v1.05 Suggestions

The "Starfire" Mod

Change Log - a history of changes and the results/reasons for each change.

Starfire Mod Strategy:

• First fix the economies for all nations. This means that every country should have an appropriate, sustainable industrial level comparable to their historic economy. Our figures are based primarily on Maddison's (1995) GDP figures. Note: some countries will have resource imbalances (i.e. will need to trade on the world market; use events for trade or do conversion to supply their industry - these countries should have world market trades set initially).
• Second increase all combat values to allow for finer adjustment and tweaking.
• Third adjust "brigades" to be less important and lower cost. The idea here is to allow the human player to have more fun making divisions with flavor without as much concern over the cost justification of the brigade.
• Fourth evaluate manpower - is it enough of a restriction to prevent unchecked building of infantry? (the latest experimental download reduces manpower pools by 2/3rds and increased the costs of units by 1/3rd.)
• Fifth - rework the technology tree to allow for country specific techs (to better handle the production costs of items like submachineguns).
• Sixth add in events to give minor countries some doctrines / techs that are impossibly expensive to be researched manually by those countries yet well after all other major countries will long since have researched these. (this is partially to simulate the ability of minor countries to purchase equipment from other nations and also to offset the relative imbalance of cost between major and minor countries to obtain techs)
• Seventh adjust the ai files (produced by the ai tweaking project) to be as effective yet historic as possible, this includes any tweaks to events to switch from one ai file to another.
• Eighth reduce the number of useless leaders for major countries; raise experience of all leaders to 75% of the way to the next level (so with usage they have a chance to gain a skill point).

Known bad/troublesome economies: Afghanistan, Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Canada (must trade), Chile, Columbia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy (must trade), Ireland (must trade), Japan (must trade), Latvia (must trade), Lithuania (must trade), Mongolia (must trade), Nepal (must trade), New Zealand, Norway (must trade), Oman (must trade), Panama (must trade), Paraguay, Peru, Persia, Philippines (prob just fine), Poland (must trade), Portugal, Spain (must trade), South Africa (must trade), Switzerland, Turkey (must trade), Uruguay, Yugoslavia

Resources - in general each country should have resources that closely match their economy.

Technology - lower end techs must be cheaper (for minor countries); Coal to Oil conversion techs must advance in a tighter range.

Events - Events will be used to encourage a historic flow and add flavor and variety, they are also critically important for handling raw material trades outside of the (non-functional) world market.

Ministers - all "Administrative Genius" ministers have been changed to "Resource Industrialist" except for Speer (Germany) and Bernard Baruch or Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson or Secretary of War Henry Stimson for the USA. Although Baruch & Johnson were advocating increased military spending in 1938 the actual increase wasn't effective until late 1940 (after the fall of France). These should be reviewed as it could be a nice way to lower base IC yet retain historic production (a tweak to make conquering a country less valuable).

Armor - increase combat values and increase cost (including manpower from 7 to 9); infantry (and other types) also gain an additional point of hard attack. The concept here is that armor is your offensive spearhead but that it wears out during combat quickly and takes time and expense to rebuild (although we can't really simulate the time it takes). Armor isn't "uber" (infantry can wear it down) but it is powerfully capable of slicing through an infantry defense. Also armored divisions are not a lower manpower alternative to infantry divisions! (although they should remain one manpower point lower than infantry)

Air - increase cost and increase combat values? The idea being to reduce the micromanagement human players need to do without eliminating aircraft completely. The AI is too stupid to escort bombers with fighters, thus a human using fighters is too effective. Two solutions: 1) increase the air combat values of the bombers to reflect some escorting fighters. 2) reduce the org levels of fighters so the "bounce" but don't destroy bombers. Another potential tweak: reduce the speed of air units so they aren't rebasing and flying missions in "real time" (at air travel speed) - this could reduce the micromanagement of air forces (however would this then make it too difficult for an air unit to intercept a fast moving Naval unit?)

Naval - increase capacity of carriers to two air wings (so that a single carrier can carry both bombers and fighters). Is this done already in v1.05b?

AI Files - increase "strat_redeploy_threshold" from default of 5 to 14. Raise "panic_ratio" & "max_front_ratio" values to reduce the demand of front ai for units (fewer militia?); increase min & max_garrison_prop to promote more "defense in depth"; reduce base/min/max attack_odds to encourage more offensives and reduce uber stacks; reduce enemy_reinf_days to also encourage lower odds attacks;

Unit Speeds:

• Speed 3 - Paratroop & Militia
• Speed 4- Infantry, Mountain, Marines (this is roughly 4 km/hour maintained 24 hrs a day)
• Speed 5- Cavalry
• Speed 6- Super Heavy Tanks
• Speed 7- Heavy Tanks & Motorized
• Speed 8- Medium Tanks & Mechanized
• Speed 9- Light Tanks
• Speed 10 - Advanced Light Tanks (fastest unit)
• Engineer brigades should only add one to max speed.
• "Advanced" tanks are one speed point faster than basic or improved

ToDo List:

• Rewrite the "Tripartite Pact" event - as it is every twenty days from Sept 1940 there is a 84% chance of (AI) Germany, Italy & Japan each gaining ten techs and 10,000 coal, steel & oil. That's effectively 420 coal, steel and oil per day. This virtually assures no resource shortage for a fully AI Axis.

Stray thoughts / Notes:

Germany - notes for Germany

France - notes for France

Russia - notes for Russia

Sweden - notes for Sweden

USA - notes for USA

Drop the cost of an Infantry division to 4 to obtain historical production rates (coupled with a 10% increase in total world economy)?

HoI Divisions are roughly a typical Western style (German/American/UK) historical division. A Russian HoI Division represents more like 1.25 Soviet divisions.

One HoI Division (Infantry/Motorized) is approx 15,000 Men (10 MP)

One HoI Armored Division (Armor/Mech) is approx 13,500 Men (9 MP)

A HoI Cavalry Division will represent a "light" division with slightly more mobility and fewer men (9 MP ~ 13.5K men).

HoI Marines/Paratroopers/Mountain divisions are "elite" divisions (9 MP ~ 13.5K men).

HoI Militia divisions represent "garrison" and "home guard" divisions (8 MP ~ 12K men). These are poorly armed and poorly trained (low org, low combat factors).

Human Border parameter should almost always be zero. (the ai should defend against humans just the same as against ai) If players are really ahistorical (Canada attacking the USA) you've got a screwed up game anyway.

Greece - make Lt. General Katsimitros high skill (defensive trait) - 5?; no forts in Ioannina

China:

• Don't build industry (basically just gives it to Japan once conquered)
• R&D - don't research armor
• Jiangmen is a crucial defensive province (give it some garrison priority) also give garrison high priority against Japan.
• Set enemy reinforcement days low.

Event Notes:

• Always put in an "offset" (i.e. "offset = 1") - apparently there is a bug if there is a deathdate and no offset.
• Fix "Private Initiative" event so that it only increases the IC of a single province, make this more common.
• Note: Event 2030 Demand Sudentenland - option A reduces USA war entry by 10! option B reduces USA war entry by 20. Fix this!
• Note: USSR "Holy Crap" AI is never invoked. Standard USSR AI is used for both initial and "counter offensive" - this is really poor.

More Economic notes:

Base v1.05b Total ICs are 4227 IC (note: due to many countries having resource issues this level of production is misleading)

• Coal - 14,424
• Steel - 7,955
• Oil - 2,308
• Rubber - 2,597 (would support 5,194 IC)

Base v1.05 Total ICs are 4205 IC (note: due to many countries having resource issues this level of production is misleading)

• Coal - 13,729
• Steel - 7,395
• Oil - 2,251
• Rubber - 2,597 (would support 5,194 IC)

Thus technically no world wide shortage of resources, even with a 23.5% worldwide industrial growth.

Trying to equate ICs to dollars gives wildly inaccurate results.

Equating experience and skill:

exp Skill
0 0
10 1
20 2
40 3
80 4
120 5
180 6
250 7
330 8
430 9
600 10

This table is stored in the 1.05b exe at offset 2112196 (0x203ac4). It is 11 32-bit integers.

Errors in Paradox v1.05b found:

USA Provinces:
5 - Spokane (Washington)
6 - "Burns" (Eastern Oregon)
9 - San Antonio (SW Texas)

Are all considered non-national (i.e. colonies)!

While 288 & 267 (Panama & San Juan Puerto Rico) are considered National.

Supply cost of Early Tank (MG) (model #1) is 10 and should be 2.

UK Provinces: Rangoon (1590) should be colony; Mandalay (1588) should be colony; Valetta (896)(Malta) should be national? (surprisingly it starts out only level 1 coastal fortified)

Errors found in v1.05c:

Colombia 1936 - capitol is set wrong as "95" (Anchor Bay off the coast of California); manpower wasn't reduced.

Italy 1936 - OOB still has mismatched { }

Poland 1936 - capitol is set wrong as "275" (Bridgetown); manpower wasn't reduced.

Bizzare: Event 2633 (in 101.txt) is one of the Soviet decisions to move industry. This also kicks up USA War Entry by 15%!