has an event for this, the GoI should have gotten you a free interventionism slider move if I remember right.

 

[Blecky]

There's something I don't understand about the start of the war. Playing UK, Sept. '39. All events historical thus far. Germany invades Poland - and nothing happens for me. I'm not automatically joined into the war, and the "declare war" button for Germany is still gray since they have 20 belligerence and my interventionism still requires 24. It's not clear that the guarantee of independence does anything (maybe because Germany initiated the war via event rather than by clicking "declare war" on Poland?) - according to the manual the guarantee is supposed to bypass the belligerence/interventionism constraint.

From my previous game obviously AI UK has no difficulty entering the war, but I don't know how it does it...

There´s no event for a human UK player to enter the war. You have to increase your interventionism slider manually (maybe twice a year, causing 9% dissent hit). If you don´t mind gamey tactics you could GoI Albania, resulting in two (I think) slider moves towards interventionism. While gamey this still could be seen as somewhat plausible. Don´t forget to improve your relations with Poland, or you won´t be able to get them into the Allies (and you don´t have a chance to inherit whatever is left of their navy).

 

[Beagá]

If no slider moves toward interventionism were made that sometimes happens.

Not that there aren´t good reason to move the slider there at least once, consumer good cost is a pain.

 

[jhhowell]

I think the trigger for the USSR event "Internal Opposition Surfaces 7" should include "flag = purges_no_last" rather than "flag = purges_last". If I'm reading it right, the event as written would trigger the random monthly(ish) dissent hits if one *did* do the last trial purge event, whereas the other Internal Opposition Surfaces trigger if one declined the associated purge event. Or is it intended that to avoid all Internal Opposition Surfaces events one should choose "this has gone too far" in the last trial event?

 

[Beagá]

Not a real bug, but maybe something that can be improved regarding AI.

Germany has a tendency of being too pro-active with its air units during the Phoney War and ends up taking huge losses. If the modders could teach us how to change the AI behavior so that the AI only goes trigger-happy with the Luftwaffe after it DOWs Benelux, would be great. Or is it impossible to block such behavior?