Any details on how the campaign will work?

[Crazer]

Hi all!
I'm eagerly awaiting the release of this title and definitely will buy it.
From what I've read so far, campaign mode will be included into final version. So I'd like to know what will be the main features of campaign game, what instruments and resources will be given to user? I'd like to hear some comments from developers. Thanks in advance.

[Bullethead]

Yeah, I'm very interested in the campaign aspect myself. I have some reasonable assumptions of how the sea side of the campaign would work, based on other naval sims with campaigns, but my big questions surround the land side of things. How much, if any, control do the players have over the movement and success of the massive armies involved in this war? I don't expect to see any battlefield action (although I'd LOVE to have that in a game someday--storming the Port Arthur forts would be a great game in itself), but surely there'd have to be some way for players to influence land events? Maybe something along the lines of the Uncommon Valor type of thing?

[Lempereur1]

Bullethead:

In the Distant Guns:RJW@Sea campaign game, you only have control of the naval forces. However, your success at sea will have a direct bearing on the success of the land campaign.

If the Japanese Army cannot get the required supplies to conduct the latest offensive, it will have an effect!

[NormKoger]

The campaign situation is all about the flow of goodies from Japan to Korea and Manchuria.

While there was some limited naval gunfire support near Port Arthur, we won't be modeling that directly on the first pass. The gunboats are there, so I will probably be adding naval gunfire support missions when this thing enters the post release tinkering phase. Players of TOAW can tell you what's likely to happen with the game once that starts.

But for now, the campaign mission is pretty simple. The Russians have to try to eat up as many Japanese merchants as possible, and the Japanese have to try to stop that from happening. You will be able to observe the advance of armies, but you won't have anything directly to do with them. Unless the results on land are ambiguous, your naval losses will have very little impact on whether you win or lose the game. So the Russians can lose their entire fleet and still win if they do enough damage to the Japanese. On a tactical level, the Japanese are hard to beat. But it is much easier to win the campaign game as the Russian.

[Matto]

The campaign situation is all about the flow of goodies from Japan to Korea and Manchuria.

While there was some limited naval gunfire support near Port Arthur, we won't be modeling that directly on the first pass. The gunboats are there, so I will probably be adding naval gunfire support missions when this thing enters the post release tinkering phase. Players of TOAW can tell you what's likely to happen with the game once that starts.

But for now, the campaign mission is pretty simple. The Russians have to try to eat up as many Japanese merchants as possible, and the Japanese have to try to stop that from happening. You will be able to observe the advance of armies, but you won't have anything directly to do with them. Unless the results on land are ambiguous, your naval losses will have very little impact on whether you win or lose the game. So the Russians can lose their entire fleet and still win if they do enough damage to the Japanese. On a tactical level, the Japanese are hard to beat. But it is much easier to win the campaign game as the Russian.

Looks pretty good ... thanks for info :) A have some additional questions:
Exists some merchants traffic east from Japan (good target for Vladivostoks cruisers) ?
As Japan, can player control merchant conwoys ?

[NormKoger]

Looks pretty good ... thanks for info :) A have some additional questions:
Exists some merchants traffic east from Japan (good target for Vladivostoks cruisers) ?
As Japan, can player control merchant conwoys ?

Yes, the merchant network does run off to the east. But almost all of the traffic is in the Sea of Japan and Yellow Sea.

The Japanese did not really make an attempt to convoy merchants. I suspect the reason is that they could not afford the inefficiency of a convoy system. They really were on a shoestring. It was all they could do to keep the army supplied with every available ship moving directly from where the goodies were to where they were needed with as little delay as possible. Simply forcing the Japanese to use convoys for the majority of their shipping would probably have won the war for the Russians.

[Rhetor]

Yes, the merchant network does run off to the east. But almost all of the traffic is in the Sea of Japan and Yellow Sea.

The Japanese did not really make an attempt to convoy merchants. I suspect the reason is that they could not afford the inefficiency of a convoy system. They really were on a shoestring. It was all they could do to keep the army supplied with every available ship moving directly from where the goodies were to where they were needed with as little delay as possible. Simply forcing the Japanese to use convoys for the majority of their shipping would probably have won the war for the Russians.

Can't wait to dispatch "Nowik" and "Bojarin" after them :-D I would not lose the latter as foolishly as the Russians did.

[Bullethead]

The Japanese did not really make an attempt to convoy merchants. I suspect the reason is that they could not afford the inefficiency of a convoy system.

IMHO, in those days convoys were neither necessary for defense nor really possible to create anyway. This was before subs and airplanes, so the only threat came from surface ships. These raiders had to be pretty much specially built for the task, due to the state-of-the-art of their machinery. They burned coal, which is bulky for the amount of energy it provides, and their machinery wasn't that efficient by later standards, so they needed a lots and lots of coal to have the endurance necessary. This meant a big, expensive ship that skimped on guns and armor for range, seakeeping, and to some extent speed, such as the USS Columbia. Such ships were nearly useless for the battlefleet so, given their cost, nobody had many of them. Regular cruisers could be used as raiders, of course, but most lacked the range to be much of a threat except near their base. Plus, the battlefleet usually needed them, so not many could be spared for raiding. Thus, merchants were unlikely to be molested in mid-ocean due to the scarcity of purpose-designed commerce raiders, could be routed around the bases of regular cruisers, and when that wasn't possible, those bases could be blockaded and/or mined.

The other side of the coin is, how would you escort a convoy back then? You had to have something capable not only of beating the expected opposition, but which could go the distance across blue water. This would entail an even bigger ship than the commerce raider, to have the guns and armor to win, as well as the necessary endurance. IOW, either a ver big armored cruiser (for the range) or a long-legged battleship. But nobody was going to built these in the numbers required to implement a convoy system when they had trouble enough building sufficient numbers for their battlefleets. Thus, nobody used convoys back then, and the accepted wisdom was that they were neither practical nor necessary.

Convoys only came into use again (they'd been last used in the age of sail) in WW1, when the nature of the game had changed dramatically. By this time, the threat came from U-boats, which were numerous enough (because they were relatively cheap) and had the range (thanks to the new diesel motors) to be encountered anywhere in the ocean. However, fighting U-boats required much less ship than fighting cruisers, so it was now cost-effective to build an escort fleet. Plus, advances in machinery and ship design gave smaller ships the ability to go further and stay out longer in the open sea.

But anyway, back to DG......

There not being convoys, how are the merchants handled? Do you track them all as individual ships under AI control, or do you have percentages of raiders meeting merchants in various parts of the ocean?

[Don Maddox]

A new set of screens showing the campaign game mode have been posted here:

http://www.strategyzoneonline.com/articles.php?p=729&page=1&cat=52