Weather Conditions

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    • Weather Conditions

      This one I doubt will ever be added, if ever.
      But weather plays a major role in war, look at Russia.
      So I was thinking that weather should be added to the game. It will make the game much richer and allow for much deeper strategy and tactics.
    • Not as hard to implement as one might think. I seem to recall an Avalon Hill game "Operation Barbarossa" that did a decent job with a simple look up table based on a die roll and the turn number.

      More challenging is the timing of weather. What is the weather time scale?

      This is where the liberties taken to make this a playable game start to get really ugly. According to the Infantry Tech Tree, we have 2 days to the year.

      Day 1 is 1932 Inf
      Day 4 is 1934 Inf
      Day 12 is 1938 Inf
      Day 20 is 1942 Inf
      Day 28 is 1946 Inf
      Day 36 is 1950 Inf

      This is 12 hours to the year, 1 hour to the month. With 730 hours in a standard month, tech is developed at a ratio of 730 to 1.

      Now if we look at the time / distance / speed of our units, all of the above falls apart and it needs to. Otherwise it will take years to cross the Atlantic in a convoy.

      Submarine in a game I have active in another window.
      36 km/hr
      33 hours from Gibraltar to New York.

      It is 5844 km from Gibraltar to New York (Google). Divided by the 33 hours transit time above the "submarine" is flying along at 178 km/hr.

      Do some math and we have a 5:1 ratio between a real hour and hours in the game. That is 36 km/game-hr times 33 hours of real time is about 1/5th of the distance between Gibraltar and New York.

      We know have ships moving 5 times faster that real hours and tech advancing 730 times faster than real hours.


      What ever time scale is chosen it needs to be fast enough that we don't spend all of 1933 in winter. It needs to be slow enough that units actually interact with it. A 30 minute long "winter" in Russia will have little impact on the game. It needs to be offset enough from the 24 cycle that it is not always winter when the sun is over Hawaii.

      The modifiers for speed, combat and such are easy. Those calculations already have inputs for a variety of modifiers.

      The real challenge is figuring out how fast a weather front moves across the map and how fast a season changes compared to real days.
    • F. Marion wrote:

      According to the Infantry Tech Tree, we have 2 days to the year.
      I wouldn't invest too much time in analyzing the in-game tech timeline. According to the tech trees, the tech timeline varies across nationality and unit types, and there is little relevance to the actual game. And given the level of game abstraction, I don't know how it could be otherwise. In the real world, 1939 German infantry were qualitatively superior to 1939 Polish infantry or 1939 American infantry. (I will leave it for others to discuss whether they were also better than 1939 British infantry or 1939 French infantry, or just better led.) In the game, all infantry units of a particular research level are absolutely equivalent, regardless of nationality, and this is true for all unit types. All countries may exercise the research options and employ the best available technology. As an example, only one real world country had long-range ballistic missiles in World War II (Germany), but all in-game countries may utilize that in-game tech if they exercise the prerequisite research. In the real world, different countries had decidedly different technological advantages in different areas; e.g., Britain in radar, sonar (asdic), and code-breaking; Germany in ballistic missiles, jet aircraft and heavy armor; and the United States crushed everyone else in the quantity of industrial output.
    • I agree. I did delve into it a little bit and realized it was aimed at being a game and not reality.

      I grabbed the Infantry tech tree for the time line since, theoretically, Infantry is the queen on the chess board. If the game does not have that at least mostly right, everything else will fail.
    • F. Marion wrote:

      theoretically, Infantry is the queen on the chess board. If the game does not have that at least mostly right, everything else will fail.
      And to the credit of the game designers, that is borne out in the infantry unit spec details vs. other unit types. For all of the flack the designers/developers take in these discussions, I am constantly amazed at how much they got right, and how clever the software engine for resolving combat is. Bytro did a lot of things right at the outset, and that is the great strength of the game.
    • To me call of war is more fun/playable of a game compared to 1914. To me what would be a "home run" of a game would be if they did the modern day arms/tech (i.e. drones, nuclear missile subs, etc.) and slowed the time frame down to where weather would be a factor. You could even take it a step farther where you could manipulate the weather with cloud seeding, or satellite anti missile or weather changing. You could really oppress some populations then.
    • mallahanjr wrote:

      To me what would be a "home run" of a game would be if they did the modern day arms/tech (i.e. drones, nuclear missile subs, etc.)
      You need to check out Conflict of Nations, which is set in the Cold War through the present. CoN was developed by one of Bytro Labs' sister companies, using Bytro's software engine for Supremacy 1914 and Call of War -- you can use your same user name and password for all three games.
    • I already made a thread about that, but I can't see it anymore. I completely agree.

      In my opinion nevertheless, different climates should affect different units differently :

      - Desert would have no affect to speed, but would give a fighting advantage for tanks and planes,
      - Mediterranean should have a possible increase in speed, and wouldn't touch fighting statistics.
      - Icy/north russia, etc/ slow down speed by a lot, increase fighting stats of infantery, decrease stats of airplanes.

      I didn't bother including many details here, but you get my point.