Omnius -> CW Trade - Convoy Nightmare (12/12/2013 3:46:53 PM)
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I was in the Jul/Aug 1940 turn and I had an extreme nightmare with production, trade and convoys as the CW player. I enjoy the rest of the game the way MWiF automates so many time consuming bookkeeping tasks, but trade, production planning and convoying has become a major nightmare. I started trade with China as the CW player to give China one oil resource, from Burma. Then I decided to bump up the trade to two non-oil resources and one oil and then things went totally nuts. Instead of continuing to use the Burma oil for trade the idiotic program picked oil coming from Britain, then as I tried to change that it switched to Canada and finally it picked a saved oil in Inverness. I was in the CW Naval Movement phase trying to figure out my unused convoy points in each area as I'm transitioning from the Bay of Biscay to the North Atlantic and then to the two sea areas adjacent to Greenland and Iceland. After reading everything in the three manuals as regards convoys and when to designate trade I decided to wait until the Preliminary Planning Production phase to try to change the oil being traded from my saved oil point in Inverness to Burma. Even in this phase, which the manual says is the phase where I can set default trades and countries, for resources and oil I wasn't able to budge my oil trade from Inverness to Burma. This totally fou9led up my plans as I put two convoy points into the Bay of Bengal ready to transport the two unused resources from Malaya to China. Unfortunately convoying oil from Inverness and then the program forcing trade from India, thus necessitating convoying a resource from Malaya my convoy rou9ting plan was totally screwed up by the most ignorant convoy programming that really hasn't been improved since Marinacci's version. I am really peeved that I couldn't tell the program what oil or non-oil resources to use. Every time I tried to change what the program would use then it would recalculate to some other I didn't want that was equally stupid. It screwed up my convoying of a resource from Australia to Britain although I was able to repair that, though not the way I wanted because I could never change that Inverness oil trade. The one thing I thought Marinacci did wrong in his original program was to have oil go first for production before non-oil resources. Unfortunately Steven hasn't corrected this massive mistake. I always see oil being used for production before non-oil resources, I always see unused non-oil resources with all oil used. I always have to fight the stupid program to try to make the non-oil resources move to factories so that I can save the oil. Steve needs to fix this so non-oil resources move to factories before oil. I've also got a real mess with some of my CW factories. I show no idle factories on the main summary screen, yet when I actually click on that idle factory number that shows zero I see two factories supposedly idle. One shows it has 1 of 254 factories idle, a slight improvement from showing 1 of 255 idle. Yet neither of these factories is idle and if I try to send an unused resource to one of them it really goes bonkers on sending a resource to it. There is most definitely something wrong here. Yet I do get full production. The other really massive screw up is that I've transitioned my CW convoys from the Bay of Biscay, there are no convoy points or ships of any kind in the Bay of Biscay from any country. Yet when I look at the routes of resources flowing to Britain I find many still using the Bay of Biscay still. When I try to manually go in and as per the manuals change the convoy path from the Bay of Biscay from the North Atlantic to the Faeroes Gap it never, ever allows me to make that change. It always reverts back to the Bay of Biscay even though there are no convoy points or ships of any kind there and should be considered an illegal convoy route. I was wondering why as I put more convoy points in the North Atlantic and the Faeroes Gap why I was seeing more unused convoy points in those sea areas while I was taking three convoy points a turn out of the Bay of Biscay. Something is really screwed up with convoy routing in version 1.05. I did see a 1.06 fix that hopefully will help alleviate some problems but I'll have to play through the Sep/Oct turn before I can see if this fixes some of my many problems. I've had problems with sending oil to Italy from Germany to be able to save it for use reorganizing Italian naval units. I had to send 8 oil from Germany, including 3 saved points, just to get to hopefully save one oil for Italy. I was able to use German saved oil to reorganize Italian navy on the second turn of trade, but not on the first. I really hate that oil I try to trade is always used for production, usually bouncing a non-oil resource being sent to a factory already. We need to be able to designate traded oil as being saved by the recipient. When I tried to change the trade purpose from the sending country I am told some lame excuse why it can't be done like I don't own the factory. When I try to change that traded oil from being used for production from the recipient country I'm told I don't own the resource and can't make a change. Even in the Preliminary Production Planning and Final Production Planning phases, when the manual says I should be able to access the default trade and default country functions I can't, something is broken for sure. I'm having so much fun getting farther along in the Global War scenario than with the board games or Marinacci's first computer version, but I'm absolutely hating the production planning and convoy routing system and now the trade function. I've read everything in all three manuals about production planning and convoy routing and I'm not seeing the things work quite the way the manuals say it should. While I want to close the Burma Road as the Japanese I'll leave it open in order to try clearing all trade for one turn between the CW and China before trying to reestablish it with the new 1.06 update. I'll also keep trying to trade between Germany to Italy to see if I can actually save some oil in Italy instead of having it sent to production. I'm really frustrated that trading oil is so difficult for trying to save it as the recipient country, or to use it for reorganization. Instead of wasting so much time trying to make a worthless AI I suggest heavily that Steven invest some time in making the production and convoying of resources a lot smarter and less frustrating. I mean it's really stupid that it's seems impossible to send oil to a country in trade so that country can use it to save rather than being forced to use it in production. What could be a very helpful system is now most unhelpful and frustrating and it needs to be improved vastly. A real shame this wasn't done before release, but now it needs to be addressed before too many see how screwed up this is and complain, or quit playing. Why does having fun have to be so much work? Omnius
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