Since we've missed the end of the month, we've made the testing version available for anyone who would like it. Please see the details in the thread on the dev forums.
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Played with an old laptop (cpu: amd turion TL-50, gpu: 7200 go, 2gb slow ram). The game is playable, but is very slow when zooming in or out. Haven't tried playing more than a year, but at the beginning without units, speed it about ~4 seconds/day on max.
Downloaded the testing version. Huge differences. Love how that colonies auto-send their excesses to the parent. Makes playing the UK enjoyable. AI unit pathing seems better as a whole but there are more then a few merchant marines just stopped at random places. The economy AI seems improved. No great shortages after 4 years. No noticable slowdowns with the speed. Will keep an eye on that as it approaches 1956 when the slowdown generally happens. The military AI is actually sending units to the reserves, I think that this helps.
I've been playing this new testing version for couple of days now, and I thought I'll post my impressions after playing with USA in sandbox mode. I have very high volatility, no-units start, complete victory, new unit trading mode checkbox unchecked and everything else as default settings if I remember correctly.
First of all, there's a huge improvement on the speed. Around 1960 game still runs less than 10 seconds per day even there's lot of big wars ( USSR vs UK, USSR vs West Germany, USSR vs Spain, China vs France and India vs France ) and few smaller ones and lots of units moving. I haven't encountered any stacking issues at all, but there's some issues with pathfinding in Arctic Ocean with merchant marines. AI nicely scraps units if they get stuck, except after Egypt went to dictatorship and broke all agreements, which left minor traffic jam outside Egypt's national waters.
Economy seems to be changed quite a lot too. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it's impossible to sell anything at a profit on the world market ( at least with USA my production costs on all commodities are higher than world market prices ), so this takes some adaptation to get used to. It's still possible to increase your GDP/c though, but it's significantly slower and takes more attention than it used to. I dont know if this is WAD, so maybe developers could shed some light on this one.
Military AI in general seems better than it was. Europeans dont send their troops to some out of supply place in Canada, and NATO is not having a summer vacation on Crete or some caribian island. Unfortunately your own minister still generally ignores your theater settings, but setting units to path around the countries where you dont want him to send units seems to do the trick.
North Korea and North Vietnam have both been eliminated like usually, and I think neither was allied with China or USSR. I did not participate in either of these conflicts. I also forgot Israel vs. Egypt war, and had no troops on Israel soil when DOW happened. I gave Israel about 300 light infantries, but Egypt massacred those swiftly and captured all ports before I could make a landing, so Israel got defeated too. Nice blitzkrieg Egypt
UK managed to conquer some land from USSR by attacking from South Korea, and currently it seems like USSR can't push them back. All USSR attacks in Europe has also been stopped and pushed back, and there seems to be very little progress going on on either front. France seems to be making slow progress in China, and currently have conquered about half of China's landmass, and has about 230 million population. India on the other hand conquered some land from south-west Asia from France, but after that battlelines haven't moved. Probably worth noting is, that I have only participated in european defence, and all asian conquests are done by the AI nations. But I started the game without units, so that changes balance of power a lot, and USSR with it's starting units is a much harder opponent to crack. If I could suggest something though, maybe increase spawn rate of guerillas, so that conquests would not be so easy. At least in areas with high population, guerilla activity could be much higher than it is now, and long dragged wars could slowly turn to defenders favour.
I didn't notice much difference in diplomacy, except maybe more of those annoying trade offers, where other countries try to buy commodities cheaper than it costs to produce. I can understand that my allies with high relations try to leech, but when random countries I have no alliances or anything to do with try that too, it seems a little weird. Maybe this is because world market prices are so low, but why they even want a trade deal when world market is in excellent supply? Some button for auto-decline all offers where offered < requested maybe could make the game a little more user friendly.
All and all, testing version of the patch increases game speed a lot, and also at least in my machine it is really stable too ( not a single crash ), so job well done and hats off to your coders! New economy model leaves me a little disappointed though. It's certainly more realistic that I can't set my domestic prices to 1000% anymore, and just cruise with 0% taxes and max social spending, but when world's most industrialized and technologically advanced nation can't sell anything at a profit, maybe some tweaking is still needed.
First of all, there's a huge improvement on the speed. Around 1960 game still runs less than 10 seconds per day even there's lot of big wars ( USSR vs UK, USSR vs West Germany, USSR vs Spain, China vs France and India vs France ) and few smaller ones and lots of units moving. I haven't encountered any stacking issues at all, but there's some issues with pathfinding in Arctic Ocean with merchant marines. AI nicely scraps units if they get stuck, except after Egypt went to dictatorship and broke all agreements, which left minor traffic jam outside Egypt's national waters.
Economy seems to be changed quite a lot too. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it's impossible to sell anything at a profit on the world market ( at least with USA my production costs on all commodities are higher than world market prices ), so this takes some adaptation to get used to. It's still possible to increase your GDP/c though, but it's significantly slower and takes more attention than it used to. I dont know if this is WAD, so maybe developers could shed some light on this one.
Military AI in general seems better than it was. Europeans dont send their troops to some out of supply place in Canada, and NATO is not having a summer vacation on Crete or some caribian island. Unfortunately your own minister still generally ignores your theater settings, but setting units to path around the countries where you dont want him to send units seems to do the trick.
North Korea and North Vietnam have both been eliminated like usually, and I think neither was allied with China or USSR. I did not participate in either of these conflicts. I also forgot Israel vs. Egypt war, and had no troops on Israel soil when DOW happened. I gave Israel about 300 light infantries, but Egypt massacred those swiftly and captured all ports before I could make a landing, so Israel got defeated too. Nice blitzkrieg Egypt
UK managed to conquer some land from USSR by attacking from South Korea, and currently it seems like USSR can't push them back. All USSR attacks in Europe has also been stopped and pushed back, and there seems to be very little progress going on on either front. France seems to be making slow progress in China, and currently have conquered about half of China's landmass, and has about 230 million population. India on the other hand conquered some land from south-west Asia from France, but after that battlelines haven't moved. Probably worth noting is, that I have only participated in european defence, and all asian conquests are done by the AI nations. But I started the game without units, so that changes balance of power a lot, and USSR with it's starting units is a much harder opponent to crack. If I could suggest something though, maybe increase spawn rate of guerillas, so that conquests would not be so easy. At least in areas with high population, guerilla activity could be much higher than it is now, and long dragged wars could slowly turn to defenders favour.
I didn't notice much difference in diplomacy, except maybe more of those annoying trade offers, where other countries try to buy commodities cheaper than it costs to produce. I can understand that my allies with high relations try to leech, but when random countries I have no alliances or anything to do with try that too, it seems a little weird. Maybe this is because world market prices are so low, but why they even want a trade deal when world market is in excellent supply? Some button for auto-decline all offers where offered < requested maybe could make the game a little more user friendly.
All and all, testing version of the patch increases game speed a lot, and also at least in my machine it is really stable too ( not a single crash ), so job well done and hats off to your coders! New economy model leaves me a little disappointed though. It's certainly more realistic that I can't set my domestic prices to 1000% anymore, and just cruise with 0% taxes and max social spending, but when world's most industrialized and technologically advanced nation can't sell anything at a profit, maybe some tweaking is still needed.
The economy changes aren't done, there will be more changes on that.
We've also done a bit more work on the NV and NK situation but it's still a challenge to make it historically accurate.
We've also done a bit more work on the NV and NK situation but it's still a challenge to make it historically accurate.
Good to hear about those economic changes. But like I said, I had no-units start which messes up the power balance, so maybe USSR and China take more active role in NK and NV wars when they have their proper units ( heh, and USSR don't go bananas against Europe ). Keep up the good work though, the patch is looking really good already.
Have you done anything to prevent nations stacking up a few 100k troops in Hong Kong or even more in South Korea? Also that all NATO nations stacks up their troops in Alaska?
Has anything been done to balance production of industrial goods?
I am glad to see that you're still working on this!
I am glad to see that you're still working on this!
As been stated in other forums, the economy is a little screwy at the moment. You start off short in all goods and then, almost miracuously, you start showing major surpluses after 6-8 months. At least this has been my experience playing the UK and France. As prices stay low, it seems that this happens in other countries as well. Personnally I like it this way, the 50's-60's time frame was an era of plenty and I think that the game reflects that fact now.
I've seen enough comments (and patch notes) on the other forums to believe that they started tweaking the economy, but haven't finished. They altered the demand formula, but then have to adjust production values, or some such.
Played with Intel P7350 + 9600m GT (ddr2) + 4gb ddr2 slow, but dual channel RAM, on laptop. Windows 8 Pro, 64bit.
Even though this is an old laptop, the game is completely playable. Played as Sweden. Conquered Finland, got invaded by USSR, kicked their ass and took leningrand, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kaliningrad, Belarusia, Ukraine and Moldovia for Sweden. (With some help from allies lately). So easy. Game stutters when zooming in and out and when scrolling around the map in certain zooms. Which is not nice, because I love zooming in and out alot. But the game is very much playable even with this old laptop, which is only a good thing. Didn't encounter any glitches, although it seems strange that I kicked all those countries asses only with mechanized infantry units. Though I played with no units at the beginning (and high volatility). The game is really enjoyable now. Looking forward to the release of update 3 and modern world mod adaptation.
Also, I've noticed this game doesn't need all those visual studios, frameworks and even directx updates (as for example HOI3 does). I wonder why.
Even though this is an old laptop, the game is completely playable. Played as Sweden. Conquered Finland, got invaded by USSR, kicked their ass and took leningrand, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kaliningrad, Belarusia, Ukraine and Moldovia for Sweden. (With some help from allies lately). So easy. Game stutters when zooming in and out and when scrolling around the map in certain zooms. Which is not nice, because I love zooming in and out alot. But the game is very much playable even with this old laptop, which is only a good thing. Didn't encounter any glitches, although it seems strange that I kicked all those countries asses only with mechanized infantry units. Though I played with no units at the beginning (and high volatility). The game is really enjoyable now. Looking forward to the release of update 3 and modern world mod adaptation.
Also, I've noticed this game doesn't need all those visual studios, frameworks and even directx updates (as for example HOI3 does). I wonder why.
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Wonderful news, I'll be trying this new patch out tonight. I had some games I just had to give up on since the days took so long to process.
I'm also saving for a new computer, so I hope this patch makes it playable for longer on my current computer so I can play it now and not have to wait the few months it'll take me to save for a new computer.
I'm also saving for a new computer, so I hope this patch makes it playable for longer on my current computer so I can play it now and not have to wait the few months it'll take me to save for a new computer.
If I'm not mistaken its been months since you said this would be out. That's a little crazy isn't it? I'm quickly loosing hope that it will ever come out...
At the end of August we indicated that we fell behind due to some bugs and released a beta of the update. We're trying for the end of Sept. for the actual update. That would put us 30 days behind schedule.
Seeing as the end of September is in a week, are things progressing on schedule for a release at the end of September?
A popular request after the "release candidate" of Update 3 was to look at the economic issues and spend development time making the economy play much better, especially in long-term games. As posted on our battlegoat forum today:
In our last episode, the cast was discussing giving the economic model some tough love. This has now been done (or, more precisely, has been and is still being done). Chris and I think that the issues introduced in the update test release have been removed/resolved, and in fact it is looking pretty good. However, economic model work is among the slowest and most persnickety, because small changes in the model can either break entire countries, or can have major effects in long-term games.
So each fine-tuning test adjustment and change requires playing the game for 30 years, making more changes, and doing it again (boy is our DeLorean getting tired!) As I say, not a quick turn-around for QA.
We are just about at the point where we will release another release-candidate for Update 3, to allow you all to test the economic fixes, plus a few other things that have been improved under the hood. That will get out by the weekend.
Doesn't look like much chance of the "final" Update 3 getting done this week, but if the release-candidate testing goes well then it shouldn't be long. If the RC testing doesn't go well, then, well.... we'll keep working on it.
Now back to our regularly scheduled deprogramming.
-- George / BattleGoat.
I assume it's still early at Canada and you are still working, but weekend here in Europe is already starting, so any chance you could give us some news about the patch or even better, a link for next release candidate...pretty please
Sometimes it's a hindrance to live in the future...
Sometimes it's a hindrance to live in the future...