Paper Tiger

Yes. The German units withdraw from the battlefield as they are core units and will appear in a later mission. The briefing tells the player that the Germans are withdrawing: "2/505 will advance rapidly to locate and destroy enemy forces, preventing them from exiting the battlefield." It's not a disaster if you can't catch them but I suppose it is rather anti-climactic if you take your time.

Ouch. Painful topic I had almost finished it - a 6-mission campaign IIRC with all the map work done and the AI plans mostly done. And it ALL got lost when my old hard drive burst into flames (literally) I thought I had back ups on my old laptop and on disk but I can't find them and that really hurts. I had two maps for Aubin, a genuine beach landing which surprisingly worked and wasn't the bloody mess I'd expected it to be with a small south Aubin mission,'Going to Church' or something like that with a single platoon and a tank. Then the came the Tailleville map which I expanded greatly into a master map (not of the same scale that you guys make them though) from which I could make two missions. Then it was on to Carpiquet with three missions there. That was a second master map from which I created three missions. I still have the little book I bought about the North Shore Regiment called D-Day to Caripquet by Marc Milner which I used to design the campaign and all the physical notes I made regarding the missions and the OBs and the names of certain leaders but there's just no way I'm remaking all those maps again. Aubin was not a big map but the detail was an incredible amount of work.

This is going to take a bit longer to finish than I'd hoped. While all the important map work is done, I got stuck on two phase 1 missions, Hill 142 and The Barrier, neither of which I could find a good story for. The old story is just nonsensical to me now and so I need to completely redo these two. It's likely that they will be player attack missions rather than meeting engagements Some of Phase 2 is done already but I was having similar issues with Heavy Metal and Sadara as mentioned above. The old stories are just too nonsensical. (The new ones will be less nonsensical though) However, Heavy Metal is fixed story-wise all I need to do now is craft it. When I finish Dinas, I expect I'll do my Scottish Corridor rework next before returning to Hasrabit. I need a change of eras.

A quick update since it's been so long since I posted anything. I got 'stuck' on Jameelah and the Tumah Crossing missions - I was playtesting Jameelah after a bit of a break and found it was too difficult. Yes, it's meant to be a difficult mission but it was too difficult and not fun and so I need to make it more fun. Tumah has been a problem because it's one of the last massive map overhauls and I've been stumped as to how make a mission out of it which doesn't feel like 'Here we go with this again!' when you play it. Of course, with such a long campaign, it's going to feel a bit samey as you get to the end but it's the map and the situation which draws you in so finding the right 'story' for the mission is what keeps them interesting. The new story is coming to me slowly. After that, there's not much left to do as I've worked ahead and done most of the work on the Lakes, Perditions' Flames and Dinas missions already.

Not really. I'm taking a break for a while. I'm working on Dinas very sporadically because I don't want to burn out.

I don't know what a Syrian commander would do in this situation - the campaign covers a very short time span, just over 24 hours in 14 missions, and the situation is emerging rapidly. My best guess if that the depleted battalions would go into action as long as they were combat effective in such a high stakes throw of the die so I'm favouring that option. I guess I could do a deep dive into what happened in the battles for the Golan Heights to see what they did but I'm not taking this rework that seriously. As for the point of doing so so late in the campaign - I can't do it earlier because each company only sees action twice before these final four and would be a waste if it were done earlier. I don't think the BMP Mech Inf company B will be combat effective after Jameelah though. Both their missions are potentially tough ones but I have no doubt some will complete these without any effort or substantial casualties - the game is already very old and your skill levels are much higher than when the campaign was first devised. It's almost certainly going to be 'no disbanding' at this point though. Tumah is going to take a bit longer to get ready as I'm not happy with that enormous enclosed compound to the north of the entry position - it's artificial and could be improved further to make it more defensible. I'm not planning on anything massively ambitious with the revision though.

I took a short break from this game to play something else and to manage some real-life matters as well but I have been giving Tumah and the last three missions some thought. I have decided that these four missions will be near-Battalion level missions with two companies of mech infantry and a company of tanks in each. I'm not going to be able to manage these forces myself but I'll get an idea of how effective the AI is. One reason why is because these maps are all big by my standards and there's a lot of open space with long LoS so I'm going to make these missions more lethal to mechanised combat with more ATGMs, both deployed and mounted, and tanks on the other side. I'm humming and hawing over whether to 'disband' a mech inf company from one or both groups to reinforce and refit the remaining two but if I don't, the chances of you having anything like a full battalion in these is unlikely.

There is a platoon of BDRM-2 (AT-5) in your core forces and they appear in a few missions. I'm a fan too. I've tried to use as much of the regular Syrian army kit as possible in this campaign so the only things you're not going to have under your control are the formations that wouldn't rebel (Republican Guards, Airborne, Special Forces and GOOD tanks that would go to the trusted, favoured divisions) and Shilkas - they're for Hasrabit. So no BMP-2s or 3 or T-72 tanks. Regarding MOUT missions with such small forces, this is a Red v Red campaign and bombarding the crap out of civilian structures is not punished so you can open up lines of sight to buildings in the interior. I even used this tactic, albeit more carefully, in Gung Ho! and other Blue v Red missions I've designed.

I'll probably post some pics of the updated maps some time later but this is just a quick update on progress. I have completed three of the four phase 3 missions now and am currently working on The Tumah Crossing. Road to Amarah, Where Farmers Dare and Jameelah all have functioning AI plans and reworked maps and I've done some proper testing on them. I beat Jameela yesterday afternoon and I feel I'm done with that for now. After phase 3 is complete, I only have the final three to rework and much of that is already done as I tend to improve maps when I'm not feeling that committed to AI scripting and actual playing so it's not going to take as long to rework these as it did the earlier missions in the campaign. So while an end is in sight, I will need to revisit all the earlier missions and test them to make sure that the campaign is actually winnable. And of course, there will be the revised briefings and artwork to do but that's not a particularly big or unpleasant task.

Strangely enough, one of the keys to this is to take it reasonably slowly and set up a strong fire base before sending a small team down the trenches to touch the objectives. The trench run triggers the reinforcements so it's best to do it as quickly as possible. The documents are 'hidden' in the 3rd Gun square. You don't need them to win but a Total Victory isn't possible without finding them.

I have no idea why that might happen. Is your soldier physically placed IN the square? You should hear a notification that you have touched it. My first thought was that the game engine is perhaps confused because there are two overlapping objectives, one an allied player TOUCH objective and the other an axis AI Trigger but all of the gun positions are like that.

I just took a look and I can see where the confusion arises. Look at the tac map and you'll see the rough position of the guns. you are told that you must TOUCH these positions to destroy the guns. The VP objectives won't show if you hit Alt+J as they are not known to either. I have changed the settings so that these three objectives are Known to Player so that if there is any revision, this change is implemented. However, it changes nothing - you just have to move down the trench line and 'touch' the guns which you can SEE on the map.

So that there's no confusion, any changes I make to the campaign will not carry to an older version of the campaign. Once you start, you are locked into that particular campaign with OBs, artwork, AI plans etc until you finish it. As for any chance of a revision, I'd say there is no chance of a new version any time soon. Unless something utterly egregious occurs (in which case I absolutely will fix it asap), this is the final version.

There is so much more that we can do with this simple binary system with a little imagination. I'm feeling the 'so little time' part too. There reworks are taking up months of my time - I had hoped to make much faster progress with them but I just have to rework these old maps first and the AI in these two early campaigns was abysmal, basically being QB map AI plans. Although I was pleasantly surprised by what I was getting from testing the original Amarah - one sees what can still be done with the old forms by one who knows how to handle them.

Two completely contradictory requests. Whatever I do, one of you is going to be unhappy. It's something I'm taking my mind to consider and I won't decide until a bit later, at least until testing properly starts. In favour of the consolidation option is that the average player will probably have pretty much the same head and vehicle count as they would without it. On the other hand, an experienced player who has managed to complete the earlier missions with next to no casualties would see his forces lost. My thinking on that point is that if you've already preserved your force so well, the campaign obviously isn't posing a real challenge and so you will probably find a better challenge at the end. Who knows? There's a lot to consider and sometimes the best answer is just to leave as much as possible without changing it. If it ain't broken, don't fix it. Which segues nicely to my next point. As I've said a few times already, the new engine has pretty much obsoleted the old campaign because defenders in buildings are far more resilient and even conscripts with low morale will stand and fight. And artillery doesn't do nearly as much damage to infantry in buildings as it did way back when the campaign was first devised. Add to that the near-absurd force ratios and that's a lot of rebalancing work. I've started real work on the phase 3 missions now, Amarah, Farmers, Jameelah and Tumah, and have decided not to make nearly so many radical map overhauls this time around apart from the Tumah Crossing map which has already been improved considerably. I am splitting up some of the massive grain fields on these maps and 'planting' different crops there to make them a little less yellow overall. And I'm reworking some of the compounds so that they're a bit more realistic but otherwise, I want to keep the flavour of these maps intact as much as possible. It will also save a bit of time. When I was devising core units, I spent a lot of time improving three of these four maps so most of the map work is already done. Amarah is the only one that needs real improvements but I'm keeping the extreme elevation changes and the overall terrain as is. What WILL go are the AT-14 ATGM teams. The briefing is totally misleading in that respect, not to mention that they're massively lethal to both vehicles and infantry. The initial recon phase is a bit boring so instead of having the reinforcements arrive earlier, I'm going to beef up the starting OB with some of the 'tools' that the original CMSF didn't have. These two changes alone should allow me to keep the general flow of the battle intact from the original rather than a whole new battle like Sagger Point and SAM Hill needed after the extensive overhaul.