Paper Tiger

Furthermore, if those dudes are standing on a flat roof waving their danglies at the business end of a pair of AFV's or a twelve pack of Jarheads they should get IDed and hosed. Perhaps you should be petitioning BFC for the addition of a 'waggle danglies' command to be added to the command interface.

Funny thing is that the download counter there is at zero!!!! Which would mean nobody downloaded the mission there! It's been showing number of downloads at 0 for everyone's missions for several months now. BTW, I REALLY wish people who haven't played your mission would desist from posting negative scores. How can anyone rate a mission as '1' when they haven't played it?! There do happen to be a number of people who go to that site to download missions and won't look at missions that don't have '5' ratings. You're probably going to find that they don't have the Marines module installed.

What the hell... I have quite a few more of these... I just love the tanks in this game...

Some interesting points there PP... What I would like to see is AFV's with thermals being able to spot these guys after several minutes or at the very least generate a "?" marker In any MOUT situation it's a pretty safe guess that there are civilians in that house too and they're probably doing they're absolute darndest to stay down and hidden too. Do your thermal optics discriminate between civvies and combatants? Mind you, the REDFOR units were not "Hiding" they were full-on, sign-me-up-for-my-virgins standing in front of two M1's! LOL. I guess the game engine just assumes that if they're in a building and not firing their weapons that they're making some effort to conceal themselves. Those same units with a Hide command will continue to hide right up to the point where you enter their position. Depending on their skill level, they will stay hidden even if you are in the same room as them. Troops with low experience will get jittery and not hide so effectively. I agree that it is reasonable for infantry in a building to remain unspotted to those outside some of the time, especially if they are "Hiding." What's more, I find it perfectly realistic for structures to harbor a concealment "bonus." It's just a bit overdone at present. and, from an earlier post... MOUT actions would benefit greatly from a reduction in structure's ability to grant overly high levels of concealment. My take on this is that most of us are playing 'worst case' scenarios rather than there being a fault in the game design. If you are fighting against uncons with very low quality settings, they'll give up their positions VERY quickly if you put a bit of area fire on their building, especially in v1.11. Rather than reduce the building's ability to conceal, which SHOULD be almost perfect, instead, encourage scenario designers to reduce the quality of the Syrian forces to more realistic levels. If you're playing MOUT missions as the US v crack/elite, fanatical uncons then you ARE going to have the Army's worst nightmare scenario that can only be avoided by levelling that building beforehand.

(in game action from the mission 'Jameela') Sometimes, when you're working on a very large and ambitious project like this, you just hit a wall and feel like giving up and today was one of those days. I've just played some of these missions to death over the last few months and I just don't enjoy playing them anymore. I was playing my way faithfully through the early Group A missions earlier today and just felt sick of the whole thing. Of course, I can't quit because I've been posting regularly here about this project and I'd look like a complete jerk if I just gave up. (Incidentally, that's one of my main reasons for posting in this thread: it REALLY does keep me working flat out.) Anyway, I had a bit of a revelation this afternoon about how to get this thing finished a.s.a.p AND make sure that it's thoroughly playtested. I had to change the OBs of a couple of missions around and amend the briefings and I've changed the campaign script to make the phase 2 battle 'Burning Bridges' appear ONLY if you lose the 'Farmers' mission. These small changes will simplify everything and allow me to use what time is left of the holiday to get to work on the last couple of missions and start work on the finale. (in game action from the mission 'Jameela') So, I got back to work on 'Jameela' and 'The Lakes' mission later this afternoon and I feel fresh with the whole thing again. I really want to make that Lakes mission something special and since v1.11 has drastically reduced loading times, I was able to test the AI set up out a couple of times this afternoon. By the way, I'm finished with 'Jameela' now. I've playtested it both stand alone and compiled. As a stand alone mission with your full OB, it's ridiculously easy to win. However, after the changes I made this afternoon, I think it will end up being quite a challenge for what's left of your core forces.

Happy New Year to all you guys. I would like to ask some of you guys to resolve to do the following in this new year: when you download something from the Repository, please, please PLEASE, return a bit later after you've played it (important point! ) and give a bit of feedback on your download, even if it is just to vote. I have just visited the site and seen the first two entries in the Base Game section: Pete Wenman's 'A Bridge Too Far' Downloads 161 Votes 2 Gregory KELLER's 'A Crossroads Hamlet Assault' Downloads 118 Votes 2 Further down even George Mc's 'Armour Attacks' with 223 downloads only has 3 votes. I think almost all of you know that designing scenarios or drawing mods for this game is a lot of work. A little bit of feedback is a small price to pay for all this work. cheers PT

I just got hit by ~1700 Syrian Light Infantry conscripts in a quick battle Now THAT sounds like MY idea of a fun quick Battle. I should try a couple out again some time.

There are two parameters in a campaign script that will determine if this will happen: Blue Refit and Blue Repair. (as well as for Red too) The campaign designer decides how high/low to set these parameters after each individual mission in the script. That can be anything from 0% (bugger all) to 100% So if your tank's main gun gets damaged or targetting gets knocked out, whatever, and the Blue Repair parameter is set at 25%, you might just get lucky. Set the same parameter to 100% and these problems will definitely get repaired for their next mission. If the vehicle is knocked out, it can only be replaced and that's the job of the Refit parameter.

(in game action shot from the mission 'Sagger Point') FINALLY, that's the new version of Sagger Point finished. I playtested this version agan this morning and won without too much trouble and with very low casualties. That was with the core forces at full strength so that means that it should be a bit more difficult when it's played compiled. The map's not quite finished yet as the south eastern quarter is pretty bald, just grass. But that's work that can be done in an evening sometime after I return to work next week. (I don't 'play' CMSF at night, just work on maps.) The new version is quite a large battle. You get two BTR Infantry companies and two platoons of tanks to do the job. I had originally planned to take out the rides to keep everything tidy but that was more trouble than it was worth. Think resupply and you'll get the picture. You're gong to need a TON of ammo to do this one. I had also intented to include an entire company of tanks for this mission but I came up with a little addition to the campaign story line to justify excluding four of them. So now it's quite nicely balanced. Oh, and by the way, that's Sagger Point in front of that tank. It's a huge feature. I will give all the Phase 1 missions another run through starting tomorrow and hopefully, I'll have that part of the campaign solid by the weekend. Since the Phase 2 battles have been thoroughly playtested as stand alone missions, I don't expect them to require more than one compiled playtest. The second shot comes from one of last weekends playtests of the 'Orchard Road' mission. I'm looking forward to playing this one again tomorrow.

CogNative: Yes, I am VERY methodical with my work but even so, it's amazing how much gets past me:o. I have to be because both 'Hasrabit' and 'Dinas' are very dynamic and that means that there are lots of branches to keep track of. But I have a system for checking that the script works as designed without having to play every possible permutation. The Dinas campaign branches have all been checked out now (it took around an hour to explore the entire thing). I also pause and make lots of notes of anything strange I see or want to change when I'm playtesting, especially if I'm working on an AI attack. The one major flaw in my testing process is ME! Not only do I know exactly what the Red side has at it's disposal during the mission but I also have a tendency to evolve a plan for playing each mission and refine that plan without really exploring all the other possible ways to accomplish the mission. Occassionally, I do something wild and see how the scenario works but that doesn't happen as often as it should. Case in point, I am playtesting the new version of Sagger Point where you have to cross a river across one of two bridges. I ALWAYS choose bridge A and never bridge B for various (and very good ) reasons but some of you WILL choose this path and maybe it will be a cinch to win. I spend a LOT of time 'finding' the right battle for each map and that's where 'Sagger' is just now. I have played through several iterations in the last 24 hours and had to abandon the version with the Special Forces ATGM teams; the AT-14 is just TOO tough for this mission. I have also cut back the Red OB quite substantially and had to play around with the Blue's reinforcement schedule to get everything just the way I like it. In my current playtest, I made the crossing with ZERO casualties, due to a particularly methodical assault, woo hoo! but the real work is still ahead. If things continue to go well, I'll stick with this version. BTW, the Sagger teams in this mission are DEADLY! I've never seen them used so effectively before and they're proving very difficult to deal with. The good news is that you guys won't have to wait much longer to get to play this. Once Sagger is finished, I just have to check the Group A mission through to 'The Lakes' mission and then it's 'develop the finale' time. It's already started but I really need to see how much of your core force you can reasonably expect to have to finish it. Since the first few missions are actually very easy for a Red v Red scenario, the REAL challenge will be to complete them with as few casualties as possible, just like you do as Blue, and I have to make that doable for all of us. So far, with careful play, it's looking like your core will be reduced by between 30-40% for the finale.

How's work going on this project guys? Are we going to get an update very soon?

It's definitely seperate although a Smoke mission seems to use a little of your HE ammo as well. It looks like the Smoke column is the third from the left (HE being first) and once it's used up, you can't call in any more Smoke missions.

After spending a LOT of time this weekend playtesting a few missions where the AI controls some Conscript troops with Poor morale, I have been seeing a LOT of this behaviour and while it sure as hell looks like they're routing, they're just repositioning to somewhere safer. I am still seeing those orangey brown '!'s appearing occassionally so they still rout normally too. In a dense urban environment, this new AI behaviour is making Blue's job MUCH more challenging as the enemy won't stand in the face of enemy fire for long and die. Instead, they take up new positions deeper in the urban jungle and they still have the fight in them so be wary. I'm having to adapt my tactics to take account of this behaviour. It also make MY job a bit easier as my troops won't stay in harm's way for long when I'm not babysitting them either. IMNSHO this is one of the best features of the new patch.

When I reloaded the saved game You may be experiencing some problems playing a saved game that was started with an earlier version of the game and taken up again with the new patch. Since nobody else seems to be having this problem, try restarting the mission from scratch and see if this 'problem' persists.

I've playtested all the way through to the end of Phase one, eight battles to get to 'Sagger Point'. Everything prior to that mission is just fine now and I don't plan to make any more changes to them. But I HATED 'Sagger Point' and so it's getting a complete overhaul to make it more interesting. So, what happened? When I first set it all up, prior to v1.11, Blue's forces arrived on a VERY narrow front in the SE corner of the map. From there, they had to fan out and move on their two objectives. There was a nice little tank battle about half an hour or so into the mission and, depending on your success in that battle, it was time to tackle the objectives. All good fun but v1.11 has made the AI so aggressive with it's artillery that breaking out of that bottleneck was proving to be a nightmare unless I nailed that FOS with the opening artillery barrage and that meant cheating. So I brought the tanks in earlier to make the breakout faster and basically 'broke' the entire mission. With the tank battle decided within 15-20 minutes of the start, Red's goose was cooked and it was just boring to play. Since this is the Phase 1 finale for Group A, I want it to be somethng special, just like Group B's phase 1 finale 'Sulit airfield'. So, I have started reworking the map by expanding it massively in the southern direction. This will give Blue many different ways to approach the objectives instead of confining you to a narrow front at the start. It'll take a couple more days to get the map up to par with the other campaign maps but the battle itself will not require much more playtesting to finalise as it's the same battle but on a much larger map. As mewntioned earlier, I want this mission to be a bit more special than just a quick tank rumble and then a very long wait for the mission to end. The new AI 'buggering off' routine has made 'Sabatani' a lot of fun to play by the way. I had thought of this mission as one of the 'fillers' before v1.11 but now I'm very happy when I reach this mission. It's not too difficult, there are no enemy tanks or ATGM support worth mentioning, and it looks good so you can relax a little bit and just take out your frustration on the enemy forces.

I've been seeing this happen a LOT when I'm working on a large mission of my own. This is what ALWAYS happens. I open the map up in either 3D view or for placing units and everything's fine. But, if I don't exit the editor before attempting to do the same thing again, it always crashes with a fatal error - out of memory warning. I am not a computer guy but I would guess that the 'old' copy of the 3D map still resides in your memory somewhere and when you reload it, there's not enough left to load it twice. But exiting the editor clears it out. So my advice would be to exit the campaign after saving and then start the new mission with a 'clean' memory.

Finally, I was able to sit down for a proper play session this morning with the new patch and I can see that I'm going to have a lot of work to do with it. The patch has reduced the effectiveness of artillery v troops in buildings and as a result, 'Petani' and 'Orchard Road' became VERY tough to beat. Usually, the initial artillery barrage sent a lot of those conscript boys running but the number of MIAs has reduced in these missions by as much as 50% and I have the AAR screensaves to prove it. I was unable to get a win in either of these missions without taking HORRIBLE casualties. Since this is a 16 mission campaign, that's clearly not an acceptable situation so I've had to substantially rework the early Group A missions. The new version of 'Orchard Road' is so much fun to play now that I just can't believe I didn't make these changes earlier. Since I'm working with short compilations of the early missions, I've been as far into it as 'Sabatani' and I'm pleased to see that this missions won't require any changes. When I played it, I won it quite easily even though I had to work for that win. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I'll have Phase 1 completely sewn up and then it'll be time to compile and playtest all the missions up to the end of Phase 2.

I bought CMSF from Gamersgate and it really sucked having to wait 2-3+ extra days for patches. If you buy the Marines module, you'll never have to experience this frustration again. If THAT ALONE wasn't reason enough for buying the module, you'll also be able to play all the new stuff that's out, or coming out soon, with USMC content.

Clevinger If you are happy to do that, then that's fine by me. Once I have finalised it, I will send you copies of all the briefings and I'll post a seperate French version for you guys.

Okay, I got it downloaded and installed earlier this afternoon and I just HAD to give it a quick work out to see how the game has changed. I will have to be very careful with my language here as I might just get a bit carried away and end up with a ban but what I've seen so far is absolutely <bleep> AWESOME!!! First, I decided to open all my existing work in the editor and save the missions to a second v1.11 ready folder. I was quickly surprised to find that misssions that once took 6-8 minutes or longer to load only took 2-3 minutes MAX. Once I'd done that, I decided to play a mission on the largest map I've got in my scenario folder (The Lakes) which, prior to v1.11, took about 12-13 minutes to load up. The new v1.11 version took exactly 4 minutes and 40 seconds. <Bleep> amazing! Good work there guys! Then I gave another mission a quick work out. I usually win the 'Petani' mission very easily but today it beat me. WTF!!! Why? Because the AI sets up most of it's units in buildings and are less inclined to run away during the opening artillery barrage. This made the fight in the village very intense and a HUGE amount of fun but when time ran out and I lost and I saw how many units were still intact, I knew that this game has changed massively for the better. The AI doesn't have any artillery to throw around in that one so I haven't seen how the new system works but no doubt I'll see it in action when I play a mission where it does have it tomorrow morning. (Yes it's Xmas Day. I'm a sad ba*%tard but I don't care). But I did have time to try out the new vehicle pathfinding routines and I saw nothing wrong there. Vehicles sped along tree-lined roads without deviating off them like they did before in v1.10. I don't play WeGo so I can't comment on the changes there. However, I'm very happy to hear that it's had most of the cause for grumbling sorted out as I would prefer to play CM WW2 in WeGo mode as it will probably feel more appropriate for that era. I know that I haven't really had enough time to explore the new game thoroughly but I am so <bleep> impressed with what I've seen so far that I wanted to post this and say thanks to BFC and their Beta testing team for sticking with this.

Well, I'm in the process of downloading the patch and I'll have a chance to have a look at the changes it makes either later tonight or sometime later tomorrow (maybe!). This being the last few days before the Xmas holidays has meant that I haven't been able to spend ANY time at all this week working on this project and I probably won't be able to do much more than update my maps before the weekend. After reading the change list, I have a feeling that the new AI behaviour combined with experienced units spotting more efficiently will end up making the missions easier to win as Blue and that's not really a bad thing. The change that will likely cause the most problems for balance are the new AI artillery routines. The new ablility to save your campaign progress before you move onto the next mission and to switch between WeGo and RT means that I won't have to bother with those save point missions anymore. Really, in almost all of these missions Blue only has a single company with support elements so while the maps are big, the forces aren't. And that's true well into Phase 2 and even most of the Phase 3 battles. At the moment, the only missions with 2 infantry companys are 'Sagger Point', 'Flames' and 'Dinas - Agony of Doom', the last two being the campaign finales. The rest all have one infantry company with some tanks and support elements, engineers, BRDM-ATGM 2 (AT-5) vehicles etc. Nothing to give your processor a hard time. Oops, time to get back to the party...err work again.

When I first bought CMBO aeons ago, the thing I fell in love with was the scenario editor. I used to try and convert ASL scenarios for CMBO but they were never any good. But I had fun. Then came CMBB and the love affair with the editor intensified. WW2 Russian Front will probably always be my favourite and I can't wait to get my hands on CM Bagration sometime in the future. But, as with CMBO, my scenario designing efforts weren't very good. As it happens, I uploaded one of these ancient creations to the Repostory a couple of weeks ago just to see how uploading worked. It's nothing special so don't rush off and try it out. However, it is BLOODY HARD!!! Once the Brit pack arrives, I'm going to try my hand at a Brit campaign as well as finishing off my mini Marines campaign. But I have to confess that I don't have any passion for playing as the US. I'm not American so I guess that doesn't help. But then neither's George Mc and I'm a great admirer of his work. I'll be giving his armour campaign a run through when I get this project finished for sure. I'm not going to lie and say that I wouldn't like to be a Beta tester but it's certainly true that, apart from the delays waiting for patches and the new stuff, I'm VERY happy working on my own projects according to my own schedule. I don't think I would enjoy the creative process quite so much if I had BFC breathing down my neck to get me to finish something before the 27th January 2009. Today was a VERY productive day. I compiled three Group B missions and played them all the way through to the end. As well as catching some errors in the briefings and badly placed flavour objects, I was pleasantly surprised to find that those three missions are very well balanced. I won the first two missions quite easily with very low casualties and just got beat in third. Since those three missions comprise one 'thread' in the story, I can leave them alone until v1.11. Then I returned to 'Sulit Airfield'. It's been a while since I last tested it and I got a real buzz playing it as the map is one of my very best works. The only problem with it though is that it's hard. Oh yes, it's very winnable but I'm not sure that the core forces that take part in it will be much good for anything later in the campaign. Since I've started playtesting in earnest, I'm playing them now and trying to beat them as Blue. When I design, I usually root for the AI and I test mainly to make sure that the AI puts up a good fight and covers all the angles I can think of. That's where I was with Sulit. But today, playing as Blue desperately trying to preserve my boys, it feels very different. I'll play it a couple more times before I get v1.11 and see how I feel about it. I even got started on some serious work on the finale this afternoon and that makes me feel like it's all nearly finished. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do so much work next week because of the holidays. But I hope to get it finished quickly after the new year. To be honest, I'm rather keen to get started on something new. It's been nearly six months in the making.

Ali! You bugger! For ONE second I thought it was real. Still, it gave me a laugh. My plan to work on the variants soon came to a halt earlier today when I realised that I might have to make changes to the optimal version after I install v1.11. It's much easier, and safer, to have just one version of each mission until the optimal versions are compiled and playtested. hen, when I have my gold missions, I can quickly knock out the variants. But the briefings for them all are done now. Instead, I got back to work on 'The Lakes' mission, first to get the briefings and artwork in and then later, to try out the new AI OB. The first playthrough was a huge success but VERY difficult. Since a loss at this mission exits you from the campaign, I don't see any problem making it a real toughie. The map's stunning and it's a really good fight so it shouldn't be a great hardship to play it a few times to get that win. I got some great screenshots from the action too but they're for later.

Currently I play with an other game (Ageod's American Civil War), If I didn't LOVE this game so much, I'm pretty sure that that's the game I'd be devoted to too. It's a board game but it's stunningly beautiful.

Woo hoo! This all sounds great, especially the reduced map load times for v1.11 formatted scenarios. I had no idea that those fixed elevation points were responsible for longer load times. Just in time for my campaign too! When you say 'saved in v1.11 format', you mean 'Install the new patch, open the secnario up in the editor and then save it again'... voila, v1.11 formatted, right? I had a feeling that the new Marines campaign hadn't been released yet was because we'd need v1.11 to play it. I'm REALLY surprised that nobody's mentioned the terrain resetting when viewing WeGo replays. People have been compaining and complaining about that since... I'd like a clarification about which version of the patch I'll be using as well. I originally bought CMSF from Gamersgate but I bought the 'Maraines' module drectly from BFC (where else?) so does that mean I can install the BFC version or must I wait for Gamersgate? I'm looking forward to hearing more about these changes later this weekend. Good luck guys.