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epo01

33
Posts
17
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A member registered Jul 30, 2019

Recent community posts

The Ukranian war will likely change land war for the forseeable future. So how do we include this in EDCE? Some likely characteristics:

Made in cities. Based in cities, air bases or do we have a new infantry type, drone operator? Should they be made by a drone operator?

Same range as a fighter or bomber?

Can migrate between hosts, whether operator, air base or city. Can be transported by carrier units: trucks, aircraft carriers, transports.

Obviously good for surveillance and with a single charge can attack targets.

Could be set to patrol with an attack enemy on sight option.

(This is on a mac). I had done this previously but cannot seem to get it to work any more. I can download a map or scenario and when I choose it it opens in the editor, which seems fair enough. What I can't seem to do is save it as (open it as) a playable game.  What have I forgotten?

I have previously observed that the choose dialogs are confusing in that I have to triple click the download folder in order to see downloaded files.

I wonder if it has to do with auto load/unload? I have that turned on.

Thanks, I have stacking turned on This is a Mac if that matters.

(Just in case any updates are forthcoming). Heavy artillery is stuck in the city were it is built, i.e. it cannot travel over terrain or on roads. However if a transport enters the city then it can take HA with it when it leaves, this could be useful for shipping HA where it is needed. 

However the transport has no means of unloading HA, the unload command adjacent to a city has no effect and if the transport enters the city and unloads the HA are still onboard when it leaves. The only working method seems to be to ship to another city and then scrap the transport.

Also playing the important cities variant it can be very difficult to see neutral important cities as the star is not at all prominent against a B&W background.

Thought: try it with an unmodified game, that is the supported configuration.

"EDCE won't open in MacOS Catalina 10.15.1"

You have to jump through some hoops to make it double clickable

Excellent post! Very thought provoking.

I play capital kill games on large (125x125) maps with 3 AI enemies and usually there is no interaction between players until I locate and destroy one of them. My capital has never been located so I never even bother defending it these days. Because of speed I found little use for air transports. This has given me ideas for customising units to encourage a faster more exploratory game. 

The interesting thing of course is that I can modify my gameplay to match the new units, but can the AI also adapt? I suspect not.

My mistake, I was reading the red bar by the icon as damage. Resting restores readiness, as it should, but does not repair damage.

Perhaps I am confusing lack of readiness with damage, but I am certain ships have engaged in combat, taken damage and repaired by resting at sea; will investigate and get back to you.

Can't wait.

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Don't know if this is a bug or just a feature I never discovered before but if you have a damaged boat then it can repair at sea by doing full rest in its present location. I have a reflex action of sending it home to rest which can take time and expose to risk of attack while travelling. Satellites can also repair by resting them.

EDIT, seems to work for destroyers but not cruisers so probably a bug.

EDIT 2, seems to vary with level of damage, a cruiser with 2 hits can repair, one with 4 cannot.

Lots of food for thought here. I've never tried modifying units or the rules but this has inspired me to try. Where would I find this ww2 mod?

I play on a 27" iMac with 24Gb RAM so use a game size of 125 by 125 and have 3 opponents each enhanced standard AI, everybody starts with one city. My initial priority is expansion capacity so I build armour which explore trying to find a city to conquer and build transports. I produce a single bomber to explore while I am building up invasion capacity. On this size of board finding the enemy quickly is vital so I try to build surveillance satellites as soon as I can  and meanwhile build bombers which I throw away on 24 move reconnaissance missions. Similarly I build destroyers as soon as I can so they can perform high speed exploration.

I find cruisers and battleships useful for defending the first couple of cities taken on an enemy island. I also use sea bees or engineers to construct oilfields, ports and roads to speed up transit across poor terrain. Due to their anaemic range I have no use for missiles or nukes. I find air transports too slow to be useful and I have never built an aircraft carrier. In old empire I used carrier loaded with patrolling fighters for rapid exploration, now there are satellites.

I quite like the capital kill variant as this means you have to carry out missions inside enemy territory in order to take out one city.

I tried a few games with the big earth map but it eventually got a bit too familiar. I play the Capital kill variant on big maps and it was too easy to guess where the opposition(s) were going to be.

Anyway, on changing back to a random world builder, the maps seem 'different' to what they had been. The terrain seems different and I frequently start out in the only city on a small island. How can can I reset back to an out of the box setting without losing my progress to date?

So I downloaded a map and went to try and load it. Started a new game and in theatre of operations select "choose a map". I get an empty selection box with [downloads] at the top. 

Single or double clicking [downloads] has no effect other than to change the text colour, after many futile attempts I discover it is necessary to triple click the text to get a folder listing or to navigate up again.

This is surely some kind of bug.

I see this with games involving multiple foes and capital kill. When you take the capital then all occupied cities stay as they were and all units (land, sea and air), all stop in their final location. Annoyingly armed satellites also stay active and will take pot shots at you. The last is, I think, fair enough but I do think all other units should go to their nearest city and disband. Then again, some enemy units may not have got the memo and if you encounter them while in transit then they might choose to engage in combat. Perhaps a random setting, some surrender, some don't?

Don't know if EDCE is still under development, I suspect not but if so ...

One annoyance is units onboard ships prompting for orders if they happen to pass through a city, passing through should mean passing through. This is also annoying for units on board air transports which have landed for refuelling but I see no easy way round this.

It would be nice to have a whole map view with the current area indicated, perhaps toggled by a button?

Sea bees can travel on land so should be shown in land production dialogs.

Will add more as I think of them.

After some research I have found a fix. Doing this bypasses MacOS security so only do this for applications you can trust

I downloaded a fresh copy of EDCE for Mac (just in case) and extracted the app from the zip file. I moved this app to the /Applications directory.

Then in Terminal I typed the following command line

chmod +x /Applications/EmpireCombined.app/Contents/MacOS/EmpireCombined

Following this the icon in /Applications is double clickable but will not run because the developer is unknown. 

Click cancel in that dialog and immediately open Preferences. 

Open Security and Privacy and navigate to the General tab, in the lower part of the window there will be a remark about the developer of Empire Combined being unknown. 

Click "Open anyway" then click open in the resulting dialog box and you should now be in business.

Did a backup, wipe and install of MacOS Catalina. Just tried to install EDCE and it won't open but gives no further details. have looked for install instructions to see if I missed anything but can't find anything specific to MacOS. 

Erm, help!

Not a great improvement TBH. That went to a black screen with the % CPU usage at > 100% for a minute or so before I force quit. The activity monitor showed both system and user utilization >35%

(Late 2013 iMac with 27" screen, Mojave and 24Gb RAM)

While supposedly idle and waiting for me to take a turn EDCE uses about 9.5% System CPU time and in excess of 35% user CPU time. This seems extraordinarily high.

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If a unit requires attention and it is not visible it is necessary to issue a centre command to see what needs attention. Would it be possible to auto center units which are not visible? (I have a 27" screen so sometimes it can be difficult to tell what it is going on). 

Similarly combat reports replay combat in some distant corner or edge, could these also be centred?  Or perhaps a highlight circle drawn around the unit or activity of interest?

I realise that sometimes people may hate this behaviour so making it a user selectable option would enable it to be selected, or not.

EDIT: I think it does auto centre if not visible but otherwise on a large screen it is not always obvious what unit requires attention or where combat is occurring. So a highlight would be a great help.

Ah, so if there was a road then HA could travel along it?

Did the experiment. Set screen blackout to 1 minute and screen saver to 2 minutes, normal and expected behaviour is that screen goes dark after 1 minute.

If EDCE is running but not in a game (displaying main menu) then it behaves normally. If a game is active without user interaction whether current or  non current desktop or  minimised, the screensaver displays after 2 minutes.

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Many units, e.g. Heavy artillery or bombers in cities, and also armour (and I think infantry) all have set road loc as an available order even though this cannot be actioned.

Am I correct in thinking only engineering units should be able to set road locs?

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EDCE runs on it own desktop on a Mac. If I leave it running there while I switch to a different desktop to get some work done and then go away the display never turns off and the screensaver cuts in after the preset period. But this can mean that the screen saver runs all night when I'd really rather have the display go dark.

This is easily demonstrated by setting display go dark to 1 minute and screensaver activation time to 2 minutes. Then leaving the machine alone with and without EDCE running in its own desktop.

Engineers can destroy mines (manual pg 41)

My pdf copy has lots of whitespace on pg110, pgs 111-112 are empty.

I have little snitch running on my mac. It reports unexpected outbound network connections and on starting EDCE there are connections to a unity domain and to killerbee.


What is going on? My inclination is to block these.

I had a satellite directly over one of my cities. In a nearby city I created short range missiles, launched them and then sent the missile to the square occupied the satellite. There was a battle and the missile fails to bring down the satellite. Is this how I am supposed to attack satellites?  Wrong weapon? Did I hit my own city?

Pretty sure I've had transports sunk by mines.

Also with wrapping there is a 2 cell horizontal and vertical sea section on the map.

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Very happy to discover this again. I thought given the lack of updates for the IOS version that it had been abandoned.

On a 27" iMac at maximum zoom there is an out by one error, anything on the right hand edge can also be seen on the left hand edge.

(Edit) This is with horizontal and vertical wrapping enabled.