Vergeltungswaffe

A quick observation of how projects evolve as I develop them. I am working on missions 2 and 3 this week, Sabatani and Suib and they're both infantry-centric assaults on an urban area defended by infantry attacking across a river. The two missions were so similar that I went to bed last night thinking that I'd just ditch Sabatani. But when I woke up this morning, I decided to remove the river from the Sabatani map. Once I did that, I liked it a lot better but I took a look at the old ASL-style compound to the north of the urban area and decided that had to be redone as well. I need things to look more realistic when I play now.
Here's the OLD Sabatani map with the ASL compounds to the north of the road as well as the dry river bed and bridge.

So I went to Google Earth and scanned around and found a small but rather interesting area in the vicinity of the Golan and so I deleted the original buildings, walls trees etc to the north of the main road and replaced them with an all-new farm complex and a tiny lake which I really like the look of. So Sabatani has been saved from the chopping block by a morning's map work. This afternoon, after work, I fired up the mission and gave it a spin and it looks like it will be sufficiently different from Suib to justify keeping it in. And there's no river crossing battle here either.
Here's the reworked map with the new farm complex and the small lake. (This is a real place). I've also broken up the HUGE grain fields and replaced them with some other crops. Instead of the empty ground, there are some sheep/goat pastures as well to the front of the small town which fill the map out quite nicely.

Thanks.  That makes perfect sense.

All of us that have communicated with Mr. X to receive his Battlepack know full well there is nothing monetary involved and I'm sure Elvis will get it sorted quickly.

Yes, from 44 on, the British also used the white 5 pointed star to make aerial recognition of allied vehicles easier and more consistent.

I'll post my progress on this campaign in this thread from now on. For those who don't know anything about this campaign, it was my second Red v Red campaign made for CMSF way, way back in the days of the release of the USMC module and its setting is a Syrian civil war scenario where some Syrian generals attempt a coup. The premise is that the coup is launched with thunderclap surprise and so rebel forces are put into action as soon as they mobilise. While a good number of divisions will 'wait and see', the regime has a number of divisions that are 100% loyal so the rebels are on the clock as the more time they take to accomplish missions, the more time the regime has to assemble its own forces to oppose them.
This means that time limits will be reasonably strict to reflect that pressure and so casualties are to be expected to accomplish your goals. However, the campaign gives you quite a large core force of which one company and support (usually tanks) is drawn to perform the mission.
One point is that some of these maps are very large and so it would seem like it's a bit of a stretch just to have a single company when a battalion would be better. For example,

A single company? To take THAT?! Are you HIGH?" And this...


In both these situations, the friendly forces arrive in small packages and so the action unfolds over time. My plan is not to change the nature of the campaign too much and keep the player's forces small and have lots of artillery support as well as as many 'cool' toys as I can find in the Syrian OB to play around with.

On the other hand, we're an impossible crowd to please an BF has already give us so much, so let's rely on them. 😉

Last year I played a few of the Italian scenarios PBEM with my army buddy and I won every single time thanks to those beautiful little mortars.

Let's have a little chat about where everything is at the moment with me and my work. As you've noticed, Hasrabit has not been completed yet and no progress has been made. I've been working on Road to Dinas instead and am beginning to encounter some of the issues that delayed Hasrabit. Namely that these two campaigns are OLD, and I mean really old. They were made when I was still in love with the European theatre in WW2 and many of my map designs were influenced very strongly by ASL scenarios. The inexperience really shines through with these two. Don't get me wrong, they both were innovative in some respect (Hasrabit used core artillery and Dinas had Red core units too.)
Like pretty much everybody else who wasn't on the Beta team, I didn't really know how to make a good AI plan back then and I spent a lot of time making Quick battle maps which I used for Hasrabit. Almost ALL the Hasrabit missions have QB AI plans, namely that I painted large set-up zones for a group and let the AI deploy the units in the group according to the desired parameters. AI attacks used these large blocks as well. I was still using this in Dinas as well so you can imagine that this is completely unworkable now. This all started to change when I joined the Beta team to work on the CMSF Brit module and I was no longer working alone on projects. I got a LOT of very useful criticism from an Australian captain which really shaped what I was to produce in the future. By the time I was developing the NATO campaigns, I had evolved an entirely new system of making AI plans which I still use today. And I started using more sensible force ratios.
The second thing these two campaigns have in common is that you're often attacking at ridiculous odds - attacker v defender ratio is 1:3. While I don't like making them like this anymore, I'm going to stick with it for these reworks because the REDFor is defending the entire map which means you'll always have a local superiority unless you are really far too aggressive. While AI triggers may alleviate some of these issues, overall, the AI is unable to react properly to the player's moves. In addition, your firepower is almost always greater so these numbers are not so much of a problem for me.
As a player, I've slowed down quite a bit and am no longer able to manage much more than a company and some support assets comfortably in Real Time. I also don't particularly want to play a 3+ hour mission either. And Dinas in particular had missons with 2+ mech inf companies with armour in support. This is affecting testing as I just can't motivate myself to manage such monsters in RT. Which brings me to my next point.
A fourth issue is the presence of MOUT elements in most missions which is not always enjoyable and can be a bit repetitive. Dinas has quite a few missions with small MOUT elements - for example, Sagger Point which features a very large hill with emplaced tanks and ATGM teams dug in with great LoS. But there's also a small village at the foot of the hill. Now, with two mech inf companies and tanks in support, this is doable. But I don't want to manage two companies + support anymore so am thinking about having the infantry clear the village and the tanks and support with artillery clear the hill. That's a rather long-winded way of saying that I want to tone down the difficulty of each mission and am concerned about the overall same-ness of many of the missions. A bit of MOUT is a good thing but not everywhere, all the time.
A last point, but an important one, is that these are essentially fantasy campaigns. While a few of the maps are based on real world locations (Strong Stand and Hasrabit in Hasrabit), almost all of them are just made-up. In Dinas, I seemed to be obsessed with river crossings, for example and many of the missions are fights for control of such objectives. This was me still under the influence of some ASL scenarios I played with friends in the 90s. Dinas and Hasrabit are both completely fictional locations and the maps are just a product of my imagination and not on any geographical reality. For example, Lakes in Dinas might work in a northern Syria setting but anyone with Google earth can see that no such feature exists between the Golan and Damascus. There's absolutely nothing I can do about that so I'm just going to remake them and hope that folks just enjoy them for what they are.
My plan is not to change very much with Dinas - I had already reworked some of these maps for Gung Ho! and I have expanded and redeveloped two of these maps for the opening two missions (Petani - Flintstones and High Chaparral - Orchard Road) so that they're not the same. But have resorted to the old Dinas maps for Sabatini (not Detectives) and Where Farmers Dare - (not Bridges) to preserve the feel of the original campaign. Besides, Red v Red is a bit better on smaller maps, especially with Infantry which doesn't spot nearly so well as Blue forces do.
I have redesigned the villages and compounds on the maps to get away from the ASL blocks I used back then. I've found some real world villages in Syria as templates and you'll really see this when you play Petani, Orchard Road, Where Farmers Dare and The Tumah Crossing missions.
For the time being, there will be no core artillery in the campaign and will instead give the player what he needs to get the job done. I might reverse this decision at some point.
I've also replaced the T-72Ms with T-55MVs which, in spite of being older, are just better tanks to work with. Plus I like the look and sound of them.
And that's where I'm at just now. Dinas will get finished first, then I want to rework the Scottish Corridor and then finally finish Hasrabit.

There will be a (last) short delay of some days 🙈
I am still working on two missions, which I decided to rework. 
 
Regards
Mr.X

S-tank did some new Tiger II skins worth checking out IMO https://www.mediafire.com/file/xorg29okl3zk247/S-tank%27s_Tiger_II.rar/file

Just trying to add some clarity:
The Core unit file for sure must be saved within the .cam file.
The problem I had when writing ScAnCaDe was that I could not really identify where the information is saved, at least not realiably.
Therefore the core unit file is not provided by ScAnCaDe, only the individual scenario files.
If someody would like to re-pack the campaign from the extracted scenarios, he/she would have to create their own core unit file.

100% agree.
I very much enjoy uneven battles for the challenges they bring.

100% agree.
I very much enjoy uneven battles for the challenges they bring.

100% agree.
I very much enjoy uneven battles for the challenges they bring.

100% agree.
I very much enjoy uneven battles for the challenges they bring.

I'm not planning to make it easier overall but there were one or two missions (Fair and Square [veteran] comes to mind) where the AI forces need to be toned down a tad. I would like to add a flamethrower tank to the mix in the opener only but otherwise, the plan is simply to update the AI where it is needed. Some of the missions have very small AI forces so 8 groups is already fine but I'm sure some triggers would make the missions a bit more challenging. Where the real work lies is in improving the AI attacks, of which there are quite a few when the SS counterattacks come in. 

David - One thing I learned from watching many replays of the campaigns I made for FR (with multiple AI plans) was that people would sometimes get an outlier AI plan, right off the bat. The other thing to campaigns (especially the longer ones) is the testing - It's impossible to accurately test all the outcomes of multiple plans over the arc of a campaign.
My work-around in the crucial cases was to use somewhat larger AI plan areas, so the TacAI could have a bit more freedom to use the areas set. These were still carefully placed, but add some variation.
I don't recall what the setup zones were (I made that campaign earlier in the development) - Some had to be set set-ups due to LoS issues. If there's something that I can adapt, maybe I can do so and upload it informally.
3D Editor setup and AI planning is the dream. It would save a massive amount of time.
No, no it doesn't. That looks like a Draw.

I tend to feel that balance has always been seriously overrated in game design. I'm perfectly capable of having fun while taking a beating from a stronger opponent (desperation and despair can be a lot of fun in a simulated environment), or ruthlessly crushing a weaker one (indulging in a power fantasy is also fun). And thinking of CM as an educational tool, it's certainly valuable to learn how to fight a set piece battle against an equal opponent. But learning how to exploit against a weaker opponent or withdraw in the face of a stronger opponent is just as important.
Withdrawal and exploitation are two skills that us wargamers get precious little practice with. There is probably a bit of sport/tournament thinking going on. People think that once victory/defeat is determined, the battle doesn't matter anymore. All that matters in a sport is who wins and who loses. There are no higher or lower gradients of victory or defeat. But in reality it mattes a great deal whether you can turn a victory into a decisive victory, or prevent a defeat from turning into a decisive defeat.

@Bearstronaut:
Of course 👍🏻
There will be a last (small) delay of maximum 1-2 weeks🙏🏼 Sorry for that, but reworking some missions costs more time than expected and I want to give you high quality content. 
 
Regards 
Mr.X

That was pre-planned with the 6.0 Update 'Unity'.

I've updated/created a couple of vehicle dealerships for Downfall to the best of my abilities. That is:

The existing German dealership - with the new Downfall units.

A new UK dealership - plus a few Canadian vehicles that I couldn't find in the British TOE. No Polish forces, at they don't seem to contain other units than the British.

I think I have found all units available in the dealerships, but I'm not sure.

I haven't updated the US dealership yet -  but might do so later.


UK dealership FB.btt Dealership_GER snow 45 Downfall.btt

Same here.

Dont know if you are aware, but there is a collection of "dealership scenarios" for the CMFB base game. When you load them, they should show you all the vehicles in the game. I'll attach them here, but be aware that they are not official, so some vehicles might be missing. And the one called "Downfall" is my own incomplete attempt to update the german vehicles.

Alas, I can remember who made the Dealerships originally.

EDIT:
I've just updated the German Downfall dealership - as I finally found the Ostwind - and added the StuG IV's
Dealership_GER snow 45.btt Dealership_GER.btt Dealership_USA.btt
Dealership_GER snow 45 Downfall.btt

It's on the list of things to do. Already started. However, CMBN Battlepack has my full attention for the moment.

Or, and hear me out, you could just by a nice Windows machine and be happy you saved money and have a great machine.

Butschi's video tutorial covering the same thing as this post:
 
Understanding EPSG numbers (Why the hell are they a thing?):