Paper Tiger

Cheap HE weapons: The Syrians have an abundance of cheap and deadly HE weapons which also double as semi-useful AT weapons, namely the RPG. The US has no equivalent - the closest you get is the m203. A well placed RPG round can knock out 2/3 of a fireteam in a building. Agreed. Another good reason for keeping the engagement range nice and long for the BLUE player. Make the Syrian unit's experience Regular or better and you're in real trouble. Airborne units with Veteran and Crack experience are lethal when equipped with them. I've never tried Elite...

how much artillery would you give BLUE if it was designed to be played by the AI? Since the AI can't use it's artillery 'intelligently' during a mission, ie anticipating observed enemy movement and bombarding ahead of them, you can give the AI side a lot. Exactly how much would depend on the terrain, potential LoS etc, and you'd gauge this only after playtesting your mission for the umpteenth time. If the terrain is very closed, dense urban or example, the AI will probably never call in any artillery bacause the ranges are too short. There's a lot to consider. Something very important to bear in mind when designing missions to be played as RED vs the BLUE AI is that the AI controlled units won't be able to access extra javelins and so won't be nearly as uber as they would be if controlled by a human player.. How much would give BLUE to optimize for a H2H scenario? Again, it's hard to say because playtesting would determine this. Basically a human player, whether RED or BLUE, will react to spotting rounds zeroing in on his positions and move those units out of harms way in good time. The AI won't. It will even run its units into an active barrage.

The things people do when their wives are away... I suppose that's one of the reasons why my wife is so supportive of my hobby.

Patrocles: Try to be nice please. I think it is very bad form to post links to places where people can buy a company's product at discounted rates on the company's own boards.

If you are creating a scenario where the RED side is a Human controlled player, you'd be surprised how easy it is to create missions like this. However, if you want to play as BLUE defending vs the attacking RED AI then you've got an enormous challenge. One way to do it is to give RED LOTS of artillery and create a Pre-planned artillery barrage that targets the best positions for the BLUE defender. Doing this will expose you to the risk of the human player crying 'FOUL' when his set up area gets targetted at the start. Further, you need to take away artillery from BLUE, ALL of it. Even one module of 60mm mortars will kill any chance the AI has of winning. I believe that player controlled artillery is the single most unbalancing feature in a scenario v the AI. Some air support works quite well though for BLUE, a single Helo or Harrier (or even two) shouldn't unbalance things nearly so much. Regarding armour, give the Syrian lots of it, a least one company. Set the experience level to Regular and even T-62MVs start to become quite challenging. Birdstike. Stunning looking map. Look forward to giving your mission a spin sometime if it's designed for play against the AI.

Wow. Looks good. I haven't the time to read it all in detail but it looks like your doing just fine. There are a couple of things that v1.21 will clear up. I'm going to regret naming that town Persik. It's the last name of a famous Indonesian dancer and she's just got divorced for the second time this morning. If she does a search on the Internet to see how people are reacting to the news, she'll find 'Attack on Persik'. Poor girl...

What is the largest engagement you can have in SF currently? If your computer is up to it, you can manage a single Battalion in CMSF. I believe there are a few missions in the CMSF campaigns where you get a full US Stryker or Marines (YIKES!!!) battalion to play with. That's why I haven't played any of them yet. However, if you want to play with battalions, you would be better playng the game WEGO and not Real Time. To be honest, if you're playing WEGO and your computers red hot, why stop at a Battalion... My own personal comfort zone is around 2 companies in Real Time. More than that and it's too much to manage.

I can certainly understand why some folks are uninterested in the Syrian setting. However, CMSF has turned out to be very very good wargame indeed and it's a bit of a shame that some folks will pass it up simply because it's in the desert. Frankly, you've missed lot. Even in the arid setting, the game looks utterly gorgeous. I can see a lot of folks who turned away from CMSF coming back for the WW2 title with their mouths open in awe. Since it will be using the very mature CMSF game engine, you can look forward to some very rewarding game experiences indeed next year, especially after the initial release bugs get wrinkled out (of course there will be). But until it arrives, I guess CMBB will rule for a lot of folks.

Well, unless playtesting turns up anything, you can expect to see this at the Repository as soon as the v1.21 patch is released. It's called 'USMC Second Storm'.

Has anyone tried 'removing' them with artillery?

Perhaps one suggestion to improve the role of minefields in the game would be to make them a wee bit more similar to terrain objective areas. That way, if the minefield is 'Known to Enemy' or both etc, the Engineers could locate and neutralise them. And if they're 'Known to Neither' etc, you only get to find them by walking into them. However, to implement that would require a lot of coding work so I don't expect to see any change in the way the CMx2 engine handles mines in CMSF or the WW2 title. I'd rather that coding time was spent on flamethrowers, burnable terrain, heavy rain, etc...

Stunning work, man... as always. You are an artist...

Well, here's a bone. The mission is pretty much finished bar the testing. (I've yet to win it). In my testing session this afternoon, I came up against the Syrian equivalent of Bruce Willis. This guy just wouldn't die and was single handedly holding up an entire platoon. He went down literally just after this shot was taken but he took the guy on the left with him.

So this is what CMSF Beta testers get up to when they're not playing CMSF:D? I downloaded the demo this afternoon and am enjoying it tremendously. By the way, it's only the middle of the afternoon here.

What, no pink paint shells in Oddball's Sherman?

noxnoctum: Where's the tiger picture the OP mentioned? http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=86106&highlight=Tiger+Normandy+picture I think this might be it...

'Hasrabit' was only available for download at CMMODS so when it closed down, that was it for 'Hasrabit'. However, I still have it all in my CMSF game files folder. Before posting it at BFC's repository, I was going to revise some of the missions to take advantage of some of the things I've learned about scripting the AI, and also to get the AI to make better use of its artillery during the missions. But this review is proving to be a LOT of work. I've already rescripted 'Buying the Farm' (my favourite) and the opening mission 'Ambush' but I don't see me redoing every single one in this way. Once I've redone the finale, I'll probably post it up again. In the meantime, have you played the 'Dinas' campaign? With 15 missions, it should take you quite a while to get through.

Thanks for showing your support for this guys. I am really looking forward to getting stuck into this mission. I'm just tinkering with the map to improve it's tactical potential and it's appearance today (it got a 'woo hoo' approval from the wife yesterday so it's lookin' good) but the real fun starts tomorrow or Thursday. I have a holiday next week so I'll be able to do most of the work on it then. Although there will be a few trucks in the mission, I sincerely hope that folks won't be daft enough to use them as Infantry support vehicles. They are going to go in so as the player has a mobile supply depot that he can use to resupply his own forces and secondly to provide transport for the heavy weapons platoon. The manual says that they'll need some transport as they'll get tired very quickly lugging their guns about. (Yet, I remember when I was playtesting that Convoy mission for the Brit campaign and found that the trucks, herded together could put out a formidable amount of firepower to protect themselves at long ranges before units could fire their RPGs.) The 3:1 attacker to defender ratio... not going to happen, especially as BLUE has artillery (the company's own 60mm mortars, 2 sections of heavy mortars and 2 sections of heavy howitzers at present) as well as 2 Super Cobras and 2 Harriers. When we can program the AI with triggers to react to the player's moves I might give the real life 3:1 ratio a go but at present, the AI is simply scripted and unable to react to the player's movements. Therefore it has to be able to cover all the approaches and objectives. I also want to keep the tanks in as well so it looks like you'll be putting in an attack against a numerically superior foe. Just how superior will be determined in the course of playtesting. 30% Casualties! :eek: OMG! Would the Marines be willing to accept that kind of casualty percentage for anything less that a WMD objective? I'm planning to keep the player to something between 10-15%, probably nearer 10% seeing as how the Marines are primarily Infantry and so have fewer (expensive) vehicles to yield their casualty vps to the enemy side when they are destroyed. Whatever it ends up at, I'll make sure that the Marines have the firepower to do the job and take less than 10% casualties - or at least I will

At least the LAR would have a rotary asset like a Cobra circling around prepared to give CAS. I should have mentioned that there will be two Cobras at the start . They will be joined by a couple of Harriers later in the game. I like Air Support and to be honest, I don't much care to play BLUE v RED missions that deny air power to the BLUE side, at least when the opponent is Conventional. (Against UNCON, no problem) The plan is to give BLUE as much firepower as a Marine company going into combat against a conventional RED mech force could expect to have. That means air support and artillery as well. Of course, this will come with a very heavy price tag, namely that BLUE will have to do it by taking as few casualties as possible, (I'm thinking between 10-15% maximum just now but we'll see how feasible that proves oncee I start testing)

Hi guys. I've got a bit of free time coming up very soon and I'd like to get stuck into my first USMC mission. I have a nice big open map already drawn up for this battle but I'm a bit perplexed by the USMC OB and how to build the battle up in a 'realistic' way. I'm planning to make it a 3 hour mission so I'd like to start it off slow and build it up. The basic story is this: Marines are moving west to a small river crossed at the northern and southern ends of the map that they believe will be defended. There is ridge running in front of their start line to cover their advance. From the top of that ridge, they can see pretty much the entire board (and vica versa;)) How would they approach these crossings? I have elements of the Light Armored Recon platoon on the map at the start and want to add a single Infantry company, and the tank and engineer platoons from the MEU. What would likely accompany the Recon units? Would one platoon of Infantry in trucks be realistic?

Here's a link to the fully dynamic version... http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=314&func=fileinfo&id=171 and to the linear version... http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=314&func=fileinfo&id=172 You'll need to have the US MARINES module installed as there is a Syrian Airborne Company in the OB. You do know this is Red v Red? Not to everyone's taste.

And what's with the AI? Most of the time it never tries to retake the lost areas. Have you come to this game after playing the original CM titles? CMSF's AI is scripted by the scenario designer. Therefore, it doesn't react in any way towards the change of status of a VP location the way it did in CMx1. (Of course, if you follow the path the scenario designer hoped you would, the AI may 'appear' to react to your moves. But that won't happen very often.) With regards to the original campaign, the missions were designed using a beta build of v1.0. The TAC AI has evolved so much since the game was released that many of the missions that came with the game play very differently now. That's one of the unfortunate side effects of the game continually being improved without anyone updating the campaigns and missions that came with the base game. If you don't have any of the modules yet and you want a challenge playing as BLUE, I'm sure you'll be able to find plenty of very challenging missions at the Repository. You might try to find Webwing's 'In Search of a Ghost' campaign which might give you a bit more of a challenge that TF Thunder.

It sounds like ade670 plays the mission pretty much the same way I do and I have great success with that approach. SPOILERS The southern orchard is an EXCELLENT place to park some WMIKs and Jackals once the HMG threat has been significantly reduced. From there, they can area fire pretty much everything as your troops approach Block C, the North Yard and the buildings behind the school. I generally take very few casualties before I begin to assault the two main objectives in the town centre. That's when I start to get careless and turn a potential Tactical Victory into a Minor Victory or a Draw

Although I edit frequently to correct typos that slipped by my initial proof reading I don't think that there's any need for a longer edit period than 30 minutes with the obvious exception of that FAQ thread. I type what I want to say, check it quickly, post it and then read my post again. If I see some horrible typo or some grammatical error I will edit I quickly and then leave it. (Honestly, how often does anybody hammer a non-native poster for a spelling mistake or a grammar error?) So why do people feel the need to edit after 30 minutes? They have said what they wanted to say and have had 30 minutes to read and reread it. That's more than enough. If you can't polish your argument in that time then you were simply too hasty posting it. And if you really don't like what you said then you shouldn't have posted it in the first place.

How can you make a totally collapsed building? I've seen scenarios with this squares filled with rubble, but I don't manage to find the way to do get rid of the roof of any building. Any help appreciated. Hey hey. You'll love this Iomir. It's really easy to do. Open your map up in the scenario editor click MAP click on BUILDINGS you'll see in the top left NONE, and next to that is a box saying 'rubbled'. Click on Rubbled and select the biulding profile you want and place it on the map. Ta Dah!