Paper Tiger

I sincerely hope that this is a very bad joke in the worst possible taste. definitely not funny! There are better ways to communicate bad news if it is true.

There was a discussion about the restrictions of CMx2's AI scripting in this thread a couple of months back which might answer your questions. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=103215 The CMx1 series of games had an AI system that reacted to VP locations switching control. This gave it the appearance of reacting to the player's moves but it also led to some utterly horrible behaviour that it was almost impossible not to exploit.

Nah! The issue with jagged shadows is a fairly obvious one . They look like that on my graphics card too. However, when I look at that screenshot, I notice the detail on the canisters in his kit. Or the shoulderstraps being askew because his upper body is leaning to the right. Some look and see bad, some look and see good but we're both looking at the same pic. What we say reveals more about ourselves than anything else. (I know you were joking, Erwin )

I don't use any terrain mods so they are the vanilla textures.

[Added after Edit - aha, I just had a closer look at your AAR screenshot and saw that you forced a German surrender. The reason you lost the mission is because you took too many casualties in capturing the objective. Yup, unfortunately, the campaign script only allows two possibilities - win the mission (this can be any level of win or even a loss) or lose the mission. So this happens. But my misreading of your post did give me a chance to drone on about something I feel is quite important] Sometimes, I wish we were not given so much information in the AAR screen because it misleads the player. If the clock runs out and he finds that there are still three guys occupying a victory point objective denying him the points he might be led to believe that this intelligence would be available to the real life commander as well. As far as the commander can tell, there is still a full platoon on veteran fighters holed up in that VP location and he needs more help to root them out. Thus the tanks are sent off to eliminate a threat that is non-existant indstead of going to Hamalet. This was an issue with testing 'Going to Church' mission in the Scottish Corridor campaign as well. In the real life battle, the Brits couldn't winkle out the last of the German defenders from the vicinity of the church. We don't know how many troops the Germans actually had at the 'end of the battle' because real life battles don't end in such a fashion. Perhaps it was just a couple of Snipers and a MG team? Or perhaps it was a full platoon. Whatever, the Brits gave up and left the Germans in possession of the VP location and tried again the next day. Unfortunately, the player is told that there are only two guys and a dog left standing at the end of the game and so thinks he got a win but is being denied it by some quirk of the game engine. Glad you're enjoying the revised campaign BTW.

Heh heh!

Thank for that feedback, Hister. I appreciate it. BTW, were you reviewing the campaign version or the stand-alone version? The stand-alone version is a tad tougher than the campaign version I absolutely did not want to have the player sacrifice some very good units early in the campaign just to get a win. It would also have meant some rebalancing of the later 2/505 missions. Everything in this mission is designed with a particular effect in mind. If you play this mission aggressively, you shouldn't have much of a problem with it. Players who play cautiously and slowly will have a different experience playing this mission. It's designed to reward the bold player and punish the cautious one.

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=102600&highlight=panacea You can see how the community felt about it in this thread . I reworked 'The Road to Montebourg' a few weeks back so that the US 2/8 INF were Green troops to keep it in line with the Green Scottish troops in 'The Scottish Corridor' campaign. Personally, I think the game plays in a much more realistic manner with Green experience troops and will be sticking with them for the forseeable future

Not that I'm aware of. We were able to position guns in trenches in the base game when it was first released. But the AT gun got no benefit from being in the trench. What might have changed is that it now does but you'll need to wait for somebody official to confirm/deny that.

Heh! It could be worse if it was positioned behind the bocage as it would sometimes swivel towards the noise of the guns suppressing the forward MG position. So when your boys moved up to the bocage line, they were well set up to get the first shot off. Yikes! I tried lots of different tricks to make it work and this is the best solution, bar Pete's, that I could find for having the Germans fire the guns on the attackers. It never happened in the real life mission because they were 105mm artillery pieces and likely couldn't depress to fire on targets so close. How did you get on with it? It was designed to play quickly and be fun but not difficult. However, it will pose problems for a cautious player.

'Utah beach to Cherbourg' was one of the books that I used to develop the background for the Montebourg campaign. It's online too.

You'll see even less of this in the MG module as Dutch forests in the main don't seem to have dense undergrowth like they do in Normandy. However, I'm developing a 'trick' to make their location knowable with trees switched off because you will have to fight in them from time to time and that means you'll have to switch trees off if you're going to see anything.

Hister Ah! Those are the old historical Brecourt mission landmarks and there's a mismatch between them and the mission's VP objectives. I left them in for flavour, perhaps not a good idea as they are confusing if used together. There were four guns in the historical mission but the fourth was in that gun pit with good LoS to the US entry area beside the derelict truck. Sometimes, they spotted your guys getting into position and they started firing. This made the mission a crap shoot and not so much fun to play (as in no fun) so I took it out. Pete Wenman figured on a solution to this particular problem in his 'Silence the Guns' mission but I wanted to keep the map small so I couldn't use his ingenious idea.

Sometimes, people are capable of changing their minds about things they said/did and the past. Let's just be grateful that BFC have changed their minds here and not try to score points off them for doing so.

The game does look so much better with his mods. I wish we could have had them when I was testing. And ROAD OPENING is Snake Eye's work, not mine Unfortunately I had a hard drive die on me earllier this year and I have never reinstalled CMSF on the new one. It's not because the new drive is a tad on the small side. It's just that I can't work with the CMSF editor any more. There are so few connecting walls for example. But perhaps I will one day as one of my all-time favourite campaigns is a CMSF campaign.

One very good reason for sticking with it, apart from the enormous amount of work that has already been put into it, is that it is an infantry-centric campaign and those are my favourite to do. I like playing with tanks but only when they are supporting the infantry. I loved playing the Argyll missions in the Scottish Corridor campaign much better than I did the Cameronians missions because the former are infantry missions while the latter are combined arms for the most part and especially towards the end. (My favourite Cameronians mission was the bonus one ) Eek! I wouldn't do that as you'll be missing out on some great stuff. I'm not doing a campaign for Sicily because I don't have the time to do one properly just now but the three guys who are doing them have a lot of experience making campaigns. JonS made most of the campaigns for CMSF as well as 'Courage and Fortitude' and 'Panzers Marsch!' (but not NATO - they were mine), Normal Dude made the most popular of all the CMSF campaigns (Task Force Panther) as well as 'TF Engels', and FMB made the extremely popular 'Devil's Descent' campaign among others. I thought you had already started it, didn't like it and gave up to go and play TF Engels This won't even be ready for the Repository until after OMG module is released so you might have a very long wait.

I don't know as the Beta team don't usually design for the Repository. And with BFC speeding up their release cycles, it's unlikely that you'll see much private stuff from them in the future either. Most of the Repository content seems to be generated by third party fans and I'm not sure why there has been so little of it lately. This particular campaign was originally intended to be a third campaign for inclusion in the Commonwealth module but that was too ambitious. I've already sunk a lot of time into creating the maps so I don't want to write it off yet.

Finally, BFC have let the cat out of the bag so now you guys know why work is progressing so slowly on this. I want this campaign to take advantage of all the v2 features, particularly the AI groups. Since I am already working on something for OMG I don't think I'll be able to finish this before that module is released. But it will be a priority immediately afterwards seeing as how the maps are all done and the mission concepts have been finalised. I just need to do the AI plans and test them BTW, I would also like to revise 'The Scottish Corridor' campaign as well so that it takes advantage of the v2 features as well. The AI was doing a lot of attacking in that campaign and the extra groups will help make the AI more effective on the offence. It will be broken into two separate campaigns, the Cameronians and the Argyll's and expanded a wee bit (at least one new mission for each)

Yikes! That looks absolutely horrible!:eek:

The maps for the 'Scottish Corridor' campaign were all derived from the aerial shots in Daglish's Epsom book so they will look very different from their modern day location in Google Earth. I did use Google Earth to locate the buildings that were in the photos so that I could place them as precisely as possible. As for the Montebourg maps, they are almost exact replications of their present day Google Earth locations although some small changes had to be made to keep the roads all straight to preserve the LoS along them. I'd rather preserve the roads at the expense of narrowing a field here and there. I don't keep the 'squares' in Google Earth because I constantly expand/shorten the original map's dimensions as I work and especially after playtesting commences and I need to add an extra 400m to one side's set up area, or the entire southern sector is redundant. While it's not a ball-breaking amount of work to change the polygon each time I make such a change, it's not really at the top of my list of priorites especially seeing as how the Beta team are working under the clock to get their work finished so that BFC can ship the game.

This is a tough audience. :eek: Three weeks and 114 downloads and still not a single comment. It's not exactly inspiring somebody to produce more stuff for the Repository.

Are you playing the Green version of 'Fair and Square'? It sounds like you are if the campaign ends in a defeat. If so, this is the end of the campaign. You've made it through to the very end of that thread and that's quite an achievement.

I'd say that AI scripting is definitely the most daunting aspect of scenario construction, whether that be for stand-alones or campaign missions. There are plenty of guys in the community willing to devote the time of their lives to crafting highly detailed maps but not so many willing to do the AI scripting. But AI scripts are not necessary for maps for a meta-campaign as a meta-campaign will be played by two or more human players, am I right? That means you just need maps. I don't really see why every map has to be as accurate as possible as it's almost impossible to recreate real life places exactly in the CMSF game editor. For example, we have a very limited number of angles available to us which seriously limits our ability to create road/wall/fence networks. If you want to recreate large areas in the editor, why don't you just create reasonably accurate maps without worrying about the detail and use the more detailed user-created stuff when it's available. That would really cut down on the time it would take to do a meta-campaign. I'm currently working on a new set of maps for 'something' and I've decided to worry less about absolute fidelity and go for more of the spirit of things. It makes map creation a faster and more enjoyable business.

Heh . I'd hazard a guess that Pak40's talking about the 'Hell in the Hedgerows' mission as there is no barbed wire in Ecausseville.