Please feel free to add any of your observations to this, the Dynamic Campaign Generator is a particularly mysterious beast. I have studied many types of campaigns long and hard. It is always guaranteed to throw you a curve ball as it doesn't always do what is expected and some times does more than you could have thought.
Here is what happened to the carriers.
Once sunk........ they disappeared as they typical do and we couldn't use them.
The next mission loads and the carrier is still not there but it was replaced with an air spawn.
Next mission loads and the air spawn was gone.
This was incorrectly observed during the testing, it was thought that this only happened for the last sunk carrier and that..... that air spawn would remain for the remainder of the campaign. It wasn't until we had so many people destroying the carriers in sequence (the live campaign) that this mission1 sunk----mission2 air spawn----mission3 gone routine was noticed.
Another issue was we changed the standard Wings~of~War 2 hour mission reload to 4 hours. This was to ensure that there would be enough time to properly/repeatedly attack the fleets. Turns out 4 hours was too much time.
We are going back to 2 hours in order to take some of the heat off the carriers. During the mission reload, ships and other targets do repair, they do not fully repair. There is a cumulative damage roll over in the next mission.
These numbers are not accurate as we do not know the exacts but we do know this happens to ground targets within the DCG/FBD. If a ship is damaged say 75% to being sunk and the mission ends. The ship will come back as 50% damaged. If it goes for that mission as undamaged, the next mission it will be 25%. Another mission of no damage it is then fully repaired. Same for tanks, just depends on damage model of the ground target......what ordinance is used on the target and etc..........
Also another critical mistake was made with the DCG and FBD configuration. Ship's AA is on the ratio of the cyclic rate of fire and not percentage of fire. Configuring this in the mission file was misleading and wasn't totally noticeable because the original volley of AA fire was at the 1 ratio. Problem is that was on the 1 of the 1 to 100. Different AA weapon's range and cyclic rates from different ships at different distances blurred the identification of the second volley of AA to the first or the third.
AA is set properly at a 1.0 cyclic rate (actual real world cyclic rates for the actual weapon), the AA is now A BOOMIN.
2 solutions went into making the ships able to defend themselves better. We improved/fixed the AA rate of fire. Another was to increase the amount of AA guns to the fleet, we did this by simply replacing a couple of destroyers with generic battleships.
We would love to be able to add more ships but that requires the construction of a ship roads file for the FBD and waypoints on the DCG, both are different and have to match EXACT. That is a crap load of work and even more time to test it. Time simply doesn't permit this at this point.
We hope that with these slight and easy changes that this campaign will now at least last 4 - 5 days.
It has always been our goal to make these campaigns both balanced and winnable. Nothing better than driving the enemy off the map............... just not in a day.
