PGF WaW - Why's and How's
Well... long story short - there are two main motivations behind what i'm doing here:
a) I want to make the game fun again - although, everyone's definition of what "fun" is will differ, i believe most of us agree that PGF as it is now is "broken", at least when used in the context of the stock PG/AG content. The new AI, while improving upon the original in some aspects, has introduced so many annoying new issues that it made playing the game very tedious to put it mildly. This is what motivates my tinkering with the scenarios and trying various "unorthodox" things, it's basically to make the play against the PGF AI fun again, in the same sense it was fun to play the original PG(DOS) all those years ago (at least fun to me). It is not designed with another purpose in mind than campaign or single scenario play against the AI, and while i didn't deliberately put any obstacles to playing it in H2H mode i do expect some of the scenarios to be unbalanced, because they were optimized for the PGF AI.
b) I want to expand the unit roster to make it possible to cover a wider selection of scenarios, historical and speculative, within the time frame of the WW2 (say, starting with Japanese incursions into Chinese lands in the early 1930's and finishing with Korea and Suez in the mid-1950's), for the usual "big" nations but also for the often overlooked "little" ones (it is not for nothing that i have 100 flags in my flags file). This is what motivates the eqp file edits i'm making, which are as much as an integral part of the WaW project as a whole as they are a standalone "product" (in lack of a better term), as evidenced by the Waffen-SS campaign. The SS campaign is much more "orthodox" in the vein of the SSI PG/AG content compared to the main WaW project, and largely without any clever trickery used in the scenario design. The main difference between the stock SSI content and the SS campaign is the expanded unit roster (and also a significantly smaller core size, and a different core nation with it's own quirks with regards the purchasing choices - but that's beside the point

). I will keep the eqp file between the two projects in sync, any and all future additions and edits to the WaW eqp file will be fully compatible with the SS campaign.
I did not change the AI or any other hard-coded aspect of PGF, all my edits are purely done to scenario and data files. I am using several tricks to counter-act the PGF AI behavior, trying to set the scenarios up so that when playing they behave more like they did under PG. Just a personal preference of mine.
There is one main difference between the old SSI PG AI and the one implemented in PGF - the SSI AI understood the value of entrenchment and would keep highly entrenched units put in place, not just blindly move them about for no apparent reason. This allowed scenario designers to set up defensive positions outside designated victory hexes, all you needed to do is to assign an entrenchment value of 6 or higher to a unit and the AI would not move it. Instead, the PGF AI immediately abandons all non-VH positions and clusters all its units around the VHs. Also, at each VH it purchases the identical setup of interlocked multiple cheap AT, AD and ATY turning every scenario into a very predictable and repetitive affair. When set to attack, the PGF AI blindly leaves all VHs undefended and moves all available units towards the enemy held VHs, as far as they can go, often pushing ATY and other units in trucks right next to player's units making them too easy target to destroy. It will just send human wave after human wave until it runs out of prestige and is unable to replace it's units.
What i do is i limit the ability of AI side to purchase new units - they need to lose a big portion of their initial deployed force before they're able to start replacing them. To counter this, i am beefing up the initial AI force by adding more planes, tanks, artillery, AD etc (but not the cheap stuff AI buys!) so it is significantly stronger than what SSI gave them. On the player side, i have disabled purchasing auxiliary units so what auxes you are given at the start of the scenario cannot be replaced (and in some cases you'll need to keep them alive if you wish to win). I have also created some "special" units like the Garrison which is essentially an INF without movement and put into the FRT class, to make sure certain VH and non-VH locations are being defended at all times. All of this is tested and retested many times until i am satisfied with the result.
Not everyone might like it but hey you can't make everyone happy!
I consider the Waffen-SS campaign a finished "product" (that word again!), and unlike with WaW i see no reason why the SS campaign scenarios couldn't be played in H2H mode any more (or less?) than any of the stock SSI PG/AG scenarios. In fact, i see no reason why the stock SSI PG/AG scenarios and campaigns (and in fact any custom content compatible with the stock eqp files) couldn't be played using my expanded eqp file, if someone wishes to do so - i even encourage it. I do plan to convert other custom content, scenarios and campaigns, including SSI PacGen ones (see the Khalkhin Gol scenario already included in the latest WaW beta) to use my eqp file - but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
And if someone would decide to create future custom content based on my files, or even modify my files to make them better suited to their needs, that would make me extremely happy!
Because making mods is only half of the fun. The other half is sharing them with the world.
