Paper Tiger
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Posts posted by Paper Tiger
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Well, well. It turns out that a single platoon of T-90s isn't really that much of an upgrade. I thought they'd be much tougher in action and so decided that a single platoon would suffice where a company of T-72 TURMS served before. Not even close. Well, that's going to make the Guards missions a tad easier anyway.
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The campaign covers about 30 hours of real time so there won't be any replacements for losses. However, the Special Forces don't fight alone in most of their missions so I'd suggest you let the help do the door-to-door.
There's no option (that I'm aware of) for replacements to be of lower quality. It's a good suggestion though. Fortunately, you can combine two or more depleted units into one large squad now with the new engine so at least you're not stuck with several 1-man squads running around in later missions anymore.
The Guards are on their own in their missions though so I'm trying to keep the difficulty of their missions down. Once I've got the RG missions all crafted, I will compile the missions into mini campaigns to test them to see if the campaign is viable.
I prefer the Red v Red myself but I'm missing hearing artillery and air strike call-in voice acting when playing and the Syrians also have very poor co-ordination of artillery and air strikes in particular. After Gung Ho! and the new German version I'm working on, the contrast is striking - the voice acting helps to create the impression of a living battlefield and the call-in times are really short, sometimes just 2 minutes for battalion mortars and less than 10 minutes for sir strikes called in with an air controller. But the actual balance of forces is better and there are fewer constraints on your actions in a mission so that you don't have to worry about civilian casualties so I really let rip with Red v Red MOUT.
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A quick update on progress - I've been trying to decide how best to get this project moving and one of the reasons why it's proving hard to do is that some of the new missions are just too damned hard and just not fun for me to play. I don't enjoy playing really, really hard missions any more and prefer something doable with proper planning and a little bit of luck. So I'm dialling down the difficulty in some of the missions so that they're not all hard.
I thought I'd get this finished quite quickly as it's already a working and finished campaign and just needed some AI improvements but it's turned out to be much more work than that. I forgot that pretty much every mission has an AI attack and they're a lot of work to get right. I want to do a good job with this and try to use as many of the improvements to the game engine since Hasrabit was released. I did a quick and dirty v2 back in the days to add AI fire plans and well, I was a bit over-zealous with that feature and that has required quite a bit of tinkering alone.
Apart from the finale, 'Hasrabit', the Special forces missions, both Phase 1 and Phase 2, are all pretty much done with new OBs for both sides, AI plans and very extensive map reworks. The first three missions of the campaign are tested and finalised now and am trying to get the Phase 1 Republican Guards missions into a similar state. As I mentioned in an earlier post, almost all the RG missions are AI attacks or meeting engagements and they're really hard to do. 'The Guards Counterattack' mission is almost there but I've decided to make 'The Barrier' mission an AI-defense mission instead of the meeting engagement it was. Now it's the AI that is forming the titular barrier and that should make it easier as it doesn't take so long to devise a good defence with 2-3 AI plans.
I've been scratching my head what do with Hill 142 - the delay calling in Syrian air strikes is appalling and so I'm pondering redoing the entire mission to skip the long recon phase. There was no Syrian air support in the original version and so adding it has changed the balance. I find it only works well in very slow missions with long waits for things to happen or if it is available from the get go in which case, it's often too OP.
As for the Phase 2 missions, there are only two RG missions and they're both proving tough nuts to revise.
Heavy Metal - now I've decided to go back and use the original map with some tweaks like I have done with The Guards Counterattack for this one to avoid having to redo it completely. That means I will be able to tweak the existing AI plans instead of crafting whole new ones. I will keep the new map shown above for a future project - I have some ideas but I'll hold on until after this gets finished.
Saudara - I've completely redeveloped the small built up area and expanded the map but otherwise it's not going to change that much.
That's where I am at the moment. I have to admit that I'm enjoying the newer, easier versions and the ideas are coming along slowly for the Hill mission. There's no rush to get this finished, there's no release date to consider so I can take my time. If it gets too much again, I'll maybe do some work on the German version of Gung Ho! to reinspire me.
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14 hours ago, StieliAlpha said:
„Gebirgsjäger Vorwärts“ definitively sounds good.
Just strike out the „s“ at the end. Unlike „Hunter“, „Jäger“ has no specific plural in German. It‘s one Jäger or two Jäger or many Jäger….
Okay, done that. Thanks
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20 hours ago, StieliAlpha said:
Hm, good question. „Gung ho“ translates indeed to something like „wild entschlossen“ or „übereifrig“. But that‘s useless as a scenario title. @Paper Tiger What do you want to express with your title? Are you looking for some kind of „unit motto“? I understand „Gung ho“ is very much a USMC typical phrase.
Otherwise, offhand I would recommend something like „Vorwärts“ or „Attacke“ or „Zum Angriff“.
BTW, in our context, I would translate „Vorwärts“ with „Advance!“
Actually, I used 'Gung Ho!' for the USMC because that was the name of the ASL USMC module. Yes, that's how deep my thinking was. These seem to be good suggestions but for now, I've got 'Gerbirgsjagers Vorwarts' as a working title but it's certainly not set in stone.
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I had a quick look at the 'Tiger' mission and the attacking Pioneers' morale is Extreme which is probably why they don't give up. There are some very weak units mixed into the German OB but the majority are good quality and so they won't surrender. It's definitely not due to reinforcements that never arrive.
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Correcting a typo in the briefing means I need the original core units file to recompile the campaign and I lost all my campaign files nearly 10 years ago in a really bad hard drive burnout (although it only seems like a couple of years ago). Making a new core units file also means re-importing all the units into each mission and placing them before recompiling otherwise the whole thing would be utterly broken. So it's not trivial at the moment. If I had a the original core units file, you'd be correct - it would be a few seconds work.
It's a job I'll get around to eventually but it's far down the list.
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On 6/29/2023 at 11:58 PM, PEB14 said:
I'm just starting The Scottish Corridor campaign. After six months of playing this game (mostly infantry scenarios), I want to see how I can fare in this reputedly very difficult campaign.
Anyway, I was surprised to notice that the briefing specifies that my core units start at 80% strength because of the losses sustained during the approach march. Fine. But obviously they DON'T. All my squads have 10 men (good for me!).
Which leads me to wonder wether @Paper Tiger never noticed the headcount bug (which forbids to modify initial headcount for core units), or if this bug only appears in recent versions of CMBN?
I was not aware of this bug. I'm not sure I want to 'correct' it as the campaign is hard enough already.
I'd have to redo the entire core unit file, import all the new units and place them so it might be some time before I can do even a simple correction as updating the briefing.
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Well, work on this is going much more slowly than I thought. I haven't given up on it but have to confess that I find that playing Red v Red isn't as much fun as playing Blue v Red - it takes absolutely ages to call in air support and high calibre artillery, nearly 30 minutes which is a long wait. Recon is also not as much fun as a result so I'm doing a bit of a rethink on how to approach certain missions.
The sheer number of AI attacks in this campaign is pretty overwhelming as they're hard to do well and I prefer to have more than one plan. Almost every mission is an AI attack or a meeting engagement (even worse!). I've already turned Strong Stand from a meeting to a player attack and will do the same with Hill 142.Anyway, I opened up a few of the maps and got back to work this morning and have a better idea where to go with this. It's going to get finished later rather than sooner.
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On 5/1/2023 at 7:31 PM, Aussiegrit said:
Ok so I downloaded the patched/corrected campaign file from the Batlefront patches section. I cut and paste it into my Campaigns folder within the game directory. I load my last save for this campaign prior to the much maligned and stuffed up mission 7 mook bridge canal mission. Sure enough after I do my setup and first turn orders and hit the red button the wooden bunker is still right on the edge of the bridge along with some wire. And when my infantry reach the bridge, they still don't cross it.
So do I have to save this and start a completely new campaign again from the first mission for this stupid wooden bunker not to appear and block my troops from crossing the bridge no matter what where all the objectives reside that are impossible to capture due to this campaign killer bug?
Interesting. I'm afraid so. If the bunker is still right at the edge of the bridge, that's not the updated version of the campaign so you'd need to restart the campaign to get the fix. Saves from the old campaign have the old campaign baked in. The fix wasn't a code fix but rather a scenario design fix.
For the rework, I repositioned it away from the bridge to near the pump house and tested it several times (read that as more than 5 at least) to ensure that the US could get across the bridge and they could every time.
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Well, thanks to Age of Wonders 4, not an enormous amount of progress has been made but I've been working on the first two missions and have finally gotten Overkill and Ambush to where I want them. I'm considering taking out the Adan airfield missions as they are not part of the original campaign and the second one involves a large AI attack and these attack missions are a lot of work to get right.
I've toned down the difficulty of Ambush quite a bit - the new AI fire plans mean that the player will get ripped to pieces by the superior firepower of the attacker. It's an ambush mission - the AI is not supposed to know you're there and to blunder into your well-set ambush. Best guesses aside, I don't really know when the player will launch his ambush so I'm not going to script in fire plans for AI groups and just let them start firing once they know the enemy is there the old fashioned way. But I'm taking this experience with me to the Montebourg rework to make German AI attacks much more effective.
Testing the Guards Counterattack mission is quite hard work because while it's an AI attack, it's also quite a long mission as you have to counter attack, obviously. The opening AI assault is brutal and I'm happy with that but I have yet to win it - the T-90s are not as OP as I'd feared so I'm going to stick with them. The Barrier mission is a meeting arrangement and is going to be a lot of work testing too. I've reworked the original map and extended it quite a bit to improve LoS and added some terrain features to an otherwise barren map. A lot of apparently arid Syria land appears to be worked by farmers so I've worked a couple of features in from real world locations to make it look more interesting.
The AI is defending in Hill 142 so that won't be nearly so much work to finalise. Obviously, Heavy Metal is a complete reboot and another meeting engagement and then there is the final Guards mission, Sadara, which is like Hill 142 but much bigger.
The final mission, Hasrabit, is another large AI attack and quite a beast to manage so there's still a lot of work to do there.
So, it's a lot of work but I'm slowly working my way through it. Slow and steady wins the race (Tell that to Usain Bolt)
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I see this situation has been resolved. Sorry, I've been very busy with both work and AoW4 this past week.
Hope you enjoy the campaign. I've yet to hear from anyone who has completed it or at least any feedback on the final three missions.
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Just a quick post to reassure you that I am still working on this. However, Age Of Wonders 4 dropped last week and I've spent all my game time playing that and will likely be playing a lot of it for some time to come.
I'll be working on this in the evenings in the future as I don't generally 'play' games then. It's also good because it prevents burnout from being a thing.
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Not going to lie, I'm kind of burned out on doing infantry-centric missions at this point. I don't know if it's the cold and the resulting poor quality sleep or if I've really just played too much of the same kind of missions for too long. Whatever the reason is, I know that I just can't face playtesting either Farm or Breakout any further without doing something else instead. Fortunately,
the campaign has a mix of Infantry (Special Forces) missions and Mech (Republican Guard) missions to mix things up for the player so I'm going to avail myself of that option as well and do some work on the Guards missions for a few days before returning to work these two.
Besides, working on the AI attack plan on the Farm mission has got me enthused about reworking the AI in these set of missions. The AI attack plans in The Guards Counterattack mission are abysmal. (Although there are four of them and some are very aggressive which compensates a bit) You're still fighting an entire battalion in the original version of this mission which is just too much. While I've already removed an entire company from the AI's OB, that might change if the T-90s are just too OP for the AI to go up against. The tools exist now to make the AI much more effective on the attack (though nowhere near as devious as a real opponent) and I've got far more experience with the editor now so I don't need to rely on maxing out the AI's OB to create a challenge.
I seem to recall sneaking along the board edges to get LoS on the enemy in the earliest versions of this game and I don't want to be doing that again. I'm looking for a better experience this time around.
I'm a bit disappointed because I'd rather hoped to have almost all the SF missions in the bag before I return to work next week but what's the big rush? I need to spend quite a bit of time playing each of these missions properly before I can make it available for the community so I'm just going to go with the flow and accept that it's time to work on the Guards missions for a few days instead. It's not like it's time wasted.
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I could write a very long post about this topic but I'll keep it simple.
You PAINT up to three set-up zones for both players - Blue 1, 2 and 3 and Red 1, 2 (pink) and 3 (orange) and any units that are placed in these zones in the editor by the designer can be re-positioned by the player (and the AI through painting yellow zones) anywhere in the same set-up zone. Units not placed in a set-up zone are fixed in place and can't be re-positioned by either side. A lot of the time, players just paint one large Blue-1 or Red-1 set up zone and don't bother with the others. The extra allows the designer to exert a much more sophisticated level of control over AI placement in plans.
You can overlap these zones and units placed in such a mixed zone can be placed in both. I don't do this intentionally as I have my own system.
The player can position the AI's units very precisely in the editor and, as long as you don't paint any yellow set up positions for the group in order 1 in a plan, they will stay there at set-up if that plan is selected. Or you can paint certain sections of the set-up zone with yellow boxes and decide if they'll set up on Lower Floors, Upper Floors, Rooftops or a mix if they are in buildings.
There are five possible AI Plans so if if you're not too particular, you can paint zones for the AI groups and it will place units from that group randomly in that yellow set-up zone in that plan. If you're only planning to use one plan, set the units up by yourself.
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I've had a really bad cold this week and didn't make the tremendous progress I was hoping for but regardless, I soldiered on and got something done while I was sniffling and coughing and dosed up with the really potent medicine they prescribe out here such non life threatening illnesses. (I'm not complaining though) When I'm feeling really, really crap, I work on maps as it requires almost no concentration so I started adding some new terrain features to the Guard Counterattack mission (that name's going to have to change - it's SO ASL!) as well as making other similar tweaks to other missions, in particular to the Breakout mission which I'll talk about below.
But the MAIN work has been on the two Phase II Special Forces missions, 'Buying the Farm' and 'Breakout'. Since observing the AI carry out its plan is quite easy work when you're feeling sick, I can settle back with a cup of tea and make notes and the necessary adjustments. I had big ambitions for the AI attack in the Farm mission but I have had to temper them as the AI really, REALLY can't make any sort of attack across a bridge. I can't get them to manage the crossing unopposed either as it's an absolute mess to watch as the vehicles just get confused and just mill about. I really don't like to undo hours of work planning and adjusting AI plans to reposition the forces for the assault and was even trying to justify leaving it in to myself as making the player's job easier. But that's just a poor excuse for crap scripting.
But it's not for nothing as I will be working on the AI for the Republican Guards later and there are no bottlenecks on their maps so the experience will serve me well when I get around to that.
'Breakout' is a much simpler beast to script. It's another 'living' battlefield experience but you'll be on the clock on this one - find the AA guns, knock them out and exit your forces from the map. Getting the timing right on this one will be challenging - it's not a hard mission to kill the guns but getting off the map is a different story. While having too much time will just make it a filler mission.
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I have to say that the game engine has improved massively while I've been absent. Today, I really got my teeth into my first proper AI assault and the new orders really, really make a huge difference to the AI's effectiveness. It's still nowhere near as good as a human opponent but it's about as good as an AI can get and it means that I can keep the numbers roughly even, with BlueFor outnumbering RedFor. Of course, a substantial part of that force is going to get wiped
In the original 'Buying the Farm' mission, a small force of reserve infantry started in the centre of the map and were attacked immediately by a mech company. Later, when we were able to add Artiilery Fire zones to our AI plans, I subjected the poor sods to a massive artillery barrage. In the meantime, your Special Forces were building up and getting ready to come to the rescue.
I wanted to maintain as much of that as possible but I was struggling to get the AI to attack a well-defended railway station surrounded by berms. No matter how big the barrage (and it was getting really stupid) when the attackers crossed the berm, they were mowed down. There was nothing for your Special Forces to do so the berms had to go and what a difference that made! Now the AI artillery barrage has been massively reduced to sensible proportions and the AI clears the station very efficiently with few casualties. I tested and tweaked the AI attack all morning and early afternoon before finally bringing in the core forces and play testing.
It's still 'Buying the Farm' but it's tougher and more fun, at least for me. I might have to rename the mission though as it's a railway station instead of a large square block of 1-story buildings, perhaps 'Repo Men' as the AI takes control of the station and it's your job to repossess what was stolen. Now I just need to make sure that it's winnable without being too bloody, a three-hour slog or too demanding of your core artillery assets. As before, you'll have some very shaky reserve infantry forces and some bottom of the barrel tanks to help you win the fight.
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Strong Stand and Adan Airfield are both done now, AI plans made and tested and victories scored in both missions. With extensive use of triggers in both missions, they make the Adan mission feel alive with units reacting to your moves. They're scripted not to be 'John Wick' efficient but to behave realistically. But they'll still fight.
This is Adan Airfield. I've reworked the Minakh Airfield map and made a whole new mission from it. There will be two versions, the Attack version, which will be the new opener (because the result will have consequences for the rest of Phase I) and the Defend version in Phase II which is intended to be a real tough one and will similarly have consequences for all the Phase II missions.
I suspect some folks are going to rage at me for giving you 40 minutes to capture the airfield. I just forced a surrender with just over 9 minutes on the clock so it's more than doable.
Here's the Strong Stand map:
It's been extended a fair bit and the compounds have all been reworked to make them more realistic.
That's not a small amount of work but it's all done and the mission appears to be doable too. The original version was a real dog to play, 2+hours fighting in the dark against a numerically superior mechanised force that was well trained and equipped. It's a Light Infantry action and Special forces are just not that good against mechanised forces and, to be honest, i was finding the prospect of testing it a bit daunting so I decided to rip it all apart and start again with a whole new Red OB with new AI plans. Now it's a lot of fun to play.
So that's all the Special Forces phase I missions finished. So it's on to Phase II now which will take a bit longer as the maps have been changed so substantially that they'll need a lot of testing to get right. The Phase II missions are
Adan Airfield (Defend)
Buying the Farm
Breakout, and
Hasrabit.
After that, I'll get to the Republican Guards missions.
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I'd imagine there are a few Second Front players hanging around these boards.
It's the nearest thing to ASL for the PC that you're likely to find.
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That's Ramadan finally and officially over so I can probably expect to get an uninterrupted night's sleep once again. When I'm a bit sleepy, i tend to spend more time working on maps and I've now updated all the maps for the campaign. I even reworked the 'Breakout' which I was kind of dreading doing as it was the most ASL-like of all the maps. I also got 'Overkill' finalised last night so that one's behind me. Now I'm on holiday for about 10 days and today I got started on serious AI planning. This is the plan going forward.
I'm going to focus on getting all the Special Forces missions up and working so that I can compile them and test them together. This shouldn't take long as the maps for all of them are now done and I've already imported all the core forces and placed the enemy forces. Today, I worked exclusively on 'Ambush' and it became very obvious early in serious testing that the river and the bridges were going to have to go. The AI really struggles on the attack even in the best of circumstances so add two bottlenecks across a river and have a mech infantry company try an assault across it and you're really flogging a dead horse. So the river was removed as well as the bridges and it plays much, much better. This is the type of mission that I'm likely to play over and over again while working on the campaign, short and small, fun but dangerous, so it'll get iterated upon as testing goes on.
Tomorrow, I'll get started on Strong Stand and the airfield missions and that will be all the Phase I SF missions done. However, the Phase II missions are almost entirely new because of the extensive map reworks as well as me rationalising the campaign so that there is some consistency to the friendly board edges. so will take a lot more time to test.
Here's the old Breakout map:
Here's the new one from the same angle.
And from the other end
Gone are the elevations, the mud, the foliage and about half a million flavour objects.
I've added a river (the player has to move across it so there's no worries about the AI being able to navigate across it). Gone is the massive, boring workshed complex and it's been replaced with a real-world farm complex, only a few kilometers west of 'Hasrabit' as it happens. I was lucky to find a large, square farmhouse to replace the old one too so I'm happy with the result.
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Thanks for the feedback. It all helps me to improve things and I'm glad to read you're enjoying it. That's the most important thing.
A couple of points. There's only one Reserve Infantry company with a platoon of tanks in that mission. The actual force ratio is almost 1:1 with regards to raw manpower, with REDFor having 12 more men in total. Those USMC squads are almost twice as big as a Syrian squad. The USMC have much better equipment, training and have a number of vehicles, artillery and a F-18 Hornet in support. In playtesting, three USMC platoons was overkill. (Indeed, I'm finding the force mismatch between Blue and Red even worse with the Gebirgsjagers - I thought I would need all three platoons to make up for the reduced manpower but, boy, can those guys dish it out. And their artillery is awesome. Three NATO platoons is too much for any sort of challenge to be present in the mission.)
Which brings me to point 2. Perhaps it's not obvious from the briefing or the tac map but about half the village buildings are not part of the Preserve objectives and so you can blow up quite a lot of **** without any loss of points. Since the likely result is an enemy surrender, you'll get 250vps for the objectives and a further 100vp for keeping your casualties low and that more than offsets the vps the enemy gets for killing your troops. I earned that bonus almost every time during playtesting because I don't care nearly so much for the Preserve awards. There's an interesting psychological consideration employing them because some folks think they're must haves to get the win - that they should NOT destroy any buildings. You can win the mission very comfortably without ANY of them. The enemy only get points for killing your troops so getting in and contesting the VP locations and killing the enemy while keeping the casualties to a minimum is one way to win. It is possible to win and get all the points but I didn't do that very often.
But, of course, DON'T blow up the mosque. That gives the RedFor an award which is hard to offset without the Preserve awards. A lot of thought went into those victory conditions.
EDIT to add:
I see that's your first post. That's a W-A-Y better post than my first post on these boards -(a lame joke that nobody noticed.) Thanks for the feedback and I appreciate you signing up to provide it. Good luck with mission 2.
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Here's the new opening map: Overkill. Once again, it's a night mission but I've set the timer to 7am so that you can actually see something:
It's a small map with very small forces on both sides. While it's intended to be easy, you can't just rush in, you'll need a reasonable plan.
It's a real world place too. I was tempted to expand the map to include all of the terrain around that strange round hill to the east of the village but I'm beginning to get tired of doing map work for this campaign and want to get stuck into doing the AI and actual play-testing.
That's the all-new Heavy Metal map. It's another real-world place, and yes, there are large open areas with orchards scattered around within these berms. I expect it will change a bit as I test it but that should do the job.
Now I'm reworking the Saudara map and expanding the Hasrabit map considerably. The former is a completely fictional map so I can do what I want with that but Hasrabit is real and so it's getting expanded considerably to include the open, farming terrain to the east of the city as well as the compounds. I guess I'll have most of that map work done before the holiday begins.
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Well, it's been a really busy week this last week and because it's the last week of Ramadan, it's quite noisy at night, fireworks, drums etc, (silent through the day though) and so sleep suffers a bit. And that means I can't really focus to do a good job of AI planning. So instead, I've been reworking the existing maps to improve each of them and make the compounds and villages much more realistic. They're all real world places in Syria although from wildly different parts but the difference it makes in night and day. While they look like NATO maps now, they still strongly resemble the original maps which is a considerable improvement. And it hasn't required an enormous amount of work either. The best change made so far is The Guards Counterattack which looks pretty realistic in the moonlight. Screenshots will follow later but boy, is that a brutal mission!
That map has been expanded quite a bit too as has the Barrier mission which has been reworked as a Prevent enemy forces from exiting the map edge mission. I'm happy with how the changes look too. They make the map look more interesting.
Another mission that has been substantially reworked is the Buying the Farm mission. I was looking for a large warehouse feature in Google Earth and had the idea to make it a railway yard instead and so the entire thing has been redrawn, trees removed and elevation changes substantially reduced and rail lines added with bridges over them. It looks really good and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
I've added a couple of new missions to the campaign to create a story line with consequences that matter including a new opener, which is tiny, but a lot of fun (for me anyway) and should allow the player to indulge himself letting rip with the heavy weapons in a civilian area, a welcome change from the usual Blue v red restriction. Called 'Overkill', winning this mission deters the civilian population from rising up and joining in the revolution at least for a few hours anyway. This allows me to create a variant of the opener which is much easier if you win Overkill. This required a new map but it's very small and I finished it this morning. Funnily enough, it started out as an experiment to see how the Special forces AA, Grenade and HMG vehicles work and I was so happy with the result that i decided to make this the new opener instead. So you have a single platoon and some new vehicles to play around with.
Immediately after that, I decided to do a whole new map for Heavy Metal because I just felt I couldn't use the old one. It was too small and too artificial for what I need but I found a location to the SE of Damascus which fits the bill perfectly for a large mech/tank clash and have got it 50% done. It's an arid map so it's pretty open and flat but there are lots of berms which break LoS up.
I have created the core unit file and done the admin for the campaign so that I know who goes where and when and have imported the new units into all the existing missions except heavy Metal so I've done a LOT this week, just no new AI plans which is the real work. With regards to the core units, I've decided to try out a couple of platoons of T-90s to accompany the Republican Guard. Now you have just two mech companies with attachments instead of three but I figure the T-90s will more than compensate for them. if they're too OP, I'll swap them with the T-72 TURMS again. There are three SF companies but one is designated for a special series of two missions on the same map (the second new mission) which it's unlikely to survive so there will be one company with attachments in each mission, usually Reserve Infantry and some tanks from the very bottom of the barrel, just like original Hasrabit.
So, Ramadan ends mid-week next week and I have a week's holiday so the sleep deficit should get paid back quite quickly. Then I'll be able to focus on doing AI plans and testing done on some of these missions. I guess I'll have a better idea of how long this is going to take after we get back to work after the May Day holiday. I'm hoping it won't be too long as I'd like to have this wrapped up by mid-June. That's probably a tad optimistic but we'll see.
There's no option (that I'm aware of) for replacements to be of lower quality. It's a good suggestion though. Fortunately, you can combine two or more depleted units into one large squad now with the new engine so at least you're not stuck with several 1-man squads running around in later missions anymore.
New campaign - USMC Gung Ho! available
in CM Shock Force 2 Maps and Mods
Posted
Ah, you have no idea how much that is appreciated.
Thanks for posting that. You have re-inspired me to get back to work on this with more enthusiasm so that all that hard work doesn't just go down a black hole.
Your opening is almost identical to mine but I am much more aggressive with my Humvees than you and much less aggressive with the AAVs (They're carrying so much valuable ammo). I tend to hit the northern yard HARD with heavy artillery and send 1st platoon into the town from the north yard while 2nd platoon and the engineers go in like you did. If you clear out the north yard, the Syrians in the centre usually surrender more quickly.
There are several AI plans in that mission and two of them will give you quite a different experience so your video and my post won't spoil much for others
If you record yourself playing the next mission, I'll be curious to see how you approach that one.