Destiny of the World News

Just wanted to touch base and give an update on where we are with the game. All of the planned features are now in the game.

I am still on the lookout for information that the player needs to manage their country. As I continue to test, and get feedback from players, I will be adding this to the game where possible.

As an example, I think one thing missing from the game is the ability to gauge the strength of the enemy troops. An area where this is most glaring is between Japan and China. Playing as Japan, it can be quite intimidating seeing those huge stacks of troops deployed against you.

In actuality, the Chinese divisions are much smaller than the Japanese divisions, and much more poorly equipped. To address this in game, I am planning two additions.

First, I'm going to add a Unit Specifications Report that will let you compare the technical specifications for a selected country's units and your units. For example, you'll be able to see exactly how one of your Armor Divisions stacks up against the enemy country's armor's number of tanks, troops, gun size, armor, speed, range, etc.

Second, when planning an attack, in addition to the current estimate of the number of enemy divisions you see in the tooltips, I am planning on giving you an estimated strength. The accuracy of this estimate will be based on the amount of espionage you are conducting against them. If you have no espionage teams assigned, you won't get an estimate. If you have 1 team, you will get an estimated range of strength of the units in that region. The more teams you have assigned to that mission, the more accurate your estimate range will be.

Look for those changes coming in the next update.

Going forward here is the plan for getting the game from Early Access to General Release.

I'm currently playing each country, to tune them and hunt for bugs. As I do so, I will be continuing to balance and tune the game. Concurrently, while I am manually testing the game, I am running automated tests where the AIs play games against each other, and then I analyze what happened in the game.

In case you're curious, when I run these automated tests, the game generates computer and human readable log files. A typical game will produce about 50,000 files, and about 2 gigabytes of data. I then load that data into two programs. One lets me graphically view the game, turn by turn, and the other lets me review grids and charts with details about Production, Trade, Research, etc.

I also review some of the files manually. For example, I can review in detail what each country AI was thinking or planning for each turn of the game and see where they get hung up or fooled. I can also review battle details for every battle which occurred during the game.

Anyhow, back to the road map. A big part of the remaining Todo's is balancing the economies. I think some production costs are too high. For example, large capital ships are using too much factory capacity. I plan on starting to tune their costs down in the next update.

I'm also adding the finishing touches to the AI. The Pacific War AI still needs some improvement, so I'll be focusing attention on that going forward. You will also see a little more variability in the AI between games.

Finally, I will be testing the game options (e.g., Spain joins Axis), and testing the game difficulty levels.

As always, I welcome any feedback you might have. I'm especially interested in any bugs you find, or in information you can't find in game to manage your country.

I think the game is in the home stretch, while I finish up the testing and tuning.

If you have any questions, feedback, bugs, or suggestions, please leave your comments in the Discussion Forums. I check and respond to them daily.

Thanks for your interest in DOTW. War is coming! :)

Dave
Fiddlyware

Tuning
[List]
Repair points used to repair coal, oil, or metal bombing damage have been reduced to one point per hundred damage. Costs of producing repair points was based on repairing factory damage. These resources were far too expensive to repair.


Changes:

• Strategic Bombing was very simplistic and predictable and was ignoring country's priorities. This reworks the AI to consider strategic target priorities as well as the value of the targets. It should also sometimes target a less valuable target to throw off defender response.
  
• Submarines in combat with surface ships may now disengage earlier from battle, if they aren't winning the battle. This may be adjusted further based on testing. Submarines were already harder to detect by surface fleets, unless there were also cargo ships or transports in the region. This is because submarines are more able to choose their battles. This new change reflects the advantage of submarines in being able to more easily break off combat when they wished.
  

Bug Fixes:

• There was a major bug with Repair Points, which allowed countries to use other country's Repair Points. They should now always use their own Repair Points to repair damage.
  

New Functionality:

• Added resources grids to Production Manager Screen. This should remove the need to keep switching back and forth between the Production Screen, and Production Manager Screen when using the Production Manager.
  

Tuning
[List]
Increased effectiveness of shore bombardment against troops
Adjusted some production costs. Reduced factory cost of producing Cash, and increased factory costs of producing Supply and Fuel. Adjusted Italy's factory capacity slightly upward to compensate for impact to them. Net impact was a slight overall production cost for most countries initial production.
Reduced factory production costs for Armor, Mechanized Infantry, Fighters, Tactical Bombers, Strategic Bombers, Air Replacements, Tank Replacements and Transports


Changes:

• Researching "Factory" used to only improve efficiency of new production. Existing production was not changed. Changed this so that existing production items have their factory costs reduced as well. This should make this research have the intended effect, which was to model the production efficiency increases that some countries experienced during the war.
  
• Changed default option to Show AI Battles. If you don't want to watch AI Battles, you can disable this in the Game Options Screen.
  
• Cancel Button on Production Manager Screen renamed to Back Button to better reflect its functionality.
  

Bug Fixes:

• Found numerous bugs in the consumption of fuel by land and air units. Fuel consumption should be now much more accurate.
  
• Trade was not enforcing limits properly. The Trade Screen properly showed the amount a country was willing to trade, but would allow purchasing more, if the trading partner had sufficient quantities on hand. The game should now respect the trading partner limits.
  
• Neutral countries, such as Italy before joining the war, were being blocked from passing through Gibraltar and Suez Canal by sea.
  
• Not-ready marker was being drawn on units in Grouping Screen and Information Panel.
  
• Fixed Grouping Screen crash that occurred when merging army at top of stack with army further down in stack
  
• Units could be erroneously pinned, due to a flaw with the AI deployment logic. Example: Italian units being pinned by AI units trying to illegally deploy to Alexandria, which was occupied by Italy, resulting in the Italian attack from Alexandria to Port Said failing because the illegal deployment kept pinning the Italian forces.
  
• Ships with no guns of firing class were displaying a message that they fired 0 guns. Message has been suppressed. It was just cluttering the logs.
  
• Attacks against troop transports weren't being handled properly, causing minimal troop and transport losses even against overwhelming enemy attacks. Amount of damage may be tuned further, pending further testing.
  
• AI was ignoring Strategic Redeployment limits in some cases. Note, the AI is given a small advantage in Strategic Redeployment vs. a human player. That is intended, but this was far and above what was intended.
  
• AI Ship patrols tried to return to home ports which had been captured instead of choosing a new friendly home port.
  
• German fighters climb rates were incorrectly entered for lower tech levels. Should have intended values now.
  
• Orders panel should not be displayed when you select an ally stack. You couldn't enter orders for them, but it was confusing to have it display for units you don't control.
  
• Very long strategic redeployments weren't showing the movement arrows on the full path.
  
• Grouping screen allowed you to transfer allied units to your armies.
  
• Fixed a number of problems with selecting and displaying armies and units in the Grouping Screen.
  
• Fixed a number of display problems with the Unit List in the Information Panel.
  
• Units Report grid column alignment was misaligned.
  
• Air units based in a region that was conquered in battle weren't immediately rebasing to new air base. This caused the game to generate additional battles in the region, in error. Air units should now retreat upon region capture.
  
• If naval units attacked region with land units, and naval force did not contain transports, a land battle was being triggered if the land region contained land units. Should have just triggered shore bombardment
  
• Dive bombers from carriers were not doing damage. Oops! Normally, the number of aircraft sent to drop bombs is reduced if the airbase they flew from is damaged to reflect the fact that fewer aircraft could sortie from a damaged airstrip. For carrier-based dive bombers, they have no airbase, so this value was 0, resulting in the dive bombers not doing any damage. Torpedo bombers weren't affected by the bug. This has been corrected. Carrier dive bombers actually dive bomb now. :)
  
• Shore bombardment damage was not being reported. It should now appear in the Messages Panel.
  
• Updated the mouse-click handler to allow the mouse to move a small amount from the time the mouse button was depressed until the mouse button was released, without canceling the click event. Currently, the program requires the mouse to remain stationary for the click to be registered. This should make the program's mouse-click detection to seem to seem less fussy, while still allowing a mouse click to be cancelled by moving the mouse off the object.
  

Enables Tutorial in game.

New Functionality:

• Added the Tutorial to the game. The tutorial consists of three videos. The first tutorial video covers the Game Overview, Movement, and Combat. The second video covers both types of Production: Manual and Production Manager. The third video covers Research, Trade and Espionage.
  
• Added button for the Production Summary Screen to Production Manager Screen.
  

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug where naval units in conquered region weren't retreating.
  
• Fixed bug where trade partner resource lists weren't correctly enabled/disabled for oil, supply and fuel
  
• Production manager was providing an inaccurate maximum build number in some instances. Items like Cash that are built in units of measure (millions, in the case of cash) require enough capacity to build at least 1 unit, or $1,0000,000 in the case of Cash. The maximum build number was including regions that could build a fraction of a unit in the totals, which inflated the maximum build quantity number. However, when the manager actually tried to fulfill this request, it could not find sufficient idle capacity, since it enforced the unit of measure minimum build requirement. This resulted a smaller quantity being produced than requested by the player.
  
• Production manager was not enforcing maximum build quantity for some item types.
  
• Production Manager Screen was returning to Production Screen after Save. Now returns back to Production Manager Screen after displaying confirmation message.
  
• Production Manager didn't display messages for items deleted.
  

Changes:

This version makes a big change to the way the Production Manager works. The old Production Manager was designed to let you overproduce by automatically reducing Cash production, if necessary. This misled players to underappreciate the importance of Cash. This could lead to instability in the economy that would be more difficult to stabilize. Production Manager will no longer cancel production to satisfy new production.

Instead, it will only schedule using idle production. If you need more capacity, you will need to reduce production of other items manually, using the Production Manager. This is covered in the new tutorial.

To facilitate this, a link to the Production Summary screen has added to the Production Manager Screen. This will help you identify items you can cancel to free up capacity.

I believe these changes better meet the design goals of Production Manager, which is to let the player set production levels, and letting the computer schedule that production across your regions.