RAMADI (Iraq): Mother of All MOUT Maps

[Ryujin]

Well hold on a sec , we'll have to see what BF says about that. But if you ever need a artist, I do 2d/3d/etc.

Though it would be nice not to have to do little "hacks/kludges/whatever" to make things work (a benefit of the dev tools and info).

Speaking of kludges and hacks, I made the UAZ an IPS pickup as an experiment, seems to work fine so far as the two are so similar. It has a separate texture set, so the normal pickup is unaffected.

[LongLeftFlank]

Been silent on this for a while (worked 60 hours in the past 4 days, and not on CMSF....), but here are the briefing maps for RELIEF OF JOKER THREE.

For those who don't know anything about the Battle of Ramadi, they tell a concise story of what went down and why. It is the capital, agricultural and industrial hub and largest city in Sunni Anbar Province, a hotbed of Ba'athist support, and sits along the main highway / smuggling / infilitration route from Syria to Baghdad. Main US bases lay largely outside the urban core, but especially after Falluja they had to prop up an official presence at the Government Center for symbolic reasons. To do this, they needed to use a road (Michigan) and traffic along that road got attacked, constantly. So the Marines began setting up smaller OPs to protect the road. THEY got attacked. And so on, in a lethal game of cat-and-mouse for 3 years.

[Sgt Joch]

so when do we get to playtest this baby....

[LongLeftFlank]

I am trying to get the AI uncon Fighters to Advance/Assault up a city block against resistance without getting completely wiped out. It has to do with the distance they are asked to cover in each Order. Whenever I have that down reasonably well I will solicit playtesters. Spent a couple hours last night and will try to pit a couple more in tonight.

[Ryujin]

http://www.filefront.com/17049681/RYU-Iraqi-Police.rar/

Police Mod

Sorry, I don't think I'll be able to finish the damaged buildings, but here's some .psds with all manner of bullets holes, bigger holes, and RPG impact (with shrapnel "splash"). Easy to apply to bulidings, just a LOT of copy-pasting and such.

http://www.filefront.com/17049767/bulletholes.rar

[LongLeftFlank]

Ryujin, many thanks for the work you've done already. At some point I'll relearn the alpha channel transparency tricks in GIMP and work up some nice ragged-looking blown out windows to go with your building skins.

I have a demanding day job too, as well as a family, and I know all too well how much tinkering it takes to get the awesome but often nonintuitive CMSF engine to do what you want.... Especially when you're a perfectionist.

EDIT: Here's a screenie of Ryujin's excellent Iraqi Police mod, including a GAZ-69 reskinned as a pickup. Ryujin, will you be uploading this work to the Repository and/or GreenAsJade's mod warehouse? http://cmsfmods.heroku.com/

[LongLeftFlank]

Still testing AI plans on a 2 block section of the Ramadi / Mulaab map.

Tactical problem: how to advance a Large Uncon Fighter group (Regulars, 4 teams + HQ, small arms only) against significant Marine defensive fire (1 MMG + 4 rifles on rooftops and balconies) in defilade. Success is defined as, in 3 plays out of 5, inflicting 2+ US casualties before Red casualties exceed 80% and trigger Surrender.

Having some wrecked cars parked in the street helps soak up the incoming a bit, but overall this particular plan was a Fail. Looks like a tableau from one of those "Lone Wolf and Cub" samurai gore flicks.....

These guys were supposed to occupy the rooftops on the left side of the street. Sometimes they make it, but not this time.

*Sigh*. Try again tomorrow. No point in having a beautiful map if the AI can't mount an effective counterattack at 3.5:1 odds.

[meade95]

Map just looks amazing - Though it is going to be brutal trying to operate throughout it - The CCQ and how rooms are cleared with the current movement paths in CMSF worry me with trying to utilize this amazing map - Incredible micro-mgmt will be needed - I also think rooftops are much too much of a "kill zone" as is, in CMSF -

Guys used rooftops to move and shoot and scoot from all the time in Iraq - Yet here, if you get spotted on a roof top it acts is if there is no protection whatsoever....and 9 out of 10 times you are WIA/KIA...

[LongLeftFlank]

My learning: as Blue, don't "clear rooms" by going in. Always shoot into them with Area Fire before entering. That will generally reveal hidden units. Go in when they're dead or suppressed. Send bullets, not men.

In (Ramadi) world, where very few buildings have (protected) interior spaces offering wide fields of fire, rooftops with parapets and balconies are relatively good vantage points. But don't stay out there too long -- you tend to start taking casualties. Go out there only long enough to locate enemy rooftop positions and then kill their asses with guntrucks or squad grenade launchers from the street.

Infantry on the streets is surprisingly well protected by the walls on either side, so long as the enemy doesn't (a) have full defilade, or ( isn't within 40 meters (hand grenades thrown from rooftops are the number one killer).

[SlapHappy]

One concern I've had for a long time is the relative scale of movement in regards to the fastest movement rate - FAST - as opposed to the actual human potential.

In other words, soldiers don't seem to move as fast as they could on scale.

This would be very important in a high density area like this where a sprinting individual could cross enfilade zone very quickly and increase self-preservation by presenting an extremely short-term target.

[LongLeftFlank]

I actually haven't had much problem with that while playtesting, except when the running guys are engaging in "Keystone Kops" behaviour (milling about in place) in front of a terrain bottleneck like a door. It takes weapons a couple of seconds to draw a bead. My running Uncons tend to be able to cross 2 squares (16m) intact when >50m from the enemy... a guy catches a bullet about 1 time in 6 or so.

[Ryujin]

Looking like some great CQB there!

As far as uploading the police mod, yeah, it'll get on the BF repository soon enough, I forgot I didn't put it there.

[Erwin]

Amazing map. Can't imagine the work you've done. But, plz get it out there for playing. One can always do more work as nothing is ever perfect.

Also, is there a single place to get all the mods I am reading about in this thread?

[LongLeftFlank]

Thanks. The link to Ryujin's amazing HD sound and US uniform/vehicle mods is in this post (and thread):

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1199856&postcount=53

I don't use the Battlefront Repository, since I can never seem to log in there, so I use the CMMODS site maintained by GreenAsJade:

http://cmsfmods.heroku.com/mods?auth...95&game_type=4

You may want my Improved Middle East Shopfront mod. Search under my username.

For M1A1's various mods also referenced in this thread, search under his alias VladTemplar. I definitely recommend his 3rd ID mod, as well as the Iraqi Army mod to the Syrian Special Forces.

Mord and Scipio have also done some outstanding work.

Anyway, off to do some AI work now so I can get my first Ramadi historical scenario out the door for playtesting sometime.

[LongLeftFlank]

Sigh, yet another lost week Ramadi scenario-design-wise. Another 60 hours negotiating a major construction contract for my company (which is also 6 months behind its planned closing date), plus family obligations, and I am exhausted (have a cold, to boot). I can definitely sympathize with BFC's schedule slips, on all fronts....

Unfortunately, this isn't merely a matter of being a perfectionist. In the narrow streets of Ramadi, if I dumb down the AI orders too much it just results in mindless one-sided slaughters of the kind pictured above. The zombietruppen are just too damned stupid to do much to protect themselves once fired upon unless you preemptively order them to enter buildings and take up decent firing positions regularly along their advance routes, with units covering one another, and that requires careful plotting and testing.

I worked too long on this map to accept a substandard gaming experience. Frustrating, I know, but I hope the final product will deliver a very challenging, authentic and unique CMSF game that is good for numerous replays. But I'm no longer the young guy able to work undistracted late into the night.

[John Kettler]

LongLeftFlank,

Simply stellar! Shared it with two of my brothers (impressed one mightily; other hasn't seen it yet) and my brother-in-law, the last of whom sent a great set of Iraq pics to us that he got from a friend. Sorry my efforts to get you battle audio didn't work out (insert expletives re idiots and their insisting on adding music to combat footage). Keep up the good work!

Regards,

John Kettler

[Erwin]

After putting in such a huge number of work hours it wouldn't be surprising if you are so close to the material, that some solutions are not easily apparent.

If the map is pretty much done, have you considered releasing it so that other designers could work on it? I know it's tough when it's your baby. But, fresh insight from third parties can often be a hot knife through buttery problems (sort of).

[LongLeftFlank]

This first scenario (RELIEF OF JOKER THREE) is also the single most documented Marine action I am aware of to come out of the Iraq war: an entire chapter in Bing West's NO TRUE GLORY; 2 chapters in Donovan Campbell's JOKER ONE memoir; a "Shootout" episode on the History Channel (although the last gets a lot of unit location details badly wrong); various medal citations and other press accounts.

I have already distorted the unit locations a good bit; otherwise, I'd need to spend 3 more months building another 300x500m patch of Mulaab.

There are two major AI insurgent "counterattacks" and I've now finished one of them in a way that seems pretty challenging. Learned a lot about AI dos and don'ts as I go along, so like BFC I'm hoping the next scenarios won't take as long as this one.

[meade95]

Cant' wait for the release!

[LongLeftFlank]

And it seems I'm not the only nutjob out there doing this 3D Historical Urban Battlefields in Agonizing Detail thing. Yes, that is a 3d reconstruction you are looking at!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100728/ap_on_en_ot/eu_poland_world_war_ii_in3d

http://www.miastoruin.pl/

Oldakowski said it took 40 specialists two years to make the five-minute 3D aerial view sequence, a simulation of an imaginary flight of a British Liberator bomber over the city right after the war in 1945.

OK, I don't feel quite so bad now....

[Frankster65]

Interesting indeed. Unbelievable work!

[LongLeftFlank]

An update on Ramadi.

In playtesting RELIEF OF JOKER THREE, I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the battlespace (the main fights are east-west) is too confined. I therefore am in the process of adding 75 meters (about 2/3 of a city block) to the south end of my map. Don't know how long this will take.

In keeping with my original vision of putting everything on one huge honking master map and then carving out smaller, more playable segments for each scenario, I am doing the buildout on the master map first. I'm just doing the eastern map details I need for the JOKER THREE scenario right now and will do the rest later on (mapbuilding is time consuming but requires a lot less brainpower than scenario design once you have the basic principles down -- it makes a welcome break though).

Since copy-paste terrain isn't available, this means I have to create a new Joker Three submap, and therefore, a new scenario (transferring all the units and data over from the existing one). This will also take some time.

Screenshot of the work in progress here, looking west:

Apologies to my loyal fans. The playtests were just feeling too cramped -- it's worth doing right, believe me. The finished product should play a lot more like the actual battle.

[Pinetree]

No apologies needed mate. Just do what feels right.Looking forward to your masterpiece.

[Jonny(FGM)]

Me thinks someone needs to make map converter for CMSF

[meade95]

Appreciate your work!