Concept Merchant Marine Questioning

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mrgenie
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Concept Merchant Marine Questioning

Post by mrgenie »

Main point/opinion.

I do want to stress out this is just my opinion, it's not meant to rant or anything and I do see from a programmatically point of view as well as AI decision making it's a pretty good solution to handle issues most other games have on this matter.

But why I think it's still wrong:
-1) First of all the logic. It makes transport ships and amphibious landing pretty much useless. I just move amphibious units with a merchant marine around the globe and for instance marines create their own
merchant marine at any port instantly and unload wherever they want. How unreal is that? Telling marines without any industry to build ocean capable merchant marine with their shovels and guns.

-2) Also I don't need to build any transport capacity. I just tell my units in the USA to move to Europe even if I have not just 1 single ship they will arrive.

-3) units sometimes really make bad decisions. When moving from Greece to Denmark to prepare an invasion force for the British Islands the units embark and go all around Italy, Spain, France, Morocco. Either they all
arrive because i already wiped out British ships or 99% being killed if not. But since they embark automatically no way I can really control this.

a few minor points not really worth mentioning.

So what I would prefer:
-1) units never embark automatically
-2) you first need to build a fleet of transport ships to be able to transport units across the oceans
-3) in the global unit rules you can switch on/off units to use transport ships or switch on/off use airplane transport or nothing at all meaning they ALWAYS would plot only a path across land
-4) amphibious landings can ONLY be done from amphibious ships


Again, just my opinion and I do understand my preferences will be insanely complex on the AI. But I think your engine is so well done, it's time to add this complexity which 100% of the other games on the market fail to do properly but I
am very confident if 1 team can pull this one off properly it's the BG team.
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way2co0l
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Re: Concept Merchant Marine Questioning

Post by way2co0l »

Merchant marines were added some time ago, and prior to that you were required to use actual transport ships. The problem at the time and the reason the merchant marines were added was due to the fact that the AI had a difficult time using them effectively. Players wanted to see amphibious operations, especially since cold war features required for units to be able to move vast distances to get to the new theaters. Trying to program for them to use transports effectively and to properly guard them was proving difficult, and the merchant marine were added as an admittedly less than desirable work around in order to make it possible. Battlegoat has always had limited manpower to work on their game and so they simply couldn't add everything to the game in the way they would have liked. Not without sacrificing pretty much everything else. So they had to make acceptable compromises that allowed for the game to work as closely to their dream as possible.

I agree with you that I personally dislike the merchant marine and would prefer for manual transports to be used, but I recognize that it's a very difficult thing to make work right. Given that there are many other things that I personally would prefer that they work on as more of a priority, I'm willing to accept that the merchant marines are simply the way they will be. lol
YoMomma
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Re: Concept Merchant Marine Questioning

Post by YoMomma »

I have learned to accept it, but obviously i got the same issues.
Recently i was playing a game in SR2020 where France invaded a small African country. That was crazy to see, as they obviously used transports. There where a couple of other sccenarios where AI used transport ships in SR2020.
I think the main reason it didnt really work out was because most regions dont have the available transport ships with extra capacity room for the AI decisions. I just like an option of using merchant marine yes or no. I guess i can just delete the 2 units in unit file tho.
Gameplay 1st
SGTscuba
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Location: Tipton, UK

Re: Concept Merchant Marine Questioning

Post by SGTscuba »

I'm not a big fan of the merchant marine system for certain respects but I understand why its been done.

Personally I don't mind troops being transported from port to port by these ships, but I would remove the amphibious version and get the AI to use landing craft as that is what they are for at the end of the day. At the end of the day it feels like the entire class of assault ships have been made useless, although I still use them for the initial assault as I can at least carry supplies forward unless the fleet empties them. Maybe assault ships could have the option to disable supply transfer whilst we are at it so the troops have supplies available when they arrive.

If they could crack it I wonder if they could then crack the ability for the AI to do airdrops?
My SR:U Model Project, get the latest and post suggestions here:

http://www.bgforums.com/forums/viewtopi ... 79&t=28040
mrgenie
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 923
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Re: Concept Merchant Marine Questioning

Post by mrgenie »

As I pointed out in my original post: "I do see from a programmatically point of view as well as AI decision making it's a pretty good solution to handle issues most other games have on this matter."

but I also mentioned: "But I think your engine is so well done, it's time to add this complexity which 100% of the other games on the market fail to do properly"

So we disagree on priorities here :)

Anyway, if they go release an c++ SDK I'm more then willing to take up this task myself. I've done embarking, amphibious AI programming on civilization in a own made mod I never published and it worked really well, until my HDD broke and I lost all the work
and of course I didn't use subversion and didn't wanna do it all over again for a game that's outdated by any next release.

But since SR is a continuing progress/process on the main AI engine to handle the units and maintained for decades I'm more than willing to take up tasks too much for BG to handle.

From the looks of it, SR AI is however 1000 times more complex as the civ AI, but I'm good at learning from code done by someone else and adept/add/change it.

Rewriting the code for an SDK release will be a tough nut to crack as well though. If not designed from the beginning that might be half a life work to do :)
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SGTscuba
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Re: Concept Merchant Marine Questioning

Post by SGTscuba »

Yes, an SDK would be good, maybe in C# if that's what the engine uses (or C++)
My SR:U Model Project, get the latest and post suggestions here:

http://www.bgforums.com/forums/viewtopi ... 79&t=28040
mrgenie
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 923
Joined: Jul 08 2008

Re: Concept Merchant Marine Questioning

Post by mrgenie »

Either way, I need an option to tell units NOT to embark and go somewhere unless I explicitly tell them.

Maybe allow AI to do it the easy way.

But for the human player an option under the "Global rules of Engagement" to not embark automatically.
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