Paper Tiger

I missed this thread and only just found it this morning. There's a LOT to read so until I have time to read them all later I'll confine my remarks to this: When the 'Cain and Abel' mission was designed and playtested the maximum allowed scenario length was 2 hours. The code changes that allowed you to extended a mission time to 4 hours didn't come in until later in the development of the Brit module. Since it worked fine as a two hour mission, I didn't see the need to increase the time limit as the playtesters could win it in that time. (Besides, we were uncertain if missions over 2 hours in duration would be accepted for inclusion in the module so it seemed an unnecessary risk to take) However, if you guys feel that two hours is not enough for using real tactics then just edit it in the scenario editor. I won't mind And regarding timing of missions in campaigns, I assume you're speaking about PT designed campaigns? You will frequently find that I design campaigns that have the core units fight two or more battles within very short time spans of each other - the BIG picture is broken down into 2-5 closely linked missions. I usually script things so that units in Mission A must accomplish their objectives in X amount of time so that they are available for the next action. Failure to achieve your objectives within the alloted time means that they will not be available, or will be delayed in arriving in mission B. Usually THAT is your penalty for failing Mission A. A suggestion for another mission? GeorgeMc's 'Armor Attacks' or 'UK Armour Attacks'. George is the real deal if you're into serious Modern Era combined arms combat. I just get lucky sometimes when I'm designing

bodkin have you played this mission yet? There are SO many ways to approach it, it's silly.

Yikes. I think that's the best result I've ever seen for that mission. Iron skill level too, just like me. Congratulations.

The DESTROY parameter kicks in very quickly if it is solely a single tile building. You will lose 50% of the points for damaging the building and 100% if you reduce it to rubble. If it's a larger building or a block of them, then it gets harder and harder to lose those points. I tried to use the DESTROY objective more than PRESERVE when I was designing the Al Bab mission in the German campaign and painted while blocks. Then I leveled a few buildings with artillery and ceased fire and the RED side got nothing, even though several of the buildings were rubbled. I hadn't damaged enough of the block to lose 50% of the points. So, Destroy works well when it is a small building. On the other hand PRESERVE gets lost very quickly. You can paint quite large city blocks with a single objective zone and then heavily damage a single building in that zone and lose 50% of the points. Rubble it and all the points are lost even though the rest are just fine. I had hoped that it would work so that you lost points in proportion to the amount of damage that had been inflicted on the total number of buildings in the objective. But it's a 50% or 100% loss only. Hope that helped and made sense. BTW, I'm not sure I should be posting just now as I have the flu and Indonesian medicine is unbelievably potent stuff. Plus I got up at 5:30 this morning to take photos of my wife's dancing competition... one of our neighbours is very rich and it's his birthday so he put on a show for us. You should have seen the singer... wow! I had to confine myself to photoing my wife only.

Also, I've got more Air and Arty in this mission that the entire Marines campaign, but I cannot use any of it because of the ROE Have a wee think about those ROEs and what you need to do to get a win. You can level every PRESERVE location and still win by eliminating the enemy forces as long as you keep your casualties down to a minimum. With all the PRESERVE points, that's 15%. With none of the PRESERVE points, it's about 7%. Bringing your boys home is your priority. You get brownie points for preserving civilian buildings but you lose VPs for destroying certain structures. So... a) don't destroy those special structures. And don't stress about the PRESERVE VP awards. Preserve your forces first. BTW, the REDFor is really poor quality in this mission. Their best quality troops are in Waltoo and they need to be taken seriously. But even then, we're talking Conscript/Green max with Normal morale at best. Take Waltoo slowly. The Nasri defenders have numbers but... well, let's see how you get on.

I thought that mission 4, 'HOPE', is one of the best in the Tall Tamir series. Nobody seems to have reported their experience with that one. I had the most fun designing and playtesting that particular mission.

It's funny how things turned out. I felt very sad when work was winding down on the Brit module because I had had so much fun with them. Being a Scot myself, and having authentic NE scottish accents in the game, "Save yer ammo!", made the experience far richer than it had ever been playing with US forces, or Syrian for that matter. I had almost no interest in the NATO module until I was invited to design the campaigns for the module. Once I got into it, I grew to love them. In fact, my personal all-time CMSF favourite formation is the Gebirgsjager formation. Prior to that, it was the Brit Light Infantry formation and it's a close second. But those Gebirgsjagers are awesome. BTW, I have a lot of love for the Marines as well. If I'm going to play US, I want to be a Marine And the Syrian Special Forces are fantastic fun to play with as well.

I suppose one could use a lot of smoke and then move freely since the triggermen couldn't see to detonate. I find myself continuously torn between trying to use RL tactics and realizing they can be disastrous in the game, and being frustrated at being forced to use gamey techniques to win missions. Are you serious? Would a real-life commander not use smoke to conceal the movement of his forces in such an environment as you'd find in mission 3? Then perhaps the gamey tactic should be adopted. The purpose of mission 3 is not to go in and identify the IEDs and disarm them. That is beyond the scope of the game, much as some of us would love to have this functionality extended into the game. Your mission is to go in there and eradicate the pocket of resistance that is forming in this corner of the town before it inspires others to rise up and resist the invader. You are informed that the barricades have been booby trapped with IEDs. At first I used mines at the barricades but because it is impossible for the player to disarm them without first setting them off, horribly gamey, I decided to go with IEDs which you can prevent from going off. The alternative was no mines and the mission was too easy that way and was a rather unremarkable MOUT mission. Since the first two missions fall into this category, I wanted to have something different for this one.

As I see it, there are two major obstacles to creating a CMx1 Operations style campaign with the CMx2 system. Elmar mentioned the persistent damage obstacle and the second is that we only have one possible branch after a mission ends. Yes, you can fudge it slightly so that if you fail to capture that farmhouse in mission 1 you start back on the same map and have to do it all over agai. Whereas if you do succeed in capturing it, you set up in the farmhouse and the scenario designer extends the existing map for the second battle. However, that's as far as the victory conditions will allow you to take it.

Of course, this is the crux of the situation. There's a huge difference between the survivability of being in a rubbled building and being in a building that's being 'rubbled'. I am more concerned about units surviving buildings being rubbled and not the amount of protection the subsequent rubble offers those troops who infiltrate the newly fortified position. How difficult it should be to reduce a building to a CMSF rubble tile is a completely different argument and doesn't belong in this discussion. At the very least, units that survive the rubbling should be out of things for a few minutes and not instantly back up on their feet. After all, they are permitted to continue firing their weapons at maximum efficiency right up to the point of impact so arguably they're not making best use of cover within the building when the bomb/shell hits. The way things stand at the moment, they're still fully functional after the hit as well.

It was the Airfield mission FYI. Special Forces or not I don't care... when you get a gigantic bomb dropped on you that leaves a giant crater... you die. Same if you have 48 dudes shooting and lobbing grenades at you at relatively short range. It just needs to be turned up a bit. I dunno... maybe by 50%? I didn't mention arty either but that's definitely an issue too. I consider it basically a waste to use my arty on anything but guys in the open or in trenches. Also had an apache strafe "heavy" a building twice. Everyone inside was green and I had to take them out MOUT style. Quick comment. The Syrian Special Forces in Minakh have mostly Normal morale. One platoon has High morale. Further, they are mostly Regular quality with only a few Veterans thrown in. They had higher morale earlier in testing but I noticed that they were proving very hard to kill when they were in buildings so I decided to reduce them. The team that sits in the forward buiding used to be a real PITA before I nerfed the SF in Minakh. I JDAMmed that building, hit it with mortars but most of them survived and I still lost guys in very long firefights weeding out the survivors. It didn't seem very realistic to me so I reduced their quality drastically and it began to play better.

I failed the "Valhalla" (Walhalla) mission and still beat the campaign Failing the final mission shouldn't necessarily mean that you failed the campaign. After all, your earlier results contribute something towards your final rating. Yes, I could have set it up so that a loss in Valhalla meant a loss in the campaign but I think the way I did it is fairer to the player who has struggled through some quite difficult missions to get there. I tend to think that a player who can get through to the final mission in a PT campaign has done really well and deserves a wee pat on the back Also I didn't play a mission called audacity before the current mission 'Kunheit!' is German for Audacity. That's my bad as one of the beta testers who can speak German posted a few revised names for the missions towards the end of testing and I elected to use his recommendations for some of my missions. By this time, of course, Webwing had posted the flow chart using the original names. That it is 'outdated' is not his fault at all. Any confusion that resulted is my responsibility. edit to add: BTW, are you going to post your playthrough of Valhalla? I'd really like to see how you approached that mission.

Valhalla is indeed the last mission of the German campaign. There's nothing beyond it. Are you going to return to the decision point and follow the Allepo branch? There are some very fine missions awaiting you there. Was anyone able to win this mission easily? Oh dear God, I hope not During playtesting, one tester was able to break this mission spectacularly. I made a small change to the reinforcement schedule which I hoped would fix it.

Nothing special: Intel Duo Core E8200 2.66GHz NVidea GeForce 9600GT Windows 7 2GB RAM (more coming for Xmas!) beautiful monitor though... I'm running the Debug version of Normandy just fine with pretty much the same frame rate as I ran the Debug version of CMSF NATO. It's been quite a while since I played a non-debug version of any CMx2 game so performance-wise, Normandy is probably about as demanding of my system as NATO was. I'm not playing Battalion sized missions though...

The golden age of Avalon Hill board games. I am now living in Indonesia but last night, I dreamt that I found a store that sold wargames and I was really excited, running around trying to find the name of the street so that I could come back when the shop was open. Through the window, I could see some old AH classics, including the ASL Rule set. I have never had that kind of feeling from a computer game, EVER. CM is very, very good indeed, but has yet to top the ASL experience for me. I miss those days badly sometimes as that dream last night suggests. Buying wargames was a hobby in itself, playing them another.

That's how it's meant to be . Lose mission 2 and it takes you longer to get to Al Bab than planned.

Something for you guys to bear in mind is that the NATO campaigns were designed and largely playtested while Alpha and Beta testing were still going on. Issues like the Canadians not having demo charges and core air units being fully resupplied between missions were observed and reported and would get fixed in time, or not. I'd have to say that I never played any Canadian campaign mission with demo charges because they didn't go in until very late in the day - and then they came out again Regarding the air support being shared, I too am glad that the Apaches have their full ammo load-out in each mission. I find they're more fun to use in game than heavy artillery. Dietrich: Is it in according with modern air support tasking practice that just two Apaches would be assigned to provide CAS to a mechanized battalion battlegroup? Or would it be more likely that two or more pairs of Apaches would be tasked to cover the various sections of the AO? Granted, the PPCLI battlegroup's AO is a small-ish city, which could, I suppose, be covered by just two gunships, but would they really be tasked to cover one element of the battlegroup for a limited time and use only a certain percentage of their loadout, then shift their support to another element in an adjacent area? I didn't know that. Nobody brought that up while we were developing the campaign. I just liked the idea of having the player have to manage these assets in the early part of the campaign. It seemed like a cool idea. Bloody amateurs I'll keep that in mind if I ever get round to doing another CMSF campaign. BTW, I put you in charge of one of the German PzGren Companies. Did you notice? The other company is led by (Klaus) Fischer whom I played a game of ASL by email with. ASL KG Pieper - Panthers in the Mist. He was the German and he slaughtered me. Made a big impression on me at the time.

What's the ETA? Nice try . The plan was to have the first three missions in the Canadian campaign share the same artillery and air assets as they all take place within a very short span of time and pracitically side by side.. However, the air assets got fully supplied between missions regardless of the parameters I set in the campaign script. The artillery units don't get resupplied between missions though until later in the day.

I would wait for the fix. Core Air units get fully resupplied between missions regardless of the resupply settings in the campaign script.

No worries. I remember how frustrated I used to get waiting for patches - fixes - and, worst of all, the occassional bone. I really wish I could say something that would ease your frustration but I can't. If you're like me, you forgive everything when you finally get your hands on the patch/game. But prior to that, well, I'm a different kind of fan I, too am very frustrated with the wait because I put a huge amount of my own time and creative effort into the Canadian campaign and nobody's playing it. Why? Because it's crap? Hopefully not , rather they're waiting for the little bugs that snuck in at the very end to get fixed before they play it. I'd imagine that Sergei and Normal Dude are similarly keen to see this patch out so that folks get to work on the Dutch campaign too. We're all waiting on BFC to release whatever it is we're waiting for them to release.

Woah there! The 'fix' for that low wall bug was to replace the existing LoS system with the new ELoS system. Patch 1.05 introduced the Low Wall bug, and yes, it was a PITA for those of us who had to wait but the fix was anything but simple. Thus the long wait for v1.06. Perhaps you just picked a bad example to illustrate your understandable frustration though. I'm not allowed to comment about patches but I don't suppose anyone would mind me saying that it shouldn't be much longer. But please remember that BFC is now supporting two games and is developing a third so it's not quite as clear cut as you might first expect

Is is possible to create a campaign that strings together a bunch of otherwise unrelated single missions? For example, I want to play a bunch of scenarios with the same set of core units. Absolutely. I understand this isn't aways a good idea or what the author intended, but is it possible? Assuming you're making a standard Blue v Red AI campaign, first, decide which scenarios you're going to combine. Note the Blue OBs carefully in each mission, experience, leadership modifiers, etc. In particular, pay attention to Reinforcement slots. Second, create a core unit file for your campaign that contains as many of the units you want to be used repeatedly. It's not necessary to have every unit in those missions in your core unit file. If they only appear once then they can stay that way. Thirdly, go through each mission importing the core units and placing them carefully in the scenario editor. Exit set up and delete the old BLUE OB units that you have subbed in. Voila. That should take care of it. If you are creating this for your own private pleasure, nobody will care. However, if you are planning to share it, you might want to ask the scenario author's permission first before doing so. For campaign scripting, JonS and GeorgeMc both posted examples of their campaign scripts in an earlier thread. Have a look here for help in that department. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=93518 If you need more help, just ask...

This point was brought up during testing... twice. It earned the nickname 'the Terminator Effect'. It was observed and reported, and some of the posts read practically word-for-word like the posts in this thread. Especially Lanzfeld's

Ha ha! It looks like we're going to get at least two new campaigns set in this region of the world. I just got started on a map in this region for my new Brit Light Infantry campaign this weekend.:eek: Anyway, not to steal your thunder, mate. Your maps look excellent.

I failed all the mission parameters but saved the lives of my men while utterly annihilating the opposition. I like to think that now my men adore me while my superior officers dislike my ham-fisted approach towards mosques and civilians in general. War is hell. THAT'S the way to do it! I didn't change anything in the first mission. It was intended to be easy. were there actual bad flaws in the original? no bad flaws that I'm aware of... the only error was that I used the wrong air support in one mission but that got corrected for this version.