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Pharnakes posted:I mean, NATO invading Kaliningrad is scarcely less fantastical than the USSR invading the west coast of the USA in container ships The British arguably kicked it off with invasion literature. Apparently uneasy is the head that wears the crown.
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Feb 8, 2023 23:26
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I bet there were some Roman authors writing Clancychat about a giant wave of barbarians crossing the Rhine
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Feb 8, 2023 23:31
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Dreadnoughts has been patched like once a day for the last fortnight. I'd give it a little time to settle. When I played it last year the missions were good but I didn't like the campaign.
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Feb 9, 2023 00:05
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I tried UA:D and yeah, the campaign map still feels pretty rough and I have no idea what I should be doing on the map at all. It's also kind of obtuse. Event box told me Laos was attacking Indochine, but the map says colonial forces in Indochine are attacking Laos (same as it ever was), and there was no way for the navy to get involved at all since Laos is a landlocked country. The minor countries rise and fall and I again, can't interact with them and certainly not with all these ships.
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Feb 9, 2023 00:26
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Pre-dreadnought ship design in UA:D is mostly a matter of stacking as many accuracy bonuses as possible. The first war you're most likely going in with low single digits hit % so even just a percentage point can make a massive difference when you've got two lines of shitbarges flailing at each other from 700 meters with a 2.6% hit rate on their main battery and 0.8% for secondaries.skooma512 posted:I tried UA:D and yeah, the campaign map still feels pretty rough and I have no idea what I should be doing on the map at all. It's also kind of obtuse. Event box told me Laos was attacking Indochine, but the map says colonial forces in Indochine are attacking Laos (same as it ever was), and there was no way for the navy to get involved at all since Laos is a landlocked country. The minor countries rise and fall and I again, can't interact with them and certainly not with all these ships. According to the mouseover information on the "army logistics" line in the politics screen, more fleet tonnage makes your troops fight better so building more random junk will provide moral support to the army. I've not seen much reason to not try to get close to maxing out the shipyard capacity(but take care not to go over because of orders from minors or damaged ships coming in for repairs) for the purposes of improving my army and having spare tonnage to anchor around invasion zones/do blockades with.
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Feb 9, 2023 01:28
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I've actually mostly been doing the Naval Academy missions instead of looking at the campaign just yet - RTW is great, but it doesn't really do instant big boat battle gratification the way UA;D does. The advice on predreads paid hilarious fruit - I had so many 3" guns in casemates and secondaries that I was machine-gunning them out in one battle and managed to kill a semi-dreadnought just by burning it down. Also it is deeply satisfying once you start unlocking the missions that let you play with dreadnought tech. There's a bunch of missions that seem to be basically "Why don't you go lay waste to all you see before you, as a treat?", especially the "Fisher's wet dream" missions where you drive battlecruisers into convoys cackling like a maniac the whole time. Viscerally satisfying in a way that RTW's dry presentation can't quite match when you can start reliably landing big hits from ten kilometers away. That being said, I did take a quick peek at the campaign mode to see what it's like. Does the old RTW basic strategic advice still apply, i.e. "Focus on solid cruisers and light cruisers because convoy missions will be the bread and butter of any war, while building battleships largely to maintain tonnage and prevent blockades or to allow you to blockade others as well as just to have some in case a big battle gets forced"? Or is the strategic logic different? I do notice that it seems like you can actually move fleets around and exert area control now - I guess straits and chokepoints are going to start becoming that much more important? ARE there still randomly generated battles or is it actual proper map control now?
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Feb 9, 2023 02:58
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Tried the Broken Arrow demo and while it has some promise what loving year is it supposed to take place in? The demo mission has you running around with M47 Dragons blowing up S-350 SAMs (service year, 2019). Meanwhile the armory has the M551 Sheridan and M60 alongside F-35Cs and Stryker Dragoons 
Mr Luxury Yacht fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Feb 9, 2023 |
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Feb 9, 2023 03:13
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Tried the Broken Arrow demo and while it has some promise what loving year is it supposed to take place in? Glad I'm not the only one who noticed that, it's bizarre
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Feb 9, 2023 04:25
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Current events have proven out Javelin vs T-80 engagements, so...
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Feb 9, 2023 07:18
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VostokProgram posted:I bet there were some Roman authors writing Clancychat about a giant wave of barbarians crossing the Rhine Maybe some Thomas Clancius story about the Queen of Egypt unleashing African hordes to take over the Mediterranean inspired Marc Anthony as well?
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Feb 9, 2023 10:28
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Battlefront released a patch adding slitherine's PBEM++ (their server holds the saves, no need to email each other) and tournament mode for Shock Force 2 and Black Sea, as well as a tournament mode. No eta on the Steam version but hopefully soon.
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Feb 9, 2023 10:52
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Tried the Broken Arrow demo and while it has some promise what loving year is it supposed to take place in? It's set in 20XX AC*  *Anno Clancy.
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Feb 9, 2023 11:42
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Tried the Broken Arrow demo and while it has some promise what loving year is it supposed to take place in? I was more surprised to see Russia has mostly the latest gear while the Americans don't. In particular, the armoury has the T-14 Armata, so far unseen outside of parades, while the US tops out at upgraded M1A1s. Then again, the game ate all of my RAM and asked for more, so I'm kind of incentivised to nitpick on it.
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Feb 9, 2023 13:54
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Theres alot in the files for BA still. Total US list: A10 AAVP Abrams Abrams M1A2 AC130 ACV ACV Dragoon AH64 Apache AH64 Longbow AH-1W AH-1Z Airborne Airborne Sappers Blackhawk Chinook Cobra Guardian AH-6 Killer Egg Kiowa Knighthawk MH-6 Littlebird Osprey Silenthawk Stallion B1B Lancer B2 B52 C-17 Drones ? F-117 F-14 F-15 F-16 Block 52 F-16 Block 70 F-22 F-35 Growler Hornet KC130 / MC130? Superhornet AMPV Assault Engineers AV8B Harrier Nightattack Harrier Avenger M2 Bradley Bradley Fist Bradley Linebacker Cavalry Scouts CH-53 Combat Engineers C-RAM CV-22B Delta Force Dragon Engineers F/A-18F Fire Team ? Force Recon Green Berets Rangers Rangers AT SMAW Weapons Team? HMMWV HMMWV TOW HMMWV HAWKEYE HMMWV LRAS LAV-25 LAV-AD LAV-AT LAV-M M3A3 Bradley HEMMT HIMARS JLTVs LCAC LHA LMTV LSV LVSR M106A3 M109 M1117 M113A3 M1288gmv m1297 M1A2 SEP v2 M270 MLRS M2A2 Bradley M2A3 Bradley M60 M8 AGS M901A3 M981 FIST Marine Raiders Mech Riflemen MH-6 MH-60 MH-60S MQ4S Triton MQ4 Global Hawk MQ8 MQ9 MTVR MV22 Navy Seals OH-58 Kiowa Pararescue Patriot Rangers Rangers AT Rangers MMG Rangers RRC RSOV Scouts Scout Snipers Seahawk Sheridan Smaw Team Sniper Stinger Stryker ATGM Stryker ICV Stryker Shorad Stryker MGS Stryker Mortar Stryker RV UH-1Y UH-60 UH-60M Game is promising but weird so far. Really dislike their take on the AP/HEAT interactions vs armor but they may not be fully implemented. Dandywalken fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Feb 9, 2023 |
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Feb 9, 2023 14:07
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The game does feel like an step between world in conflict and wargame, healthbars and rock paper scissors and so on but also armor facing and 50 variations of apc, I dont think they're going for realism as much as they are flavor
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Feb 9, 2023 14:19
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Tried some proper dreadnought fleet battles in the Naval Academy and man, they're a very different kettle of fish to just making one specially-designed super ship and going to town. One thing is that the battles seem to outright require more micromanagement than RTW, though. In particular it seems like each division automatically targets the same ship, which is a problem if you're relying on heavier guns to win a long-range duel and the "other ship's gun splashes" modifier rapidly becomes insuperable when three or more ships are firing on the same target. Divisions also seem to have more trouble staying in coherent overall formation as well without some goosing now and then. Was trying to do the old RTW thing where you set up all divisions to center around the flagship division one way or another and then focus on just driving the flagship around to direct the rest of the line, but it seems without the occasional direct intervention you'll end up performing badly if you do. Also, am I misreading the way gun stats work? I know traditionally a rule of thumb is to make ships that are proof against their own guns, but looking at 16" guns with midgame tech for instance it seems like they'll go through anything you can realistically make at any range. Yet actually bringing them to battle and mousing over other ships offers a "12% penetration" chance. Does the penetration chance include the 5" secondaries as well, or is something else in play making penetration less likely than it seems on paper, or what? Edit: Also, what goes into making all-or-nothing armor in UA:D? Is it a toggle option like in RTW, or a specific combination of techs and armoring choices or something? Tomn fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Feb 9, 2023 |
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Feb 9, 2023 20:36
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More advanced armor has more effective thickness. I think the penetration stat for gun is vs unmodified thickness. I don't think there's an armor layout button anymore so to make different style of armor scheme you just have to adjust how you distribute your armor.
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Feb 9, 2023 21:48
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Max citadel, bulkheads, and antiflooding with only main belt and deck is AoN.
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Feb 10, 2023 04:40
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Has anyone worked out what a "critical hit" in second front actually means? I can't see an entry for it in the explanation of combat results tab.
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Feb 11, 2023 13:38
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VostokProgram posted:I bet there were some Roman authors writing Clancychat about a giant wave of barbarians crossing the Rhine Jokes on them when it actually happened.
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Feb 11, 2023 14:31
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So how long until UA:D is good?
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Feb 11, 2023 16:19
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My UA:D experience so far was that I jumped into a randomly generated battle to fight 4 USA BBs against 4 IJN BBs and it worked right out of the box unlike that really old 3D sim from Stormfront Games so my bar might be really low but it passed it
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Feb 11, 2023 16:50
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I think of it like I thought of Starsector. The battle system is good and fun and was worth worth the price of entry a year ago. I haven't really grappled with the lastest version of the campaign map but all the funamentals are there and it's getting rapid balancing/bug fixing patches. It isn't going to get 10 years of work like Starsector has but it is only going to get better.
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Feb 11, 2023 16:53
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The battles and ship builder are great. I find the campaign layer less fun than RTW because everything takes longer (battles themselves, designing ships) and either it just feels like less stuff happens bc slamming end turn isn't as frequent or it actually has less events. Hopefully they can make the campaign feel like less of a slog. But even if you just play the scenarios or mash boats together it's worth the price.
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Feb 12, 2023 07:18
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Anybody want a 50% off code for Matrix/Slitherine?
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Feb 12, 2023 09:24
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Yes please, I'd love one.
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Feb 12, 2023 12:58
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Infidelicious posted:The battles and ship builder are great. I really think that the campaign layer should use different turn lengths depending on if you are at war or not. Something like 3-6 month turns for peacetime would seem about right.
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Feb 12, 2023 14:58
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Infidelicious posted:I find the campaign layer less fun than RTW because everything takes longer (battles themselves, designing ships) and either it just feels like less stuff happens bc slamming end turn isn't as frequent or it actually has less events. I'm pretty sure you get fewer events from a smaller pool than in RtW.
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Feb 12, 2023 17:02
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Getting further in the UA:D campaign, and...is there any way whatsoever to see the designs of your rivals? That used to be a critical part of RtW, trying to figure out what your particular enemies had and designing to try and counter them. Feels like I'm just building blind and hoping for the best. Can't even seem to figure out how to get a vague guess as to the tonnage of individual ships (though I for sure can see the OVERALL tonnage of ships so I suppose I could turn it into a math equation if I really wanted to).
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Feb 13, 2023 01:22
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This is going to be a bit of a niche post, but I've been using Lossless Scaling on some of these old Matrix Games with passable results. if you take a game like Eagle Day to Bombing the Reich, or the OG War in the Pacific, they support windowed mode, but the resolution is stuck in 1024x768, and it can look way too small to be playable within such a small window on a modern display but if you set it to full screen mode, it's often going to not play-well with alt-tabbing. Even if you're playing War in the Pacific: Admiral's Edition where they support command line arguments to increase the resolution to whatever you like, you're either on a bordered window mode, so it's not matching up to your monitor's resolution precisely, or you're going to fullscreen which, again, doesn't always mesh well with alt-tabbing so you instead use Lossless Scaling: you play it in windowed mode, and the app stretches the image to fill your whole screen (using any number of available upscaling solutions). You get the best of both worlds: * the image and the text is large enough that it's still legible * the image will fill your whole screen, without windows borders * you can alt-tab freely, because the game is still technically running on windowed mode  this is a shot of WITP: AE, set to an internal resolution of 1600x900, and then upscaled to 1080p ___  and this is a shot of Bombing the Reich, set to an internal resolution of 1024x768, and then upscaled to 1080p. This one doesn't quite look as nice, but that's mostly because BTR doesn't look that nice at all, even when you're running it completely native.
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Feb 13, 2023 06:01
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Thanks! This should be quite interesting for WinSPMBT.
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Feb 13, 2023 15:40
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Dimitris posted:Thanks! This should be quite interesting for WinSPMBT. If this thing works for WinSPMBT I'll buy it immediately. I still refuse to pay $40 USD just resolutions greater than 800x600 but I'll gladly pay $5 to get it plus upscale some of the old early Windows/DOS games I've been playing lately.
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Feb 13, 2023 15:49
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I grabbed the free version of WINSPMBT, set it to windowed mode, set the resolution to 800x600 (the highest it would go) it came up in a tiny window  but this is what it looks like upscaled 
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Feb 13, 2023 16:01
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Can you upscale the return fire stage of spmbt?
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Feb 13, 2023 16:19
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Playing through the UA:D campaign more and in some ways it sorta feels like changes to the RTW were made for the sake of making changes and it's tricky to see the benefit sometimes. For instance, great, OK, you can create task forces out of individual ships and move them to individual points on the map, but it doesn't seem like it really matters WHERE they are on the map for battle generation purposes as long as they're within the right sea region, unless you're ordering a naval invasion in which case you just need to be close to. That doesn't seem functionally much different from RTW just shifting ships within regions, but the fact that task forces can be created and sent to specific areas DOES mean that the AI loses its tiny goddamn mind and sends enormous swarms of two-ship task forces on a constant stream all over the world. Or for instance, it's now possible to engage in diplomacy and actively trade on your prestige to convince the government to do stuff. Neat - but it also drops the RTW system where tension tends to slowly rise randomly over time even without events which all adds up to mean that the player is much more in control of how and when they go to war, which partially undercuts the tension of being a naval secretary whose jingoistic pronouncements to maintain naval prestige regularly runs into the issue of governments taking you too seriously and sending you to war before you're actually ready. In a way it feels like the UA:D campaign is in a weird halfway point between trying to copy RTW, and trying to do its own thing and create its own identity. It'd probably be better to pick one and go full-bore with it than where it is now.
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Feb 13, 2023 17:16
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FYI: Slitherine is having a sale on the Field of Glory/Sengoku Jidai/Pike and Shot franchise on Steam right now.
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Feb 14, 2023 01:08
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FastestGunAlive posted:Can you upscale the return fire stage of spmbt? You monster.
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Feb 14, 2023 18:21
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I've been meaning to make a snarky post about Second Front going for gold on "shortest, least descriptive patch notes possible" latelyquote:close combat less deadly but today's made me laugh out loud Version 1.1148 posted:faster now Squiggle fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Feb 14, 2023 |
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Feb 14, 2023 22:11
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I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who laughed at it
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Feb 14, 2023 23:46
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Squiggle posted:I've been meaning to make a snarky post about Second Front going for gold on "shortest, least descriptive patch notes possible" lately lol I mean im happy at the pace of fixes but yea
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Feb 15, 2023 07:00
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