Mosul (Iraq) The small red-headed child of an epic MOUT map!

[sburke]

Lol yeah there is a St Stephen, but that ain’t me. 

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Mosul under ISIS:  http://jihadintel.meforum.org/203/unseen-islamic-state-regulations-for-the-mosul

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Time for a wee race, BFC vs me.....Can I get 'Al-Hutumah' (The Crusher) finished before Steve & co. make it seem a bit redundant with CM:SF II?

TBH as the discussion above makes clear, it just won't be possible to translate either scenario directly to CM:SF II, so I hope these scenarios may retain some value for their fairly unique nature.....I'm going to keep fiddling with Mosul in CM:SF and look for another MOUT battle to focus on in the new game.

Will stick some screenshots up in due course, this thread is looking a bit spartan since Photobucket vandalised it. 

Edited June 1, 2018 by Sgt.Squarehead

[sburke]

13 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Time for a wee race, BFC vs me.....Can I get 'Al-Hutumah' (The Crusher) finished before Steve & co. make it seem a bit redundant with CM:SF II?

TBH as the discussion above makes clear, it just won't be possible to translate either scenario directly to CM:SF II, so I hope these scenarios may retain some value for their fairly unique nature.....I'm going to keep fiddling with Mosul in CM:SF and look for another MOUT battle to focus on in the new game.

Will stick some screenshots up in due course, this thread is looking a bit spartan since Photobucket vandalised it. 

To be brutally honest, you know I love your work, but CMSF 2 will likely kill anyone's incentive to load CMSF again.  Not just an issue of the capabilities of the engine, CMSF is just a laborious process to install even if you have that process down.  I would advise you to not spend too much time on it just to see your work get little to no exposure as new players will never buy CMSF to run them. That would be the saddest result after all the effort you put in. I think @MOS:96B2P came up with some pretty creative ways to separate units that he didn't want in his scenario or wanted to utilize for different things.  There may be other ways to skin that cat and if there aren't I'd still consider just moving with those particular shortcomings and work in the new version.  I fully expect to delete CMSF from my hard drive once CMSF2 is GA.  Sad moment and I'll probably have quite a few drinks in it's memory, but just like I left behind CMx1, it is time to move on.

On top of that, are you really willing to give up all the new capabilities of CMSF 2 for the few items you can't do from CMSF?  Triggers, better AI commands, better tactical options, better models etc etc.  Seems a bit like you are letting a few items cloud your view of the creative potential in the new engine.  

Edited June 2, 2018 by sburke

[Erwin]

Yes, SS may be better off focusing on CMA which has unique features re era and topic and will never be upgraded.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Al Hutumah (The Crusher) is pretty much finished.....Once that's released my work in Mosul will be done. 

It's occurred to me that there could be a very simple fix for all this in a future patch, if Steve & co. could add an extra 'Vehicle Condition', so you would now have:

OK

Dismounted

Immobilised

Destroyed

Dump

AFAIK that single change (and a few mouse clicks from me in the editor) would make these scenarios viable for the new engine (and of course, it would make the crew-swap techniques viable for other designers too).

Edited June 2, 2018 by Sgt.Squarehead

[Erwin]

Am wondering if it would be useful to allow immobilized vehicles to be mounted.  Esp if one could ACQUIRE not only ammo etc but per MOS's TOC concept, some sort of info.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

The former is a thought, but the latter would be much easier to link to the action spot the vehicle is in, rather than the vehicle itself.

[banned]

 Mosul, great idea. Good to hear you´ve already made progress with that project.

With CMSF2 at the doorstep and talented guys like you working on real world operations maps and scenarios I am pretty sure Shock Force will see another golden age.

Very excited.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Sadly my Mosul stuff doesn't look like it will work in CM:SF II, I plan to switch to another theatre of operations for the new game. 

[sburke]

4 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Sadly my Mosul stuff doesn't look like it will work in CM:SF II, I plan to switch to another theatre of operations for the new game. 

see the CMSF2 thread, you just need to be a little more creative and stop obsessing over the way you used to do things.   

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Show me how to do it and I will, see CMSF2 thread. 

[Combatintman]

On ‎09‎/‎06‎/‎2018 at 9:59 PM, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Sadly my Mosul stuff doesn't look like it will work in CM:SF II, I plan to switch to another theatre of operations for the new game. 

As @sburkesaid, you're hung up on one way of doing things. As I discussed with you early on in this project, the other option is to use US forces, swap in Arabic voices and plead with one of those talented Modder type chaps/chapesses to do a US black uniform Mod and black HMMWV mod.

[sburke]

Canadians in Kandahar!

[Sgt.Squarehead]

I've decided to keep a watching brief.....Who knows what may be possible in the end. 

 

[LongLeftFlank]

Couple of interesting bits in this piece on urban sieges in the Syria and Iraqi civil wars.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n14/patrick-cockburn/the-war-in-five-sieges

In every case, ground troops have only been able to win with the backing of airpower, artillery and advisers most usually supplied by the US-led coalition or Russia. Whether the fighting was in Ramadi and Mosul in Iraq or Aleppo and Damascus in Syria, the way the sieges were conducted was similar.

Few combat troops were used: no side could afford heavy losses in street battles with a well-trained enemy. The attackers relied heavily on shelling and bombing to clear the way or to batter the defenders into submission. It was a strategy that always succeeded in the end, but it had the inevitable cost... of causing great destruction and civilian loss of life.

 In the final months of the sieges of Mosul and Raqqa the coalition bombing, and the Syrian and Iraqi shelling, became considerably more intense.... They had always been less capable than they claimed of locating the right target, and now they faced another problem: IS and other jihadi groups were showing great tactical ingenuity in fighting guerrilla war in the streets, inflicting heavy casualties on Iraqi army and SDF ground troops.

IS fighters moved swiftly on foot or by motorbike from house to house, cutting holes in walls and tunnels underground, making surprise attacks and avoiding surveillance from the air. Their sniper, mortar and mine-laying teams never stayed in one place for long: they would move on quickly from a house they had used as a base, leaving the civilian inhabitants to face coalition retaliation. Such tactics went a long way towards negating the advantages of the high-precision airstrikes.... In the end, maximum firepower was used to obliterate the last stubbornly defended IS enclaves, with no regard for the number of civilians killed. 

 

 

[Sgt.Squarehead]

They clearly needed @General Jack Ripper to take command. 

It should be possible to do a lot more of this with the new engine, both @MOS:96B2P and I have been experimenting with using demo-charge equipped AI units on the map.  At present you kind of need to customise the buildings for best effect, but with experimentation you can usually get them to do what you want without making it massively obvious what's afoot. 

Just having 16 AI slots to play with will make a huge difference.....In Mosul my static units took up one slot, as did the (snowballed) VBIEDS, the initial attack wave took three slots and the (snowballed) tunnel rats used up the remainder.

Edited July 31, 2018 by Sgt.Squarehead

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Soon(ish). 

[MOS:96B2P]

8 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Soon(ish). 

Looks cool.  

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Cheers, it's still a WIP, I guess it's probably my farewell to CMSF1, so I'm trying to put my absolute best into it.....The map has taken me ages, it's slightly larger and more complex than that of 'Ashsh al-Dababir' (a whopping 400mx400m) and I'm now at the point of tweaking it for best AI performance. I also still have to add quite a few more flavour objects to give it that 'lived in' feel. 

The first third of the fighting is fully scripted, I'm now experimenting with various timings and attempting to get the pacing right.  Almost everything is intricately snowballed in this one, it's an amazingly useful technique.....I'm hoping that this scenario should prove surprisingly busy (for a game with only eight AI & Reinforcement slots) even for experienced players. 

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Having just discovered that this is possible:

I guess I'll be seeing you guys in the new forum in due course. 

I have work to do. 

 

[MOS:96B2P]

1 hour ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Having just discovered that this is possible

Switching out vehicle crews??  Or something else?  Details, details please!!................ 

[Sgt.Squarehead]

That is a (AFAIK) fully functional version of Ashsh al-Dababir, in CM:SF2.....Battlefront totally kept their word, if this thing works, anything will! 

It appears that CM:SF2 will indeed import and (presumably run) any CM:SF1 scenario as is**.....So while I haven't got my head around crew swapping in the new editor yet (It's all a bit odd on that front, have you checked it out yet?), it seems very likely that I can create Core Unit Files in CM:SF1 (bypassing the peculiarities of the new editor), then transfer that file to CM:SF2 so the units can be imported using the device for campaigns in the usual way.

Haven't tested it yet, but I will have pretty soon. 

** This requires another tip of the hat to Steve (& Co.), when he (they) make a promise, he (they) mean it, all of it.....Battlefront have exceeded my expectations in all regards, this is a truly superb product, at the price I paid for it I almost feel guilty! 

Edited December 11, 2018 by Sgt.Squarehead

[MOS:96B2P]

23 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

It appears that CM:SF2 will indeed import and (presumably run) any CM:SF1 scenario as is**.....So while I haven't got my head around crew swapping in the new editor yet (It's all a bit odd on that front, have you checked it out yet?), it seems very likely that I can create Core Unit Files in CM:SF1 (bypassing the peculiarities of the new editor), then transfer that file to CM:SF2 so the units can be imported using the device for campaigns in the usual way.

Yep. I've been spending most of my time in the editor with a new scenario I moved over from CMSF1 into CMSF2.  I was a little nervous of how the crews might act after the scenario began.  Since they were not crucial to my scenario I started with a fresh TOE from the CMSF2 editor.  However if it is truly stable CMSF1 will live for many years on my hard drive as a place to build certain units and then move them over to CMSF2. 

If Charles knew how we used and abused his editor he would probably like to kick our @sse*   .       

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Just ran some more tests, it all looks good so far (see CM:SF2 screenshot thread).....Need to have more of a play around in the new editor to see how I might approach things best, I suspect a combination of mobile units imported from CM:SF1 and infantry from the new editor might be an option for my ISIS in Mosul stuff (and there was me considering moving to Raqqah). 

Christ on a bike this game has so much potential now, I'm genuinely blown away.....The only BfC product likely to get uninstalled from my system is CM:BS, I don't like it much anyway, and now it just seems so pathetically limited in scope compared to it's new sibling, my 'Fragmentistan 2' stuff is going straight into the recycle bin! 

Edited December 11, 2018 by Sgt.Squarehead