3rd Guards Mech Corps Campaign feedback

[DRG]

Tobias, your original assumption was correct. There is a SERIOUS shortfall of troops for the Russians in that scenario in that campaign. It was based on scenario 547 and that scenario has the same German troops in the same positions but the Russian have 3925 points in the scenario to attack with but the campaign version only gives 1540.....that's a 2385 point shortage!



.....Lucy has some 'splaining to do

(a cultural reference to the old TV show "I love Lucy" which may not be familiar to everyone and ran probably well before many of you were born)

There are other issues we are investigating as well but I would suggest if anyone does want to play this campaign in it's present form they open the in game campaign editor and add a couple thousand support points to that second node.

EXPECT that this will be rebuilt and re-issued at some point but there are some code issues but we don't know yet if they are new or legacy issues from the conversion of the original scenarios.

Resurrecting and breathing new life into old scenarios that had not been updated yearly was a noble idea that we fully supported but I think from here on we need to stick with new only

[Ts4EVER]

Ok. Kind off relieved, I was starting to doubt my skills for a second...

[DRG]

Well Andy did say he had his butt handed to him as well but when you are 2300 points short it's as futile as the Charge of the light brigade

[zovs66]

I’ll take a look next week and make any needed corrections. AFK/PC till Tuesday.

It’s supposed to be hard, not impossible. Sorry for any issues.

[DRG]

It may not be quite that simple.......still investigating

[DRG]

EDIT....... OK there is something very odd going on with this scenario/node that's going to take some time to sort out. I did see reports of Marders and StugIII's firing smoke indirect when I set it up as a scenario


Further EDIT and Info


What started off innocently enough has spun into a major project not just for the scenario but for Andy and I as well ( but especially Andy )

That campaign had not been tested......the scenarios it was built from had been but things went wrong with the campaign and it slipped through the cracks. There will be a re-issuing of that campaign at some point I just don't know when but if anyone does want to give it a try I would highly recommend you open it up in the campaign editor and give the second scenario at LEAST 4500 support points.

But during the investigation into that we discovered something that has been going on probably since SP2 was first created but because we've been adding to the game it finally revealed itself

The editor was holding info in memory of any previous game you played or scenario you edited and adding it to the main DAT file of the scenario being edited. In that one we found evidence of British equipment and Hindi names...... all of this was flagged inactive and Andy tells me that is SOP for MS to do "soft deletes" it retains all this junk but hides it in the basement so to speak behind "inactive" markers and that's worked OK for decades but in this case, when we put a scenario into a campaign all the editing and re-editing shuffles around a lot of phantom junk and in this case finally found a way to interfere.......THAT is why you saw the German tanks firing indirectly. It had picked up the fire plan orders from the RUSSIAN guns in the original scenario and that wasn't a lot of fun wading through code to discover. ( I know that because I watched both and where the German tanks and AT guns were firing indirect matched the Russian barrage in the original scenario )

We have an EXE now in testing that eliminates that junk and fortunately these "soft deletes" do not cause any real issues in 99.99% of the cases.......you just found the one that did and that has led to a journey we really hadn't planned on but since everything is pretty much locked down we had the time to dig it out

So if you do want to continue on with that campaign add those extra support points and it will play OK except for some oddities with the german tanks but that stops after a turn or two and doesn't really affect anything and when we have a fix for the campaign one will be issued but don't expect anything super quick

Don

[Mobhack]

Yep - soft deletion was what used to bloat Microsoft Word files - lots of no-longer used data (like embedded pictures say) was still stored in the file after a zillion edits. The SOP for those docments was to save it to a temporary file, delete the old working copy and then rename the temporary file back to the old filename. Apparently saving as a new file did not carry the cruft over. Not sure if that applies to modern editions of Word, but was cerainly true back around 2005. I use LibreOffice now, with it set to save as a docx type (so if I send it to oters they do not get confused) so have not had to suffer Word and its foibles in a decade+!

So I now have a "cruft clearance" routine run over files on load, and will do so on save as well. That may save a fair few bytes since the run length compression will pack a load of 0's down to a couple of bytes.

This scenario's cruftiness was shown up by the user campaign's reshuffling of the unit deck to insert the campaign core troops and supports etc, so some cruft tables then found themselves aligned with reshuffled 'live' units, and the cruft had been tabled to fire a programmed routine. Hilarity then ensued!. Cruft removal ensures the side tables are deleted as well as zeroing the crufty "inactive" units lying around in the main unit table.