byron13
Posts: 1589
Joined: 7/27/2001
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Gosh, so much to talk about - if only Matrix were listening. HELLO!!?? ANYONE THERE???
I hadn't considered actually being able to choose the name of a new ship, and I like Showboat's idea of being able to assign names from a database that's provided (alternative: name it whatever you want, e.g., the USS Suzy Q, the HMS Beavis Butthead, or as suggested, the USS Goombah). It wouldn't be that hard to determine the various nations' naming conventions and to provide a database of not only actual, historical names, but possible names as well based on the conventions. So, if the British use gallant names like the Courageous and Audacious, you could add to the historical list additional names that fit the convention and could be selected like, say, the Contagious, the Outrageous, or the Flirtacious. Just kidding. It would seem to be easy to provide sufficient spare names based on naming conventions that you could assign to ships. Destroyers would be a pain, though. And would you still reserve the name for a particular class of ship? For example, could you assign the name Essex to a Yorktown class carrier, or would the class name be reserved for the first ship of that historical class? Personally, I would opt for the latter. You might even restrict the use of historical names to the class that it was historically used in. For example, if you built more North Carolina/Washington class BB's (whatever that class was), you might not be able to assign the names New Jersey or Iowa to that class. But that still leaves a lot of states, cities, rivers, admirals, battles, or whatever that would be freely assignable and historically feasible.
Mr. Moore: Yes, I'm a fan of the priority system. Maybe be able to set absolute priorities or select with a button the option to reduce all classes of raw materials shipped by X% if your shipping is reduced by X%. No, that doesn't really work either. The problem with the former is that you may not receive any of your lowest rated raw material. That's not realistic. Reducing everything by X% doesn't really work either because you may want to ensure that you get a certain minimum amount of steel to build your planned ships. Seems to me you'd after to actually be able to set the quantities shipped for each type of raw material - if you use different types of raw material. I think you could still have a ghost merchant fleet, and the computer may even be able to calculate the relative ease with which different materials were accessed. For example, rubber may take more ships because (I'm guessing) it had to come from longer distances than something else.
You could even assign various hexes or regions with points for each raw material. If the closer regions were captured before the farther regions, the number of ghost ships required to ship a point of raw material would increase to account for the extra shipping time. This could all be done in the background without having to see what was going on. Jeez, I'm living in a fantasy world; we'll never see this.
So, if you use the ghost fleet, would you be able to augment it by assigning non-ghosts to the ghost fleet? Or, if you had to start shipping major quantities of men and materiel to Australia as a prelude to a major operation, could you draw ships out of the ghost pool? I guess you would - that was pretty much the premise in WiP. Pretty basic.
I only agree with your comments to a degree on your models/versions. A lot of what you're asking for could be accomplished by subsequent historical variations on the aircraft. Spend enough R&D points, and you can get the -D version of the P-47 sooner than was historical. I think it would be difficult, though, to have a system where you could actually design aircraft. Throw enough R&D points into the B-17 and you get the B-17J with a 50% increase to range and payload. If you did that, you or the computer would be responsible for naming the variant, and the beloved B-17G may not have any of the historical qualities that were associated with it. Somehow, this crosses a line for me that I don't want to cross. The game would lose its historical flavor and just become a generic war game in the Pacific with weapons being used that have no relationship to what actually was there. I understand the the idea of optional production would be to alter the historical outcome, but I would rather do this by accelerating the introduction of historical models rather than introducing ahistorical models designed by me.
In any event, I think the issue is already moot. Gary's technical database is already so large from having done WiP and Twelve O'Clock High that he's just going to use the existing database to cut down on design costs. The screen shots already show that he's pretty much co-opting the Battle of Britain/Twelve O'Clock High way of doing things, so I don't think we'll be able to vary the qualities of the aircraft. But I'll bet that it will be possible to accelerate the introduction of particular models because he's already done that (by assigning the equivalent of R&D points) in Twelve O'Clock High. Place enough resources into R&D, and the German can have the Me-262 much earlier than was historical.
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