Paper Tiger

Okay, a bit of background on how this mission evolved. The Canadian campaign was originally slated to be a Light Infantry campaign. For a long time, that was how it was going to be and so I got to work on designing my missions for it. Before the first NATO build arrived I had already completed the following missions: Killing Ground FAITH HOPE Sound of the Guns/Blood on the Rooftops CHARITY. These missions were all designed and playtested thoroughly using the US IBCT Battalion in place of the anticipated Canadian Light Infantry group and it worked really well like this. I even subbed in the Brit Light Infantry formation and had a real blast playing it that way too. The main idea here was to keep the REDFor as small as possible in as many missions as possible with the exception of HOPE which was always intended as being a meat-grinder. FAITH, in particular, had a very small RED OB and BLUE outnumbered them 3:1 at this stage. After all this work was done, it was decided that the main Canadian force would be a Mech Battlegroup and so now, all that work would have to be redone. To avoid having to redo all this work again and the AI plans in particular as they were very detailed, I decided to put an IED on the bridge to inhibit the player from moving his LAVs and tanks in support of the infantry. Since CMSF does not allow the player to locate either mines or IEDs prior to setting them off, I chose to use an IED on the bridge because the player could prevent the IED from going off in two ways: eliminate the triggerman or prevent him from gaining LoS to the bridge. Putting a fordable tile across the river wouldn't have been a solution as I would have had to mine it too. The Syrians would know this particular part of the terrain far better than the NATO forces ever would so why should NATO be able to sneak across an 'uncovered' ford? That seems foolish in my mind. And so, that in part should explain why the IED is there. I'm reluctant to say more in case I inadvertently let something slip...

Bodkin: the RED side has to have a large force preservation bonus to prevent BLUE from winning the mission at start-up. Your main objective in this mission is to PRESERVE the WMD site (200 points) with secondary objectives being to occupy it (100 points) and to destroy the REDFor (100 points). You also get 100 points if you do it with less than 10% casualties. RED has a force preservation bonus of 500 points to counter the 300 BLUE starts the mission with (PRESERVE and Friendly Casualties) and it's lost when RED loses 60% of his force. That's not really a high threshold IMO. It's just high enough to ensure that BLUE has to commit enough force to do the job and not sneak a win by blasting the crap out of the RED side with the formidable artillery assets at his disposal and then hitting CEASE FIRE. You were just a few points shy of inflicting 60% casualties. If I set that threshold at 50% then the same thing would happen to someone who completed the mission and only killed 49% of the enemy force. It's going to happen and I thought 60% was fair.

You can employ that tactic as well. While playtesting I would infiltrate my infantry across both sides of the bridge with little difficulty while my tanks and LAVs on the other bank provided very generous cover fire. This was my favourite way of playing this mission and I was under the impression that THAT was the gamey tactic - that IRL infantry don't like to get too far from their rides.

I'd really like to hear why the scenario designer thought this was a good idea. Simple answer: I have no military experience. Smoking an obvious choke point like that bridge to conceal your crossing seems like very good sense to me. But if you want to tell me otherwise...

Many happy returns of your 40th birthday Jon. Spend it with your family and ignore these boards for a day.

Sounds like you are familiar with the CMx1 scenario editor? If you were able to produce good maps with it, then you'll be able to producegood maps with the CMx2 editor with only a little bit more work. Designing maps/missions has been the biggest part of my CM experience whether that be x1 or x2. Making a good map has always been a lot of work and the CMx2 editor doesn't have any new tools that make certain aspects of it easier to do. Your 80/20 rule applies equally to CMx2. You can knock up a functional map very quickly in the editor. It's getting all the finer details in that takes the time. But when I do this, I listen to some Bach, or Mozart, or Pink Floyd and make the experience as pleasurable as possible. In fact I enjoy doing this almost as much as I enjoy playing the game itself, but that's me. The biggest new challenge that you'll face is flavour object placement.

I enjoyed reading your earlier post but this is utterly inexcusable and deeply, deeply offensive.

The thing with the screen shot you posted above however is that from my understanding, you know for a fact that the 2 properly spotted units are in fact, pure infantry units with their usual array of infantry small arms. Can't possibly be MG units, an HQ unit or an artillery spotter because if they were then you would know this at this point in the spotting cycle. That's what I feel I'm going to miss. KR: You wouldn't believe how hard we're pushing for this level of information to be substantially reduced. We're putting forward ideas that you guys have never even contemplated. But, at the end of the day, there's only so much two guys can do and I'll accept what we're given because it's already so much better than anything else you can play at this level...

This has already been discussed in this thread here... http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=94423

Interesting point. I have to confess that I find it very hard to make easy scenarios. Probably because I spend so much time working on my maps, I feel that the player should spend a proportionate length of time playing on it. I intended several NATO missions to be easy. How successful I was in doing so, I'll let you judge, so here is a quick list of the intentional 'easy' ones: German Campaign The Borders are Burning Ghost Towns Canadian Campaign Storming the Gatehouse Suburban Hell Sound of the Guns BTW, if I were to ask the question, 'which, in your opinion, is the most difficult campaign mission you've played?' I'd expect to get quite a few 'Objective Pooh from the USMC Campaign' answers. That is one of the most notoriously difficult, but fun, missions to play. As a result, it got discussed and discussed. Now, some of us scenario designers (not all though - George Mc immediately springs to mind) have egos that need a bit of stroking from time to time. We'd all like to produce the next 'Pooh' and have our mission discussed in a similar fashion. Easy missions tend not to get played or discussed nearly so often. So I'd blame 'Pooh' and Sgt Muhammed (I think he was the author of that legendary work, but if I'm wrong, my humblest apologies to the author) for the increased difficulty of campaign missions.

It's a fairly safe bet to say that if you really liked CMSF and you are a fan of WW2 wargaming that you'll like the Normandy title as well. However, if you're a big fan of CMx1 games and didn't like CMSF for any reason other than the Modern Era setting, you should wait before getting too excited. ESPECIALLY if the 1:1 scale or the RT engine were serious issues for you.

Trust me, Bodkin, I understand how you feel. I bought CMSF because I loved CMBB so much and I figured that Modern Era would tide me over nicely while I was waiting for the first WW2 title to arrive. I didn't really like the way that BLUE could steam-roller over RED so easily though and one particular experience with an M1 SEPS surviving 12+ consecutive hits from a platoon of AT-14 teams while it wiped said teams out pretty much finished the BLUE v RED experience for me. So I turned to RED v RED, as you know, for a very long time afterwards. Now that really hit the spot for me. (No casualty restrictions in either 'Hasrabit' or 'Dinas'). So much so that it took getting invited onto the Beta team to get me back into playing BLUE v RED. I got in in time for work starting on the Brit module scenarios and I quickly rediscovered why I disliked BLUE v RED. The solution I came up with (or more accurately, the wheel I re-invented as others came up with it before me - FMB and Normal Dude) was to restrict the casualties that BLUE could sustain in the course of a mission. Right or wrong, I'm sorry but that's pretty much the only way I could find to make BLUE v RED challenging and fun for me to play. It's you guy's collective bad luck that BFC asked me to do the campaigns for the NATO module Anyways, I am hard at work on my first WW2 campaign and I have to say that I am glad, glad, glad! not to have to rely on enforcing tight casualty limits to present the Allies with a challenge. Of course, I think you'll find you'll be very mindful of sacrificing your core forces to get wins in WW2.

Believe it or not, the scenario times were lengthened to allow players more time to accomplish their objectives than was necessary for a good player to do it in. It's the opening mission and the design was to have an easy one to ease the player into the campaign. The three NATO forces are all unique and so we didn't think you guys would mind having a fairly easy start to familiarise yourselves with the Dutch kit. If you go adding reinforcements that never arrive to prevent what's onboard during the mission from surrendering, some folks who are not such good players will not be able to complete the missions without taking unnecessary casualties and that would defeat the purpose of extending the mission length. In fact you should find that most of the missions in these campaigns have 2 hour time limits to allow players plenty of time to accomplish their missions. Really good players shouldn't complain if they win the mission well inside the time limit. Besides. it doesn't always feel real to have the Syrian Regular forces fight to the last man. Armies have a tendency to throw in the towel when they perceive that further resistance is futile. (UNCONs, Republican Guards, Special Forces and Airborne are a different matter though but there are none of these in this mission.) In fact, IIRC, you are facing a Conscript force with Poor morale in this one. they're practically looking to surrender to you from the get-go.

JEEZ! After reading this thread for a few minutes I actually forgot that I was reading posts on the outer boards. You've no idea how close I came to violating my NDA... Fortunately, the spell was broken when I read a post from Ali Baba and I thought 'when did this guy become a tester?'

I don't have CMA . Anyway, I'm WAY too busy working on my most ambitious campaign project yet -'The Road to Cherbourg' for WW2. Obviously, I cannot say anything about it other than that it will be bigger than anything that I've ever done before.

I presume you are not talking about any of my missions? I design them so that very good players will be able to get Total Victories while lesser mortals, myself included, will get a lesser result depending on how many friendly casualties we've taken or civilians we've killed while performing our mission. I've been making them that way since 'USMC Second Storm'. I think it's a good thing to have a wide spread of possible results.

Euri: Enjoy it while it lasts. You won't get many of those.

ThePhantom please post this over on the main boards as it's very unlikely Steve will ever look in these Scenario boards. The more attention this gets, the better the chance that it'll get fixed... QUICKLY.

What I hate is when a scenario designer chooses to make a battle difficult by making enemy reenforcments appear on the map from unrealistic directions. Sometimes they do it right in your rear without any warning in the briefing. I doubt those T-72's could sneak up on you like that in this day and age. When this happens I get the feeling that the scenario designer is just running out of creativity. Eek! Which campaign mission did this happen to you in? Or are you talking about scenarios in general?

I think it takes quite a while for folks to learn to relax while playing the game in RT. I remember when i started I would pause the game very frequently indeed, especially when things were happening. In fact, I'd say that I spent far more playing time paused than running. Some folks, particularly those who were upset about the inclusion of the RT option, felt that this was even worse than WEGO as the player could pause and reissue orders practically every second rather than be forced to wait a minute and accept the consequences of their actions. However, if you pause the game rarely, you get a much better RT experience. I only pause now when performing the artillery/air support call-in routines and when I get reinforcements, and, of course, the occassional 'WTF' moment. That way, I can play an hour long mission in about 1 hour 5 minutes. RT works best when you are controlling a single company or less. Two companies gets a bit unmanageable and anything bigger would be a nightmare. However, if I were playing a H2H game RT with a human opponent, I'd say that, since we were both operating under the same handicap, it might be an interesting experience as well. BTW, once you get very comfortable with RT, you might find WEGO play a bit too s-l-o-w. That 1 hour scenario will take upwards of 3 hours to play. For playtesting, I'd rather play something 3-4 times in RT than play it once in WEGO.

Ditto, so it's not a fluke...

Yeah, that one was a tricky one to engage. But there is more than one AI plan in this mission and in one plan, the AI doesn't set up in that building, at least at the start of the mission. They might just sneak a unit in later though If you have a look at the game map, you'll see that it's pretty much spot on as far as building placement is concerned. Unfortunately, there is no street view for the Tall Tamir area which is a shame and there are precious few photos on the web of this part of the world but it's about as close as you could expect it to be from someone who doesn't get paid to do this sort of thing . You would have to deal with that particular tactical challenge in real life as well.

I wonder how much longer this particular forum will be hosting the Pong challenge thread?

I will post a screenshot soon of one of Paper Tigers maps to show you what I mean. If you take a look at the real world locations that these maps represent, you'll find that the building facings are more or less accurate. If there's a 'puzzle' element in the map, blame the Syrian town planners I spent a LOT of time working on each map to get it as close to real as possible including the elevations.