[WIP] SH5 True Dynamic Campaign

[R-T-B]

Yeah man, I know. I did go a bit nuts as I pretty much have been working on this for the past week "top secret" I was working before I even had the game. Keep in mind I never really intended anyone but me to read the notes in the quote.

A goal is to decode the savegame format via a hex editor. That's another thing I have a rudimentary understanding of looking over them in the past few days. It's yet to be implemented in my program (I want to get a realistic war enigine simulator going first), but I'm pretty sure it can be done via VB Binary file access commands.

EDIT: Actually, my understanding comes from SH3 save games, which I was testing with. I just looked at SH5 save games and they seem to be encrypted! Oh Ubi... :shakeshead:

No matter, there may still be a way around this, and even if not I can easily work without player impact, just would suck quite a bit.

EDITEDIT: Workaround found! I can look in the "Campaign Progress" text file and get all the information I need! It has my most recent kills nationality, for example!

[CCIP]

That sounds pretty intriguing. Keep us updated - hey, a bit of strategy in this never hurts, and it's always fun to explore even the distant "what-ifs"

[R-T-B]

Yes, but my main goal for making this thread was to conduct research, we must keep that in mind. It's far from finished, heck, Lurker may finish his campaign before I even have a prototype out!

The engine is ready to parse excel files, but at the moment my fairly fake values are producing totally off the wall results that are far from believable (Germany declaring war on Italy, for example. WTF?) I need some acurate data, but have no idea where to find any... Especially not how to interpet it into a simple "Military/Relations/Industrial value" which is quite abstract. It's proving diffilcult, which is what prompted me to make this thread.

EDIT: Ok, let's start with something a little more simple:

What nations should qualify as "Major" nations? These are the nations that can actually go to war, decide policy, etc. The rest of the nations will be "Minor Nations" and unfortunately due to limitations at the moment, will only go to war if a major nation they are "associated" with does (they may/may not based on a decreasing percentage chance per turn), and they will never change their relations/industrial/military values. They also will generally lose wars if a bigger nation attacks them.

Right now, I'm thinking:

United States,
Germany,
Japan,
England (pretty much the whole empire will be treated as one unit, objections?),
Russia,
France,
Italy.

Thoughts? What "sub-nations" should be associated with each nation. For example, if the United States goes to war, should Mexico have a strong chance of following suite (just an example?). If so, Mexico should be considered a minor nation under the influence of the US. Please note, due to engine limitations at the moment only one "major" nation can be assigned to each subnation.

Thoughts? Also, if anyone could provide me with a complete list of nations in SH5, it'd help a lot for coding minor nations.

[R-T-B]

For those interested, this is the following excel workbook that will be used for relations. Comments welcome, and I could really use a list of minor nations to work with. I'll post my preliminary ideas soon:



Just FYI, there will be several editable tables like this that ship with my program.

BTW, Anyone ever played making history? It sort of like Hoi, which I never got into.

Anyhow, since I am using a similar system to it, I'm actually going to use it for reference military and industrial values until you guys give me some sources... It may be ugly, but who knows, might work. :P

EDIT: This is what Making History indicates industrial values should be. Thoughts?

[R-T-B]

I decided to make all nations represented in game by any sort of thing "major" nations AI wise. This will require a bit of a rewrite but I think it's neccesary to produce authentic results.

Here's my new table. Please comment. 100 relations = OMG I LOVE YOU, -100 = very bad words are used to describe the other nation



Thoughts? I sort of made a few up randomly, others came from Making History the video game. It's probably not the best, but we'll see how it runs soon. I'll also follow up with approximate industrial values (again, until I can find another source, taken from Making History. :/)

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by R-T-B

I decided to make all nations represented in game by any sort of thing "major" nations AI wise. This will require a bit of a rewrite but I think it's neccesary to product authentic results.

Here's my new table. Please comment. 100 relations = OMG I LOVE YOU, -100 = very bad words are used to describe the other nation



Thoughts? I sort of made a few up randomly, others came from Making History the video game. It's probably not the best, but we'll see how it runs soon. I'll also follow up with approximate industrial values (again, until I can find another source, taken from Making History. :/)

A few suggs: I think Spain should be moderately hostile to the UK and France. IIRC several British ships were sunk by Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and by 1939 there would still be some anger between the countries, I suppose.

Ireland should be hostile to the English, although unlikely to go to war (historical resentment, the Easter Rebellion during WWI, etc.)

Japan and Russia should be somewhat more hostile to each other - right before WWII they were in an undeclared "hot war" with thousands of casualties.

[R-T-B]

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

A few suggs: I think Spain should be moderately hostile to the UK and France. IIRC several British ships were sunk by Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and by 1939 there would still be some anger between the countries, I suppose.

Ireland should be hostile to the English, although unlikely to go to war (historical resentment, the Easter Rebellion during WWI, etc.)

Japan and Russia should be somewhat more hostile to each other - right before WWII they were in an undeclared "hot war" with thousands of casualties.

Noted. As I said my history isn't what it could be, so this help is massively appreciated. I'm a coder and a gamer first, a historian second.

I'll update the image to show the changes. Japan and Russia are now -25, ireland and england -10, Spain and england/france now -5.

EDIT: Table now up to date. I'm eager to plug this baby into my engine and simulate a war for you guys! Wouldn't that just top off the evening? Just need to work on the industry table now...

[Vikinger]

Originally Posted by R-T-B

I decided to make all nations represented in game by any sort of thing "major" nations AI wise. This will require a bit of a rewrite but I think it's neccesary to produce authentic results.

Here's my new table. Please comment. 100 relations = OMG I LOVE YOU, -100 = very bad words are used to describe the other nation



Thoughts? I sort of made a few up randomly, others came from Making History the video game. It's probably not the best, but we'll see how it runs soon. I'll also follow up with approximate industrial values (again, until I can find another source, taken from Making History. :/)

You do miss the neutral nations like the Swedish.

Lots of swedish ships was sunk during the war.

Sweden also shiped most of germanys steel they needed during the war. 80% came from sweden.
And we was neutral country.

later the british put up an ultimate to sweden to stop the shipping and sweden responded to dubble cross hitler.

We give you steel but it was bad quality and sweden informed the british navy when thos shipments was gona take place. Many cargo ships was sunk becuse of this dubble crossing, but it was the tool the swedish gouverment had to pay if we still wanted to stay neutral. swedeb was not that neutral during the war. Damn chickens in my eyes,,,

[R-T-B]

Originally Posted by Vikinger

You do miss the neutral nations like the Swedish.

Lots of swedish ships was sunk during the war.

Sweden also shiped most of germanys steel they needed during the war. 80% came from sweden.
And we was neutral country.

later the british put up an ultimate to sweden to stop the shipping and sweden responded to dubble cross hitler.

We give you steel but it was bad quality and sweden informed the british navy when thos shipments was gona take place. Many cargo ships was sunk becuse of this dubble crossing, but it was the tool the swedish gouverment had to pay if we still wanted to stay neutral. swedeb was not that neutral during the war. Damn chickens in my eyes,,,

Yeah, that table has seen some major revisions since then. Unfortunately, as of the moment Sweeden, finland, and other nations are not present in the game.

Sad, I know, but I didn't pick that country list, ubisoft did. I'm looking to fix it pretty soon though.

[iambecomelife]

Very fascinating. I myself would love to play into 1946 or even beyond.

Anyway, here are a few suggestions for minor nations:

GERMANY:

Finland (opposition to Soviets)
Spain (Franco's Nationalist/anti-Communist Policies)
Argentina (German expatriate population, pro-German military officers)

UNITED STATES:

Most of Central/South America, other than Argentina
Philippines (Quezon's pro-American Gov't)

France's and England's minor nations should probably be whatever colonies and ex-colonies they owned.

I have a copy of Conway's Fighting Ships for the WWII era, and I can give you an idea of how strong every country's navy would have been around 1939. Let me know if you're interested.

[R-T-B]

That'd be great. The main problem I'm running into is that many nations navies aren't actually represented in SH5. I don't know why, but I have to deal with that. As such, I either need someone to model a massive amount of ships for me (that'd be pretty hard to do honestly), or I just have to live with the nations I got at least for initial relase. Right now I'm going with the latter. The table above shows the nations present in SH5.

A bit dissapointing nations like Finland aren't present (It would've been cool to simulate the Winter War), but eh, not much I can do really.

BTW, based on your advice Germany and Argentina's relations will now be 20, as opposed to 10.