ASL Veteran

Of course if points aren't awarded for kills or damage then the entire purpose of creating the exit zone in the first place is defeated since exiting things that give no points is a pointless exercise is it not?

The dismount will take place when the vehicles reach the painted order point. I've done it hundreds of times in the game itself and never had it work as described in the manual. Go ahead and do it in the game and tell me how it works out. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that the vehicles will remain at the dismount order point only for a short time unless you delay their move to the next order point and if all the passengers haven't dismounted by the time the vehicles move to the next order point then they will remain mounted until the next order point is reached. At that time they may attempt to dismount again even if no dismount order is assigned to that order point.

If you wanted to keep both passengers and vehicles in the same AI group, then what you need to do is pause the vehicles at the dismount point until all the infantry have dismounted. If the vehicles begin moving to the next order then the passengers that haven't dismounted yet will remain mounted until the next order location has been reached. If the next order location is in a building then the vehicles won't move and the passengers will remain loaded for the duration. The dismount has to happen the order before you enter the building not the order in the building, so with one AI group it would look like this SETUP - colour in the appropriate setup area - NOT intended objectives. Leave infantry mounted. ORDER 2 - Color in movement objective Set to Passengers DISMOUNT. Set to quick, Active. Add delay for however long it takes for all passengers to dismount. ORDER 3 - Color in building objective. , advance, active. Vehicles will remain at the last order location since they can't enter the building but the infantry should advance to this objective as long as you set the delay long enough for everyone to complete their dismount. If anyone begins moving to the next location without dismounting that unit will remain mounted because it has moved on to the next order. ORDER 4 - quick, Ambush 100m.

I'm going to guess that Pete has already addressed this with you via e-mail, but if you have mounted troops and you want them to go into a building then you would have the following: Vehicle AI Group SETUP - colour in the appropriate setup area - NOT intended objectives. Leave infantry mounted. ORDER 2 - Color in movement objective Passengers Dismount. Active. ORDER 3 - If you want the vehicles to move to a different location after the passengers dismount you will then give the vehicles a pause here and once all infantry have disembarked the vehicles can proceed to location three sans passengers. Infantry AI Group (No Set Up because they are Mounted and are inside the vehicles) ORDER 2 (takes effect when the vehicles arrive at their order 2) - Color in building objective. advance, active. (No need to set infantry to dismounted - you only have to set the vehicles to passengers dismount) ORDER 3 - quick, Ambush 100m.

I probably shouldn't have used 'setup zones' here. I was referring to the first 'order' within the AI section for when you paint the 'setup' order for the AI. Set up zone is different and is painted onto the map while in the map portion of the editor.

I don't have CMFI installed anymore so I had to load up CMFB and look. The only time what you are describing happens is if you are painting your set up order with AI Plan 1 and then you are in AI Plan 2. Yeah, so I went back in and double checked. When you initially open the editor and you select AI Plans everything will be as you describe. No wait for button and no plus or minus buttons to push. As soon as you paint a setup zone then the wait for and the plus and minus buttons will appear but they will only appear for an AI Plan that you have painted a setup zone or an order. If you subsequently delete the setup zone or the first order the wait for and the plus and minus buttons will remain. Soooo, if you have painted a set up zone for Allied Plan 1 and you currently have Allied Plan 2 selected it will appear as you describe because you haven't done anything in Allied Plan 2 yet.

When you click on the + and - buttons then that alters the time for when that order takes place. The wait for button is right there when you have the specific order selected. However, you have to have a VP location painted on the map and named first or nothing will show up when you select the wait for button because until you create a trigger there is nothing to select.

If those types of timed victory conditions were present in the game then yeah, that would be an option.

There is a fundamental difference between a scenario and a QB. A QB player selects his own force and that force is tailor made to suit that player's preferred method of play. A map for a QB is also agreed upon in advance by both players. In a scenario neither of those conditions exist. A scenario player must succeed with the forces provided upon the terrain that the battle was fought upon. A QB legend may or may not be good when fighting in a scenario depending upon whether that player can adapt to a force or terrain that isn't of their choosing. The skill set doesn't necessarily translate. Take your equivalent of QB players in Total War. The top players will typically have a 'formula' or a 'system' that they employ that gives them the best chance for victory. If you take them out of their comfort zone they may not know how to win with a force that they haven't hand picked in a situation that they don't have full knowledge of. Why is the pregame so important when fighting QBs? Because it is all important that the situation be controlled to enough of a degree that the players can fight their fight within their comfort zone and if the parameters or agreements are too far out of line then a player isn't certain of their chances of victory. Conversely a scenario player will probably struggle when placed in a QB environment since that player hasn't spent hours cooking points and formulating an OB that maximizes their chance of winning within the context of a set of parameters that have been agreed to in advance. Players who are comfortable with both play methods are probably the most rounded players and perhaps better on average, but I wouldn't assign any one method as obviously generating more superior players than another. The requirements for success in each arena is different.

I would actually say that the entire scenario doesn't need to be about a fighting withdrawal in order to make the point. I think that if a defender has an occupy objective on a map that is tenuous to hold - even if a counterattack force may enter later in the scenario - that most players would rather fight to the death trying to hang onto that occupy objective with every last ounce of their fighting energy rather than withdrawing from that objective and trying to retake it when the counterattack force arrives. I just think that most players have an aversion to surrendering ground or objectives simply on the basis that losing even one objective location is the equivalent of losing 'something' and of course players don't want to lose anything at all if they can help it. They are just pixelsoldiers after all so it isn't like anyone is really losing a life so in the mind of the player there is absolutely no reason not to defend an objective until every last soldier has been blasted into pieces rather than withdrawing from an objective and admitting that you can't hold it.

The problem is that you can explicitly state in the briefing that 'you will likely be forced to retreat' which sort of ruins the scenario in my opinion since you are stating what the player needs to do so the scenario plays out less 'organically' if that makes any sense. However, even when you do that there are a large number of players who either don't bother reading the briefing or if they do they ignore your advice and fight in place to the death anyway. In one scenario the briefing does explicitly state that the player will probably need to retreat and it also hints that the sounds of heavy armor can be heard, but even with all that the player complained on the forum that the scenario was unfair. When I pointed out that the forces were asymmetric he simply said 'well I didn't know it was an asymmetric scenario' so I guess he wanted me to put all in bold caps across the top 'the scenario has asymmetric forces and you will need to trade space for time in order to win'. It would be better to let the battle play out and hopefully the player will figure out on his own that he needs to retreat, but then you have the whole player 'no retreat' mentality issue so that doesn't usually work either. The thing is that the player has to trust that the designer has gotten the scoring right even if the player does recognize that the scenario is asymmetric since playing against a superior force is less pleasant than other situations. The player will typically not have the patience to fight to the end and see the final score rather than just quitting because they don't like the situation and they probably don't trust the designer enough on the scoring to take the game to the end. The player may not even recognize that he is outgunned until it is too late to do anything about it too though so there is that issue as well. So anyway, yeah those types of scenarios can be made and have been made but players generally don't like them very much. With historical scenarios the first option for balancing will typically be with VPs rather than with forces if the force composition is well known. You can do a lot of tweaking of soldier soft factors and if the force details are a bit sketchy you can add or subtract a few things but generally speaking your options for balancing historical scenarios can be limited. If an attack against an enemy force is difficult then the designer mostly needs to adjust the VPs to compensate for that and I do that a lot. It's just that players don't think of balance in terms of VPs even though VPs are the exact thing that determine victory or defeat in a scenario. Players think of balance in terms of force balance in spite of the fact that OBs can be a complete non factor in determining scenario balance. Just think of all those threads of people who want to design scenarios using QB points for the forces so they can have a better chance to create a 'balanced' scenario. As should be apparent from the fact that VPs determine victory or defeat a player or designer who starts with a force first mentality for balance is not using the right starting point since the starting point should be VPs and not OB. It is the QB mentality. Be that as it may, the force first mentality is probably the most common way players approach the game and so scenarios that deviate from that will probably generate more complaints.

I have made asymmetric scenarios before and the problem is that players don't play that way. Players, as a rule, don't like to retreat and typically don't know how to so if you design a scenario where one side is likely to be forced to retreat the player who is supposed to retreat either fights to the death in place or just hits the surrender button instead and complains that the scenario is broken and unfair. To be fair, scenarios where one side is obviously more powerful than the other aren't always as fun to play if you are the side that is disadvantaged. However, the mentality of players is that the way the battle itself plays out typically carries more weight in their opinion than how the VPs score out at the end. In other words, a player who plays and loses a game on unbalanced VPs but the battle itself played out in a way the player thought was 'fair' or 'enjoyable' will more likely count that battle as 'balanced' or 'good to play' rather than a scenario with unbalanced forces that is perfectly balanced in terms of VP awards.

Lt Bull, thank you for confirming my suspicion that you would not be receptive to any suggestion that perhaps your views on scenario design may not be based on a solid foundation of knowledge or experience. Your answer above "I have played around with it, mainly looking in to map making techniques using digital topographic data sources. One thing that was apparent that kind of put me off entirely was the relatively crude and limited tools in the Scenario Editor, in particular related to the importing of external digital data that could conceivably make map making a whole lot less of a chore. Perhaps if the process was more efficient I would stick at it but I am not a fan of working inefficiently." would seem to confirm my comment that "This explains a lot. You have a lot of big ideas and plans for making things better but you have no idea how things actually work in either a general or specific sense. You are making a lot of assumptions about a lot of things but very few of them are actually tethered to reality for an experienced scenario designer who knows what they are doing. Everything you are saying is relevant to someone who is inexperienced and or unsure of how to create something." was factually based and your response of "Wow, why wasn't I surprised by your response, but really, I've come to expect that from certain types on this forum who just come across as insular, defensive, rude and narrow minded. Kind of stretching my respect for scenario designers, but then again it's not about their personality. OK so you don't address anything I say and just want to try hard and dismiss what I am saying on account that you are an experienced scenario designer (of the BFC mold, the one I am questioning, I assume) and I am not. "You have no idea", not "tethered in reality for an experienced scenario designer", "everything you are saying is irrelevant", "relevant to someone inexperienced/unsure of creating something"...WTF? Kind of petty, condescending and unconstructive to any intelligent conversation." just tells me that not only are you uninformed, but that you are unwilling to learn. If you aren't willing to admit that perhaps you don't have all the requisite knowledge and experience to pontificate on the topic as an 'expert' then we wouldn't be able to have an interesting and compelling discussion. Unless you stayed at a Holiday Inn last night. From a theoretical standpoint perhaps your views on the subject may have some merit, but once your theories hit up against hard facts then your theory of a collective of several scenario 'specialists' who create three versions of every scenario with each specialist doing what he does best crumbles to the dust of impracticality and irrelevance. Scenarios aren't created in a fashion similar to building a car at the auto factory. Sure, things do need to be ... assembled ... in some fashion, but only in the same way that a master carpenter might make a custom built chair. While the process may superficially appear to be suitable for mass production in a scenario factory of some sort the fact is that scenario design is more of an art or a craft than a simple matter of assembling parts. The fact that you haven't gotten past the parts assembly bit is why you have the views that you have on this subject. If you ever made it past the basics then perhaps you would understand my responses a little better.

The Spur is an American objective. It is located .... nah, better leave that a secret. I've reported the discrepancy for the patch so hopefully it can be cleared up when that is released.

Presumably your German troops would see the paratroopers falling from the sky?

I'm not discussing editor functionality specifically although I think that Lt Bull's suggestions are probably mostly predicated upon that since he probably hasn't advanced beyond that stage yet. Even if someone has mastered the simple mechanics of the editor there is a conceptual level to scenario design that Lt Bull is missing and which I'm hoping to allow him to 'see' through the vehicle of 'self discovery' when he tries to address the questions I'm posing.

Lt Bull, just so you know I am not really interested in whether you know the 'right' answer to these questions or not. This is not a test of knowledge. I am hoping that you can identify something 'larger' ... a theme if you will ... about the process itself.

Not too bad. Yes, the first thing someone generally does is decide what they are going to depict or do. In the case of a historical scenario you would look in a book and try to find something that had enough information to allow you to represent it in the game. Hopefully it will also be interesting enough that it will be fun for someone to play, but knowing that is almost impossible to predict in advance since it isn't always easy to gain a full appreciation of the battle situation until you have seen it in 3D. Many times a battle location is simply a town name in a paragraph, but even when a map is available in a book you can't always gain an appreciation for the lay of the land and how that impacts the battle without seeing the area in 3D inside the game. So one of the first challenges is if you can accurately find the battle location on the map. After that you need to have enough documentation about the forces involved to have at least some idea as to what was present for each side. Let's just assume that you have determined that you know the location of the battle and you have enough OB information to proceed with that scenario idea. You go into Google Earth and you have to block out your map dimensions. You now have your next decision point. How big is my map going to be and where will it be centered? This is the most important decision that you can make because once you have the map centered you can't go back and shift it without redoing a ton of work and once you have the map size determined it is very difficult to go and expand it. It is a lot simpler to trim the map but then you would still end up doing a lot of work on stuff that you are just going to trim off later so that's not desirable either. So this is my next question: how do you decide how big your map is going to be and where it will be centered?

This explains a lot. You have a lot of big ideas and plans for making things better but you have no idea how things actually work in either a general or specific sense. You are making a lot of assumptions about a lot of things but very few of them are actually tethered to reality for an experienced scenario designer who knows what they are doing. Everything you are saying is relevant to someone who is inexperienced and or unsure of how to create something. Maybe if I have some time I may try to explain some things, although I'm not sure how receptive you will be so I may need to go about it in an indirect way. Maybe you can answer something for me? If you want to create a scenario what would be the first two things you would do?

Lt Bull, have you ever made a scenario before? If so I would be interested in seeing a list of what you have done. You can include scenarios that were created in CM1 if perhaps you were more active with that than with CM2.

Excellent work Poesel. Just one minor modification for the MG scenario 'Devil's Hill'. It is a little too far to the southeast. It should be just a bit east of 'Beek' where you see the L shaped body of water. If you zoom in close enough you can see the hill itself labeled 'De Duivelsberg' on the map. Other than that everything looks great. Oh, and Bridge Number 7 should be northeast of Heumen just below where the N271 crosses the canal. There isn't a crossing there anymore, but it is on the southern end of where the canal gets really narrow at that one spot. Do'h, sorry, I found another one. 'Le Desert' isn't in the right spot either for CMBN. The town is actually 'Le Dezert' and it is located North of Saint Lo between 'It's a New Dawn' and 'Panzers Marsch'.

Okay. Yeah, I think you are out of luck then with the copy paste. I think all the stuff inside the game itself must be typed manually.

There aren't very many editor text fields that you type into within the editor itself so I don't really understand what you are asking. The briefings are all done on a text document outside of the game and then loaded into the scenario as a file. You can do whatever you want with the text file outside of the game. The only thing that I can think of right now that is inside the game is renaming units, naming victory locations, and naming reinforcement groups. It only takes a second or two to type a unit name. Is that what you are asking about? Typing unit names? If so then I don't think there is a way to paste into those fields. If you are asking about something else then I'm not sure I understand. The thought just occurred to me that you may want to translate briefings? I haven't done it in a while, but you should be able to export the briefing files while within the scenario editor. At least you used to be able to do that. When you export the briefing file you get a text file with the briefing so you can do whatever you want with it.

This was actually discussed prior to release and pictures similar to what you have posted were also posted, but BFC wasn't interested in allowing riders. The way it is now is the way it probably will remain since a change would require extra coding work on the vehicle. If they wouldn't do it before release they probably won't do it later.

The ranks for each command level are automatically set by the game and can't be altered so if someone of a different rank was in command of a unit historically you can't change the rank in the game to match the actual rank of the commander. You can change the name though. Out of curiosity I did a quick scan of all the CM scenarios listed at the Blitz and I crunched a few numbers. There are a total of 120 scenarios listed for CMBN, 42 scenarios listed for CMFI, and 40 scenarios listed for CMRT. That gives us a grand total of 202 scenarios for all three game series combined. I considered that a scenario needed to be played at least ten times to have a sample size large enough to give us a good idea as to scenario balance. Out of a total of 202 total scenarios listed 35 scenarios were played ten times or more for CMBN, 9 scenarios were played at least ten times in CMFI, and 8 scenarios were played at least ten times in CMRT. That gives us a total of 52 scenarios out of 202 that were played at least ten times. I considered a scenario to be 'balanced' if no side won a scenario more than 60 percent of the time. So a result of 60 - 10 - 30 would be counted as 'balanced' for my purposes. Of those 52 scenarios played ten times or more 19 CMBN scenarios were 'balanced', 4 CMFI scenarios were 'balanced', and 3 CMRT scenarios were 'balanced'. That gives us a total of 26 balanced scenarios out of a total of 202 were we have results listed. Out of those 26 I know that there are plenty of player comments indicating that the scenario was impossible to win for one side or another so even among those 26 there was a great deal of disagreement about whether a scenario was 'balanced' or not. A couple of observations I could make here. First I noticed that only about a quarter of all the scenarios available have been played ten times or more. That should give a decent idea as to how difficult it would be to test scenarios head to head under the time constraints while the game is being created by a limited number of beta testers. Second, even amongst those scenarios that were played ten times or more only about half of those fell within the bounds of what I considered balanced for these purposes. Finally even amongst those that did fit into the balanced category for my purposes there was disagreement amongst those who played the scenarios as to balance. There aren't a lot of scenario designers in the community at large and even fewer who create on a consistent basis. Scenario designers do the best they can with the tools available, but I think it would be helpful to keep expectations a little bit restrained. Creating a perfectly balanced scenario that is fun to play for everyone and that every player agrees is actually balanced is probably the scenario designing equivalent of hitting a Grand Slam in baseball. We can hit some solo homers and maybe get a few doubles and singles, but expecting a Grand Slam to be created on a regular and predictable basis is unrealistic. Sometimes things work out and sometimes things don't. Designers just put their best foot forward and hope they've created something fun and hopefully challenging for both sides.