Bimmer

Just an example of what I'm talking about:

You've created a monster, Aris - by adding some hi-res textures to the terrain, the old low-res ones stand out, thus making it easier for us to very specifically pester you for more. I'll start: the new pavement textures look great, but on my Palma di Montechiaro scenario map, they put the adjacent old highway cobbles to shame. Any chance of having a look at the highway tiles?

Those heavy rocks look much more natural to me. Thanks for putting in the extra effort. Can't wait to try these new textures.

A few shots from a particularly nasty grenade exchange in from my upcoming scenario "Misty Mountain Hop".

After the improvements your ground textures made to CMBN, I am fully confident that these new CMFI textures will be a considerable improvement over the stock ones, even considering how good the stock ones are. Very much looking forward to them. If I may offer a tiny piece of criticism (which you are free to ignore, obviously), I find the size of the rocks in the Heavy Rocks texture pic above too regular and consistent. I prefer the more varied size and somewhat scattered effect of the original. Yours appears closer to a man-made culvert or something similar to my eyes.

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=106762 Just sayin'....

Don't both checking the spacing; I didn't. No need for PMs here - if you want to you can leave your more detailed comments in the announcement thread in the Scenarios subforum. I'm not looking for new playtesters at the moment, but if that changes I'll let you know. Thanks for the offer. I haven't tried it with Move, but Slow and Hunt do seem to help. Short stages are, of course, critical.

The Hills Have Eyes does include AI plans for both sides, though my suggestion would be to play as US vs. German AI. This one is being held hostage, but Palma di Montechiaro is based on historical events described in the briefing and includes two pure H2H variants, one more historically correct and one with a bit of an ahistorical twist. All I will say is that it is entirely possible to move among vineyards in any direction if you plot movement appropriately for the terrain; 60mm mortars can and will demolish buildings with enough concentrated fire, and will suppress occupants effectively with less (and no smoke round is available in-game); and arriving troops will become visible at some point in their advance, which may or may not coincide with the boundaries of the map. Is it particularly surprising that a defending force might have settled on a position incorporating a terrain feature that is advantageous to them? Oh, and testing suggests that your single result does not necessarily correlate with a larger sample. But thank you for your feedback. P.S. - Please do not post spoilers for any scenario in this thread, especially not without an appropriate warning. Thank you.

When it's 0630 and there's fog in the mountains.

After the various discussions about feedback for scenario designers (or more accurately the general lack thereof), I've decided to try a little experiment. I've got a new head-to-head scenario - Misty Mountain Hop - pretty close to done, but I'm holding it hostage until one of the following conditions is met: either I get three new comments (real detailed comments, not just a word or two) for each of the two CMFI scenarios I've got in the Repository - Palma di Montechiaro and The Hills Have Eyes, or two players get together to do a pair of detailed, turn-by-turn AAR threads for a PBEM game of one of those two scenarios. In the latter case you'll get the new scenario when you get through the first ten turns of the PBEM. Let's see how this works. :cool: A little tease:

Not that I disagree with the sentiments suggesting that light mortars are perhaps too effective (over and above the ranging bug issue), but the open terrain of Sicily depicted in most scenarios exacerbates the problem. Scenarios with close terrain, limited visibility, and lots of buildings severely limit the ability of mortars to dominate the battlefield.

Thanks for the feedback (please also leave your comments in the Repository if you get the chance). Glad you enjoyed it. You played v1.01, yes? POSSIBLE DESIGN SPOILERS Cautious play is key, I think. The odds definitely favor the attacker, though I think a clever human player on the Axis side could make things considerably more difficult. I am not sure that, given the nature of the battle, there was much more to do with the AI, though I'm hardly an expert in that regard.

This is the v1.01 update. If you downloaded previously, please replace the old version with this one; there are significant improvements.

These are really nicely done. Thanks.

I've submitted the v1.01 update. The advantage of it having taken a few days to get approved means that I had a chance to test more and make some substantial adjustments to the map; it's really quite a bit better, I think. Hopefully it will be up soon.

V1.01 update has been submitted; please wait until it is approved before downloading.

FYI, there's going to be a quick v1.01 update to this immediately after it is released. As soon as it shows up in the Repository I'll send up the revised version. I suggest waiting for it. Sorry for any confusion or delay.

Much of the map is covered in small adjoining vineyards. It's quite a small map (and utterly fictional, BTW), so a windbreak might be presumed to be off-map somewhere, though your point is well-taken. As to walls, I tried to build in as many as possible, but the issue is that the way CM deals with roads and walls (you can have one or the other on a given tile, but not both), I had to make some choices. Ideally most of the roads would be bounded on at least some side by walls, as would the small olive groves, but doing so just leaves too much open ground.

Thanks for the comments and the suggestion. I looked at that map but I didn't see any ruins. In any case, this is not a map with any pre-existing battle damage, and the buildings are so tight that armor movement of any sort would be impossible, as one would expect in many of the small Sicilian villages constructed before cars. I think it's plenty brutal enough at this point.

A small battle at dusk set around a tiny nameless hilltop village. Best as H2H, but reasonably good as US vs. AI; playable as German vs. AI (there are AI plans for both sides), but not recommended.

Go back and read the recent scenario thread - I think you'll see that you are making a few assumptions about what motivates designers. And a scenario/map conversion tool is pretty useless for any designer with even a vague sense of historical correctness.

Hey, I'm all for another tournament, but as noted above (based on my experience), if you don't institute a "produce an AAR or forfeit" rule, plenty of people will simply ignore the requirement.

When I playtested for Talonsoft way back when, the standard procedure was to play each scenario twice, once from each side, against the same opponent. We had a detailed form to complete after each run-through. As often as not the same player won both times. This indicates that the scenario is relatively balanced, and helps to eliminate player quality as an issue. It's not perfect, and having numerous testing pairs active helps, but it does work relatively well. Whether one, as an independent scenario designer, can find a group of people willing to do this and actually keep it up is another matter. In lieu of that, the tournament idea works well, to a point; when I ran "The Farm" tournament for CMBN, I was able to confirm relative balance in the scenarios, but getting players to complete the required AARs was impossible without instituting punitive measures, which I was not willing to do in an informal tournament. And after all that, at last check not a single comment has been posted for any of the tournament scenarios in the Repository, and that with 32 confirmed players in the first round, 16 in the second, 8 in the third, and 4 in the final.

I guess I'm in the minority, in that I release (eventually) most of the scenarios I build. Writing the briefings isn't a big deal to me, and I can become a bit obsessive about finishing up the details and tweaking the little stuff, so when I declare something to be done, it's usually ready for release into the wild. Of course, my scenario production is sporadic and fairly slow to begin with, and I can and do get distracted for long periods of time, which causes things to grind to an abrupt halt.