Paper Tiger

Okay, I see what you're saying and that's a very impressive programming achievement. I guess I'm not seeing it react to 'massive groups of enemy infantry' because I'm manouevering my platoon of veterans with a tank and IFVs in support in the face of superior numbers but I'm definitely the one shepherding the conscripts and not the other way around. Without the vehicular support, I do see single veteran squads repositioning when they run into very close quarters with a single enemy conscript squad that's in good order but what's not realistic about that behaviour?

Possibly my most boring screenshot posted on this forum EVER. SO why am I bothering? It would appear that sometimes, when you import core units into a campaign mission, you import more than just the units. Lake Mercury is one of the five small lakes in my 'Lakes' mission and I named it as a Landmark. Last night, I was working on the map for my finale and lo and behold, this landmark popped up in the map corner. This actually isn't the first time I've seen this happen either. It happened in another mission too and there were a whole group of landmarks. They were also distributed on the new map in the same pattern that they were in the original map. Unfortunatley I didn't take a screen shot at the time so it remains anecdotal. Okay, that's really not a particularly important bug is it. But what about the next photo? Once again, I reported this earlier. It would appear that when I import Company D into a mission, sometimes, not always, the ATGM teams appear as one single amalgamated squad. If any of you have played 'Hasrabit' you will also have seen the Republican Guard's MG teams getting glued together in the 'Hill 142' mission to name one. One last bug is that the Battalion FOS unit doesn't get his GAZ jeep when the missions are complied. So he's going to have to hoof it or get by with a little help from his friends in this mission. Once again, anyone who has played 'Perdition' will probably have noticed this too. These all appear to be problems with the Syrian side played as Blue only as they'd already have been caught if they were US. And they only seem to occur with core units. The GAZ jeep ALWAYS appears in the non-compiled mission and I've never seen amalgamated Syrian weapon teams in a scenario either. It would be nice if we could get these little wrinkles sorted out sometime.

I couldn't win with them as regular. With veteran Marines I achieved a solid victory. from post 8 I degraded the Marines in v1.0 of this mission because they were always so brave it was a bit too easy for my taste from post 10 I don't understand guys. Now you're both saying that changing the Marines experience level (ThePhantom up, Webwing down) had no influence on this aspect of the game? I'm not arguing with you, I just don't have the time to spend doing experiments on this right now and it's a very important new feature and I'd like to understand how it works too.

OK, I admit I enjoy CAS but that is my personal peccadillo Yup, I have that one too. I really like playing missions with air support. Unfortunately, I don't see how I could justify the Rebels having control of the air in my campaign since they didn't have it in 'Hasrabit'. But it's in the early missions and it's fun to use. I really don't much care for playing Blue missions without CAS either as they should almost always have some available. My Brit campaign will definitely have a LOT in it.

So redeploying is directly influenced by the size of the opposing force ( like ThePhantom noticed ) rather than ANY settings of the units. I certainly wasn't aware that the strength of the opposition the units are facing had any bearing on the 'Run for your life' factor. That is a pretty nifty piece of programming and thanks to you guys for discovering it. This opens up some rather intriguing possibilities for later. However, unit experience definitely influences it too. You see a big difference in this behaviour when you change a units experience from Regular to Veteran. That's the reason why you made them 'Regular' in the first place, because they so brave it was a bit too easy for your taste.

It's funny but the first thing I did today with the finale was to start redrawing the map. I think you'll find a picture of the original map on the first page called 'Dimas Part 1 Agony of Doom'. What I have in mind for this battle is a pretty intense MOUT operation, rather like the way I finished 'Hasrabit' although this time, you'll be doing the attacking. If you look at that map, you'll see that it's about 90%+ farmland and forested hills. Definitely not what I need for the finale. However, I did spend a lot of time working on the village and that's the work I'm going to expand upon. I'm going to build up the village and make as realistic a small town as I can by this weekend and then get started on the playtesting. This will free up the original map for the purpose I'd originally intended it for, a Red v Red ASL Hill 621 style mission. I guess as soon as I finish with 'Dinas' I'll get cracking on finally doing this as a stand alone mission. Mikkey: Although those missions play fine with US units, they would require a bit more work to bring them up to the standard where I could release them as stand alone missions. I REALLY want to use Brits in these missions too. But yes, it's going to happen sometime... just not with Marines or US Army as Blue.

Further, aren't Syrians receiving training to use 80's equipment and outdated doctrine as well? They still don't have T-90s yet. Old Joe 'Quarterpounder' with the wrong kind of six-pack there may not be as fit as some spunky 18 year old kid in the back alleys of Damascus but he's received at least a modicum of training to fight a war in the 21st Century. I think there's a bit of wishful thinking here about the quality of the opposition in this title which gives rise to the occassional bit of grumbling about how RPG-7s are much more lethal than they are shown to be in the movie 'Blackhawk Down' (PLEASE!)

Ach, thankfully, I'm well past that creative bottleneck now and playing the newer missions has injected fresh blood into this project. It's been a long time since I've had as much fun developing a mission as I've had working on 'The Lakes' mission. It's a cracking tank battle and it's difficult but definitely doable. All this week I've played and played and played it and I've finally got it balanced. In the end, it came down to getting the VP awards for both sides just right rather than making adjustments to both sides experience levels and quality of equipment. Although it's a tank battle, it will be your infantry that will win it for you so it's not like anything I've done before. It's not the perfect 10-10 mission that I'd hoped for but it's 9-10 for me. I suspect some of you will hate it though. That means that I'm able to get started on the final mission later today and I have some good ideas to take to it from my experiences developing 'The Lakes'. It looks like the finale will be a much more intimate affair than I'd originally envisaged and I'm quite happy about that as it'll be easier to playtest. I would expect the finale to be finished before the 18th Jan and that means I should have the whole thing finished sometime before the end of this month. That means that it will arrive just in time to be overshadowed by the arrival of BFC's Brit Pack sometime early in February. But I really couldn't care less as I'm anxious to get to work creating missions for the Brits to play on some of these maps. While I see me doing a lot of work in future for Brits v Syria, I want to do something with the Syrian Airborne and some T-90s as your core forces before WW2 comes along. BTW, I've already experimented substituting Blue forces on these maps and the missions still work. I've done Stryker Infantry in 'Road to Amarah', Stryker MOUT Infantry in 'Sabatani' and US Marines in 'Flames' and they all worked just fine, EXCEPT for the armour part of the game and also the presence of javelins. Those are two real game breakers for me. AND I gave them the full panopoly of US support goodies too, air support and artillery and the missions had enough challenge without raising the experience levels of the Syrian side (Conscripts). V1.11 has really improved this game in that respect.

So what are you saying here? That the average US soldier is less fit and less trained than these young Syrian tigers? :eek: Besides, aren't we talking about a company level game where leadership and NCO's are already factored into the design and not one where individual soldiers are important, except as far as casualties are concerned. Against Uncons, by all means make 'em green if you think that's fine. But in the front line of a shooting war? Well if you guys say so. I'm Scottish, not American, so who am I to argue with you. Don't expect to see any 'regular' Brits in my forthcoming missions though. Also please note that I'm not talking about 'police actions' or rear area security but at the cutting edge of a conventional shooting war with the Syrian Army. If I'm wrong, I'm very happy to be corrected. we have 'Territorial Army' units in the UK and we don't send them into front line action.

Because of the huge disparity between the two armies, in my opinion, even the very best units the Syrians have, Republican Guard, Special Forces or Airborne, should rarely rate better than Regular when fighting with the US and everything else they have should be green at best but mostly conscript. Meanwhile, US troops, especially Marines, should really start as veteran with a fair mix of Crack units and for the best US formations, crack/elite. I posted this a couple of days ago in the 'Run for your life' thread. After a bit more thought, I would like to amend those settings for Airborne and Special Forces to make them veterans and also allow them a few more Crack units. However, in spite of their receiving the best of the equipment and standing head and shoulders better over their 'regular' Syrian counterparts, I don't really believe that a Republican Guard unit is any match for a standard US military formation and so they should mostly be regular when fighting the US. Certainly they will display more 'balls' than the regulars when facing US forces but from what I've seen in-game, regular performance is about how I'd expect them to perform in real life against a western army. Set them higher than that and you're just playing a game. BTW I'm not saying that they should NEVER be Crack or Elite, just that it should be a VERY rare occurrence. Plese note that I'm only talking about Syrian vs the US or Brits or Germans etc and not vs other Syrian units. In a Red v Red situation, I have no problem with setting Republican Guards to Crack with some Elite because they really are very good compared to their lesser trained brothers in arms in the regular arm. With regards to US experience levels, we ARE talking about a conventional war and therefore I see no reason to set US forces at anything LESS than Veteran, except to play a game, as they really are much better trained than the Syrians. And besides, your government isn't going to stick untrained US units into a shooting war in the Middle East just yet. However, against Uncons, well, I can certainly see some justification for lowering their experience levels to regular for such situations as it's no longer a fully fledged shooting war. BTW, Steve, you also said somewhere that we couldn't set US troops experience to conscript. I've definitely played missions with conscript US troops v Elite Syrian forces and I've just checked the scenario editor and found that I can still buy conscript Stryker infantry. You may want to disable the conscript setting for the US as that really is fantasy land.

To answer Qs1-4, I haven't played ToW but just quickly looking at the Game Features web page and comparing it to what I know about CMSF, I think it's safe to say that they are completely different games. It's a squad level game with teams and vey occassionally, one man units (spies) If you want to compare CMSF to something, you'd be bettter comparing it to CMBO, CMBB and CMAK. It wouldn't be unfair to say that some of the negative posts you might read are written by people who have done just that and are disappointed that CMSF isn't the game they wanted from the creators of the CMx1 series. But that's not to say that some of their complaints weren't valid (note the use of the past tense there folks). Strangely enough, most of the complaints you hear nowadays focus more on how the game fails to model reality in every little detail and not on bugs anymore. With regards to poorly performing Syrian equipment v first class high tech US forces, well of course there's going to be a bit of an imbalance because the game realistically models these two forces and that's the way it is in real life. (And of course, that pisses of some folks because they'd have prefered BFC to set the new game in a different theatre. But it's BFC's game and it was their decision to make and some folks are just plain bitter that they didn't listen to them.) However, that imbalance doesn't prevent a lot of us from having a lot of fun playing it, and by that I mean serious and challenging fun, not just a lark blowing stuff up although you can do that too.

'Fraid not. The ability to choose the map you want to play on would make QB's much better IMO. I only have around half a dozen maps in my QB file at the moment and they're all mine except for a really nice city one that came with the game.

My personal must-haves are Pete Wenman's Marsh to water tile mod Gordon's Syrian tank mods Vlad Templar's Faces of Syria mod (I can't believe none of you guys recommended this one) Scipio's Flames mod (yellow) Of course, I play this game mainly as the Red side... I'll have to have a look at Birdstrike's Syrian uniforms mod

'Hasrabit' was a little more than 34MB and took around an hour to upload to CMMODS. 'Dinas' is going to be around 52MB so I expect the upload time to be around 1 hour 40 minutes or so. I did a test upload to the repository a couple of months ago and it was VERY fast but I didn't see anything happen for about a day afterwards. If you're uploading scenarios then definitely post them at both sites.

Hi Pete like the old saying goes... a picture is worth a 1000 words. Yup, that doesn't feel right. I suspect we're seeing this because those are uncon units and they're on top of a building and the civilian density setting is quite high? Further, their stance indicates that they're not actually using their weapons and so the game is treating them as if they are not actively doing anything that threatens the troops. The game doesn't show us civilians so we can assume safely that those US units do actually see those guys on the roof but they're not doing anything suspicious that would make them think "Uh oh, danger". But, they're lobbing grenades? :eek::eek: That'll be what's wrong but I guess this'll get fixed for v1.12 shortly after the Brit Pack arrives.

I hope to have something quite large ready for uploading later this month. Trouble is that it's going to be around 50MB in size and I REALLY don't want to do this twice so it's going to be either at CMMODS or the Repository but not both.

Maybe if we had a one time use Heroic action movement command, we could have some heroism, which is a part of all battles funnily enough, I see very heroic behaviour quite frequently in the game but I guess a lot of it just goes unnoticed, just like real life. I've seen one solitary soldier giving buddy aid to his wounded dying squad mates in between getting up and fighting off attacking enemy infantry successfully.

Since my last post I have worked exclusively on the 'Lakes' mission and it's been quite a struggle to find the right battle for this map. It's the biggest in the campaign and it's a stonker. The v1.11 patch has made playtesting this monster a much easier affair and so I've been able to jump in and out of it in the scenario editor without having to wait for 10-11 minutes, (now it's slghtly less than 3 minutes). However, my first couple of days work didn't produce much in the way of a result as the mission was just too difficult. It's a night scenario and Blue's tanks (T-72Ms and T-55MVs) just couldn't spot anything at night without a long delay and that was proving lethal as the much better quality Red tanks were able to spot faster and kill them. 'Death in the dark' would have been an appropriate name for this unenjoyable pile of sh*&e! But the map is so good to play on I wasn't deterred and stuck with it and yesterday evening, I had an idea that has transformed it. It now starts just before dusk so there's enough light for your tanks to spot really quickly. This actually swung the battle the other way and it was now proving impossible for red to get his tanks onto the battlefield. I spent the whole afternoon today tweaking the reinforcement settings and finally, I think I've found the battle. However, be warned, some of you are going to HATE it with a passion. Why? Because it seems to be a REAL slow-burner. I'm already an hour into my current playtest and only the occassional exploding vehicle tells me that there is enemy anywhere on that battlefield. But it really works for me. The really good news about this is that I'll be able to reduce red's OB by nearly 50% as a result of the changes. I really want this mission to be one of the best in the campaign so I'm going to take my time with it so I expect it won't be finished before next weekend. Then, there's just the finale to do and that's pretty much it finished.

I think Battlefront may have added a, "Run for your life" calculation that is tweaked too high That's as may be or... the Marines experience level is just set WAY too low in that scenario to give you a believable result. An exciting and entertaining one, certainly, but not realistic. Because of the huge disparity between the two armies, in my opinion, even the very best units the Syrians have, Republican Guard, Special Forces or Airborne, should rarely rate better than Regular when fighting with the US and everything else they have should be green at best but mostly conscript. Meanwhile, US troops, especially Marines, should really start as veteran with a fair mix of Crack units and for the best US formations, crack/elite. The 'run for your life' calculation produces good results and is probably quite realistic when you play the game with these settings so let's not judge it from playing fantasy scenarios where the Syrian side is the better trained and experienced of the two sides. I have been playtesting a number of Red v Red missions with veterans going up against conscripts and I really like what I'm seeing. To solve your problem, open the mission up in the editor, change all the Marines units to a minimum of veteran and some crack units and try it again. If you play Marines missions with 'woosie' settings then expect them to behave like wooses. Or you can make them like they are in real life.:cool:

These were regular units I see this behaviour a LOT with regular experience units but rarely with veterans although it still happens when things are REALLY tough. While I am playing as the Syrian side, appparently the experience modifiers for both armies (US and Syrian) are the same. I know I'm biased about the Corps and feel shame when I see this happening. However, it's happening a lot. This is happening a lot more than I have seen before. Given that US troops generally receive better training than most other country's soldiers, and CERTAINLY the Syrians, they should probably start with a base experience level of veteran. Play the game with unrealistic experience settings, you get unrealistic results. I remember getting really pissed a while ago playing a mission that had conscript -2 led US troops going up against Elite +2 Syrians. Sure it was desperately challenging to play as the Blue player but of course, it was nothing but pure fantasy or escapism.

So what is the US Military doing (and we surly dont have in the Game) to spot enemys hiding? Taki, do you know what? I have NO idea. I'm not a military man and I don't really spend much time thinking about these things either. I have nothing invested in this discussion and I have absolutely NO problem with the way the game handles spotting enemy units in buildings. It just seems to be realistic to me. We know that there are real life soldiers that frequent this forum and a number of them are currently in service in Iraq. I don't hear them complaining about the way the game handles this so I guess it's alright. However, let's turn your question back to you. What do YOU think they have that's not modelled in the game? How do you think US soldiers spot Uncons in buildings? I suspect that they really do just have to wait until they give away their positions by opening fire or they do something incredibly foolish that gives their position away. It sounds like you want the latter modelled into the game and I am operating under the impression that it already is, i.e. the scenario's civilian density setting and the quality of the Uncons you're facing. I suspect that a lot of the trouble you have believing this is because the scenarios you're playing are not very realistic, that your pixeltruppen are facing Elite/Crack experience Uncons and they're not going to give their positions away 'cos they're Elite/Crack troops. I think the vast majority of Uncons that are commonly encountered in real life would be Conscript or Green at best. You might even have to create a whole new level of suckiness in the game to represent just HOW bad some of them really are. Yeah, they can be unbelievably motivated but their experience is the factor that'll give them away.

Hi Pete I don't have any problems squaring those two statements as to me CMSF really is just a game. I have no idea if Area Fire is used so prolifically in real life by real world militaries but it has been a part of small unit tactical wargames since the first Squad Leader title. And, since it's a game, I use the tools the game provides for me to do the job without any qualms about killing someone's virtual granny along the way.:eek: I also happen to play this game almost exclusively as the Syrian side (although that's 100% definitely going to change when I get that Brit module) and I suspect their soldiers would have slightly less qualms about 'reconning' a suspected enemy occupied building with a 115mm shell from a T-62 than their US counterparts would. I believe that it's 100% impossible to spot someone hiding in a house when you're outside looking in and that person doesn't want to be seen. If I open my front door and scan my neighbours houses, sometimes I can see a glow of a tv screen and a shadow as someone passes between the tv and me. But otherwise, I can't see anything and it won't matter how long I watch, I won't see anything unless they come out or go to the window and look out. And they're not trying to hide from me. So I really don't see how this would be any easier in a battle torn city environment. I suspect you wouldn't see so many tv screens glowing for starters. And as for them looking out, the game heavily abstracts the interior of houses, there are no rooms and there's no furniture. It's actually quite easy to see out of a building without being spotted as long as the light level outside is higher than it is inside. Just think about it, it's the same reason why we don't get to see all those beautiful women living in our neighbourhood naked. We definitely want to, but it's not going to happen unless they want it to happen too.

Be prepared for your post to be edited. Are you using Firefox v3 by any chance? I had this same problem when downloading with FF3 last year (:eek:) When I switched back to IE7, I was fine again.

Has anyone else had a "Fatal error run out of memory" crash? I got one after the second battle had completed and the 3rd battle was loading. I did get to save the game. I have not tried to open it. Yes, I am patched to v 11. Try playing the save game. I think you'll be alright as the old mission will be cleared out of your virtual memory now. VERY interesting moniker by the way...

Steve has it from the horses mouth that this is what happens so I'm not going to argue against hard data Thank you OM, that's probably the most telling point. Although this is just a game, BFC do pride themselves with their attention to detail in the rendering of their game. If the US Army can reasonably do something, then it's IN the game already. I think expectations of what the US Army CAN do are somewhat exaggerated by some of us forum frequenters and that's really not a bad thing either when you consider the larger implications of it. Just what real life capabilities do you guys, Taki in particular, think that we're missing from the game that allow people to see through walls? Thermal Imaging? Yes, tanks and IFVs are equipped with these gadgets but what can they actually tell you? There's somebody in that house? But it's a city and that's what MOUT IS. The chances are extremely likely that it's just a family cowering in there. A curtain just twitched? "Open Fire with everything boys!" when it might be some kid or her granny peeping out? Now if you're talking about MOUT in a deserted city, that's a completely different affair but then, that really isn't MOUT is it? BTW, the 'Recon by fire' bit is how I do it in the game. With v1.11, it works really well too and gives me some measure of initiative.