Jump to content

Paper Tiger

Members
  • Posts

    3,617
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Reputation Activity

  1. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Kohlbie in Dinas Rework in progress   
    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.
  2. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    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.
  3. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    That's interesting but the friendly fire I'm referring to is gone from the game. It used to be that units could misidentify a friendly unit and fire on it with everything and it was brutal. Perhaps most of you have never experienced this in your game because the feature was removed long ago. When this happened though, I have no idea.
    I can fire up the original version of Strong Stand which was an excellent showcase for this feature - a night mission which had a couple of companies of conscript reserve infantry arriving to reinforce a battle. You had to be extremely careful how you brought your conscript reinforcements into the battle space as they would misidentify your Special Forces as well as other conscript platoons that were out of initial C2 and a full-blown firefight between these formations ensued. I first noticed this feature was missing when I returned to revise Hasrabit last year - I was expecting it to happen but the conscripts never fired on each other.
  4. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    I spent most of this last week reworking the SAM Hill map. For some reason, I just hate that map and can't play on it so it's been a massive job to overhaul.  I finished it yesterday and have tested it a couple of times and also got the Sulit Airfield map and mission updated. I'm currently reviewing the Sagger Point mission, the half-way point in the campaign and the Phase 2 finale, with probably the most ASL-style map of the entire collection and I just KNOW that I'm going to have to rework it massively. It's too yellow, there are too many hills, the fields are horrible and unnatural and some of the compounds could do with being made more realistic. Unlike SAM Hill, it's not a bad looking map at all but it looks completely artificial and I don't enjoy them like that any more. Although I'm not going to redo most of the elevations, this is going to be another SAM Hill-like rework so that's my job for next week.
    Sulit Airfield was pretty simple with just some prettying-up of the map, adding some hedges and fences and redoing the player set-up area so that it looks like Syrian farmland. As it happens, Syrians farm right up to the berm of military airfields so I've done that here. However, I'm going to take it a bit easy for a while as the SAM Hill rework took quite a lot of time to do and I want to play something else for fun for a while.
  5. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    I forget that most folks around here weren't playing CMSF1 back in the days before the Marines module was released and friendly fire was a real feature in the game as evinced by my anecdote about playing 'Strong Stand'. Hasrabit was made before even AI pre-planned artillery was a feature. (It was revised shortly after it became a  feature and so you find it very sloppily implemented in almost every mission in Hasrabit, an over-correction rather like how movies made with colour in the 50s are riotously colourful just to show off that 'we've got colour now!!!' 
    High explosives and ricochets still cause friendly casualties but your units do not misidentify other friendly units and fire upon them anymore. This only really applied to the Syrian side as their C2 is nowhere near as good as your average Blue force.
    That's my point, that both Hasrabit and Dinas were made when the game engine was a very different creature and the rework can't be 'the same but better' but has to be a whole new thing. If folks really liked original Dinas, especially back in the very early days, they might not enjoy the rework nearly so well. When this feature was removed, I have absolutely no idea as I was too busy with 'new' Blue v Red and WW2 campaigns to do much more than just add pre-planned artillery strikes to Hasrabit. I certainly didn't retest the mission beyond seeing that the artillery strikes were WAD and so missed the change. Last year is the first time I recall ever thinking about revisiting these two early works and I remember being disappointed that friendly fire was no longer working.
  6. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    That's what I thought. Thanks for that. Another really important engine change that came along much later was the lethality of MGs. When these campaigns were made, MGs fired in a random direction from the target itself so casualties were much lower. When it was changed. MGs became exponentially more lethal.
    I'm finding the Green and Conscript Reserve Infantry formations to be performing FAR better than their early CMSF1 counterparts. There's no Friendly Fire either so managing them carefully at night is no longer a concern. That REALLY changed Strong Stand, mission 2 of the old Hasrabit campaign, where you needed to herd them into the action very carefully otherwise they'd open fire on your Special Forces or each other. Wild. But that's a feature of Hasrabit that is lost forever due to changes made to the engine.
  7. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    I really wonder how many folks have played the original campaign with the new CMSF2 engine because I suspect it would be a very different beast to play now. In particular, infantry units appear to be far more resilient and have their survivability increased substantially when in a building. In Petani, the opening rocket salvo used to be enough to send half of the conscripts with Low/Poor morale running and make the rest jittery. Now it cause 2-3 casualties, if you're lucky, and the rest are 'concerned' but otherwise okay. If anyone has played Dinas with the new engine, I'd really like to hear from them about their experience and whether they won it or not.
    Both Hasrabit and Dinas are very old campaigns, made with the earliest iterations of the game engine and I suspect they are 'gone' for good. Thus the total rework required. I HOPE it will be better but there's always someone who will think the original was better, and maybe it was but the engine changed that.
  8. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    I've now moved onto mission 5, SAM Hill. Don't think that I'm finished with 1-4 yet. They all have AI plans and forces ready to go but I know I can improve them further, especially Sabatani and Suib but I've seen enough of them for now and will return to them later.
    SAM Hill has a map which I really don't like. I've tried it but it just irritates me because it just doesn't look real. It looks like something I just pulled out of my posterior with no real art or skill. I had already tried improving it by expanding it further to the east and adding a small village and some fields to give the BLUE deployment area some depth but I still didn't like it. So, once again, I returned to Google Earth to see if I could find something better and sure enough, I found exactly what I wanted  - a small military base near the border with Jordan. It fit the bill perfectly so I ripped out all the elevations on the map and started work on the new base. It's not going to take long to do, it's just a hill winged by a berm with some weapon sites on one side of the hill and a small number of buildings near the entrance and at the back and that's already all done.
    There's what looks like a small barracks area near the site in Syria so i'll add that tomorrow and that's the new SAM Hill map finished. 
  9. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    A quick update on last week's progress. I spent the week working on two missions, (3 and 4 in the campaign). As mentioned above, early last week, i was wanting to cut one of these two missions because they felt very samey. But i decided to rework the maps and try something different with them. I was very happy with the result in Sabatani and the force ratio is almost 1:1. Considering what you have and the quality of it, you're definitely at an advantage.
    And so at the weekend, I turned to Suib. I wasn't happy with the map and the compounds so I decided to revamp the map, removing the large orchards and replacing them with fields of vegetables and grain. I also removed the poor quality compounds to the east of the river and replaced them, once again, with actual Syrian village compounds. I also reduced the height of the hills at the back of the map and gave it a whole new RED OB. I now have two AI plans and another very reasonable force ratio so I feel like I've done a good job on both of these. I enjoyed playtesting them too and had to relearn a lesson - namely that I WANT to kill the player's units. I had an impulse to quit my run and change the AI to reduce the lethality and remembered that I WANT to make the AI tough if you are too hasty.
  10. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    I actually spent half an hour reviewing the opening two missions of the German NATO campaign this morning and you are correct that the ammo is restocked between missions even though there is no resupply between missions in the campaign script and they are indeed core artillery units. Since this was all tested and WAD for the CMSF campaigns, there has probably been some change made to the engine which affects this.
    Anyway, the matter is moot for two reasons:
    First, your point is that it was not spelled out to you how many missions the core artillery was meant to last and that's fair enough. It was an old campaign and the first I made as a beta tester so I own that error.
    And second, there is no core artillery in Dinas. I stripped them out very early in development.
  11. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    Well, I can kill two birds with one stone here. Including the Depot missions where you can review your core units is definitely doable, in fact, it's a very easy ask. I wasn't planning on having it in the new campaign because it's not necessary anymore but you're not the only person who liked this feature so why not? Bit there will only be one per group and not after each phase as I'll explain in a bit. I'll have to update the depot map as it offends me a bit.
     
    At the moment, each company performs 2 or 3 missions at most throughout the campaign so there won't be much in the way of ammo resupply between missions. I have yet to decide where this will occur but if I'm using the depot missions, that would be the logical time for an ammo resupply. Even so, you will receive some non-core units in most missions including at least one truck and some Gaz jeeps so you'll get some ammo resupply from these even if they are a tad fiddly to use.
    As I've mentioned as well, there will be no core artillery in Dinas - instead you'll be allocated artillery from regiment each mission so this is not an aspect you'll have to manage. The reason for this change is that it makes testing individual missions much less complicated and reduces the need for lots of compiled mission testing. I spent MONTHS working of the original Dinas campaign and I don't wish to spend months more if possible.
    Secondly, as I've already told you, you should create a thread to bring up issues with the CMSF2 campaigns as they are official campaigns. I am responsible for the CMSF1 NATO campaigns and the only one I have a real interest in revisiting is the Khabour Trail, the Canadian campaign for which I made all but one of the missions. But it's an official campaign so it's not on my to-do list. I might just do it for my own pleasure though.
  12. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    At the moment, if you win every mission in the dynamic version, you get the optimal experience - you're achieving all your objectives in good time and so the regime is off-foot and reacting to your moves. There might be one or two missions where the optimal version will have something special but I haven't decided that yet as I want to get all the vanilla missions done and then get the variants made. Since the variants will usually be harder than the optimal version, you will want to try and keep on the winning track but any such 'punishment' will be a rare event.
    My plan is to divide the campaign into four phases of 3-4 missions and each phase culminates in a finale which you MUST win to stay in the campaign.
     
    Phase 1 has 3 missions - Shock and Awe
    Phase 2 has 4 mission - Red Awakening
    Phase 3 has 4 missions - The Crossings
    Phase 4 has 3 missions - Agony of Doom
     
    The phase names are provisional. You can see some ASL influence there as well.
    For phase 1 - Shock and Awe, you will have to win Sabatani or the campaign ends. Losing will usually mean less time to accomplish a later mission and they will have an additional influence of the phase finale. So losing a phase 1 mission reduces the mission length by 10 minutes per loss - lose both missions and the finale is 20 minutes shorter. There are other effects on the finale as well. The experience of Sagger Point will differ if you lose a phase 2 mission so you might have air support or the enemy might have air strikes depending on how you did in the earlier missions.
    Winning the phase finale means all is reset so if you were behind schedule in phase 1, a win in Sabatani resets the clock and you're back on track.
    In phase 4, losing any mission will end the campaign before the finale.
    That's the plan at the moment but it will be a while before all the missions are completed and tested before I get around to the variants. but this simpler structure means that I can make each mission have more impact on following missions without turning the campaign script into a nightmare of variants.
  13. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    A quick observation of how projects evolve as I develop them. I am working on missions 2 and 3 this week, Sabatani and Suib and they're both infantry-centric assaults on an urban area defended by infantry attacking across a river. The two missions were so similar that I went to bed last night thinking that I'd just ditch Sabatani. But when I woke up this morning, I decided to remove the river from the Sabatani map. Once I did that, I liked it a lot better but I took a look at the old ASL-style compound to the north of the urban area and decided that had to be redone as well. I need things to look more realistic when I play now.
    Here's the OLD Sabatani map with the ASL compounds to the north of the road as well as the dry river bed and bridge.

    So I went to Google Earth and scanned around and found a small but rather interesting area in the vicinity of the Golan and so I deleted the original buildings, walls trees etc to the north of the main road and replaced them with an all-new farm complex and a tiny lake which I really like the look of. So Sabatani has been saved from the chopping block by a morning's map work. This afternoon, after work, I fired up the mission and gave it a spin and it looks like it will be sufficiently different from Suib to justify keeping it in. And there's no river crossing battle here either.
    Here's the reworked map with the new farm complex and the small lake. (This is a real place). I've also broken up the HUGE grain fields and replaced them with some other crops. Instead of the empty ground, there are some sheep/goat pastures as well to the front of the small town which fill the map out quite nicely.

  14. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    That first picture is from 'Suib', mission 4 of the campaign, which I'm currently doing the AI work for. (I'm working on missions 3 and 4 just now with 1 and 2 more or less finished) As you can see, it's quite built up and so you'd expect at least a battalion to take that objective in under 2 hours. However, it's not quite the herculean task that you'd think and you can do it methodically.
     
    The second picture is the opening mission, Petani, which some will have seen before in Gung Ho!. It's been expanded and improved even further with a small village complex further up the hill but it still works with a single company and tanks in support. There is a small farmhouse complex atop the hill overlooking the villages below and so your first objective is to capture that in preparation for the main assault on the objective. While waiting, your forces should attempt to interdict any attempts to reinforce the village down that road. Therefore, missions like this will be broken down into 2-3 smaller 'chapters' rather than dividing the map up. Of course, you will be free to do what you want with what you've got and not follow the 'story'.
  15. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Dinas Rework in progress   
    I'll post my progress on this campaign in this thread from now on. For those who don't know anything about this campaign, it was my second Red v Red campaign made for CMSF way, way back in the days of the release of the USMC module and its setting is a Syrian civil war scenario where some Syrian generals attempt a coup. The premise is that the coup is launched with thunderclap surprise and so rebel forces are put into action as soon as they mobilise. While a good number of divisions will 'wait and see', the regime has a number of divisions that are 100% loyal so the rebels are on the clock as the more time they take to accomplish missions, the more time the regime has to assemble its own forces to oppose them.
    This means that time limits will be reasonably strict to reflect that pressure and so casualties are to be expected to accomplish your goals. However, the campaign gives you quite a large core force of which one company and support (usually tanks) is drawn to perform the mission.
    One point is that some of these maps are very large and so it would seem like it's a bit of a stretch just to have a single company when a battalion would be better. For example,

    A single company? To take THAT?! Are you HIGH?" And this...


    In both these situations, the friendly forces arrive in small packages and so the action unfolds over time. My plan is not to change the nature of the campaign too much and keep the player's forces small and have lots of artillery support as well as as many 'cool' toys as I can find in the Syrian OB to play around with.
  16. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from 37mm in Updating Hasrabit   
    There were originally ten missions in Hasrabit. But I added a new opener which is staying so right now there are eleven.
    However, I've got a possible two extra missions as well at Adan Airfield, one of which is already finished and tested but the second of which would require me to make up a whole new AI attack which can be a lot of work. I'm humming and hawing over including this short series because scripting AI attacks can be fun if you're in the right frame of mind so we'll see.
    I'm also considering removing the Heavy Metal mission as it's a strange one and too similar to what I have already done in the earlier Hill 142 mission. It may require too much work to update. But again, we'll see.
    There are so many AI meeting engagements in this campaign and they're the hardest to make challenging. It was not much work when the AI was simply move group 1 to A, then B, then C and just co-ordinating these groups but now there are up to sixteen of them with triggers as well. It gives much better results but is commensurable to the effort put in by the designer. (I haven't used that word in a long time)
  17. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Petrus58 in Dinas Rework in progress   
    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.
  18. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Hister in The Road to Montebourg revision for v4.0 is available   
    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.
  19. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Hister in The Road to Montebourg revision for v4.0 is available   
    The thought did cross my mind briefly a while ago though. If they did want it as an extra, I'd be very happy for that to happen but I'm not pushing for it. It needs both the Market Garden and Vehicle Pack content to play so I can understand why that might not be appealing for them. 
    The same will go for the revision of the Scottish Corridor that will come along some time in the future - it's going to need Market Garden and the Vehicle pack to work. I REALLY want a flamethrower tank or two in one or two of these missions as they were present in the real operation and there's no way that I'm redoing it without one. (Or at least trying it to see if it's as cool as I think it will be. I suspect it will completely destroy any existing balance in these missions but I want to try.)
     
    Watching Hapless's Montebourg and Scottish Corridor series is what got me back into this. He did a really good job with his AARs - very professional. My wife was astonished when I pointed out to her that I made the series he was playing.
  20. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Hister in The Road to Montebourg revision for v4.0 is available   
    https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/combat-mission-battle-for-normandy/cm-battle-for-normandy-campaigns/the-road-to-montebourg-revised-for-v4-0/
    Don't worry, this won't overwrite or otherwise delete the original campaign that came on the disk. IIt's a completely different file. This is substantially different from the vanilla campaign and the number of changes made is huge but the most important one to note is that you will need both the Market Garden module and the Vehicle Pack to play this.
     
    Other important highlights are that the 2/8 INF core units are now mostly Green with High morale which means you'll need to manage them more carefully in a firefight.
    All-new AI plans using triggers and most of the tricks that came with later versions of the game.
    Flamethrowers are included in some missions.
    Some maps have been revised, most notably the map for Turnbull's Stand which veterans of the original campaign will probably notice quite quickly.
    A 'new' mission has been added although those of you who found and played the earlier revised version that was uploaded to BFC's old Scenario Depot will recognise it. The campaign has a prelude phase consisting of the new mission and then the old campaign opener Beau Guillot. You should notice quite a few changes made to that mission as well - some extra help to make up for the drop in experience.
    There is air support in quite a few missions now and less artillery, at least the bigger guns anyway.
     
    Anyway, let's post this and then I'll see what needs to be 'fixed' or not in good time. This is an old campaign so i'm not expecting a ton of feedback for it for quite a while but let me know and I'll fix things. Now I'm taking a break from CMBN. I haven't quite decided what comes next - finishing Hasrabit or a new version of Gung Ho! for the German forces. Later, I'll get to work on the two Scottish campaigns I'd mentioned elswhere.
     
    Have a Happy New year.
  21. Upvote
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Arjuna.R in The Road to Montebourg revision for v4.0 is available   
    https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/combat-mission-battle-for-normandy/cm-battle-for-normandy-campaigns/the-road-to-montebourg-revised-for-v4-0/
    Don't worry, this won't overwrite or otherwise delete the original campaign that came on the disk. IIt's a completely different file. This is substantially different from the vanilla campaign and the number of changes made is huge but the most important one to note is that you will need both the Market Garden module and the Vehicle Pack to play this.
     
    Other important highlights are that the 2/8 INF core units are now mostly Green with High morale which means you'll need to manage them more carefully in a firefight.
    All-new AI plans using triggers and most of the tricks that came with later versions of the game.
    Flamethrowers are included in some missions.
    Some maps have been revised, most notably the map for Turnbull's Stand which veterans of the original campaign will probably notice quite quickly.
    A 'new' mission has been added although those of you who found and played the earlier revised version that was uploaded to BFC's old Scenario Depot will recognise it. The campaign has a prelude phase consisting of the new mission and then the old campaign opener Beau Guillot. You should notice quite a few changes made to that mission as well - some extra help to make up for the drop in experience.
    There is air support in quite a few missions now and less artillery, at least the bigger guns anyway.
     
    Anyway, let's post this and then I'll see what needs to be 'fixed' or not in good time. This is an old campaign so i'm not expecting a ton of feedback for it for quite a while but let me know and I'll fix things. Now I'm taking a break from CMBN. I haven't quite decided what comes next - finishing Hasrabit or a new version of Gung Ho! for the German forces. Later, I'll get to work on the two Scottish campaigns I'd mentioned elswhere.
     
    Have a Happy New year.
  22. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Vergeltungswaffe in Dinas Rework in progress   
    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.
  23. Upvote
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from AlexUK in Dinas Rework in progress   
    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.
  24. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Vergeltungswaffe in Dinas Rework in progress   
    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.
  25. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Fizou in Dinas Rework in progress   
    I'll post my progress on this campaign in this thread from now on. For those who don't know anything about this campaign, it was my second Red v Red campaign made for CMSF way, way back in the days of the release of the USMC module and its setting is a Syrian civil war scenario where some Syrian generals attempt a coup. The premise is that the coup is launched with thunderclap surprise and so rebel forces are put into action as soon as they mobilise. While a good number of divisions will 'wait and see', the regime has a number of divisions that are 100% loyal so the rebels are on the clock as the more time they take to accomplish missions, the more time the regime has to assemble its own forces to oppose them.
    This means that time limits will be reasonably strict to reflect that pressure and so casualties are to be expected to accomplish your goals. However, the campaign gives you quite a large core force of which one company and support (usually tanks) is drawn to perform the mission.
    One point is that some of these maps are very large and so it would seem like it's a bit of a stretch just to have a single company when a battalion would be better. For example,

    A single company? To take THAT?! Are you HIGH?" And this...


    In both these situations, the friendly forces arrive in small packages and so the action unfolds over time. My plan is not to change the nature of the campaign too much and keep the player's forces small and have lots of artillery support as well as as many 'cool' toys as I can find in the Syrian OB to play around with.
×
×
  • Create New...