Paper Tiger

FWIW, I don't see me doing anything like this again. The last year has been one of the hardest of my life. My mother and my aunt both died within a space of a month of each other before Xmas last year, my wife's sister died in August, I got a huge promotion which has come with enormous responsibilities. All in all, I just don't have the time available in the future to craft a 14+ solo campaign a year anymore. So it's likely that the future for me will likely be more along the lines of what you're asking for. Shorter, easier, and more fun to play campaigns. Difficult is easy to do. Really, really easy. Fun to play is not easy. I'd hope folks would find playing my stuff fun. That's why you get all the toys to play with in my campaigns, lots of artillery, air support and the cool, often overlooked toys like the .50cal armed jeeps in the Para missions in the Nijmegen campaign. It really was fun for me designing and playing those missions.

That may well be true I thought that The Road to Montebourg was 'easy'. :confused: After completing my first 10-mission campaign for CMSF, 'Hasrabit', I also made a short, 3-mission campaign for CMSF that was very easy as well. (Road to Perdition) Folks actually complained that it was too easy and I got practically no feedback on it for all the work it took to make it. Who doesn't? But I design primarily for my own playing pleasure. I really enjoy playing my own stuff and if I share it with you and somebody else does, that's good enough for me. Hey, wait! Aren't you the guy who thought that 'Courage and Fortitude' was a masterpiece comparable with Stravinsky's 'Rites of Spring'?

I think I provide more artillery support for the player in my campaigns than do most others Cakewalks are not popular with a lot of folks. They require almost as much time to develop as the other missions and you get almost zero feedback on them. Personally, I think the first three Reithorst missions are easy, especially the first two, as well as the Mook Bridge mission as well. (Not the Heuman Lock Bridge mission though which was intended to give the player a bit of a slap in the face after the relative ease of the previous two missions.) The 2/505 'Badlands' mission on Day 2 can be a cakewalk if the player really put the hurt on the German core units in Papenberg. In my campaigns you have to earn your cakewalks. But otherwise, Market Garden wasn't much of a cakewalk for the Allies and so there are not many in the campaign. If you want easy, just skip the first two missions accepting the losses and then you have a whole campaign of cakewalks

And remember, it's two consecutive draws or losses that put you on the GREEN track. If you win the next mission, you can forget about your 'loss'. There are some missions where a Draw is considered a win. Aalst and Here We Fight are two off the top of my head but there are others.

YankeeDog has said it already. When I was designing the NATO Canadian campaign, I wanted to have Allied air support as core units because of the close connection between the first two battles. The second kicked off 20-15 minutes after the first and the fighting took place just a few hundred metres to the north of the first so the thinking was that the same aircraft would be flying support mission for both these actions. But the air units get fully resupplied between missions regardless of the campaign author's intentions. Probably a good thing though as it would have made those two missions a bit tougher and some of the testers were already squeaking about the difficulty And yes, the US Paras really pack some serious firepower during MG. I had to rebalance a lot of the Para missions when the new TO&E arrived because I'd been using Normandy paras as stand-ins. The difference was massive!

Me too. But the four Guards missions took more time to craft and test than the rest of the campaign put together. (And of those four, Breakout from the Neerpelt Bridgehead and Bloody Aalst were the most work) They're all quite big missions and a lot of work went into making sure that they were challenging AND fun to play (especially the latter). I did originally intend to have a 5th Guards mission on the road to Elst as a bonus mission. I even made my own map up for it but there just wasn't the time to playtest it. What's likely is that I'll include it when I revise it later. I plan to revise all three of my CMBN campaigns at some point in the future so maybe then.

There you go. That's the main line of the campaign. If you lose some missions on Day 1 you may fight Deelshurk in the morning of Day 2 but otherwise it's good to go. And I left in the designers thanks to his testing team because I can't thank these guys enough. BTW, it Normal Dude who won the Guards compilation on his first playthrough. I hope he'll forgive me that bit of disclosure

You have enough artillery-delivered smoke to lay down a smoke screen to cover your initial advance and then your forward deployed platoon can use infantry-delivered smoke canisters to cover the advance of the fire base team. It's a bit hard to predict what a player will bring to this mission as it is the 2/505's second outing and there is no refit between the two missions. At full strength, the US paras have plenty of firepower to overwhelm the defenders. If you've lost a MG team or two, it might be tough going.

Back from holiday in Bali and the computer is back from the workshop where it was getting an upgrade. It seems like there's a bit to deal with here so I'll cover it quickly. Oh, I'd definitely agree with that. It seems like it was a short, but tough fight for the 2/505. Without the MG bunker, it was a short but easy fight so I stuck with the bunker to represent a good, fixed position that couldn't easily be taken out by the 60mm mortar. If you guys are having real issues with this mission, here are a few pointers. Smoke is your friend here. Use it as often as possible to get your guys into good positions before you assault the 'island' You have plenty of time to do this so don't feel you have to rush at the start. It's better to take some time at the start of the mission to neutralise some of the German units in the trenches. In all my playtesting of this mission, I never lost a single guy to the AT gun. Not one because it is easily spotted and the mortar takes it out quite quickly. The Germans are not good quality and there is only one MG team. I think you guys are mistaking the 'second MG for the first one in a different AI plan. However, I might be wrong on this as I don't have CMBN installed on my upgraded computer just yet. Later this morning though. They also have low ammo so once things start to go bad for them, they break down quite quickly so the final assault can be a tad anti-climactic if you start slow. And this is a real SPOILER The two platoons in this mission are fully refitted before the Hunner Park missions so casualties taken in this mission are not an issue. You're going to lose guys doing this. Remember that I play my own campaigns and I don't particularly enjoy playing overly-difficult missions myself so I've scripted it so that you can lose a few guys here without spoiling the later missions of the campaign. All the maps in this campaign are historical and of my own creation. I didn't use any of the master maps at all. The maps are authentic and crafted from US maps of Holland from that era as well as looking at Google Earth and elminating any modern buildings from the map. I only used the editor overlay to create the maps for the Heuman Lock bridge and Reithorst missions. The others were all done in the old fashioned way. Regarding difficulty, I think I said all that I have to say on this matter in this post. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=110311 You'll have to forgive me if I'm not taking your post seriously seeing as how you haven't played any of the missions by your own admission (the highlighted part of your post). As far as I'm aware, I am the only campaign designer in the community or on the team who provides the player with an option to play with extended time limits if he is losing missions. So perhaps your rant would be better directed at some other less sympathetic designers If you want to lark about with CMBN, please play the QBs. that's what they're for.

It's important to note that the Guards didn't win this mission in real life. When I'm designing historical missions I will try to ensure that battles that were lost by the playable side are very challenging in the campaign too.:cool: Although the Guards were able to clear and secure the village, the Germans prevented anyone from 'exiting the north board edge' within good time in the real battle and so exiting should be very tough for the player. However, I did script this mission so that a DRAW would suffice and scored it so that the Guards could draw if they cleared the village of Aalst but failed to exit a single unit. Exiting anything will bump up your level of victory.

Thanks for that. I wanted it to be fun to play even if it was a bit challenging at times. I design my campaigns to be hugely replayable (lots of AI plans almost every mission) because I tend to replay my own stuff quite a lot. I've played Road to Montebourg about four times now. I hope to replay this one a few times as well. I wish BFC would change the way the campaign system works so that units that have taken very heavy casualties get replaced. Say if a unit is below 50% strength, then the script will build it back up to 50% strength between missions rather than the current 50% chance that a unit will receive 100% replacements.

When testing I made a short compilation of all four Guards missions and one of the testers won all four missions on his first playthrough so I guess it is winnable on the first run through. I could give you a hint if you want. When I play it, I use lots of smoke and am very aggressive with my artillery, particularly at the start.

Feel free to tell me if this is irrelevent but I used to live in the beautiful heart of Suffolk. On evenings and at weekends, I would pack a bag (no demo charges though!) and go for a long walk around the countryside and enjoy the tranquility (and the smells) of rural Suffolk. On more than one occasion, I would walk around the edge of a field in an attempt to get somehere new only to find that my way forward was blocked by a chest-high hedge. Even if I didn't care about damaging the farmer's property, there really was no way I was going through that hedge, no matter how much time I would lose by turning back and finding another route because going through that hedge would have resulted in terrible injuries. So maybe the bocage is not quite as badly represented as you think.

Yup, there are at least two ways to make casualties matter with the editor. One is to assign a casualty threshold in the parameters section and the second is to make some or all of the enemy OB a unit objective group (Shift F1 etc) and assign points to the group for destruction. If you assign a value of 1000 points for destruction of the assigned group and you destroy 33% of them during the mission, you'll get about 330 points. I use both when I design my missions. The parameters are useful for rewarding a player who completes a mission with less than say 10% casualties. If he gets 100vps for doing so and his side's group was worth 1000vps to the enemy, the 100 vps would offset the losses taken and improve his margin of victory. The enemy still gets the 1-99 casualty points though. It is also useful for balancing a mission so that one side does not get a win at the start of the mission simply by requesting a Cease Fire. The AI always gives you one and so you can win easily if the designer doesn't prevent this. One way to do this is to assign an obscene amount of points to the AI side as long as their force has taken less than 30% casualties. Or less points if you want to balance the mission so that there's a draw if players do this in competitive play.

Very good point. But you don't have to try to craft such a massively groggy beast on your first outing with the editor. I have to do a lot of research to craft the campaigns but I craft my own stand-alones as well and the amount of research that goes in to creating them is almost zero. I let the date of the scenario and the unit editor tell me what's 'historically' pickable and have fun doing the rest. I also enjoy creating my own fictional maps which have their own unique challenges. It really isn't as much work as that 'guide to scenario creation' makes it out to be. Making a map with the editor really isn't hard work at all as long as you're not trying to make a photorealistic recreation of a WW2 battlefield. Set your aim a lot lower. FWIW, my first few CMBN maps were all of Suffolk where I used to live. This was a lot of fun to do. Of course, there were no battles fought in Suffolk during WW2 but who really gives a damn. These maps were the core of my QB maps until I finished Montebourg and I've made a few cracking stand-alones out of them as well. Once you've got something that looks like a map, buy some units and start playing around. If scenario creation is your thing, you'll enjoy the process and get better at it by doing. If it's not your thing, well, all the guides and help given won't change that so give it up and just play the game instead. Assuming it is your thing, create a few for yourself first and then get something up for testing. Then you're in the club.

You know that you can create a thread here to do that? In fact, that's preferable for me as I rarely ever visit the Repository. You'll find some guidlines for providing feedback in this thread here http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=106637 this is an old issue.

There's a lot of food for thought in this thread. I have picked up a few new games in the last few months and at least two of them have a scenario editor which allows folks to make their own. I've looked at them and you need some 3rd-party software like Hexdraw or something to start with. The whole process looks hideously complicated next to BFC's incomparable scenario editor. With BFC's editor, I can create a map from scratch, with no overlays simply by setting the size of my map and clicking on a terrain/building icon and voila, the wheatfield, forest, barn, whatever appears on the grid. I can make the 'paintbrush larger to paint large areas of the map quickly. Roads and walls take seconds to place. Elevations are a bit harder to do but they're not that difficult and once you've learned how to place them, that's it. The most fiddly/worst part is placing bridges across a river. Go on. Try it. It really is very easy to create a basic map in a few minutes, a something a bit more interesting in an hour. To create a realistic looking one is much more work but it's doable with practice. And you can open up an existing map in the editor to see how the designer of your favourite map made his, how he places flavour objects to make it look real, etc. OBs for your mission can be created with one or two clicks per side. More are necessary for getting the details just right, but it's not difficult to populate your new map with a battaion for each side with one click per side. Personally, I think that the real killer is crafting good AI for your creation. (I looked and saw that 'Waylaid' is for H2H play only) Since most of the guys here play H2H, you shouldn't worry about AI as it's not necessary. And then, after all your efforts, you put your creation up on the repository and you get: a) absolutely no feedback whatsoever. Or, you get something back that's just so negative and unhelpful that it makes you wonder why you bothered. New designers are best off starting with something fictional. True, you now have a guide that can help you to create the ultimate uber-grog historical re-enactment type of scenario for sure but IMHO, starting small and non-groggy is the best way to start. That's how I started out. 'In Harm's Way' was my first mission and I cringe with embarrassment now when I open it up in the editor but that's how it begins. Fortunately, the community was incredibly supportive at that time and I received plenty of positive feedback that inspired me to go on to take on more and more ambitious creative projects. How differently it might have all turned out if I'd gotten some sarky, sneering feedback instead. Maybe the WW2 crowd is less forgiving than the CMSF crowd though? How many of you really want to play fictional scenarios played on fictional maps? I remember somebody posting something about creating a later-war Sealion campaign and one member of the community took a huge dump on it because it was fictional. I think that curtailed that potential designer's ambitions quite effectively. If the community wants more content designed by the community, I suggest you nurture it and help it to grow instead of bashing it and quoting Darwin at the poor fledgling designer when he gets discouraged.

Looks like he meant: the aa gun always wants to point to the front instead of the rear and the .50 cal doesn't shoot but he hasn't tested it much because of the first problem. It must be tough for the guys who play this game but English is not their first language.

Nice pics there, Hilts. You know how to take a screenshot to do the map justice. Thanks. I'm enjoying reading your progress with this.

Well, we could have them fall into a null AI group so that they don't continue to follow the AI group's orders. This is what happens to AT guns in the game. You can place them in AI groups, have them set up in different locations from plan to plan but not follow any orders that the group is given after the mission begins. Of course, the ammo bearers will follow the plan but the gun and its immediate crew will stay in place.

I'm not sure if this is a serious query or you're just enjoying your Sunday evening. But, if you're serious, the AI doesn't cheat The AI plays what I'd call 'ONE-Go'. That means that all its moves are planned out from the moment you start the game until the mission ends. It is following one huge WEGO plan and it will not deviate from this plan or adapt it in any way whatsoever regardless of the circumstances that develop in the game. It is YOU who cheat by changing/adapting your plans as circumstances dictate If you want to play the AI on a level playing field, you should plot all your moves from the start to the end of the mission and then click Go/Start and watch what happens, not interfering EVER if things don't work out the way you planned them to. Now you're playing like the AI plays

Bonus mission? The campaign ends after the fighting is concluded at Hunner Park. I wanted to have one last Guards mission at Elst but there just wasn't time to do it. (And Pete Wenman was doing it as well) Great result by the way. You're the first to report finishing it. Hope you enjoyed it.

A bit of a digression here (again) but hopefully, it should make sense. I love movies, all different genres. I was deeply impressed by Schlesinger's 'Far From the Madding Crowd' and 'Spring and Port Wine' when I was in my teens. But in addition to more serious movies, I have a strange affection for Schwarzenegger movies. Don't ask me why. Sometimes, it's nice just to switch your brain off and enjoy the ride and most of his movies have worked for me. (I love 'Die Hard 1-4' too) However, there was one movie, 'Commando', that I found utterly unwatchable because the climax featured him running through a compound taking out an army of bad guys while they couldn't hit squat. Boring. Unbelievable. Ridiculous. I just fast-forwarded through the "action". I find playing with Veteran/Crack and Elite troops to be in this category. Green is where I feel the game behaves more in line with what I think real-life WW2 combat should be. Upping units' experience levels to keep them in line with BFC's settings results in unrealistic combat, or rather, more like 'Commando'. Vet/Crack units insta-spot enemy units and frequently get kills with their first shot. 'Sarge. Spotted enemy vehicle" <crack> tank commander shot dead with first shot. 'Well done, Sergeant Rock!' I actually saw that happen several times playtesting this campaign when the Paras were Vet/Crack as they should be. And the Irish Guards were veterans too. The spotting, first shot kills were killing all the fun for me. I even saw a Veteran Staghound move Fast up the road, insta-spot a JPz IV, fire off a shot while moving Fast, hit and kill the JPz IV. Bad Action movie. The same could be said for pre-v2.01 machine gun behaviour or pre-v2.1's inability of troops to fire bazookas, Panzerfausts etc from inside buildings. Just because they choose to set it up that way doesn't mean it's right. If enough people want it changed, (and they don't), they'll change it. You'll probably notice that I didn't mention Conscript = Green in my earlier post. That's because I think Conscript is just fine thanks. IMO, what we need is another level between current Conscript and Green to model Green troops properly in the game. In the campaign, I just gave Green troops that were meant to be Green negative leadership modifiers and low morale. There's nothing here that I haven't done before. I wanted to make the 2/8 INF in Montebourg Green and indeed made them so in the rework. Some folks really appreciated how much better the campaign played because of that one change so I'm not alone in thinking that the behaviour of Veteran+ troops is unrealistic in the game. However, I am deeply conscious of the slur on the reputation of such fine fighting outfits. Hopefully, the respect I have for them is revealed in my efforts to make it real rather than making it "Commando"

There's a simple answer to that. As far as the game engine goes, I consider the behaviour of Regular experience of troops to be what I'd expect to see from Veteran troops. As far as I'm concerned, Regular = Veteran and Green = Regular. There are a few Veteran units mixed in there but they're usually the Platoon HQs.

I don't think a whole new user interface is necessary to provide the RT (or WEGO for that matter) player with more information while playing. IMO, the floating icons are hugely underused and could communicate far more information than they currently do. For example, just look at how much we benefited from having the icon flash when its unit took casualties. That really grabs my attention when I'm playing. You could have them display different types of information about the unit's status depending on which mode was currently active. Ammo, morale, strength reduction etc.