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Feature I would like brought back: probability of reinforcement arrival


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I really liked the ability in CMX1 to adjust probability from 1 chance in 100 up to 100 in 100 chance of a specific reinforcement's arrival after a certain turn in the battle. This really added some cool surprises to scenarios I made up and played against the AI. Like a 1% chance that sometime in the battle the enemy would get a certain heavy tank. It would always be a possibility adding excitement to the game. Or for your own side, the hope that a certain reinforcement might arrive at any time.

I have made up a few scenarios in CMBN but that range of time +/- for reinforcement arrival with no probability dial just doesn't give me that same worrisome feeling/clinging hope.

What are some other folks feelings? This of course would be a good thing even with H2H battles. Like a wild card effect?

Any chance we could drag this feature back into the editor?

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I have made up a few scenarios in CMBN but that range of time +/- for reinforcement arrival with no probability dial just doesn't give me that same worrisome feeling/clinging hope.

It is just about possible to do this at the moment with the existing reinforcement system. (P132-133 of the manual) What follows will only work if you are playing missions that are no more than 3 hours in duration. The shorter the mission, the better.

When you place units in a reinforcement slot, you can set their time of arrival to the end of the mission and apply a variable entrance time, say by as much as 30 minutes. If you create an hour long mission, set the reinforcements to arrive at 60 minutes and a variable time of 30 minutes, there is chance that they will arrive before the mission ends. It is possible to set the reinforcements arrival time to 1 hour 15 minutes with a variable entry time even though the mission finishes at 60 minutes, therefore allowing you to make the arrival of something extremely unlikely but not impossible.

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I like it because it would also let us create paratroop drops that have a more randomized way to determine when and where they appear on the map -- if they arrive at all.

Aha! Bingo! Great minds think alike. I've been doing a lot of experimenting doing exactly this with airborne units :D Unfortunately, reinforcements will arrive in the exact location that they are placed in in the scenario editor. But at least the player has no control over exactly when his forces arrive.

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It is just about possible to do this at the moment with the existing reinforcement system. (P132-133 of the manual) What follows will only work if you are playing missions that are no more than 3 hours in duration. The shorter the mission, the better.

When you place units in a reinforcement slot, you can set their time of arrival to the end of the mission and apply a variable entrance time, say by as much as 30 minutes. If you create an hour long mission, set the reinforcements to arrive at 60 minutes and a variable time of 30 minutes, there is chance that they will arrive before the mission ends. It is possible to set the reinforcements arrival time to 1 hour 15 minutes with a variable entry time even though the mission finishes at 60 minutes, therefore allowing you to make the arrival of something extremely unlikely but not impossible.

Are you sure this is correct?

I understood that the reinforcement window started at the stated time, and extended for as long as the variable window. So if you set the arrival time to 60min +30min, the units will arrive sometime between the 60 and 90 minute marks. Therefore, if your scenario is only 60 minutes long, those reinforcements will never arrive.

I think.

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Are you sure this is correct?

I understood that the reinforcement window started at the stated time, and extended for as long as the variable window. So if you set the arrival time to 60min +30min, the units will arrive sometime between the 60 and 90 minute marks. Therefore, if your scenario is only 60 minutes long, those reinforcements will never arrive.

I think.

That does still mean you could set the reinforcements to arrive up to 30 minutes after the 45 minute mark, and only have a 50/50 chance of arriving. More limited, yes, but the method's only useful for probability generation towards the end of any given scenario.

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That does still mean you could set the reinforcements to arrive up to 30 minutes after the 45 minute mark, and only have a 50/50 chance of arriving.

Yes, exactly. And as you say; quite limited. There's 50/50 chance they'll arrive while the scenario is still running, but only a 3.3% chance they'll arrive at the 45minute mark, and only a 17% chance they'll arrive with 10mins or more remaining. If they arrive much later than that they'll be more or less useless anyway.

Actually, you could have them arrive at 30+30, which means that 50% of the time they'll arrive with more than 15 mins remaining, 50% of the time they'll arrive with less than 15 minutes remaining, and the long-term average (ie, over multiple plays of the scenario) or expected time they'll be in the battle is 15 mins. Which is probably more useful. In most scenarios, 15 minutes is long enough to move somewhere and do something useful.

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I am actually with you guys on this one. Probability is very different than a time window even though they are kind of the same. Just how you get there I guess. But reinforcements based of casualties seems like a good idea and realistic at the same time. Like strategic reserves. Very good idea sonar.

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Aha! Bingo! Great minds think alike. I've been doing a lot of experimenting doing exactly this with airborne units :D Unfortunately, reinforcements will arrive in the exact location that they are placed in in the scenario editor. But at least the player has no control over exactly when his forces arrive.

I thought about that limitation too (the designer would still always know WHERE the reinforcements might arrive because of where they were placed in the scenario editor). But I guess one could scatter lots of individual 2- 3- or 4- man teams around, all with big variations in arrival time and probability windows -- and that would be very hard to anticipate in-game, even if you're the same person who set them up.

(Now, if we just had something smaller than a Kubelwagen for the Pathfinders to set on fire to mark the drop zone...)

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(Now, if we just had something smaller than a Kubelwagen for the Pathfinders to set on fire to mark the drop zone...)

To quote another:

Yeah, flares. I need a lot of friggin' flares. I want night illumination flares. I want signal flares. I want German NCO's to fire purple flares when they see tanks. I want to sit back on a hill and see a friggin' tangled skein of purple flares trailing smoke up into the sky when the Allies attack the Germans. I want the illumination flares to cast moving shadows causing spooked troops to fire at ghosts. I want the shadows to change based on the height of the flare. I want the swaying of the flare under parachute to be simulated. I want the AI to react to the flares. If my German AI sees a fellow unit fire a purple flare, I want it to react correctly.

Without flares there is nothing.

The flare firing animation and flare reloading animations need to be correct. Yeah, that's right: bolt-action, smolt-action, just get the friggin' flare firing (fff) animation right. The first time!

Carry on.

Ken

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Ideally, I'd like to see reinforcements linked to losses, then they would only be released if they were required.

That's reasonable enough for the side on defense, but for an attacker it amounts to reinforcing failure rather than success, which is not a smart operational technique.

Michael

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OK, maybe we should define reserves versus reinforcements.

Reserves: I usually play some fairly small scale battles so my reserves could/would be on map and require no special settings. The bigger the units the more it might be off-map available platoon or company or whatever awaiting commitment if needed/requested. LIke Theater of War had you designate units as reserves prior to battle start IIRC. Maybe you as human player could hit a button and request reserves to bolster defense or exploit success as attacker. sub-routine could do its black-box and either release reserves or say no. No adding to failure, etc.

Reinforcements: If we had a couple dials to adjust arrival we could make a reinforcement seem like a random, lucky thing or a real world delayed unit that was supposed to be in the line-up. I kind of laugh when the briefing says that some Sherman platoon and 1 platoon of troops will be there exactly at 20 minutes. No Murphy's law in CMBN! Of course then you can adjust the time +/-. NOW, I don't know clearly for CMBN reserves arrival, does the game engine do a single calc knowing your 45+/-30 window as game loads prior to start and this results in a a time in the overall game timeframe where that reinforcement will arrive window or is it a continuous new die roll after each minute in the 45+/-30 window?

More die rolls equals more variation and thus replayability for us stay at home, non-H2H folks.

One more thing: I used to love writing Ardennes Offensive type scenarios for CMAK and the reinforcements would also equate to units pulling back or rallying and getting mixed up in the fray.

Your side could be getting waxed and low and behold a sherman wanders through and decides to bolster your defense of some unknown cross-roads. A lot of fun.

Bottomline we need a few more dials for reinforcements. Chance of arrival 1 to 100 after radio button for probability is clicked. Please please please!

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But reinforcements based of casualties seems like a good idea and realistic at the same time. Like strategic reserves. Very good idea sonar.

It's also an idea that's been kicking around for many a year.

We need to think though, though, how that would work. Superficially it's trivial: the designer sets a casualty threshhold, and links a reinforcement pool to the threshold. Once the threshold is reached, the pool appears.

But:

1) what does the cas threshhold apply to? The entire force, part of the force, all of the force including reinforcements that haven't yet arrived, something else? That's a functional thing that could be answered in any number of ways, depending on your POV, none of which are 'wrong'. The easy answer is "well, just add options, and let us do anything!" except that isn't so easy for the guys who have to write the code to support it. Now they have to write code that supports the operation of all those options, and UI for the editor and the game that let designers and players make sense of what's going on. (Something I'd like as an option is the offer of reinforcements, which I - as a player - can accept or decline. Accepting them would cost me victory points (or grant them to the opposing player). But that's yet more programming and UI.)

2) Realistically, is this even plausible in the scope of a CM battle? I'm tending towards "no". Certainly, when under heavy pressure units did call for and receive reinforcements that allowed them to stabilise the situation, but depending on the situation those reinforcements might take many hours to arrive. Over an hour wouldn't be an unreasonable delay. But that kind delay would be impractical in the context of most CM scenarios. Having reinforcements arrive immediately the threshold was breached - as if they were poised like a coiled spring, just off the map edge, furiously watching the casualty counter climb inexorably upwards, just waiting for their chance to leap in to action - would be wildly unrealistic.

Linked reinforcements strikes me as an operational-level consideration, but CM really isn't an operational game.

Jon

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But reinforcements based of casualties seems like a good idea and realistic at the same time. Like strategic reserves. Very good idea sonar.

Well, the realism depends on how this is implemented. 'Theater of War' used reinforcement triggers based on casualties and it was certainly not realistic. In certain scenarios, for example, the very second that you lost a platoon of tanks then you would get a fresh new platoon as reinforcements. Replaying the scenario yielded the same results and made the battles predictable and led to bad player habits, i.e. players would just let that last tank die so that he would get his reinforcements.

Using randomized reinforcements & strength and randomized arrival times might help with predictability problem and force the player to preserve his original forces as best he can.

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In certain scenarios, for example, the very second that you lost a platoon of tanks then you would get a fresh new platoon as reinforcements. Replaying the scenario yielded the same results and made the battles predictable and led to bad player habits, i.e. players would just let that last tank die so that he would get his reinforcements.

ROFL. The iron law of unintended consequences strikes again! I hadn't even thought of that angle, but it is a fairly obvious way to abuse the system :D

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It is just about possible to do this at the moment with the existing reinforcement system. (P132-133 of the manual)

I just ran three consecutive tests with a large number of units set to arrive at T+05 with a vaiable time of entry of 5 minutes to see how this works and not once did a reinforcement arrive before its Arrival Time. Since this is clearly at odds with the manual, and I'm pretty certain that it worked this way in CMSF, I think we've found a bug...

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OK, reinforcements are designated in the purchase units screen with number keys, I called them R1 thru R8, and it was 1 thru 8 in CMBN but I guess in CMFI it will be 1 to 16. R1 thru R16.

How will we do that in the editor?

1 thru 10 and then maybe 11 thru 16 is shift plus the num keys 1 thru 6? Hmmm.

R8 always starts on the map in CMBN so maybe R16 will start on the map in CMFI?

Random should be in there for earliest arrival time and random for range of +/- and random for probability. Just in case you wanted max replayability.

Question: If a reinforcement arrives on map edge at the last minute, say a veteran AFV with high morale, but it can't actually fire a shot, does it still contribute say to global morale and maybe keep the losing defender from ending the battle?

I miss those "operations" in CMAK where you would push back and forth over several separate battles and in sequential battles you could see your destroyed tanks or enemy destroyed tanks still sitting there. Remember?

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