TonyE

That's a new one on me! Is there any chance you can zip and attach a saved game from right before the carrier group disappears? Bonus points for including your scenario file, GE.log, and MessageLog.txt files in that zip. Thanks!

GrantSN, could you possibly zip and upload the respective saved game files? Thanks for doing the comparison, this could be very useful! If you happen to want to do a little more, if you start the scenario a few times in 2020.003, are the ships in question always aground at scenario start? I haven't pulled up the scenario, just wondering if there are variable start points for the tanker's group, some of them on land.

Welcome and good job, sometimes just finding the manual is a challenge. For the rest of you who can't find it. Settings menu\Staff Options\Show Formation Grid checkbox.

Ci builds are working

Last week I let myself get sidetracked in building a new development virtual machine for Harpoon and other programming. It all started as a result of some functionality added to one of my programming tools that leverages MS Edge Chromium. Edge Chromium is a watershed for integrating a web-browser with your traditional thick-client applications like Harpoon. Anyway, that led me to commit to leaving my warm, cozy, Windows 7 development virtual machine behind. I have multiple Windows 10 development VMs but none outfitted as completely as the Windows 7 one (CI/CD, MS Office for the Platform editor, etc.). The what-ifs, otherwise known as the might-as-wells kicked in from that point. Harpoon Classic has been built with Visual Studio 2013 for quite a few years now after reluctantly leaving the zippy Visual Studio 2010. New development machine, "I wonder how easily it would compile with Visual Studio 2019?" We lose the ability to run the game on Windows XP but gain some other efficiencies and developer happiness. By the way, it turns out the conversion wasn't too tough. The medium sized rock was figuring out how to maintain binary format compatibility while changing the default memory alignment from 1-byte to 8-bytes. It hasn't been tested end to end yet but existing scenarios and saved games load just fine. This migration will be mostly complete in the next 7-10 days after which I can get back to changes you care about.

How low would it have to go? Message me directly if you don't want to share publicly. I may know a guy.

The Christmas/holiday sale is the big one. During the 2019 holiday sale the game was just under $10 USD. Matrix runs various other promotions during the year which I've seen hit about 30% off (as general coupons, not Harpoon specific). What version did you last purchase? (HC2002, HC Gold/2003, Harpoon Commander's Edition/HCE, or Harpoon Ultimate/HUCE)? I assume not HUCE or you wouldn't be looking to buy it again.

I concur, the only part that gave me pause is, "Because the ship was designed with space, modularity, and modernization in mind, its “optimally manned” crew of fewer than 200 sailors permits space for additional sailors and equipment to support fleet planning and operations as a surface-strike and fleet-command platform." Just because they were design to be optimally manned doesn't mean berthing, galley, etc. were designed for the far less than optimally manned that a command ship would desire. The parts I like very much are the self sensors and self defense. It may be a risky but the Zumwalt class command ships could zoom to and fro indepently as needed to shuttle VIPs as needed.

Thank you Seaplane Paul, much appreciated. I quite doubt we'll be the first game to revive multiplayer (see https://www.wargamer.com/articles/command-modern-operations-multiplayer/ ) in this style game but you never know :).

Yes, I agree that would be great. Our, granted limited, experience thanks to Harpoon 3's multiplayer has been that it is exceedingly difficult to play through any but the tiniest scenarios in a real-time fashion. Play by e-mail is much more successful but with Harpoon, even that would require a long revival of the game in terms of introducing the game to players and getting them showing up to play. By play to e-mail a potential concept is give orders for a set block of time, send them in, and get the results back. That is in large part how the paper game works including the smart concept of variable slices of time per turn depending upon the action. Anyway, time has proven that it is a dream too far off, best to look to other games or playing the paper rules (see the Simplot 2 play aid here on HarpGamer from kmart494). There are few things I'd rather implement than multiplayer, the closest even glimmer of hope would be umpire-assisted play where an umpire enters orders for all sides and the players watch it all play out. Even implementing that would require a committed group of cheerleaders to keep me at the keyboard!

Regards, Tony

Before the ExportDLL interface existed, making those changes was a herculean ask. The user-interface challenges made it a fools' errand. With the ExportDLL the asks range from 'not so tough' to 'a real headache but doable'. Air Group Post-Attack RTB: is the easy one. Since the game knows enough to say the attack is done, it is an already generated event that just needs some different options for dealing with the event. Your wish list makes two of the other ones easier than they could be. They could be interpreted as... If only the loadout had more than gun ammo and only gun ammo is left, add RTB and Attack anyway options after all other weapons are expended. That gets hairy if you launch your air to ground attack but still have Sidewinders that could attack formation air patrols. It is easy to over-engineer at that point. You foresaw that though as it bleeds right into your next one about Breaking-off/Avoiding contact. If you could get your friendly neighborhood programmer to implement the first rule without diving down the rabbit hole of complexity, it would be a win for the game.

Thank you for taking the time to type this out. Runway vulnerability is a good one that has been requested in different ways but I like how you describe it.

rainman, thank you again for the Mar 3 scenario! This evening I finished my play through, achieving total victory. This was accomplished in just under 24 hours of gametime. A little selfish plug, I didn't have to exit the game nor restart the computer during the course of playing the scenario despite putting the computer to sleep at least 15 times. I expended a lot of ordnance, far more high-end weapons than the magazines hold in real life. This was my first time firing LRASM, which landed some hits once the SAMs were worn down. What this scenario taught me: AIM-120D are nice. They make me miss my precious Phoenix missiles. Speaking of the F-14 Tomcat, Hornets have come a long way since the days of the F/A-18A. Speaking of short-legged bugs, the F-35B can barely take off before it has to land again. I paired them with MV-22 tilt-rotors which is a challenge given the differential in cruise speeds, not to mention the differential in RCS. J-20s are nasty carrying AAMs in the AMRAAM ballpark for range, and stealthy enough to regularly hide pretty well from even the Super Hornet radar. I was potentially really lucky to not have my surface groups detected by the enemy. I took a look at the scenario after completion and see there were some surprises that would have been triggered by detection. rainman must believe in crappy Little Crappy Ships. My only ship loss, the USS Independence succumbed to a torpedo. To its credit, the 44kt speed allowed it to exhaust a few torpedo's. My other losses were two Seahawks, one went down with Independence. The other ran out of fuel and crashed. Perhaps I forgot to re-home it after Independence sank. That was a ton of fun, the first scenario I've played just for fun in years!

Still cranking along when I can sneak in a minute or three. May I say the J-20 is nasty?! A couple of times it has been AAMs from nowhere aka J-20.

Fantastic! I've loaded up Mar3 and am pained by my single E-2. This is going to be a challenge. Thank you for using HCDB2 rather than HCDB.

Implemented HCE - 2018.002 - 2018-05-15 Increased the formation zones available in GE and SE from 4 to 6 so even though the game structures can handle 64 zones, the UI only understands 6 zones.

You are welcome, and don't leave me in peace, if you create a Wishlist it would be most appreciated! https://harpgamer.com/harpforum/forum/35-wish-lists/

Window sizes (formation editor dialong issues...), do https://harpgamer.com/harpforum/files/file/228-hce-clear-game-options-registry-settings/with the game closed. The next time you run the game after that, the dialogs will default to a reasonable size. I resized some of the windows to show more information but didn't tell the game to forget the previous sizes, leading to this issue. In theory, I have it fixed for 2020.004. In any event, that game options reset is a good tool to have handy. It comes into play when you switch screen zoom levels (aka DPI settings) as well. 2018.002 already came packaged to you with the latest general purpose database that works with the built-in scenarios so you should be good there.

Now that is some self-deprecating humor, cringe-worthy!

Spoiler alert.... For minimum victory, Blue must destroy any 7 Red bases. For total victory, Blue must sink any 20 Red ships. Red doesn't have to do much for minimum victory as you've found, and double what you've found for total victory. That's strange about not seeing the terrorist bases, what version of the game are you using? Screenshot attached of 2020.004 (unreleased as yet) showing them as expected, pretty far up North. As for no-win or not, someone else will have to chime in there. You certainly have appropriate resources to win but the length of time looks short to me as you appear to have only 24 hours of game time to win and that seems to me to be a tall order.

Welcome back. You can grab the current build at https://harpgamer.com/harpforum/topic/29035-current-files/ which doesn't expire for a few years. You can install 2018.002 then 2020.003 right over the top of your 2017.011. There has been no effort to backport air to air refueling loadouts to any BattleSets that didn't originally have air-to-air refueling. In 2015 we added the ability for tankers to offload fuel multiple times per sorties where previously it was one refuel attempt and the tanker was considered empty. If you are seeing troubles in the current build with refueling, I'd like to work with you to track them down. Snippets from 2015.008 release notes: - Chg:0000 GE A tanker can now conduct multiple refueling operations during a single flight. It will be prompted to split from the recipient group when there is less than 10% of the original fuel left to offload. - Chg:0000 GE Added "REFUELING" status to the Report window to go along with the existing "W/REFUEL" and "NO REFUEL" statuses.

I'm liking the USA vs. China angle. Let's pretend the TR's mission effectiveness falls in half or more due to some virus oubreak and her group needs to counter a Chinese carrier venturing beyond the cover of land-based strike fighters. So pretty much an open-ocean carrier duel with some low chance surprises thrown in (submarines, bombers, strategic recon?). In short, a fairly small scenario (by my tastes anyway). I prefer to play the USA side.

Hi Kelly, can you give some more background like what version of Access, what HUD4 file (provide URL perhaps), and what is the version of the Reimer Editor? I might be able to try to replicate the problem then.

HCE - 2020.003 - 2020-03-17 =========================== - Chg:00000 GE Formation patrol aircraft were sometimes forgetting that they were formation patrols so they were stuck in a limbo of sorts. This led to them running out of fuel and crashing. The fix was removing a break statement in formedit.c that was added in May of 2017. (thanks eeustice & Rabbit)