Paper Tiger

I doubt that BS will be the final title . Glad to hear that CMSF will get an upgrade. I installed it on my 'new' hard drive a couple of weeks ago and I absolutely LOVE the vehicle models. But the editor is so dated with only 8 AI groups, a limited number of ways to fit walls together and the game sports old MG behaviour. I don't mind the desert setting at all. I grew to love it in CMSF and I'll be happy to return to it and craft some more missions if it gets an update. One other reason to love the Modern Era game is that you can design without being constrained by history. As JonS is admirably demonstrating in his 'Sherrif' thread, crafting a historically accurate WW2 scenario is an ENORMOUS of work. It will be nice to be free of these constraints once again. Good to hear as these titles have already been in active development for well over a year now so looking forward to seeing some screenshots http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1370433&postcount=3

Never have, and never will feel that way. I'm always pushing the envelope. Two reasons. First, because I would very much like to see AI triggers make it into the game sooner rather than later. AI triggers have the potential to revolutionise the single player game. They have no use whatsoever for the H2H crowd for whom TacAI improvements would be the priority. It would be pretty easy for BFC to decide to hold off on doing the enormous amount of coding that this would entail because the community is more or less happy to play H2H. Second. I'm not convinced that the H2H community make up the majority of BFC's customers although I'm happy to be corrected. H2H players are far more likely to frequent forums than dedicated single players. The only reason I frequent these boards as a single player is because I'm interested in designing and not for finding opponents. How many folks post here? Double or even quadruple that and you still have a customer base that's far too small to support BFC. There's nothing strange or weird about people wanting to play a computer game against an AI opponent either. I've played computer games as long as there have been computer games to play and for almost all that time there was no option to play online or H2H. Had there been, I'd probably have evolved into a H2H player like the young folks that have been born after the Internet are. BFC have gone with a rather interesting AI option in the CMx2 engine and it is possible to craft missions that are very challenging for even an experienced player to play against the AI. Designing missions like that is my design goal and that is how I intend to develop as a designer. Even if H2H players are in the majority nowadays, I'll go the way of the dinosaur when there's no call for my work and return to designing exclusively for my own pleasure like I did with CMBB. That is just frankly absurd. Thick skin when getting feedback? No problem. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. Mark Gibson really helped me to become a better designer when I joined the team and, boy, was he abrasive. I listen and follow good advice when I'm given it and am grateful for it too. (Read the credit I gave to Mark Gibson in the briefing for 'British Mettle'). The guys who have playtested my campaigns have given me some very strong criticism too. Critical feedback is good when it's intended to help the designer to improve his work. Have a thick skin when folks just want to insult you? Different story. There are a LOT of folks around here who have just as thin a skin as I do.

From the start of the mission.

On second thoughts, I think it's a very bad idea to open up a discussion on this as it's a minefield. We're already throwing the criticisms of other designer's work around so let's not go there. I've got nothing but respect for anybody who takes the time to create convincing work with the scenario editor, including yourself. I'll confine my remarks to say that there are two sides in a CMx2 mission, an attacker and a defender. In MEs, both players are attackers. The AI can be scripted to do a good job of defending, no argument there but it's not a great attacker. It needs a wee bit of help to make it effective on the attack. Help that any half-decent human player can make far better use of than a scripted AI plan ever can, including using the clock. I've designed a fair few AI attacks in my time. My very first CMx2 mission, 'In Harm's Way', was a RED attack v Human US player. When I switch sides and play against the PT defensive set-up, I can blow the AI away every time. But that's just me. So, to end this post, I will continue to design missions in the way I see fit and, hopefully, BFC will think they're good enough for inclusion. When they're no longer good enough, I'll call it quits

Indeed I am, and have been here now for 10 happy years. But I'm Scottish and when I worked in the UK, 40+ hours a week wasn't usual either. But it's not important

I'd be quite happy to discuss these points but not on these boards. I don't have Fortress Italy and haven't designed even a single map for it. And I confess straight up that I know absolutely squat about the fighting in the Med theatre, at least after El Alamein anyway. (Not to suggest that I'm much more knowledgeable on NWE WW2 ) I'll start up a thread in the CMBN forum later today or, more likely on Wednesday where we can have a friendly discussion about this.

Gustav Line is definitely the better of the two as it has all the latest equipment, AAA guns, Fallschirmjagers etc and it is using the most up-to-date version of the engine. Fun, I have no opinion as I don't play Med stuff but I'd have to say, based on the opinions expressed on BFC's boards that FI is where the fun is at too . More on that below example Yup, agreed that if bocage is not your thing, Normandy is a bust and it wouldn't be representative of the real US fighting in Normandy without using lots of Bocage. (My highlight in bold) I get a bit worried sometimes that this game is being steered more in the direction of providing scenarios that are suitable for H2H play. But that shouldn't be surprising seeing as how the vasy majority of forum posters play the game H2H and want to see more content that is suitable for this style of play. Since they're the ones that provide almost all of the feedback, if you need it (and let's face it, most designers do), designing for the H2H audience is the way to go. Me? I want missions that are designed for single-play first and foremost but I'm not an H2H player. H2H seems to be where the fun is for most of you and so again, GL seems to be the better choice. I don't know because I haven't even seen them but from what I've read, they're shorter and more focussed, aren't they? I'm getting a bit tired of designing monster-length campaigns myself and see myself designing shorter campaigns like this in the future. USMC Gung Ho! and the yet-to appear Canadian campaign for CMBN are both around 6 missions long and they've been a lot of fun to work on. (Come to think of it, my second CMSF campaign, Perdition, had only 3 missions) But there will be one final monster from me and then, its smaller from then on.

40-50 hours a week is normal for me :confused:

Very simply, yes. Ys, you can determine the level of victory, or defeat that the script will call a 'win' but that's it. No, two branches, or the end only. Agreed, it would be nice to have and it's already been asked for Who knows.

If something is worth saying, then it's worth saying it twice

Vinnart I'll include what I know about AI for QBs. I've built up a private collection of QB maps, ME included, and have evolved my own systems.

Well, to be honest, there's probably not going to be much in it that any determined player can discover for themselves after spending a bit of time watching the AI do its thing in scenario author mode. Glad to hear that you've found the answers to your questions on your own.

Vinnart if you can hold on for a little while, I'll be putting together a series of posts talking about AI planning in great detail which will cover all those points. It'll start up soon after JonS has finished his Sheriff of Oosterbeek thread.

I've altered the core units' morale depending on the path the player is taking through my campaigns for a long, long time now. Most of my campaigns take place in a very short time frame and so a leap in experience would be unusual wheras a leap or drop in morale, very natural. It's a bit of a pain as you have to redo this work each time you synchronise the campaign units with your core units as you can only edit them in each individual scenario after importing

And it's always worth reminding people that it's absolutely not necessary to create high-fidelity maps. They are a huge amount of work to do. Ball park is good enough in almost every case. Leave the absolute precision to the obsessive compulsive disorder types ;D and have some fun crafting your own maps. Besides, bottom line, it's the game play that makes it worth playing. Beautiful, accurate map + crap gameplay is a waste of everyone's time.

It would be a pretty daunting task to make accurate maps of all the important battlefields in Normandy and Holland. I'm not sure that it would be possible to so even if we were to take all the community map-makers into the project. And if you miss one, somebody will feel the lack of it Maps certainly are important and you may even get what you want but... If I'm going to spend hundreds of hours of my own time crafting maps, I want to be the one developing the scenarios/campaigns on them. Selfish, I know, but that's why I do them in the first place and I'm sure a lot of the designers feel the same way. Plus, it might mean that titles/modules ship with less content and we would be relying on the community to make the content that we need. Besides, I don't think that it's a lack of maps that is holding back the community, (there are literally hundreds of QB maps from which to do this,) but scripting the AI that's necessary to make them playable is

Ain't that the truth. The number of times Ive been told that the player's infantry got hammered but at least they didn't lose any tanks.

A reasonably good rule of thumb to keep in mind when anticipating BFC releases is that they show the first batch of screenshots of the work in progress about 2 months+ before the pre-order announcement.

Well, congratulations to you on your success. This particular campaign wasn't intended to be a bitter slog to reach the end but it does require a lot of time to get there. Yes, LOS can be unpredictable on large (ish) maps especially as you can often draw LOS through the small breaks/gaps in tall bocage. But I also spent a lot of time siting those 88s so that they were a pain so I'm glad to hear they gave you a hard time. What you get in the final mission depends on the path you took to get there. You can get intel on enemy starting positions as well as a battery of 105mm artillery if you get wins in the previous two missions. There is a revised version of the campaign on the Repository which makes the 2/8 INF Green for the most part and adds a new, small mission to the campaign. To make up for this reduction in experience, I added air support to a couple of missions. Personally, I think the revised version feels more realistic when playing. Good news is that most of the campaign missions have two or more AI plans so it might not play out the same way again I love playing campaigns and so I design miine for maximum replayability. And Montebourg is my personal favourite. Not too difficult, not too easy. I've played it through several times myself. I can promise you that it will get one final revision after the Market Garden module gets finished. Mainly to take advantage of having 16 AI groups now. I'd also like to put in captured French tanks (NOT in the MG module) as well.

Steam is great for some games but I'm not sure that hardcore wargames like this would do so well there. AGEOD didn't fare so well with their experiment with Steam. Fortunately, they seemed to have survived the experience and hopefully will go on to make some great wargames.

I might have gotten a bit confused with the angles it's not using the real world orientation. To keep it logical with the other maps, I ran it from North to South rather than from East to West. I'll change the briefing to say left and right. The front part of the village appears to be called Le Val and I went with the 'real' name. There are not many good locations on the map from which to observe Le Ham. However, you do have a couple of lovely TRPs

By the way, I've just returned from reading up posts on the boards of some other games I play and I am continually astonished at the exploits some people devise just to get an edge when playing the game against the AI opponent. I don't understand why anyone would play against the AI in this way as it is clearly cheating. It's akin to cheating when playing a game of chess against yourself. What would be the point in playing at all? I don't try to find exploits to beat the AI. I play the game as honestly as I can and hope that the game will do a good job of managing the details so that the outcome is believable and fair. I hope that it's really clear by now that I don't do tricks or 'find the one and only path through the nightmare tactical maze' puzzles. I don't like them and I actively design to avoid them. Maybe others do but I don't.

In Civ 3 and 4, I played right through to the end to get as high a score as I could manage in the Hall of Fame (My HoF ran to several pages in both of these games). But it was frequently boring going through the motions of winning an already-won game. This is a major problem with most single-player strategy games: reaching the point where you know that you have won the game and all that's left to do is just wipe out the hapless computer opponents.

Would this mission be 'Le Ham'?

Okay, this would be an example of a trick. How can this be true if the mission has two or more AI plans? That perfect path to victory against AI plan 1 is useless against 2. This is why a good designer will use two or more different AI plans. There are very few missions in Montebourg or the Scottish Corridor that have one AI plan only and they're usually missions where the AI is the attacker. (Bloody Encounter, Crescendo of Doom and the Odon Bridges IIRC). My own preference is four AI plans and there are quite a few in both, and the OMG campaign that have four AI plans. This is the designer's counter to the perfect plan. Remember that I design missions that are played against an AI opponent almost exclusively and so good AI is very important to me. I can't start playtesting properly or honestly until there are at least two defensive AI plans in my mission. I've designed a LOT of missions to be played in this way and so I've evolved my own system of developing AI but since this is a topic for a future installment of the Scenario design tutorial I'll leave that alone here. Personally, I try to design missions so that the player has many options open to him. I know my playtesters play my missions differently from me. In fact, allowing the player this level of freedom occasionally bites me in the ass (Licornets for example)