GreenAsJade

This nails it. And note that as with any "general rule", there are obviously exceptions. If there is a situation where the commander in question deserves no recognition at all for kilking the enemy, then create such a scenario by all means. But this should be blindingly obvious in the briefing, and an integral part of the wonderful story. Similarly, it's not "never use Casualty objectives". Just don't use them as the normal reward for casualties, because they don't work that way. Sure, if the goal is "you must destroy 50% of the OPFOR tanks", then have an objective like that, but again: tie it to the story and make it clear. The point is that the Destroy Units objective is the one that by default people expect, it maps onto "war" the most naturally (and its no coincidence that it is the one that is built automatically into QBs). GaJ

There are two types of objectives. One is called (in the manual) "Casualty objective". They are expressed as >x% These ARE binary (*). The other is called "Destroy Units". These behave as you describe. So the single point that I am making, the single request I have to designers who are designing for H2H play, is ............Please make good use of the Destory Units victory condition in most scenarios because players _expect_ each kill to count for _something_. It feels wrong if you wipe out a third of the opfor and still score zero. Sure, you didn't achieve the objective, but that's why you only scored low. But not _zero_. If you make a scenario without a Destroy Units objective, you risk a player inflicting significant casualties and still scoring zero. Please take that into account. That is all GaJ *: At least, everything I have seen and read tells me they are. If someone has opposite evidence, I'd love to be proved wrong on this one!

Hey Paper Tiger, The issue of designers' work being assessed to death is a long-standing one, and we have lost good designers from the community as a result of it already. This is really sad. I don't know what we can do about that in general, because the opposite extreme is for us to not discuss what is good and bad about scenarios... clearly that wouldn't be right either. To a certain extent scenario designers need to design for their own satisfaction, and not really care ... not be open to being hurt by... what other people think. It does take a thick skin and strong self esteem: I think that to a certain extent this is "life on the internet". If you are going to get offended by someone who doesn't like any work you post on the internet, get ready to be offended. It is guaranteed that what you post will be disagreed with by someone, and that this opinion will be strongly stated. There's another factor too: it's easy for an author to "over-read" criticism, and be more "hurt" than is necessary. Just because someone analyses something and criticises it, doesn't even mean they don't like it... it certainly doesn't mean it's not good. However, this is one reason why I was treating the topic "in the general" not "in the specific". KR's point is true in general. In general, one expects the after-game analysis to reflect that if you inflicted casualties you did not loose 100-0. I am asserting that: *The only way for scenario designers to make this "feel right" _in general_ is to use the Destroy Units objective in good measure.* This doesn't mean that a scenario that does not do this is bad. This doesn't meant that Destroy Units is the only objective that should be used. What I am doing is alerting the scenario design community to the fact that it is quite measurable (see the graphs) that in CMBN this has not been the case, and that if the scenario designers would like their work to be widely appreciated, they should take this into consideration, in due measure. Note to MikeyD: "Casualty" objectives like ">30% cas" do more to hinder than help, because they are binary. GaJ

Great questions, that "feel right". It does feel a bit "contrived" playing CMBN and wielding offmap artillery to fall in nice deadly lines along hedgerows... I'm in awe of the WWII artillery if it could do that ... I'm just not yet totally convinced that it could! GaJ

Yeah, to every rule there is an exception. Really, this thread and my point in it is about a generality, not the exceptions. Of course there will be great scenarios with purely "touch" objectives, sometime, somewhere. However, for me, and the folk I play with, I can tell you for sure that strange distribution of results from CMBN games feels all wrong, as does 'your average scenario' not giving any point for casualties ... and these two are intimately linked. Almost invariably, reports from games with scores like 95-5 are "well, sure I lost, but not that badly, I destroyed lots of his stuff, it was a much closer battle than this result says". Feels wrong. GaJ

....... So this is wierd. I can't put a as the first thing in a post! GaJ

I think that at least the compass can be modded away

It's definitely true that the basis for this thread is H2H play. I think I've said that already - I for one am not remotely interested in vs AI play. Clearly for vs AI, the result is whatever the single player makes of it, and the VP calculation is entirely academic. So, scenario designers: please feel free to experiment with whatever victory conditions you like. Casual/vs AI players know when they have won anyhow and they're going to ignore your victory calculations. Longterm gamers will work out who designs scenarios with sensible feeling victory conditions and will choose those in the end. Personally, I think it's nuts to have a wargame where casualties don't count. How many players come to a battle and think "well, I didn't kill any of the enemy, but it didn't matter because I ... something?" So if you don't put Destroy Units objectives in, your battle feels wrong. Simple as that. GaJ GaJ

Heh heh it's always a giggle to see a grammar mistake in a spelling correction That said, you're correct, of course, Wodin GaJ

Not at all, good fellow "Flavour pack, flavour pack, we want a flavour pack!" "Flavour" .... that word starts to look wierd after you've written it a few times! GaJ

I was wondering the same thing. Maybe the OP wants those extra pixels for extra vertical display of the game action?

What's this "waiting"? Have you conquered Normandy now? GaJ

It's the opposite of this. Unless they exit, they count as a casualty. And - you are correct - you have no way of knowing unless the briefing tells you which troops this applies to. This is a real nightmare for the player unless the scenario designer does a really good job of the briefing. GaJ

AFAIK the _only_ ways for units to exit the map are 1) An exit zone 2) Buddy aid makes them disappear. You can't just drive/walk units off the map, right? GaJ

Reminder (old thread, long thread): FWIW, I think this effect is both "real" (statistically significant) and is now completely explained. The explanation emerged in some other threads recently. The explanation is that many CMBN scenarios use the "all or nothing" victory conditions, without including proportional points-for-kills scoring. The "worst" example of this is the "Casualty" victory condition, which ironic feels like the most intuitive to use. I think this is the greatest contributor to the problem (and it _is_ a problem). The "Casualty" victory condition gives the player a set number of points if ... and only if ... they exceed a certain level of kills. Each kill on its own is worth nothing. Either you got the level of kills or you didn't. In a wargame, player expectation is that "killing the enemy" just goes without saying as a thing that you'll score for. The idea that it isn't is a nice feature for "special situations" , but far from general expectation. Furthermore, it is what creates this "all or nothing" spread of results. In fact, the _only_ scenario victory condition that runs in line with player expectation is the "Unit Destroy Objective". This assigns partial points for partial destruction of the nominated group of units. Ironically, this is the most trouble for scenario designers to set up. To me the moral of the story is "ask your friendly neighborhood scenario designer to please always include points for Destroy Units on the whole OpFor". Until this is more prevalent, I think we will continue to see the lopsided distribution - it won't matter if its 100 or 10,000 samples. GaJ

I love it when someone makes a point that seems like nonsense, someone else points out that it's nonsense, and the first person can rationally describe that it wasn't nonsense, and everyone discusses this. An actual debate. On a BFC forum. Without name calling or anything! Way to go! GaJ

I thought that I've seen, in the past, that as you fire the last rounds you have available to you, the smoke count goes down and indeed smoke is fired (even though HE was called). Is this wrong? GaJ

Are you saying that if it says: 105mm 40 105mm smoke 10 Then I have 40, not 50 rounds? GaJ

Nice point: I've read about that before. It's the same thing that the (mostly Japanese) robot creators battle with: it's actually better to make a robot that's less human like unless you can make it perfect, due to the uncanny valley. In some ways I hijacked my own thread with the new topic of immersion and the quality of the realism. The interesting thing I started out noticing is that now that the game is more realstic looking, it has me much more actively interested in "what actually is realistic anyhow?". I can't imagine me ever watching a video of a tank and paying attention to how it brakes before GaJ

Its OK that foxholes are deathtraps from treebursts, I think? That is realistic. The real question is whether inf and esp shreks can fire out from them, or at least withstand small arms fire, without being masacred? GaJ

That leads me to ask again: does anyone know if they actually work now? Some guys like testing stuff: this would be a great one to test (I personally have to squeeze in actually playing the game around the edges of life, so testing doesn't get a look in once H2HH, CMMODS, WeBoB are all dealt with!) GaJ

At one level this is true. However, the costs tradeoff for forces are of the nature of "each side has a budget for forces, you choose what the best force mix for your plan is". The question is whether a foxhole is a "force mix component" or not. It can be argued either way. The "for" argument is that you balance your overall strategy within your budget: if you have an entrenched defensive strategy, then you have to spend points on the fortifications, and you will have more of those and less equipment. If you have a mobile defense, you have more equipement to defend with and less BYO cover to protect it with. Makes some sense. The "against" argument is that defense is typically conducted entrenched, and foxholes are ubiquitous wherever there are infantry defending, so it doesn't make sense to 'cost them out'. After typing this, I find the "for" argument more persuasive. GaJ

I agree. I do think it's a fair question to ask "why do I have to trade off having one more panzershrek vs having a couple of foxholes?" In an attack/defense situation, the effect of this is to swing things away from having fortifications in the exact situation where in reality the defender would have had them. GaJ

Immersion is a strange beast - the things that make or break it. Largely, it is about consistency, I suspect. For example, you can get fully immersed in CMx1 movie, or a CMBN movie. Yet the level of realism in each is completely different. But if you had a CMBN platoon suddenly appear in the midst of a CMx1 game, the immesion would break. Your mind would be like "Huh?". For me, CMBN tank behaviour is like this. Everything else is so realistic: men jump fences, etc etc. Yet tank drivers drive like learners. I think it's not only the underdamping: we could argue how excessive this is. It's the fact that tank drivers need to be handheld to drive their tanks sensibly. The overall result of giving an order like "quick, drive around behind that church as fast as you can", is a sequence of jerks and rocks that break immersion for me. As a programmer, it looks like someone found a cool vehicle suspsension modelling algorithm and didn't finish tuning it's behaviour. Stands out from everything else that is so well integrated: leaves burst of trees when fire goes through them, yet tank drivers can't drive. The exaggerated rocking just emphasises this visually. GaJ

Do foxholes work properly now? I've actually been avoiding them since 1.00 problems and haven't "come back" to them: I'd love to hear if someone did some more firing lane testing on them! GaJ