Destiny of the World News

This update contains a number of tuning and bug fixes, listed below. Of particular note, there was a pretty serious bug that was causing manpower to be drained, that should be fixed in this update.

Tuning
[List]
Supply interception was a bit too brutal. Each supply unit can now only be attacked once per turn.
Made submarines a bit easier for surface ships to detect
USSR was relocating factories to the URALS after losing just one region. USSR won't relocated until 5 regions have been captured.
UK Factories were still too high following the previous production cost adjustments. Reduced slightly.
Reduced starting War Mobilization amount for USA and USSR. They both started with too much capacity focused on War Production.
Reduced factory costs for convoys


Changes:

• AI was ignoring regions where convoys were being lost. AI will now attempt to dispatch ships on demand to trouble spots
  
• Changed supply AI to prefer land routes over sea routes, even if longer, to save on convoy needs
  
• AI will more precisely deploy their strategic bombers between theaters
  

Bug Fixes:

• The USA First Fleet should have been frozen in Hawaii until Pearl Harbor Day (12/7/41) (unless the No Pearl Harbor Option is selected in Game Options). The game now enforces this restriction. The AI already was following this restriction.
  
• French Strategic Bombers were rebasing to Poland after their bombing missions, leaving them out of position for the defense of France.
  
• Espionage country list was not being populated correctly for countries that start the game as neutrals.
  
• Factories being relocated to the Urals (Game event) weren't being removed from their original locations.
  
• Fixed crash when AI assembling ships into patrol
  
• Manpower was not being adjusted properly upon region/capture loss
  
• Trade Deals Screen only showed trade deals which you initiated. It did not list trade deals initiated by the AI that you had accepted. As a result, you couldn't delete any trades that you had previously accepted from the AI (or that were already underway at game start). All Trades should now be shown and be cancellable.
  
• Trade Screen tooltips were sometimes showing shipments unrelated to the deal you were viewing, in addition to the correct shipment data.
  
• When loading a scenario, AI was putting ships in the production queue in cities with ports. Should have been naval bases
  
• Mouse hover and click on the unit menu wasn't not firing on the full button locations
  
• Estimate to complete value was incorrect in some cases. This didn't affect the correct production time but did provide a wrong estimate.
  
• When loading the initial production for a new game, the game was not correctly crediting partial production that was completed. So partially built items were taking the full production time to complete.
  
• Repair Point usage shown on Production Screen was incorrect for USA and USSR, because the calculation was using the fully mobilized factory values in some places.
  
• Units that are out of supply aren't supposed to start starving troops until the third turn out of supply. That was working, however, if the until went back into supply, the starvation counter was never reset, eventually causing immediate starvation if a unit went back out of supply.
  

The convoy system was reworked because it was not working as intended. You used to be able to pretty much ignore convoys, because they were very hard to damage. You will see a big change with the new system. You will need to stay on top of your convoy inventory. Convoy losses should now be a critical concern like they were during the war.

There are two big changes to how convoys are handled. Because of the way convoys used to be modeled, the game allocated extra capacity for each convoy, but given that they were lightly loaded, it was very unlikely that shipping would be sunk. The game now matches shipping tonnage used with shipping tonnage needed, which means when damage occurs, you will lose fractional convoys.

Secondly, convoy detection was only occurring if the convoy ended movement in a region where a patrol ended movement. The game now checks every region a convoy moves through for possible detection by patrols. Patrols now are properly doing interception checks along their full path of movement.

New Functionality:

• When convoys are intercepted, and a battle occurs, the map is centered on the battle location, and a brief indication is shown on the map
  

Tuning

• Reduced factory costs to produce Militia or Infantry
  
• AI emphasis on strategic bombing has been increased
  
• Air-to-Air combat damage has been increased slightly
  
• Damage from ground strafing and bombing of land units by air units has been reduced slightly
  
• AI should build a more effective mix between air and land units. Land units were being under-prioritized
  
• Increased benefits of Farming Research
  
• Increased benefits of Cryptography Research
  
• Increased detection chance for ships on patrol to detect other ships
  

Changes:

• Convoy losses were not working as intended. The size of a convoy was based on the capacity of typical merchant ship. Since many supply convoy loads are less than this, losses in combat would result in losses to supply or fuel, but not to convoy ships. This did not reflect historical shipping losses. This also affected trade convoys, but the impact was less apparent because shipment sizes were typically much larger. Instead, the game will deduct fractional convoy points based on lost tonnage. You will see increased convoy losses under the new system, and will have to build more convoys, or protect them, as was the case historically.
  
• Modified to allow interception of American convoys (trading with UK or France) prior to USA entry in WW2 by Germany (to reflect what happened historically)
  

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug where some map regions along the map edge didn't render (black screen). The world map is modeled as a sheet of paper rolled in a cylinder. This problem sometimes occurred along the map edge. Note, even though the map is modeled as a cylinder, it utilizes latitude, longitude when computing distances, so large regions near the poles are smaller in distance in game terms than their visual appearance might imply. This is how the game handles mapping a sphere onto a flat surface.
  
• Fixed bug where displayed land attack rating was not being computed for newly created units.
  
• Supplies sent to units in theaters outside of the country's capital theater were being requisitioned properly from the theater depot but were sent from the capital instead of the depot region. Oops. The supplies eventually got there but took much longer to arrive.
  
• If a unit's strategic redeployment (SR) destination has been captured, the deployment was correctly cancelled before entering enemy territory, but the unit received a readiness penalty as if they had made a normal move. They should no longer receive the readiness penalty if their SR move is cut short.
  
• If Air/Land units attacked a region, and the land attack failed, the land units retreated properly, but the air units triggered new battles. The air units should now retreat as well.
  
• AI Patrols which crossed theater boundaries were not working properly. When patrols crossed a theater boundary, the new theater AI was stealing the patrol ships and the patrol was cancelled.
  
• AI would order strategic bomber missions for your strategic bomber units if they were located in AI controlled friendly territory, if you hadn't already issued orders for them.
  
• Fuel is stored at the unit level. There was an obsolete field that used to store the army/fleet value that was being used when displaying the unit that sometimes caused an incorrect value to be displayed. The average fuel for an army/fleet should have been computed on demand. References to the obsolete field have been replaced with the on-demand calculation.
  
• Convoys were only checking interception at the end of their routes. They are now checking the entire patrol route
  
• Surrendering country research was not being cancelled, resulting in superfluous messages in the message panel
  

This upgrade focused on a review of China and France gameplay. These are the two most challenging countries to play, but I think they are in a state where you can have good success with them, with patience and clever play. Giving France the ability to reject Vichy, when offered by Germany, gives them a much better position, but still a very difficult one. I recommend only playing these countries after you have gained experience playing other countries. :)

A few observations on the current gameplay:
[List]
Infantry and militia factory costs seem too high. Expect reductions in costs.
Air power seems a little too strong against ground troops, this will probably be tuned back a bit.
Air-to-Air combat doesn't seem deadly enough. This will probably be increased some.
Naval interception chance seems a bit too low and will be increased a bit.
AI use of Navies is not where I want it to be. After air/ground gameplay is more tuned, expect the AI to make better use of their navies
AI is producing too many air units vs. ground units.

Note: These are things that I'm aware of and will be tuning. But expect them to occur over several updates


In this Update:

New Functionality:

• Upgrade All Units. Before, you could only upgrade one unit at a time. You can still do that, but when you click the Upgrade Button, there is a new checkbox on the confirmation message box that you can "check" to upgrade ALL eligible units in the selected army, air fleet or naval fleet (if sufficient resources are available).
  
• The German player was always given option to create Vichy, but the French player was not. Now the player is always given a choice whether playing France or Germany.
  
• When convoys are successfully attacked, the attacking country is now identified in the message.
  

Tuning
[List]
Increased Free France factory capacity slightly
Increased German AI aggressiveness against France
Reduced number of factory points to build new factory
Adjusted food production rates further
AI will cancel trades if it is short of resources it traded.


Changes:

• Previously, if a battle contestant had very low morale, the battle would end before it actually started. Now, at least one round of battle will be fought before combat can break off.
  
• Units with low morale can no longer initiate an attack. The average morale of a stack must now be at least 50% to attack.
  
• Convoys with no coal or fuel now can move 1 region per turn (like ships can) and incur some damage. Previously, they could not move. In low resource situations, this was very difficult to recover from.
  

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed mouser hover and unit selection in Information Panel Unit List. Sometimes selection did not pick up the correct unit.
  
• China not allowed to move into UK Territory as a planned move until UK and Japan officially at war.
  
• Game would let you build a Naval Base in an inland (no sea access) region. Game now checks if the region has sea access before allowing you to build a base there.
  
• AI Patrol Logic was sometimes stealing ships being sent to other theaters as reinforcements.
  
• Manpower was not getting populated correctly for Vichy France or Free France when Vichy is created.
  
• France started with 1 too many espionage teams active
  
• Fixed bug with colony regions not all transferring properly to Vichy or Free France
  
• When convoys ran out of coal, the shortfall was not shown in the Production Screen Usage Row, so you couldn't tell how much more coal you actually need to resolve the shortage. The shortfall amount is now included in the usage row.
  
• Estimated usage was being double counted in some cases, on the Production Screen Resource Grids.
  
• There have been some reports of the game crashing when screen resolution was changed in the Options Screen. I believe this was caused by not exiting the game when changing resolutions. The game did warn you to exit but didn't force this. The game will now warn you that a resolution change will require you to restart the game, and after you acknowledge the message, the game will exit. The new resolution should be used by the game when you start it again. I think this will resolve the issues that have been reported. If you still have an issue, please use the bug report link to report it.
  
• Surrendering countries' trade deals, espionage, production and research weren't being cancelled properly (except for Vichy)
  
• Unit Report didn't show your country's units when they were located in allied regions in some situations
  
• Fixed bug where AI was trading for resources it didn't need
  

The major feature of this update is improvements to the map drawing logic. The logic used to draw move buttons and arrows was based on an early build of the game, and it was pretty inefficient. It contained a lot of unneeded logic which greatly slowed the drawing process. This also sometimes caused the game to appear to hang, because the logic consumed so many resources while trying to render each screen update. The drawing logic has been rewritten to only do the calculations needed. This should greatly improve performance when issuing patrol and strategic redeployment orders and should remove this source of "hangs".

New Functionality:

• Production queue tooltip on Production Screen now shows the earliest estimate-to-complete for each item in the queue. For example: "Infantry: Earliest ETC: 4 weeks. 2 Divisions"
  

Tuning

[List]
Changed starting unit deployment for China to give them a better chance against Japan
Increased Chinese starting food stockpiles. Decreased starting food stockpiles for other countries. All countries should start the game with 12 weeks buffer of food.
Decreased food production for China, France, Germany, and Japan.
Cash prices for trade goods have been increased substantially. Trades were so cheap that countries could buy everything on the market for very small amounts.


Changes:

• Production Screen: Changed default to repeat=no when building airbases or radar. There is no benefit to building more than one.
  

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed 5 units erroneously deployed in East China Gobi Desert. This is impassable terrain.
  
• Retreating attackers were intended to retreat to their starting region. They should do this now, when possible.
  

New Functionality:

• Added a flashing battle marker on the mini map, so you can see the world battle location more easily
  

Bug Fixes:

• Rebasing aircraft were unintentionally engaging in combat
  
• Naval combat was occurring between Japan and UK before Pearl Harbor
  
• Production Queue click-detection/tooltips in the Information Panel was misaligned by a few pixels causing the wrong item to be shown sometimes.
  
• Fixed error with RebaseAir command not allowing selection of distant airbases that are legal targets in some circumstances.
  
• Fixed bug where Units Report Select button (which zooms the map to the unit) couldn't find unit and went into loop, hanging the game.
  
• Fixed bug where movement arrows were drawn incorrectly when the movement arrow needed to be drawn exactly vertically. This happened in a few regions near Hawaii. Arrows should now be drawn correctly.