Bug: Exploits and bugs in WPP

[Jones377]

1) The CL trick

This is a huge exploit in both SP and MP. For example, as Japan you can prevent the patrol requirement if the allies send a carrier raid against the home islands. You do this by having a single CL patrolling the home islands and another CL on a nearby base. During the first turn you ask for reinforcements which will arrive on turn 2. The result is that both CL are sunk but much more importantly the base does not receive a single bomb. This will avoid having 1/3 of the fleet patrolling the base for the next several turns. This is a huge exploit that can decide the whole game. The 2 CL lost is a small price to pay. It works on other bases too but for the Japanese the home islands is the only one that can trigger a patrol requirement.

This could be fixed by allowing planes to attack both the single ship and the base on the same turn OR trigger the patrol requirement if you lose ships outside your base too. As the Japanese it can be worth defending Truk in this manner too so option 2 wouldn't really fix that.

2) Stopping surface raids/invasions

The defending player can stop an non carrier based invasion fleet or raid using a single ship and a handful of land based bombers simply by pressing the air option in the battle screen. The few bombers would inflict none or minimal damage to the invasion fleet and a surface battle is avoided. Result after 5 battle turns, invasion stalled!

This could be fixed by forcing a surface battle at some point like in turn 2 or 3. Or by having the surface fleet defending the base withdraw when the troop ships reach shore as it's not the players intention to defend it with ships, only planes.

[Von_Altair]

Yeah we played a game with Jones. All these problems came up. We had major battle at Espiritu Santo and the game crashed right after it. All these things and it didin't make us continue.

Please fix these things as soon as possible, the game is currently unplayable in MP form.

[JMHawkins]

Thanks for the reports. I've got fixes for both exploits. They'll be released as part of the upcoming patch, which is in final testing right now.

For the first exploit, with the new patch if all the defending ships are sunk and none of the attackers are sunk, then the attackers will get an extra round of raids. So it will still be possible to try using sacrificial CLs as pickets to hold off a raid, and it may occasionally work, but most of the time the ships will just be sunk without doing any good.

The second exploit was just a bug - the attackers should have been able to land troops if the defenders chose "air" and stayed away from the base. That's been fixed.

Von_Altair, you didn't happen to save the error log file from the crash did you? If so, that would be very helpful in debugging the crash.

Thanks,

John Hawkins
KE Studios

[Von_Altair]

Originally Posted by JMHawkins

Von_Altair, you didn't happen to save the error log file from the crash did you? If so, that would be very helpful in debugging the crash.

http://rapidshare.de/files/46732829/...orLog.xml.html

Thats the only thing i've got there. I am not even sure if thats correct file or if it came from that problem. I have had that blue screen problem as well. Anyway situation were that at the end of a huge battle I was jammed at battlescreen and my opponent jumped normally back to tactical map. Only way for me to get away was to end WPP process. Opponent was hosting the game.

[Timothy]

Whenever I play by network, eventually the game will freeze with a similar situation. After anywhere from a half hour to an hour later (with everything working fine), the game locks one of us either on a battlescreen while the other jumps normally back to the tactical map. The only way to get out is to end the WPP game. The host player gets the message that the network is waiting for input or something like that. I am not sure why this happens and am wondering if this could be related to one of the above problems? The only network play that I have been involved in has been with this game to play against my son with both our home computers using the same home router. When the game freezes on both computers and the message says that it's waiting for a responce/input from the non-host player, both computers are still logged on and are able to use the internet (so I know it isn't a router problem). Since this is the first game that I have ever tried playing by network, is there anything you can recommend that I do differently to prevent this game from freezing/locking up?

Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.