Paper Tiger

I don't know what a Syrian commander would do in this situation - the campaign covers a very short time span, just over 24 hours in 14 missions, and the situation is emerging rapidly. My best guess if that the depleted battalions would go into action as long as they were combat effective in such a high stakes throw of the die so I'm favouring that option. I guess I could do a deep dive into what happened in the battles for the Golan Heights to see what they did but I'm not taking this rework that seriously. As for the point of doing so so late in the campaign - I can't do it earlier because each company only sees action twice before these final four and would be a waste if it were done earlier. I don't think the BMP Mech Inf company B will be combat effective after Jameelah though. Both their missions are potentially tough ones but I have no doubt some will complete these without any effort or substantial casualties - the game is already very old and your skill levels are much higher than when the campaign was first devised. It's almost certainly going to be 'no disbanding' at this point though. Tumah is going to take a bit longer to get ready as I'm not happy with that enormous enclosed compound to the north of the entry position - it's artificial and could be improved further to make it more defensible. I'm not planning on anything massively ambitious with the revision though.

I took a short break from this game to play something else and to manage some real-life matters as well but I have been giving Tumah and the last three missions some thought. I have decided that these four missions will be near-Battalion level missions with two companies of mech infantry and a company of tanks in each. I'm not going to be able to manage these forces myself but I'll get an idea of how effective the AI is. One reason why is because these maps are all big by my standards and there's a lot of open space with long LoS so I'm going to make these missions more lethal to mechanised combat with more ATGMs, both deployed and mounted, and tanks on the other side. I'm humming and hawing over whether to 'disband' a mech inf company from one or both groups to reinforce and refit the remaining two but if I don't, the chances of you having anything like a full battalion in these is unlikely.

There is a platoon of BDRM-2 (AT-5) in your core forces and they appear in a few missions. I'm a fan too. I've tried to use as much of the regular Syrian army kit as possible in this campaign so the only things you're not going to have under your control are the formations that wouldn't rebel (Republican Guards, Airborne, Special Forces and GOOD tanks that would go to the trusted, favoured divisions) and Shilkas - they're for Hasrabit. So no BMP-2s or 3 or T-72 tanks. Regarding MOUT missions with such small forces, this is a Red v Red campaign and bombarding the crap out of civilian structures is not punished so you can open up lines of sight to buildings in the interior. I even used this tactic, albeit more carefully, in Gung Ho! and other Blue v Red missions I've designed.

I'll probably post some pics of the updated maps some time later but this is just a quick update on progress. I have completed three of the four phase 3 missions now and am currently working on The Tumah Crossing. Road to Amarah, Where Farmers Dare and Jameelah all have functioning AI plans and reworked maps and I've done some proper testing on them. I beat Jameela yesterday afternoon and I feel I'm done with that for now. After phase 3 is complete, I only have the final three to rework and much of that is already done as I tend to improve maps when I'm not feeling that committed to AI scripting and actual playing so it's not going to take as long to rework these as it did the earlier missions in the campaign. So while an end is in sight, I will need to revisit all the earlier missions and test them to make sure that the campaign is actually winnable. And of course, there will be the revised briefings and artwork to do but that's not a particularly big or unpleasant task.

Strangely enough, one of the keys to this is to take it reasonably slowly and set up a strong fire base before sending a small team down the trenches to touch the objectives. The trench run triggers the reinforcements so it's best to do it as quickly as possible. The documents are 'hidden' in the 3rd Gun square. You don't need them to win but a Total Victory isn't possible without finding them.

I have no idea why that might happen. Is your soldier physically placed IN the square? You should hear a notification that you have touched it. My first thought was that the game engine is perhaps confused because there are two overlapping objectives, one an allied player TOUCH objective and the other an axis AI Trigger but all of the gun positions are like that.

I just took a look and I can see where the confusion arises. Look at the tac map and you'll see the rough position of the guns. you are told that you must TOUCH these positions to destroy the guns. The VP objectives won't show if you hit Alt+J as they are not known to either. I have changed the settings so that these three objectives are Known to Player so that if there is any revision, this change is implemented. However, it changes nothing - you just have to move down the trench line and 'touch' the guns which you can SEE on the map.

So that there's no confusion, any changes I make to the campaign will not carry to an older version of the campaign. Once you start, you are locked into that particular campaign with OBs, artwork, AI plans etc until you finish it. As for any chance of a revision, I'd say there is no chance of a new version any time soon. Unless something utterly egregious occurs (in which case I absolutely will fix it asap), this is the final version.

There is so much more that we can do with this simple binary system with a little imagination. I'm feeling the 'so little time' part too. There reworks are taking up months of my time - I had hoped to make much faster progress with them but I just have to rework these old maps first and the AI in these two early campaigns was abysmal, basically being QB map AI plans. Although I was pleasantly surprised by what I was getting from testing the original Amarah - one sees what can still be done with the old forms by one who knows how to handle them.

Two completely contradictory requests. Whatever I do, one of you is going to be unhappy. It's something I'm taking my mind to consider and I won't decide until a bit later, at least until testing properly starts. In favour of the consolidation option is that the average player will probably have pretty much the same head and vehicle count as they would without it. On the other hand, an experienced player who has managed to complete the earlier missions with next to no casualties would see his forces lost. My thinking on that point is that if you've already preserved your force so well, the campaign obviously isn't posing a real challenge and so you will probably find a better challenge at the end. Who knows? There's a lot to consider and sometimes the best answer is just to leave as much as possible without changing it. If it ain't broken, don't fix it. Which segues nicely to my next point. As I've said a few times already, the new engine has pretty much obsoleted the old campaign because defenders in buildings are far more resilient and even conscripts with low morale will stand and fight. And artillery doesn't do nearly as much damage to infantry in buildings as it did way back when the campaign was first devised. Add to that the near-absurd force ratios and that's a lot of rebalancing work. I've started real work on the phase 3 missions now, Amarah, Farmers, Jameelah and Tumah, and have decided not to make nearly so many radical map overhauls this time around apart from the Tumah Crossing map which has already been improved considerably. I am splitting up some of the massive grain fields on these maps and 'planting' different crops there to make them a little less yellow overall. And I'm reworking some of the compounds so that they're a bit more realistic but otherwise, I want to keep the flavour of these maps intact as much as possible. It will also save a bit of time. When I was devising core units, I spent a lot of time improving three of these four maps so most of the map work is already done. Amarah is the only one that needs real improvements but I'm keeping the extreme elevation changes and the overall terrain as is. What WILL go are the AT-14 ATGM teams. The briefing is totally misleading in that respect, not to mention that they're massively lethal to both vehicles and infantry. The initial recon phase is a bit boring so instead of having the reinforcements arrive earlier, I'm going to beef up the starting OB with some of the 'tools' that the original CMSF didn't have. These two changes alone should allow me to keep the general flow of the battle intact from the original rather than a whole new battle like Sagger Point and SAM Hill needed after the extensive overhaul.

Dinas does actually have a finale with the entire BTR Mech Inf battalion and support present. The finale(s) are not really a problem as there is no way to predict what the average player will have left in the final mission after 12+ missions. Some folks will have busted OBs by the middle of the campaign while others will have their OBs pretty much intact at the end. The important thing is to make sure that it is winnable and the player takes what forces he has to the challenge and uses them well. So you'll still have the entire battalion in the finale. I'm trying to decide whether to 'disband' one of the three companies in each battalion to reinforce the remaining two later in the campaign so that you have full OBs for the final set of missions. Since the time span is far too short for replacements to be a thing, this is an option I'm considering. I'm aware of the counter arguments so it's not fixed yet. There are options available to the player that weren't in CMSF1 - namely that you can combine squads that are depleted so that you're no longer sporting a number of squads with 1 or 2 soldiers in them in later missions (unless you want to of course)

I have frequently said in my post history that I play RT without pausing (with a few exceptions). Yes, it IS possible for somebody to pause every 5-10 seconds and issue new orders. That was one of the main concerns expressed by certain quarters of the community when CMx2 was announced with Real Time play so it's not a new issue but as old as the engine itself. But I never play that way and so every one of my missions ever made has been played and tested in RT with infrequent pausing so your expressed concern about design and testing is unfounded. I'm sure some scenarios do that with victory conditions but it's simple maths and I've seen others do it - examine the victory conditions before starting and determining what needs to be done to achieve a victory. The only tricky parameter I have to consider in most cases is where to set the enemy force preservation bonus which can offset some of the VP occupation awards. While the award itself may be uniform throughout a campaign, you'll find the threshold varies a lot between missions depending on experiences during testing. Pretty much every mission ever designed can be won "simply" by destroying the enemy force and forcing a surrender for the win. Not much can be done about that and honestly, if you can do that, you've captured all the VPs by default in most situations. I'm sure somebody will be able to cite an occasion when it should not but a win by surrender is always possible. That's how I win some of my missions - by intentionally forcing a surrender. For example, new Petani or Flintstones are situations where the enemy will surrender before you capture all the objectives if you take the time to clear the enemy from the orchards and fields first. Leave them and the enemy will fight longer in the town. It's designed like that intentionally.

LOL. That's certainly true when I'm playtesting a mission with a very small force, for example, the start of a mission when you only have recon on the map. But I lose that focus when playing RT when there are more units and yes, I lose units and I don't see anything happen. Yes, the icon flashes but if you're zoomed in a bit, you miss those alerts. It's true that you can react faster and change their orders in RT when you are focused on one particular part of the map but then you're missing what is happening elsewhere unless you have everybody else just sitting doing nothing at all. If you're managing a company+ with support, you might actually have an advantage playing WeGo. RT is only really doable with small-ish forces. There's no way I could manage a battalion + of units in RT nowadays but I seemed to be able to do it up until Nijmegen at least when mission OBs could sometimes be quite large (Aalst springs to mind) I take great care to ensure that you have enough force to accomplish the objectives and always add at least 10 more minutes to the mission clock than I need to win comfortably, sometimes, quite a bit more. For example, I can do The High Chaparral mission in Gung Ho! in less than 2 hours but you get an extra half hour. (The reasons for an extra half hour should be obvious if you think about it.) BTW, I've seen players detach small scout teams which advance ahead of the others in WeGo to avoid such errors. You might lose a couple of scouts but you won't lose the whole squad. I use that tactic too, especially with the Syrians. Scout + Hunt usually does the job - it draws fire (the AI is dumb), it's slow but safe and since that's what I'm doing, you should have enough time in WeGo too. One issue I read players have is that they think they have to capture ALL the objectives whereas they're designed to be won by capturing at least one and denying control of the rest to the other side. Or to preserve every Preserve location. If you try to control or preserve them all, yes, you'll need more time and more bodies but read the victory objectives carefully and determine what is needed for a win and suddenly, many of my missions become much easier.

While I'm at it, here is the old SAM Hill map... Don't ask me why but I hate this map with a passion. It's so artificial and yes, that's mud . So I updated it, expanding the map further to the back to give the player room to deploy his forces, reducing the elevations and making all the compounds far more realistic. And of course, SAM Hill itself is now a small military base modelled on a real-world base situated just north of the Jordanian border. I'm aware it looks flat but elevations vary a lot and the hill at the back of the map still dominates but it doesn't show on the screenshot. So that's all the Phase 2 missions ready for playtesting. That's going to take a bit of time to do as SAM Hill and Sagger Point are basically all-new missions. I've playtested Sulit Airfield and it's fine with not much needing to be done to finish that. Suib is still basically the same mission as it was but it no longer has a river crossing and the same is true for Sagger Point. The river crossings are a phase 3 feature and almost each one will be feature an opposed river crossing. I started work on the first phase 3 mission Amarah and am in the process of redoing the map for the final mission, Tumah Crossing. I've already redone Farmers and Jameelah so phase 3 shouldn't take too long to get ready for testing too.

Well, it turns out the Sagger Point rework took a bit longer than I'd anticipated. It's almost finished now but I've had to redo the map. They say a picture is worth a thousand words so here are a couple which show the old Sagger map and the new, reworked one, both taken pretty much from the same perspective. As you can see, the new map is a lot less yellow with more realistic farmlands and completely reworked compounds. The old village has been relocated to the centre of the map and the huge hill to the north has been cut down to size a bit so that it's a less dominant terrain feature. I think I was obsessed with building them really high back in the early days of CMx1 The plan here is to try and keep the OB to a company of mech inf with support rather than have two full mech inf companies + support. Sorry folks but I just don't play that way anymore and since this is going to require a lot of playtesting, I need to be able to manage everything in RT. By relocating the village to the centre of the map, it fits in with my strategy of giving the player mini goals to achieve while his forces arrive on the map for the big set piece, the assault on the hill. I'm using some UNCON units in this mission to represent small bands of civilians who are against the rebellion so the initial opposition is not too tough to manage with a small force. They are scattered around the small compounds and the villages and I'll be able to vary their set ups between AI plans so that nobody knows exactly where they'll be even if you've played it once already. Gone too are the 'emplaced' tanks on the hill so that you will be able to move your mech inf in sight of the hill without the AI overriding n your orders with self-preservation retreat orders. The map as you see it is relatively bare with respect to details and flavour objects - that's an evening job when I prefer to relax, listen to some old Eagles albums and do some light map work.