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Let's talk about the Road to Nijmegen


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Back from holiday in Bali and the computer is back from the workshop where it was getting an upgrade. It seems like there's a bit to deal with here so I'll cover it quickly.

Oh, I'd definitely agree with that. :D It seems like it was a short, but tough fight for the 2/505. Without the MG bunker, it was a short but easy fight so I stuck with the bunker to represent a good, fixed position that couldn't easily be taken out by the 60mm mortar.

If you guys are having real issues with this mission, here are a few pointers.

Smoke is your friend here. Use it as often as possible to get your guys into good positions before you assault the 'island'

You have plenty of time to do this so don't feel you have to rush at the start. It's better to take some time at the start of the mission to neutralise some of the German units in the trenches. In all my playtesting of this mission, I never lost a single guy to the AT gun. Not one because it is easily spotted and the mortar takes it out quite quickly.

The Germans are not good quality and there is only one MG team. I think you guys are mistaking the 'second MG for the first one in a different AI plan. However, I might be wrong on this as I don't have CMBN installed on my upgraded computer just yet. Later this morning though. They also have low ammo so once things start to go bad for them, they break down quite quickly so the final assault can be a tad anti-climactic if you start slow.

And this is a real SPOILER

The two platoons in this mission are fully refitted before the Hunner Park missions so casualties taken in this mission are not an issue. You're going to lose guys doing this. Remember that I play my own campaigns and I don't particularly enjoy playing overly-difficult missions myself so I've scripted it so that you can lose a few guys here without spoiling the later missions of the campaign.

All the maps in this campaign are historical and of my own creation. I didn't use any of the master maps at all. The maps are authentic and crafted from US maps of Holland from that era as well as looking at Google Earth and elminating any modern buildings from the map. I only used the editor overlay to create the maps for the Heuman Lock bridge and Reithorst missions. The others were all done in the old fashioned way.

Regarding difficulty, I think I said all that I have to say on this matter in this post.

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=110311

You'll have to forgive me if I'm not taking your post seriously seeing as how you haven't played any of the missions by your own admission (the highlighted part of your post). As far as I'm aware, I am the only campaign designer in the community or on the team who provides the player with an option to play with extended time limits if he is losing missions. So perhaps your rant would be better directed at some other less sympathetic designers ;)

If you want to lark about with CMBN, please play the QBs. that's what they're for.

PT, in all deference, as we are prone to write on this forum:

I tried to read your defense of the difficulty--it is way too long for me to, enjoyably, read. Don't you (and this may be an issue) want to be enjoyable?

As a former competitive chess player, MD with a Harvard medical sub-specialty degree, who took three semesters of calculus, reads the Economist, the New Yorker, and reads about particle physics.....

And has played war sims since the 1960s, including all the ones you described in your post (I think), I am going to give the opinion:

YOUR CAMPAIGNS ARE TOO HARD.

PERIOD.

Ok, we can discuss what "too" means, and, likely, disagree.

But the concept of even a 2 hour scenario, with, say 15 minutes per turn, turns out to be 30 hours.

That is without save-scums, and multiple replays, which would make each battle even longer. I don't mind an occasional re-do (due to making some stupid tactical error), but to go back 10-20 hours, frequently, is ...... campaign-breaking.

Again, punt me from the forums. Heaven knows I have other things to do while on-call. I can scan Paradox forums, or, Zeus help me, find out if they have finally fixed Rome 2. The...campaigns here ...are....regrettably...too...hard. I am not here to beat you--you win. I give up.

[looks around] (On a non-related note. Can't wait 'till I am hunting KV-1,-2s.)

Way....too................difficult. And too long.

Well...let me put this in a different tone: Consider designing some easier campaigns in the future, just as a change of pace.

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YOUR CAMPAIGNS ARE TOO HARD.

PERIOD.

That may well be true :D

Consider designing some easier campaigns in the future, just as a change of pace.

I thought that The Road to Montebourg was 'easy'. :confused: After completing my first 10-mission campaign for CMSF, 'Hasrabit', I also made a short, 3-mission campaign for CMSF that was very easy as well. (Road to Perdition) Folks actually complained that it was too easy and I got practically no feedback on it for all the work it took to make it.

Don't you (and this may be an issue) want to be enjoyable?

Who doesn't? But I design primarily for my own playing pleasure. I really enjoy playing my own stuff and if I share it with you and somebody else does, that's good enough for me.

Hey, wait! Aren't you the guy who thought that 'Courage and Fortitude' was a masterpiece comparable with Stravinsky's 'Rites of Spring'? ;)

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FWIW, I don't see me doing anything like this again. The last year has been one of the hardest of my life. My mother and my aunt both died within a space of a month of each other before Xmas last year, my wife's sister died in August, I got a huge promotion which has come with enormous responsibilities. All in all, I just don't have the time available in the future to craft a 14+ solo campaign a year anymore.

So it's likely that the future for me will likely be more along the lines of what you're asking for. Shorter, easier, and more fun to play campaigns. Difficult is easy to do. Really, really easy. Fun to play is not easy. I'd hope folks would find playing my stuff fun. That's why you get all the toys to play with in my campaigns, lots of artillery, air support and the cool, often overlooked toys like the .50cal armed jeeps in the Para missions in the Nijmegen campaign. It really was fun for me designing and playing those missions.

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PT, I hope I'm not piling on you, but I do also think at times you take some of the difficulty to the extreme. :) Most notably (and this goes for pretty much any scenario designer) it drives me crazy when I'm given troops with experience levels below Regular and am told to take these well-defended targets. That may be all good and well if the point is to simulate Luftwaffe infantry or sailors & support clerks, but for your typical infantryman on either side, Regular at the end of the day is the most realistic representation of what a front-line soldier was expected to know going into battle. Green troops, OTOH, are often very prone to easily losing their composure after taking a small bit of incoming fire and are thus rendered worthless for the rest of the battle.

Anyways, that's just some of my thoughts. I also lost my mother this past year, so I know what you're going through. It's an awful experience.

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Well it IS Market Garden after all. I would want it to be hard. That last mission was no cakewalk even with the huge amount of artillery that you get at your disposal. Because they were all dug in deep in that park, it was difficult to get the artillery zeroed in on one particular spot. I had to do area fire over a huge area most of the time, which made it less effective except for suppression.

I thought the campaign was great. It was very challenging but not impossible. And I did love all those toys to play with. :D Too many missions don't give me enough artillery to play with.

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but I do also think at times you take some of the difficulty to the extreme

Interesting that you guys seem to forget that I have included different levels of difficulty to cater for as many of BFC's customers as possible for my last two campaigns. If you find the missions are too difficult, don't bust your balls replaying until you get a win. Just accept the loss, drop down to the lower difficulty missions and enjoy yourselves. Which other designers are willing to put in the work, (and trust me, it's a lot of work), to provide this for you? It certainly seems like this effort is unappreciated.

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Most notably (and this goes for pretty much any scenario designer) it drives me crazy when I'm given troops with experience levels below Regular and am told to take these well-defended targets. That may be all good and well if the point is to simulate Luftwaffe infantry or sailors & support clerks, but for your typical infantryman on either side, Regular at the end of the day is the most realistic representation of what a front-line soldier was expected to know going into battle. Green troops, OTOH, are often very prone to easily losing their composure after taking a small bit of incoming fire and are thus rendered worthless for the rest of the battle.

All Allied core units for the Nijmegen campaign are Regulars with a mix of Veterans and the occasional Green thrown in. Germans are almost all GREEN. And, in many scenarios, their morale is not brilliant either ;)

For the Scottish Corridor, the Cameronians are Regulars while the ASH are a mix of Green and Regular. Realistic as the ASH was rebuilt from scratch after the original formation surrendered with the fall of Singapore. The Germans were mostly GREEN again but the SS Hitler Youth had quite high morale and good leadership.

Further, if you look at the numbers at the end of the missions, you'll find that you were fighting numerically inferior foes most of the time. Placement is what makes my AI defence so tough. That and the system that I have developed for crafting my defensive AI plans ;)

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Interesting that you guys seem to forget that I have included different levels of difficulty to cater for as many of BFC's customers as possible for my last two campaigns. If you find the missions are too difficult, don't bust your balls replaying until you get a win. Just accept the loss, drop down to the lower difficulty missions and enjoy yourselves. Which other designers are willing to put in the work, (and trust me, it's a lot of work), to provide this for you? It certainly seems like this effort is unappreciated.

Not by me Paper Tiger i like to be beaten and frustrated :) replayability is what i love about this game and your stuff is always tough

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Well, looks like some people here didn't have too hard a time with this campaign, others got their @ss kicked by it.

So sounds to me like the level of difficulty is about right. With CM as in everything else, everyone has their own opinion as to what the "Goldilocks" level is. Nothing is going to please everybody.

If you're one of those who found RtN too hard, that's too bad (and I mean this sincerely, without sarcasm), but I think PT made a good effort to balance challenge for the "Master" rating players vs. accessibility for the "Junior" rates in this campaign, including adding a fallback "Easy Track" for players who are finding the campaign a bit too challenging.

And in any event, if you find the campaign battles are a bit on the hard side for you, now you have something to reach for; you can sharpen your tactics and try the campaign again a few months down the road. Replaying easy battles is usually dull.

Cheers,

YD

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the ASH are a mix of Green and Regular. Realistic as the ASH was rebuilt from scratch after the original formation surrendered with the fall of Singapore.

Where'd you get that information from? It is my understanding that the British simply re-named one of the other longstanding ASH battalion (the 15th) to be the 2nd, and carried on as usual.* Otherwise the impact on the 15th was negligible; AFAICT no survivors of the original 2nd made their way to the reconstituted 2nd. The renaming occurred around the middle of 1942, leaving two full years to train for Normandy, in addition to the training the battalion had already conducted since the start of the war, plus its experience as a territorial battalion before the war.

There are lots of good reasons to make any given unit whatever experience rating you want, but citing Singapore isn't one of them.

Tangentially related

* The same thing happened on a grander scale in 1940 when the 51st (Highland) Division was surrendered at St Valery - two months later the 9th (Highland) Division was renamed 51st (Highland) Division.

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Hi,

I just finished the fourth mission the check at hoek and got a draw because of an missdirection in the briefing.

the briefing told me that my primary objective is to exit my forces. secondary would be to destroy enemy units and deny some territory.

As I didn't saw a way to manage both objectives without taking a lot of casulties and deplet a lot of ammonition I decidet to go around a lot of the defences and exit my force with as few casulties as possible.

Well the end was. I got only points for the condition and (if fullfilt) the casulty rate of my exiting troops, but NOT for my troops exiting the map an though fullfilling the primary objective. If I would have gotten the points I would have had double as many and easely won the mission.

Well not much that could be done know but, perhabs there is a fix possible (either for the briefing or the mission) in the next patch or so.

And for those lucky reading this before playing the campaigne:

Mission 4 destroy the germans ^^

Another topic.

I only played 4 missions, but those were all great. I know it will get harder and perhabs there will be a point where i just don't want to fight an unfair fight but till now everything was great. And I love your AI plans. the movment of German troops seems realistic and they counter my moves and shift positions. That is just great. Well done Sir!

So thanks for the good work and perhabs fix that briefing.

(400 points instead of 1000... still mad)

:-)

PS: Wow I read this forum a lot since i got CM:BN half a year ago and this was my first post.

PPS: I want more AARs ^^

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Well, looks like some people here didn't have too hard a time with this campaign, others got their @ss kicked by it.

So sounds to me like the level of difficulty is about right. With CM as in everything else, everyone has their own opinion as to what the "Goldilocks" level is. Nothing is going to please everybody.

If you're one of those who found RtN too hard, that's too bad (and I mean this sincerely, without sarcasm), but I think PT made a good effort to balance challenge for the "Master" rating players vs. accessibility for the "Junior" rates in this campaign, including adding a fallback "Easy Track" for players who are finding the campaign a bit too challenging.

And in any event, if you find the campaign battles are a bit on the hard side for you, now you have something to reach for; you can sharpen your tactics and try the campaign again a few months down the road. Replaying easy battles is usually dull.

Cheers,

YD

This was one of the more potentially embarrassing things about trying my hand at designing scenarios. Did I suck so much at the game that my scenarios would end up being a cake walk for most players. :P I tended to err towards increasing the difficulty as well for the same reason - replay value only exists if the battle presents a challenge.

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All Allied core units for the Nijmegen campaign are Regulars with a mix of Veterans and the occasional Green thrown in. Germans are almost all GREEN. And, in many scenarios, their morale is not brilliant either ;)

For the Scottish Corridor, the Cameronians are Regulars while the ASH are a mix of Green and Regular. Realistic as the ASH was rebuilt from scratch after the original formation surrendered with the fall of Singapore. The Germans were mostly GREEN again but the SS Hitler Youth had quite high morale and good leadership.

Further, if you look at the numbers at the end of the missions, you'll find that you were fighting numerically inferior foes most of the time. Placement is what makes my AI defence so tough. That and the system that I have developed for crafting my defensive AI plans ;)

Fair enough. :) I should have been more fair when I wrote my post above and noted that I've not yet played the two campaigns you describe here.

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PT - really sorry to hear about your year. Must have been very tough for you. Hope it will be better year in 2014.

As for the campaigns I can only say again how much I enjoy them and I've not a great tactician. I've finished RtN with a minor victory, which included some replays, wins and losses. For me thats what the game is all about - having fun winning or losing and I had a lot of fun. On mission 3 in Scottish Corridor and I reckon I've just about fought off the attack and reinforcements have arrived. Nip and tuck at first and a bl@@dy good scrap!

Its a shame you won't make anymore but real life and family are obviously more important. Thanks for the one's you have made.

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I did lose on my first attempt at the campaign, but enjoyed every minute of it (yes, I did curse a lot). My approach the second time through was better and so was the outcome. I enjoyed it just as much as the first time. Time permitting I will probably play it again soon. Not sure you can ask for more, so thanks PT for the great campaign!

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Paper Tiger

the last thing you need to do is listen too seriously to these guys on the forum as to your work. yes once in a great while they do point out issues that are worth correcting within your work. but dont change your style or what you enjoy doing just because some of them dont enjoy it or think it is too hard or something.

Your work has proven itself and you need not worry that there is plenty of us out there that enjoy your stuff just as you create it. We also might be mature enough to take a loss once in awhile also.

What I get tired of is this generation of gamers that have expectations of what a game should give them and make demands that it should fit their personnal needs. Here is a thought, if the game is beating you, some of you might need to realize you are no great combat tactician. That might be hard to swallow, but guess what, its the truth.

So those that are asking to have it meet their needs to be victorious should say no more and go study and try to learn how to improve their play and if that is too hard, find another Hobby.

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I must say that although I've played the first four missions of "The Scottish Corridor," I haven't played the RtN campaign yet. Most of my play has been H2H against a friend who is very quick to learn what works and rarely makes the same mistake twice, so I really have to devote all my energies to beating him. We're currently playing a huge meeting engagement battle related to Operation Epsom (The Scottish Corrridor) of 120 minutes called "My Honor is Loyalty," so I don't have any issues with large sizes or long times in battles.

I have really enjoyed Scottish Corridor and appreciate your efforts in designing these campaigns. I know for a fact that I'm not capable of designing anything. I think CMBN would be much less of a joy without designers of your caliber. I don't think I've ever considered a campaign too difficult, usually too easy. If I can't win a scenario, it's usually because my luck stinks or because I sucked at the tactics.

I feel great sympathy for you in your losses and wish peace for you in this new year. Please don't let the complainers get you down. If they don't like your designs, maybe they can design some and have them rated by you. I'm sure they'll be sadly lacking

God bless you and ease your pain.

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Wow. thanks for your wishes guys. I appreciate it.

And don't worry. The complainers don't get me down although they do try my patience from time to time ;) In fact, all they do is inspire me to make the campaigns more playable for folks of different playing skills. I started out doing that in 'The Scottish Corridor' but could have done better. After the 'feedback' I received on the Scottish Corridor, I gave the Green players much more time to complete the missions.

My only real regret was making the Veteran level of the 'Crescendo of Doom' mission too hard. That one was just too hard by far but it's already been fixed in the rework. In fact the Grainville series has been overhauled to make it possible for Veteran players to have enough force to fight in Fair and Square. That was meant to be a fun battle to play but there's no fun if you have no tanks left.

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Just finished the campaign, with a Major Victory:

nuqi.jpg

Great stuff, Paper Tiger, thank you very much.

Even though I had to reload a couple of times since some of my ideas didn't work out as intended.

My favourites are the late Airborne battles, i.e. "Papenberg", "Here we fight" and "Turning back the Tide".

Especially with "Turning back the Tide", I had to restart the battle since I originally tried to defend the initial attack too far forward and got slaughtered. But if you initially hold further back, the arrival of the 8x 105mm SPA battery will take care of this battle. :)

Just one thing: In the briefing for "Turning back the Tide" it is mentioned that the Germans won't get points for the Allied terrain objectives, but this is not true in the game, i.e. the Germans are awarded points for the "Roadblock" and "Southern Mook" objectives. Is this intentional? If so, maybe the wording in the briefing should be changed to let the player know.

But overall, great work :D.

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I'm a big fan of all that Paper Tiger have made for us and if people don't like it

they can just make their own missions/campaigns.

When I saw that the bonus mission of The road to Nijmegen was not made I

started on my own version and its called "No country for tanks" about the Irish Guards

trying to smash through the german lines between Lent and Elst and with the new mastermaps I "only" had to make OOB + AI to complete and some playtesting.

LF

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Hi,

well I think my campaign is bugged.

The same problem I had in mission 4 now reappeared in mission 8.

I don't get points for exiting the map. Is this working as intended?

If so you couldn't afford any losses in that mission at all.

I could get a maximum of 200 Points in that mission. 100 for <10% casualties and 100 points for good condition.

While the Germans get points for Casualties inflicted.

If this is a bug does anyone know a workaround. Or do I will have to play this missions perfectly?

I know I'm not as good as a lot of the people here but I finished that Mission with taking 25% Casulties had good condition, the Germans surrendered and I had 20 minutes left on the clock.

For me that sounds like a good break through. The score says it's a draw. 100 vs 130 Points

hm... just let me know if this working as Intended please.

thx.

And again after playing another 4 Missions those were great too. I had a lot of fun. thx for the good work.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Sorry for digging up this old thread but just finished Bloody Alast.

That was a grind, surprised I killed so many! I did use the artillery quite heavily and just plastered areas with everything. Tip: Didn't try to rush the exit objective and focused on clearing out the three objectives. Reviewing the map think I got most of the HQ units in arty strikes.

CMNormandy2014-02-0322-02-25-96_zps89ea255f.jpg

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I am recently playing through this campaign, I dig PT's idea of switching to the 3hr time limit if the player is having trouble. I actually have more fun using the 3 hours and playing through once with a victory rather than having to reload and replay senarios. I hate the time limits in the game in general, but PT's idea of a branching extended time campaign is cleaver and innovative.

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I'm working through the campaign slowly but have now got a pasting . I got all the way to Night fight winning all the missions . I was then sent straight to red sun rising were i got totally over run .. Thats ok but what happened to mission 10 papenberg ! has anybody else had this mission missing ???

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