Paper Tiger

That's really useful to know. Thanks.

Well, yes, Montebourg is a bit of an outlier. If you do all the research, look for locations, write briefings, do all the artwork as well as craft all the maps to a high degree of precision, and make up missions with multiple AI plans as well as the variants, yes, an 18-mission historical campaign is between 3-6 months work with about 4-8 hours most days (which is what I was doing back then - my job allowed me a great deal of down time and then I got promoted- damn! ). However, I've seen that there are a number of massive maps available for the community to work with to make campaigns. I really am not joking when I say that I could knock out a 5-8 mission campaign that would be 'playable' in a week if I were to use one of those and not worry about getting it look good with proper artwork. And there's the rub: there are standards that are set by the community for our work and most folks don't want to produce something that isn't up to scratch with the more polished campaigns made by those of us who are willing to put in the time to do it to that standard. They'd be embarrassed to submit their work and that's probably the reason why there are not as many campaigns as there could be. If that's true, that's a real shame because that's what those giant maps are for. I will freely put my hands up and admit that I'm so familiar with making campaigns with the editor that the following assessment on how easy it all is to work with for a noob is way off here. But honestly, I don't think it's as much work to do as you'd think if you are not looking for a highly-polished product with briefings and artwork and since you're talking about Quick Battle Campaigns, you're obviously willing to accept the reduction of quality. I see your point about Quick Campaigns: it seems like an easy ask to say all you need are to set up the parameters at the start, the number of battles, select your QB maps, the forces that are available for the AI to buy from and voila. Yes, you could make up your own core unit file for the QC to draw from but you'd also need a script. Let's say that it was all abstracted so that a script was unnecessary though; the end result would still induce rage from folks who did all that work only to find the AI didn't perform and sat in its starting locations. There are several reasons why what the OP reported might have happened which I won't go into in any detail. Broad strokes, the AI plan might have might have put the majority of the units in a group which had an Assault or Max Assault order, the latter being particularly bad. Or, because QB maps can have multiple AI Plans, maybe it used the one plan where the AI set up that group to be more cautious. Or maybe even the one map that slipped past the testers. (I saw how much work was involved in getting the QB maps ready for the release so I'm respectful of it but we're human and mistakes get made regardless.) Unless you're using a set of maps that you've vetted beforehand, that's still going to happen with a QC.

Well, I always admit that the two designers that inspired me the most when I was starting out with the editor were GeorgeMc, whom you know, and Pete Wenman who produced some really fine maps for CMSF back at the very start. He was also incredibly creative with mods. MikeyD put me on to Red v Red. It never occured to me to do that myself and he made an interesting and fun Red v Red mission which I enjoyed a lot - far more than the Blue v Red missions I played. There was a guy around called Webwing who also inspired me to make a campaign. He was working on something called "In Search of a Ghost" and I thought it would be cool to do a campaign all of my own. And finally, Bardosy who made really fun campaigns to play. I guess it sounds like I don't have an original idea in my head after reading that but I was inspired by all of these folks and never copied. I've always striven to find my own style.

Absolutely. I've always thought of AI plans as being one massive, game-length WeGo turn 'sent' by the designer to the player and as such, the designer can script some really surprising behaviour. For me, the improvements I'd like to see but probably never will are: branching AI plans artillery fire plans tied to specific AI plans and not the entire set delays to the above AI pre-planned artillery strikes All of those would make AI scripting even more efficient. But I'm finding that I can do a whole lot with the latest engine changes that wasn't possible before so I've got enough new toys to play with to enjoy working with the expanded features for quite some time to come.

You raise some very good points there and I have every sympathy towards the argument against design-you-own as well. You explained very clearly why there is no mystery in a mission you made yourself (although by using multiple, useful AI plans, you can mitigate that somewhat but that won't help with you knowing what the AI has in its inventory). I also agree that there are far fewer campaigns than there are scenarios to play and if they're not to your taste and campaigns are where it's at for you, well, that's not helping. However, I'm not sure what other game gives you what you are looking for. Surely that will be a problem for them all? As for the editor, well, I'm going to have to stand up for that as it's by far the biggest draw of this engine for me. I've played with quite a few editors in my time away from CMx2 and some do one aspect better while they suck at others. I find the CMx2 scenario editor very easy to work with. Sure, the UI is a bit old-fashioned and doesn't look exciting or communicate information to you efficiently but what other editor allows you to take a photo of a real-world location and import it into the editor so that you can trace around it? It's really easy to 'paint' the map with different vegetation and to set elevations etc. It's not fun work, that's for sure (which is why I tend to listen to some prog rock album or Bach while I'm doing so) and a large map takes a lot of time to do. But it's not HARD to use. Maps don't need to be the best ever either. I've had a lot of fun playing campaigns and missions where the map work is <cough> not perfect but who cares if the scenarios and the stories are good. TBH, I probably fart about too much making my maps look as good as possible and would probably churn out the content at twice the rate if I simplified the maps. (Not going to happen, ever.) I think we need to encourage more folks to make campaigns with these huge master maps that folks have been drawing in the last few years. Now the AI, that's a really tricky one. AI scripting is not hard to do with this editor but it's fiddly. To contrast, I've played some games which use a reactive AI opponent that will use the forces you give it according to the changing situation without the need for scripting and guess what? Once you've sussed out the system, you know exactly what the AI is going to do and this is particularly obvious when it comes to the AI attacking when the attacks are juvenile and borderline unplayable. It's hard to pull off a good AI attack in the CM editor but the end result is usually far superior to anything that a dynamic AI could ever pull off with the same forces. Even when the AI is on the defence, I think scripting makes the AI opponent far more challenging than with a dynamic one. The price of this is that the AI needs to be directed and with no AI plans, there is no AI and even a dynamic AI is superior there. I think CMx3, if this is ever a thing, will go with scripted AI as well. And that's why you're not going to see randomly generated campaigns any time soon. They would basically by Quick Campaigns and all the issues with QBs described by the OP and yourself would exacerbate the existing frustrations with them no end.

I have to be honest, I've never read anyone complain about a lack of scenarios or campaigns to play with this title. I suspect you haven't found the Few Good Men site where scenario/campaign designers upload their work. I see someone else has posted a link so I won't. It also sounds like you have the base game only and so are confined to playing the three campaigns and the couple of dozen scenarios that it shipped with. If so, yup, that's not going to last you decades. You could argue that QBs provide near-infinite replay-ablility but that doesn't really stand up. For me, Quick Battles are probably the least-used feature in the game. It's not because they're bad, it's because they need to be able to manage ANY force that the player may purchase, armour, all-infantry, what-have-you and the AI plans try to do their best with what it's got. And that sometimes means it can do nothing. I know how much work and dedication went into creating the official QB maps and it was considerable. Almost all my QB time in-game was spent using my own dedicated QB maps that were designed for pure infantry and I only ever used them. They worked every time because they were dedicated infantry-only maps and so the plans worked just fine. (I lost them all though - a shame as I had made some real beauties from where I used to live in Suffolk) I won't comment on C&F as I'm on the team and the three rules of the club are 'you never talk about Fight Club...' If you haven't got it already, both the Commonwealth and Market Garden modules add even more scenarios and campaigns although I wouldn't recommend The Scottish Corridor if you're looking for a relaxing, pleasant experience. The Road to Nijmegen is not bad though and it's B-I-G. Plus there are German campaigns that come with both of those modules as well.

That all sounds very familiar as I've been working on the opening two missions over the last couple of days. That reassures me that the decision to keep it as much like the original Hasrabit as possible is the best way to do things. Anyway, I had originally planned to redo Ambush entirely and made up a whole new map which you can see at the top of this thread. I'm glad I decided to stick with the old map as I've been able to redesign it using the new ideas I had that inspired the map above. Bear in mind that this is a NIGHT mission and so I've switched to daylight for screenshots. Here's the old map: Not a bad map at all but I wanted to make the opener a bit more realistic so here's the new Ambush map And here it is from a different viewpoint The two sides of the river are both real world locations but not close with each other. Gone are most of the trees and the elevations have been reduced substantially. It's mostly finished now. I expect I'll rework one or two areas as playtesting goes on. The large empty areas are necessary though so the one you see in the first picture won't change. They also look quite good at night anyway. As you can see, the large workshop area has been replaced with more realistic looking compounds and there is now a small hamlet on the other side of the river. The map has been extended somewhat but it's still quite small. Since it's a hazy night mission, it feels big enough though. And I've erased about half a million flavour objects from the original map. I'm definitely of the opinion that less is more in that respect. And that brings me to the OBs. Both have been stripped down slightly with the Special Forces only having two platoons and some support and the REDFor has been similarly stripped down. Otherwise they'd just be far too OP for the player to fight against. The v4.0 engine allows me to do things with the AI on attack that I was never able to do before and it's a game changer. So OBs have been reduced by about 33% for both sides and the mission has been extended as well to allow for more time for the situation to develop. I usually return to the opening mission of a campaign several times as I get deeper into it so there will be more than one AI attack plan by the time this is finished. Now it's time to get playtesting mission 2, Strong Stand.

The latest version is attached to that post quoted above on page 2 of this thread. You'll find v09 at the top of the thread but it doesn't unpack all the campaigns but this one did.

As some of you will already be aware, I've decided to fast track revising my ancient 'Hasrabit' campaign and I've been busy with it since last weekend. I tried out the very first mission, Ambush, and didn't like it and my initial reaction was to abandon the original opening map and create an all-new Ambush map. I started work on it on Wednesday and I finished it earlier this afternoon. It's really big and very detailed but, well, I suspect you can already see why this map isn't going to work in this campaign... It just doesn't look like any of the other maps in the campaign. It actually looks like the maps I made for the NATO campaigns. So I'm going to use this in Retribution which will come a bit later. I'm not teasing you by showing that in a thread purporting to be about Hasrabit, it's just that it's the end result of 3 days of work and I'm very happy with the end result. I'd LIKE to use it but the other maps would all look utterly incongruous beside it and I certainly don't want to redo them all. Hasrabit is an old campaign and so I'm not going to change very much with it because otherwise, what you'd get wouldn't be 'Hasrabit' - it would be a whole new campaign using similar forces. So it's going to be an update instead. I'm going to improve the old maps for sure and make them look more Syrian, adding water and bridges for example and redesign the compounds and villages so that they look much more realistic. And bye bye to the vast glowing fields of wheat, the lush, green grass and the dense forests that made the maps look more like NW Europe. I'll expand a few of them, particularly the ones with armour clashes but otherwise, they will all stay pretty much the same. I'm also going to stick with the totally made-up background story as again, this is Hasrabit and there's no such place or governorate and so I'm just going to let it be. I've also decided to keep the original Ambush mission but take out the artillery strike on your starting positions and also remove all the trees and the mud which was everywhere and replace them with orchards. That huge yard will also get removed and redone with something that looks more Syrian. I suspect that the river will also have to go but we'll see how I feel once real play-testing starts because the bridges are a pretty bad bottleneck which the AI can't handle very well.. Which brings me to what will definitely change - the AI. I was rather surprised to find that the AI attacks in almost every mission and that's going to be fun to do. The old AI plans are atrocious though as are the set-up and positioning of the AI's units. The player set-ups look really terrible too with very narrow set-up are areas with units all crammed together so all that will change. I now have 16 groups to work with and can give them far more orders with some special ones which were not in the game the last time I played. And, of course, some triggers. So, that's the plan as it stands. I've made up the new core units file and I've already started improving the existing maps. So, I'm going to import the new units and get down to some serious play in against the old AI plans and OBs before I rip them out so that I know the original intention behind the mission and try to stay faithful to it. I'll probably add shots of the 'finished' maps here as I go. I suspect that by the time I've finished this revision, I'll have relearned all the skills I formerly had and will be able to do a better job of the new campaign I plan to follow it with.

BTW, Hasrabit is still the #1 priority. I've been working on the map for the new opener all morning and it's shaping up as it wanted it. I read through the campaign and mission briefings last weekend to reacquaint myself with the backstory and it's a bit <cough> out there, as in just me making **** up. 'Hasrabit' is an actual place that I found on Google maps as the map for Strong Stand was (yes, that location looked like that back then with walls and orchards just stopping for no good reason.) The real 'Hasrabit' is a small town just to the south of Damascus International Airport but the name appears in Arabic and I'm too lazy to translate it. [lightbulb moment] Perhaps one of my Muslim students could translate it for me. But otherwise, all the maps are just my creation. You have to remember that there was no scenario overlay back when I made both this and Dinas so the maps are imaginary. Ambush!, the opener is probably the least useable so it's gone but I want to keep the rest as far as that proves possible to do. Otherwise this project will take me MONTHS! So the campaign backstory will need to be reworked a bit. There's no Shuruk valley or river and since I'm more than capable of doing real-world locations in the editor, there's no good excuse for making it all up entirely. It's still going to be 100% fictional because the campaign is called Hasrabit although I'm picking a few choice real-world locations for the new maps. But Hasrabit will stay as the titular Governorate and it will feature a mix of locations from near Hama and Aleppo as well as the old imaginary maps. I'll try to keep it consistent, Special Forces in the greener orchards and the Republican Guards in the more open, arid areas. And I'm going to add a new mission to it for an important campaign branch.

Don't encourage me. Michael Schenker was a huge influence on my guitar style (mainly from his UFO days though) whose impact was only superseded by Eddie Van Halen's. I could put in a couple of German metal bands but Scorpions has to be one. Sounds like a good fit for the Bridges mission.

I was playing around with them in the Chaparral mission yesterday evening and they're very different and definitely not OP. The Marine LAR group alone is almost capable of doing most of the heavy lifting in that mission if you get the breaks anyway. The LAV's optics and their rapid fire cannons mean they can take on the tanks pre-dawn, not to mention the ATGM vehicles that can hunker down behind a hill but they're very weak against enemy ATGM teams. But the recon squads and some artillery can take care of them. The PzGrdr's (thanks) are very, very fragile but I think they'll work very well in missions 2 and 5. I think I'll leave the MOUT to the GbJg. They're really good at it from what I've seen so far. I thought I'd need a third platoon for mission 1 to match the USMC's number but as it happens, they're doing the job very well with just two at the moment. The rapid fire of the heavy howitzers and the heavy battalion mortars make a huge difference. Shame there's no helicopters though but the Tornadoes are doing a good job. But I miss the sound.

So, Wagnerian and Goethe characters? Maybe the names of some Brahms lieder? Wow, really resting on the laurels of past glory there, aren't we? But what a glorious past! Okay, thanks for that. That's certainly better than using German football players. I guess some LotR characters might work too as Peter Jackson's LotR MUST have been pretty popular in Germany. And what about Kirk, Spock and Bones? I remember some German singer (Nina?) mentioning Kirk in a song from the 80s (99 Red Balloons) and we were surprised to hear 'Captain Kirk', probably the most iconic leader for at least one generation so a Star Trek TOS reference might work too?

Aye, that Normandy bundle is going to take you quite a long time to get through but perhaps all three intended versions of this campaign will have been completed and tweaked by the time you're ready to play them. There will definitely be a Brit version as I'm Scottish. They're so laid back when calling in artillery - it's like asking for a taxi and the operator is too laid back to give a fig. "Hello, Fire Mission. Out" I did a bit of reading on German pop culture and it appears it is a bit of a weakness and Germans are aware of it. I really don't want to do German football players for objectives in every mission but there's not much else to work with. I'm going to guess that many of the media references that I use in USMC will be very familiar to most Germans though - who doesn't know the Flintstones? The High Chaparral, probably not. At least for the British version, I can work in a few Red Dwarf references. Perhaps Germans know that show? It sounds like it would appeal to their sense of humour so maybe I could have some cross over between the three campaigns.

Again, I like to muse and formulate ideas so that if I'm flirting with any ideas which are particularly outrageous, people can say so. So I'm thinking of having two units in the German version of Gung Ho! The Gebirgsjagers are a very cool formation to work with but they're nowhere near as heavy as the USMC MEU formation and apart from the Weasels which are probably my favourites (at the moment - I also like the Brit's Jackals a lot), they're light on vehicles. Yes, there are Fuch carriers but they're a tad boring for my taste. So I'm toying with the idea of alternating GbJg with a Mech company with the Marders. With only 6-man squads, the PzGrens are a very fragile formation but perhaps having them perform two missions in this campaign, #2 and #4, might make it more diverse and even more fun while not having one bad 'turn' end your campaign run for you. This means the GbJgs would feature in four of the missions, probably being carried in by helicopters (so no Fuchs) and the PzGrens in two. I'm trying not to have tanks because the Leopard is every bit a monster as the Abrams MBT and as I saw when testing Gung Ho earlier, one of these beasts can win the scenario all on their own (as long as there are no AT-14s of course)

The best laid plans of mice and men... Work on the German version is already under way. Core units are done and I've started playing around with the opener. Let's just say that it looks, feels and plays very differently from the USMC version. The USMC really is a beast with large platoons and enormous firepower. The Jaegers are much lighter but their artillery... (rubs hands) this is going to be a blast to develop. I'm going to have to rename these missions with more German style names. Gung Ho! was inspired by the HBO series, Generation Kill and I recall one episode where they were talking about Betty and Wilma so it all sprang from there. Doing German football players seems more than a bit lame but I know absolutely NOTHING about popular German culture. The missions' and objectives' names in Gung Ho! were a real nostalgia trip for me because we grew up with a lot of US TV on the BBC and ITV in the 70s and 80s. Starsky and Hutch, Kojak and The Rockford Files were the coolest things on Brit TV for a while. Even my dad loved them. Some tips from folks with German upbringing in a similar period might help with the authenticity.

Even more good suggestions. That's a tad long for the tile, not to mention that I'm sure to stuff up the spelling every time I type it but i'm sure I can work that into the campaign briefing somewhere.

Well, it is a bit of a mouthful if you're not German so that sounds better to me. Less chance of typos showing up in the briefings too.

Well, well, well. I just fired up the first mission of Gung Ho! with the Gebirgsjagers and holy crap! I'd forgotten how much fun this formation was to work with. So I guess this is going to get a bit more loving for the time being. And no javelins! If anyone is able to answer, I'd like not to use the Fuchs vehicles and have a pure Infantry formation (of course, I'll be using those wonderful Weasels and the Wolves.) I can rationalise it by saying they were choppered in in the briefing if necessary but from what I recall, they're a formation that fights in all climates and terrain and is intended to operate without vehicles. I'm sure they'd much prefer to ride across the hot Syrian country but war's tough. I might have to use some Fuchs carriers for the bigger maps like the Chaparral map where you have a lot of ground to cover but otherwise, there will be no carriers. I don't even want to use the Leopard tanks either - they're not a part of the formation but could be attached if I really need them.

With USMC Gung Ho! up and ready to be played, I started work on Hasrabit yesterday evening. I've examined all the missions, made some notes about OBs and the over-all plan behind the campaign and initial ideas how to improve on it. It's already a fairly solid design, two core unit forces that never meet but have two interconnected missions - a pattern I've used in most of my campaigns since. I opened up the first mission, Ambush! in the editor and changed the marsh tiles to river and used proper bridges. I can see I was a little over-zealous with flavour objects back then to but otherwise, it's clearly an old map but functional so I decided to give it a spin. A nice small company of Special Forces to work with, excellent, so I devised a plan and hit START. OMG! What a disaster. Sorry but that's just not my style any more so I'm going to have to make an all-new map to open the campaign (Dinas got it right) and I've got a doozy of an idea of what to do for it. I expect I'll have to do this with several of the missions but what the heck, it's work I enjoy. But I like to play the game from time to time too so this is how I'm going to progress. While getting new maps prepared for Hasrabit, I'm going to create a fresh core units file and make the German Gebirgsjager version of Gung Ho! to play at the same time. Work title is 'Gebirgsjagers Vorwarts!'. If anyone has any feedback on Gung Ho!, please let me know so that I can incorporate that feedback into the German version. I don't need to have my ego stroked (any more) or even need lots of feedback from a host of players, just one or two comments will suffice to let me know if it's up to scratch or not. I trust you guys to give me useful feedback so don't be shy.

Vorwarts ... hmm, I wonder what that means in English. Would it be Forwards by any chance? Or is it a false friend? That sounds a bit better and it's short and punchy. I like it.

More choices. They both sound good... 'Auf der Kante' sounds okay

It's up now... https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/cm-shock-force-2-2/cm-shock-force-2-campaigns/cmsf2-usmc-gung-ho/ Have fun and don't be afraid to tell me what you think

Okay, that's it uploaded. The picture failed to load but I don't care about that too much at this point. https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/cm-shock-force-2-2/cm-shock-force-2-campaigns/cmsf2-usmc-gung-ho/ This is a six mission campaign featuring Bravo Company of 1st Battalion 8th Marines. I should mention that it's a rework of my much earlier CMSF1 campaign of the same name but it's so reworked that it's really an all-new campaign that takes advantage of all the CMSF2 features. You'll need the NATO module to play this as the Syrian Airborne features in one of the missions. Sorry about that but I guess most folks reading here already have the full Monty. It's designed primarily to have fun with one of the most unique factions in the game, the USMC, a light infantry formation that punches far above its weight even without the air support that you'll have in these missions. It should also be quite challenging but not too challenging. Mission 3 - CAAT among the Pigeons is intended to be very easy, to allow you to let rip with a rather unique formation within the MEU. I look forward to hearing how you get on. Perhaps you can tell me how many kills HITMAN got in your campaign? You're not beta testing this - I've already played this myself but that's a potential issue, it's been tested by one player with a particular play style and skill set. I try to break these missions but I'm not as creative about that as some of you will be If you find any typos, let me know. I've been scanning the texts these last couple of days and can't see any but that's likely fatigue. Unless something egregious is found, you should be safe to complete a campaign before a revision comes up. I'm hoping that won't necessary but I've done this before and it can always be improved. With the exception of CAAT among the Pigeons, each mission has several AI plans to give the campaign replayablity. So, if there's enough interest in it, I will return to this to make a new version featuring the German Gebirgsjagers which look like they'd be a blast to play with as well and not need much work to be done beyond making a core unit file and importing the units into each mission. And finally, I want to make a Brit forces Light Infantry version but that will need more work to do.

Well, I guess it's time to post this up at the depot. I've really hit the wall HARD with this and just can't play it any more. That's not because it's so bad but because I've played nothing but these 6 missions for the last 12+ weeks. I'm going to do one last pass and boot each mission up (10 in total) to ensure that units are all in their proper place (again), make sure the briefings and the timings all match and that's it. I forgot that when I worked on those larger projects 10+ years ago that I took regular breaks and played a game of Civ 5 or something like that for a few days every so often before returning to the work refreshed and often with new ideas. I haven't done that this time around so I guess that's why I've hit the wall so hard this time around. So, hopefully, it will be up on the new site in a couple of hours or so. I'm sure there will be issues but by now, we all know we can fix issues quite quickly and so a v1.01 is a thing that can happen very quickly. I don't want to make you guys my testers but I can't test it properly anymore, at least without taking a break for a week or so and keeping you all waiting. Having said all that, instead of playing Civ 6 or Old World, I think I'm going to work on 'Hasrabit' next. It's the oldest and needs a lot of love. It's not a long campaign, only 10 missions and the core forces promise to be fun to work with.