Merchant marines issue

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Zuikaku
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by Zuikaku »

Anthropoid wrote:Nice!

When you say "unit file" which one do you mean specifically? I'm not real familiar with this games files.
DEFAULT.UNIT file if I understood correctly.
Anthropoid wrote: I assume the data in this file only get loaded by a save file once at the launch of the play through? Or can these changes take effect in an ongoing play through?
No, no changes on ongoing games.
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YoMomma
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by YoMomma »

Yes maps\data\default.unit.

You need to edit 2 types of merchant marines. Ignore "armed merchant ship"
its unit 20301 and 20305. BTW i checked and its the other way arround, you need to set "no land cap" to 1. I corrected the post.

You can check mods section theres recent topic http://www.bgforums.com/forums/viewtopi ... 79&t=28208 on how to mod unit file.
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Zuikaku
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by Zuikaku »

So, no more stucked MMs in siberian rivers? :D
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Anthropoid
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by Anthropoid »

Dangit. I'm not sure I can endure yet another restart . . . I suppose I could use the old "load your save file as a campaign cache file trick?"

Germany will certainly have a legup if I do that given it is Jan 1937 and I'm nearly ready to start building Bf 109s . . .

ADDIT: and btw thanks YoMomma! :-)
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Anthropoid
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by Anthropoid »

HRMPHZ!

Looks like George or Balth or somebody who controls the version that gets pushed from Steam already implemented your fix into the latest version of SRU YoMomma! :-)

I just used a little regex ** to turn the [, ] into a [,\n] so I could line up the column header index with the actual indices for the two MM rows in the array then plugged them into an excel for easy perusal.

As you can see, both already have values of "1" for the nolandcap column (shown as a row here)
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YoMomma
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by YoMomma »

Hmm ok thats good i guess, i have copy of 9.1.37 with old values and 9.1.38 got the fix. Somehow when i started 9.1.37 it showed 9.1.38. Anyway it should be fixed now. Seems i found the fix few months after BG did :roll: Altho i told them many times for many years to stop merchant marines from entering neutral waters.

Wonder why there is so few feedback about this fix. Huge game changer. Also lack of notes on any patch, somehow theres not even patch note from 9.1.38 on steam.
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Anthropoid
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by Anthropoid »

YoMomma wrote:Hmm ok thats good i guess, i have copy of 9.1.37 with old values and 9.1.38 got the fix. Somehow when i started 9.1.37 it showed 9.1.38. Anyway it should be fixed now. Seems i found the fix few months after BG did :roll: Altho i told them many times for many years to stop merchant marines from entering neutral waters.

Wonder why there is so few feedback about this fix. Huge game changer. Also lack of notes on any patch, somehow theres not even patch note from 9.1.38 on steam.
Not to disrespect the man, as I do indeed respect his accomplishments; but I get the impression George is a bit of an "eccentric." :P
jks_AsPac
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by jks_AsPac »

Hi guys! I know this issue has been somewhat fixed already but I wanted to report that in my current Cold War game, the UK sends merchant marines through the Russian Arctic and Siberia to "help out" South Korea. Only, they never really get to South Korea before it gets beaten by the North. The UK is not at war with the USSR and only has a mutual defense treaty with South Korea so I think it's more of a proxy war. Now they got over 3 dozen units stuck up there looking for a new passage to Asia.
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by SteamSupreme »

jks_AsPac wrote: Jul 09 2018 Hi guys! I know this issue has been somewhat fixed already but I wanted to report that in my current Cold War game, the UK sends merchant marines through the Russian Arctic and Siberia to "help out" South Korea. Only, they never really get to South Korea before it gets beaten by the North. The UK is not at war with the USSR and only has a mutual defense treaty with South Korea so I think it's more of a proxy war. Now they got over 3 dozen units stuck up there looking for a new passage to Asia.
I've gotten a lot of that as well, Merchant Marines stuck here and there because they could not path to a distant, or even a near location(because they could not cross a river).

Merchant Marines help a lot in invading other regions across water hexes, creating unexpected developments such as Turkey successfully invading occupied France, stealing Paris from the Germans while they were busy in the USSR, however, Merchant Marine do get stuck a lot and end up "pinwheeling," that is unable to path to where they want to go their ships spinning endlessly.

RUGE made a ferry improvement in his SR2020 map fix, an invisible bridge on the map which is text edited into the map file and functions as a bridge to allow units to cross rivers and other areas that the AI was commonly known to get stuck in.

I thought about using that "ferry" improvement consecutively to create a "shipping lane" connecting continents together RISK style in SR2020 and in theory ground units would use them as "roads" to get from one continent to another without having to hand load ships. The visual effect is a stream of tanks, artillery and infantry on the ocean waters, bizarre yes, hover the mouse over them and they are on an invisible improvement labeled 'shipping lane."

In SRU, the ship visuals already exist in the form of the Merchant Marine, it remains that they would have to be coded by devs to use a "shipping lane" improvement like units use a road to get from the west to the east side of the globe (as well as elsewhere) across several predetermined routes and avoid being stuck.
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by jks_AsPac »

SteamSupreme wrote: Jul 09 2018
jks_AsPac wrote: Jul 09 2018 Hi guys! I know this issue has been somewhat fixed already but I wanted to report that in my current Cold War game, the UK sends merchant marines through the Russian Arctic and Siberia to "help out" South Korea. Only, they never really get to South Korea before it gets beaten by the North. The UK is not at war with the USSR and only has a mutual defense treaty with South Korea so I think it's more of a proxy war. Now they got over 3 dozen units stuck up there looking for a new passage to Asia.
I've gotten a lot of that as well, Merchant Marines stuck here and there because they could not path to a distant, or even a near location(because they could not cross a river).

Merchant Marines help a lot in invading other regions across water hexes, creating unexpected developments such as Turkey successfully invading occupied France, stealing Paris from the Germans while they were busy in the USSR, however, Merchant Marine do get stuck a lot and end up "pinwheeling," that is unable to path to where they want to go their ships spinning endlessly.

RUGE made a ferry improvement in his SR2020 map fix, an invisible bridge on the map which is text edited into the map file and functions as a bridge to allow units to cross rivers and other areas that the AI was commonly known to get stuck in.

I thought about using that "ferry" improvement consecutively to create a "shipping lane" connecting continents together RISK style in SR2020 and in theory ground units would use them as "roads" to get from one continent to another without having to hand load ships. The visual effect is a stream of tanks, artillery and infantry on the ocean waters, bizarre yes, hover the mouse over them and they are on an invisible improvement labeled 'shipping lane."

In SRU, the ship visuals already exist in the form of the Merchant Marine, it remains that they would have to be coded by devs to use a "shipping lane" improvement like units use a road to get from the west to the east side of the globe (as well as elsewhere) across several predetermined routes and avoid being stuck.
I think that's a good idea. I played with Ruges' mod in SR2020 before and it worked pretty well back then. Though I won't know how the AI will send units from Europe to Asia just by that but it could work since it changes a lot of variables for the AI pathfinder. Also, it would really help if the AI can use the theaters to know if they should send a lot of troops or not. The problem right now is that they only ever care about theaters close to their region but in WWII and beyond that shouldn't be the case. Anyhow, I wish you luck with that and if you need someone to test it or to give some feedback, I can definitely help out.
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by SteamSupreme »

---------------------------------
UPDATE I increased the range of ALL supply vehicles planes and trucks for experimental purposes and that seems to help with units getting stuck, however for a more serious mod I'll cut that back to x5 range for supply planes/ vehicles only. I tried adding a "shipping lane" connecting a continent using the consecutive "ferrys" as per RUGe on 1936map but they did not show up in the game. Did not try if for the SR2020 game yet. If it did work,probably still run into no supply situation on the ocean and the distances are much more vast.

This will probably be something the DEVs will have to consider, I'll put it in the suggestion "shipping lanes" to connect the " continents together might help the AI USA to be more motivated to send troops to Europe and elsewhere, although in my last game the USA did invade North Africa though got supply stalled in the desert.
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by nick-bang »

So if I understand this correctly, then we have solved the range issue.

But as far as I can see, then its August 2018 we STILL have the problem of suicidal Merchant Marines, voiced in a thread that was started about 3 1/2 years ago.
Despite all the good work modders have done trying to fix this over the years.

Thats really rather underwhelming and not very impressive, for such a Game Breaking feature IMHO...
YoMomma
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Re: Merchant marines issue

Post by YoMomma »

Mwah its much less in my opinion, over a course of 6 years its still very much noticable in losses, but if you divide it between 6, it isnt that bad compared to other game breaking issues or what it used to be. I guess CW is still very much noticable.

Someone that can edit the map with the map editor should just cloose of some hot spots. Like the river past Novgorod or whatever it's called.
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