Paper Tiger

BTW, this is slightly further along than I hinted at in my original post. This project was intended to be part of the Commonwealth module package and I had the maps for these done first before I even started work on the Scottish Corridor. But the Scottish Corridor just grew and grew and grew and there was no time left to get this one finished. So, I've already created the German defences at Saint-Aubin-Sur-Mer for the first mission and have playtested one AI attack plan for the Franqueville mission (It's really tough too.) I'll post more as work progresses and I'll also put up some more detailed shots as well. Those shots are all zoomed out and the Carpiquet maps are still quite 'pretty'. I'll definitely dirty them up with battle damage before I finish with them, especially the first of them. It should look more like a WW1 battlefield by the time I'm finished with it.

Abso-frikken-lutley I'd LOVE to do a German campaign. They are my favourite side for playing in WW2 (Russians 2nd. Brits 3rd although US Paras are really good too) However, considering that there are precious few opportunities for what I'd like to do in the time span covered by the game, I haven't felt inspired to do one yet. But I want to! I'm trying to see if the Market Garden module will lend itself more towards a German campaign that suits my own particular style of campaign designing but I suspect I'll have to wait for either the Bulge title or... the Eastern Front before I can really go to town with them.:cool:

Heh, it's been a while since I've had the opportunity to do this. I am in the process of putting together a short-ish campaign for uploading to the Repository. I've got five maps more or less finished and I expect to start work crafting the AI plans later this weekend. The campaign will follow two companies of the Canadian North Shore Regiment from the landings on Nan Red through to the inferno that was Carpiquet. This is intended to be a hard campaign. The North Shore Regiment suffered badly in these actions and took very heavy casualties. To do some justice to it, this will be a HARD campaign. The player must expect to take lots of casualties in the course of playing the missions and there will be time limits. If time limits are not your thing, forget it now. Go and play something else. First Mission - Nan Red Beach Landing and it will be bloody. One company with DD tanks arriving as reinforcements will have to get ashore and take out the German defences. The Germans have had plenty of time to demolish buildings to create good fields of fire. Mission 2 - Tailleville Moving inland from the beachhead, the second company with some tanks will assault the village of Tailleville. This might not be a particularly difficult mission. Mission 3 - Carpiquet This will be an appallingly hard mission, just as it was in real life. I am going to pull out all the stops to make it as hard and as bloody as possible. And you're not getting four hours to do it in either. The SS defenders will be very, very determined from now on. Mission 4 - Franqueville Night mission with a strong german attack with tanks in support coming from the north. Mission 5 - Never their Like The finale and it will be a monster. Large German counterattack on the south of Carpiquet. This will be the longest and toughest of all the missions and once again, I'm going to put all the experience I got developing AI attacks in the Scottish Corridor campaign to good use in this one. It's quite possible that I'll add at least one more mission to this campaign - perhaps an attack on the radar station to the south of Tailleville? But extras will be ahistorical.

<tut tut> naughty. Let's not bring that up in here, please.

Hey! I just remembered something from my wargaming past. A while before I flew off to Indonesia to work I played an operational wargame called GD- Mtsensk, (somthing like that I think) one of a series of games that covered the actions of the GD division on the Eastern Front. What was unique about that game system was that the player had to draw up proper military-style plans before he started a mission and was honour-bound to move his units on the board in an attempt to carry out those orders. If he needed to change plans half way through, he had to redraft those orders and there were penalties involved in doing this. I thought that was fairly authentic. Perhaps that game has utterly misled me into thinking that real life military operations (WW2 or Modern Era) were planned in this way. I had no idea that it was all being done on the fly.

This is interesting. The player does have enough time to adjust his plan if it's working out. What he doesn't have enough time to do is to regroup and redeploy his forces to attack on the other flank. Further, it implies that losing is not an option. Missions should never be lost, ever! I honestly can't get to grips with that attitude. I like it when a mission kicks my butt and I am more than willing to return to it and try something different if necessary. Frankly, if I play something and I win it first time, I'm disappointed. Where's the value for my money? I want to win but I don't want it to be easy, at least all the time. This reminds me of something that happened when I designed ''Montebourg. There was one mission, 'Ecausseville', where the 2/8 INF got ambushed and murdered by a small German force. That mission was intended to be gruelling and so I followed it up with a nice easy mission, 'The Farmhouse'. It was a fictional action that was absolutely designed solely to allow the US player to relax, sit back and exact his revenge on the AI player after the last mission. And when it was released, folks complained that it was too easy!

Nah. I'm 52 and I still have a nice thick head of hair and nothing that happens here is going to change that. What I am doing is learning about communicating with people on the Internet. It's a whole new ball game with its own rules and I'm trying to avoid the 'not communicating' approach And, yup, MikeyD is always reminding us to add time to our missions. Trouble is that we do and then they ship and some guys still complain that there is not enough time. "Fifty minutes to do all that!? Boo!"

I think I found YOUR problem Why can't you just accept the result and move on to the next mission? What's the obsession with winning every single mission? Why are you willing to throw away your core forces in a suicide rush to seize an objective? When a Football team plays a game (Soccer or American, I don't care) they don't get to restart and even replay matches when they lose a match, even when they took lots of injuries. They get one shot at it and they rise and fall on the outcome. I expect that playing a H2H opponent is the same. If you screw up, your opponent isn't going to allow you to revert to an earlier save or restart, is he? Of course you are free to play this game any way you like but perhaps you should be willing to accept that what you're reporting there is the inevitable outcome of your own actions. Let me repeat, so watch my lips... 'You don't get thrown out of the campaign for losing missions'.

Once again, we are hearing the same plea from a small number of posters here for longer mission times or even unrestricted mission lengths. Since I am responsible for the campaign that is attracting most, if not all of the criticism, I will address this argument and put forward my own philosophy. What follows applies solely to the single-player experience and not to H2H play. Further, it is concerned with when the AI is defending. A Human Player Defending First, let's consider what I would probably do when I'm defending against a superior attacking force. I would send forward a few scouts and snipers far forward to garner as much intelligence as I could about the enemy's intentions. Maybe a MG team positioned to cover some open spaces and to deter a bold move by the enemy. As I get a feeling for what my opponent is up to, I will shift forces to cover the threatened sectors, perhaps calling in some artillery on likely jump-off points or in front of his likely avenues of approach. Then, once the enemy commits to his attack, I will throw as much force as I can to counter him, and maybe move a reserve if available to outflank him. And so it goes on. No great surprises there. The AI Opponent Defending What can it do? Well, quite a lot actually. In fact, if the AI is controlling a rather small force, say around two platoons with some support for example, I can script it to give it the appearance of doing pretty much everything that I've outlined above. I can also create two or more AI plans that have different objectives. For example, I can script the defending force to offer a very strong challenge to an attacker who attacks down the right flank at the expense of weakening the left flank. And in the second AI plan, I can reverse this situation so that the AI is strong on the left and weak on the right. Or I can even script it to abandon one side altogether and defend one flank exclusively. Now let's look at what it can't do. The most important thing here is that the AI has absolutely no ability whatsoever to react to the player's moves. None. Period. It cannot react to the player's moves and reposition its forces around to counter a developing threat from the human player. The AI Player cannot be sucker-punched. You cannot fool it into thinking that you are going to attack on the right by making a convincing display of force on that flank while secretly building up on the other flank. If you think that's what youre doing when you play against the AI, you're just fooling yourself. The AI is locked into its original plan from the moment you hit that START button. It is following one long WEGO plan from which it cannot deviate regardless of the actual situation unfolding before it. For all intents and purposes, it is utterly insentient. Imagine playing a Chess opponent who slavishly repeats every single move that one Grandmaster made in some game 100 years ago. He'll beat you for sure if you do what his opponent did but if you deviate from the script, he's going to keep on replicating the moves until you beat him. It's rather pathetic really, isn't it? Aren't you going to look a bit silly jumping around on the stage punching the air celebrating your victory against that opponent? The Time Limit Now, what is the time limit intended to do? In any mission that I craft, I try to give the player a bit of time at the start to perform some recce to gain intel on enemy positions, devise his plan, call in an artillery strike and then go for it. If his plan is a good one, he outnumbers the AI and so he has a real chance to win. If his plan fails, there is not enough time for him to pull back, call in another artillery strike and then approach the position from a different angle. The time limit is not there to kill the fun. It is there to even the ground for a supposedly intelligent human player to get some challenge and satisfaction playing against an AI opponent. An opponent can only do what it is scripted to do and nothing more. Some people also expect that if he has been allowed two hours to play a mission that the AI opponent will provide him with a good fight for near enough two hours. When he wins with nearly 40 minutes on the clock, he is disappointed and feels cheated. No Time Constraints What does this mean for the human player who is operating under no time pressure? This means that he is free to waltz around in front of the defender's positions gaining valuable intel on its dispositions without committing his force to the battle. This force can skulk quietly out of sight and in absolute safety from any attacks by the AI until he is ready to commit them at a time of his choosing. Then he can deliver his killer blow and claim victory. While the designer has some limited ability to control what the AI will do when its forces sees an enemy unit, a lot of the time, the AI is going to open fire on the most blatently obvious draw. No intelligent opponent would give away his positions as readily as this. The more time you give a player to 'scout' the more he can uncover for free and with little risk to his forces. The same goes with the AI use of artillery. It is possible to send out one unit to draw some fire causing the AI to fire off any artillery assets it has on a dummy target. This tactic will work almost 100% of the time. So, why do we need time constraints? Let's consider a very bizarre scenario. Mike Tyson v Your Granny Who is going to win this match up? Why, Mike Tyson every time, at least while he's still in good health. How can we make this situation a little more challenging for Mr Tyson without Grannie packing some heat? Well, perhaps we can insist that he knocks out poor Grannie within 3 seconds. Not much of a challenge I grant you. But even in the worst mismatches, time pressure can be a great leveller. If Grannie can avoid getting hit for 3 seconds, she gets a win. If At First You Don't Succeed... This has been a long post so I'll conclude quickly. The time limits are designed to allow the player to devise and carry out his plan for better or for worse without forcing him to do anything rash. He will get one good shot at the title. If his plan is a good one, he may well succeed. If it is a bad one, then he will probably lose because he won't have time to regroup his forces and try again.

Thank you! I've been working really hard on it

Almost historical. Tragically, Turnbull was killed by a mortar shell the following day. Indeed they are but the US units in this mission were more than deserving of this status. My main source for this was Keegan's 'Six Armies in Normandy'. (page 96-97) He was obviously deeply impressed by the Americans in this action too. You have exactly the same number of men under your command that Turnbull had thanks to the head-count reduction. I added a second AT-gun though as it was too easy for the US to lose it early on and therefore lose the mission. Otherwise, the US OB is fairly accurate. For the German OB, I jut guessed. The German tanks were likely captured French jobbies but we don't have them so I went with a couple of Mk IVs and a Marder III for the SPG. Apparently, they were fooled into thinking they were facing a numerically larger force than they actually faced because of the volume of fire the Paras were putting out. The real action lasted nearly eight hours. A real heroic stand!

There is no ammo resupply for your units in the first four missions of the ASH series. But, TBH, ammo management is not one of the most sexy aspects of playing a campaign and the Brits managed to stockpile quite a bit before Operation Epsom so it's not unrealistic. (The Great Storm postponed the original launch date for Epsom) But I've already had an idea how to do this better in a future campaign though a LOT better. Absolutely NOT this player! Thank you. I 100% agree with you.

This is perhaps the first ever variable-difficulty campaign devised. If you are struggling with the difficulty, you will lose levels and play the GREEN version of each mission. The GREEN versions are usually much easier to play and win for most of us regulars If you are winning each mission, you will stay at that experience level, REGULAR, while if you are winning comfortably, you will eventually face a more challenging opponent, VETERAN. So, if you are patient and skip through the first couple of missions, you'll get to play the GREEN versions of the remaining which are more suited for the player who just wants to relax and enjoy a not-too-challenging evening's play. By having variable difficulty, everyone should be able to play the campaign through to the end at their own level of ability.

Yes. Several times. First time I used it was in the 'Road to Dinas' campaign. You'll find a burning Kubelwagen in a barn in 'It's a New Dawn'.

But what if the Allies actually lost the battle that you're playing? Why should you be able to win it first time through by using good tactics? There are quite a few missions in this campaign (and a couple in 'Montebourg') that were Allied losses, or at least draws. I wonder how many of us have been 'spoiled' by playing the Allied side in CMSF and are no longer willing to accept high casualty rates when we are playing a mission. You are going to take lots of casualties playing these missions but you will be refitted frequently as well. Operation Epsom was the last time the Brits were able to refit their units without having to resort to cannibalising existing formations to make up the casualties. Just take the casualties, accept the result and move on to the next mission. You don't get thrown out of the campaign for losing missions. You simply lose an 'experience level' and will play easier versions of the future missions, with longer time limits to boot, until you win big enough to move back up a level Losing means you will have an easier time in the campaign. It is 14 missions long so if you lose the first two, the remaining 12 will be much easier. And with regards to time limits. More time = much easier mission. The AI-controlled side has no ability whatsoever to react to your moves and that one fact alone makes the single play experience hugely unrealistic. You have enough time to do a quick recon, devise your plan and then go for your objectives. There's definitely not enough time for you to change plans midway through a mission and redeploy your forces from one side of the map to the other if your original plan isn't working out.

Are you sure this is 'Panzers March'?

No worries. You don't get thrown out of the campaign for losing missions until near the very end. Basically, if you lose one of the battles for Grainville after the 'Going to Church' mission, the campaign finishes as the Germans succeeded in recapturing the place. In the event of that happening, the Cameronians will be placed in Reserve and the responsiblility for taking/holding the village handed to another of the Brigade's battalions. Win the battle and you get to face a fresh assault until either you are defeated or the campaign ends.

Aw crap! I'm about a third of the way into this and already somebody has taken a big dump on it. I'm going to take some time out playing this GAME and just relax playing something else until BFC ask me to do something new for them.

Hi Erwin. No, it's not a Do or Die mission. When I craft them, you must win that mission or the campaign ends. Instead, what you're seeing is something that I've been doing from my very first campaign, 'Hasrabit', for CMSF. Basically, you are playing a single action that is divided up into two or more, intimately linked scenarios. If you played Hasrabit, you will remember that the Republican Guards are tasked first with destroying the spearheading Syrian rebel forces. If you complete that mission in good time, then you go on to Hill 142 which you must capture before dawn. If you fail to win the 'Counterattack' mission, you start the 'Hill 142' mission 20+ minutes later but the sun still rises at 06:10 so you have less time to get the rebel FOS before he can pinpoint Special Forces positions in the valley. The whole series of 6 missions at the start of Hasrabit were very intimately connected. Same went with 'Dinas' and the Canadian campaign for the NATO module, not to mention 'USMC Gung Ho!'. In 'The Road to Montebourg' there is another very fine example of this in missions 2 to 4, the assault on the Georgian Ridge. It's one big battle broken into three parts. The same applies here. It's not "finish this mission in 1 hour 10 minutes with some extra time or your ass is on the line". You're just late for your next mission and that has real consequences, like the enemy having more time to react to your attack, etc. These are not stand alone missions and there is only one possible branch from each mission so it's better not to pay too much attention to the result of each individual mission but focus on the campaign as a whole. Considering that the Brits were advancing under heavy artillery fire directed by German spotters on the Rauray spur, the Cameronians don't really have the luxury of being able to hang back doing a bit of recon. When I played this mission, I had plenty of time to do a quick and dirty recon before launching my attack and I usually got a surrender well within the official time limit. And then I added about 10+ extra minutes before letting other folks have a go at it

The Germans have two TRPs in this mission and they are cunningly placed. Please note however that there are two AI plans in this mission and the placement of almost everything changes - TRPs, Bunkers, the single mine, the lot In Operation Epsom, the Germans had had plenty of time to fortify their positions and register their artillery on all the avenues of approach to their positions. It was hell and anything less than hell in this mission would be an injustice. But it's not all like this

Amen to that. People actually complain if missions are easy and are disappointed if they force the enemy to surrender while there is still 20+ minutes on the game clock.

Hi Raz I had a look at your AAR. I will keep going back to see how you are getting on. Good luck.:cool:

Wow! Twilight Zone. I'm not sure which campaign you were playing there as the German forces in mission 1 of the Scottish Corridor campaign are mainly Green with Extreme morale. One or two of the weapons teams are Veterans but otherwise are Regular or Green. There is one team that has Fanatic morale. That seems reasonable to me. The German Zug leaders are Veterans with Extreme morale as well. Plus, the Cameronians are Regulars with Normal or High morale. They entered Operation Epsom with no combat experience at all. I think that's more or less what you were recommending, right?

I'm doing something but I'm still not over this bout of flu so the amount of work I'm getting done is pretty pathetic. However, the ideas continue to develop in my head and when I do play it, I'm having a lot of fun doing so. The BMP-3 is an absolute beast to play with

I've had a really sh!tty dose of the flu these last two weeks and I haven't done very much, I'm afraid. I seem to be over the hump now though and will be getting back to work on this again later this week.