Don Bowen
Posts: 8183
Joined: 7/13/2000 From: Georgetown, Texas, USA Status: offline
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Historical representation of merchant ships at sea as of the start of the war did not make in into the AE OOB for a couple of reasons. First, placing allied merchants deep in Japanese controlled waters on the first day causes the game to target them, using assets that are needed elsewhere. Second, most of those ships outside Japanese controlled waters proceeded uneventfully to their destinations. Adding them in was a lot of detail to little purpose. Two ships that were sunk, Cynthia Olson and Vincent, were considered but not added. Some initial tests showed that historical interception of these two ships was hard to accomplish. We did put in a goodie for modders who choose to add such TFs (including me). Single ship cargo or tanker TFs that begin the war at sea will be given a random cargo - freighters will get random amounts of supply/resource, tankers random amounts of fuel/oil. Modders beware, you need to consider this "free" cargo in balancing initial supply levels. In fact, on our original list of want-a-do's was adding initial cargo as four fields on the ship data in the editor. That got cut very fast. Lots of overhead, screens already full, very little benefit. The random cargo was used instead.
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