Paper Tiger

Finally, we have some news on the patch and I suspect that the changes to the infantry behaviour model are going to change some of my 'finalised' missions so that they require rebalancing. There are a lot of poor quality, poorly motivated conscript or green troops in the early missions so these missions will probably play very differently with v1.11. Anyway, I haven't been lazy this week and I've pretty much finished the Jameela mission. At the moment it has just one AI attack plan and it works pretty well so far. I'll continue to tweak it over the weekend while I draw up AI Plan 2 for next week. However, I plan to spend most of my time this weekend getting the 'alternates' finished for all the other missions. I'll need to give these a bit more attention than I did the 'Hasrabit' alternative missions as I suspect that after you read the announcement, most of you will decide to play some of these. Alternatives basically means that you fight the same battle but either your OB has changed in some way or the enemy's has, or his morale is higher due to an earlier victory. There were a LOT of these in 'Hasrabit' and the mission 'Buying the farm' actually had eight different versions. The mission with the largest number of variants in 'Dinas' is 'Sagger Point' with six although I'm still hummimg and hawing about how dynamic to make the phase 3 battles. The more dynamic I make them, the more variants I need of the phase 2 battles. It's already going to be a huge upload/download so I'll have to keep that in mind. The size of the finished campaign isn't a problem for me as after I compile it, it goes straight into my campaign folder. Not so for you guys though. One of the things that really bumps up the size of the campaign file is the artwork. The BMP photo files are quite big and with so many individual mission in the campaign (now it's just over 50 with the Save Points and Depot missions included) that's going to make for a lot of pictures. Finally, before I get started with the my work for the weekend, I thought I'd share a couple of maps with you. Like Hasrabit, Dinas takes place in a fictional part of Syria and so I have to draw up some maps to make it all REAL for me, so that I can create a story that's consistent from one mission to the next. While fictional, some of the mission maps are based on real locations in Syria, most especially in the 'Sulit Airfield' mission and to a lesser extent in the 'Orchard Road' mission. The first map is of the large Suib Orchard complex where most of the phase 1 battles will be fought. The second is a map of the Tumah bend where most of the Phase 2 battles wll be fought. There is a third map for phase 3 but it's a bit scrappy looking just now. By the way, just because you see 'Infantry Regiment' appearing on those maps doesn't mean that the enemy is almost exclusively infantry. There are quite a few reserve tanks thrown in to many of these battles as well as some emplaced tanks at the 'prepared' positions at Suib and Sagger Point. This is definitely NOT an Infantry only bash. I LOVE the vehicle action so there'll be plenty of that kind of action in Dinas.

sweet... I remember snow. I'm going to have a very hot christmas in an Islamic country... fun!

I posted something about the vehicles moving through buildings bug a couple of months ago and Steve asked for a save game which I duly sent. So there's a very good chance that this problem has been fixed in v1.11. When Hurricane Ike (?) hit the US back in September and delayed the release of the Marines module BFC posted a blog to inform us of the delay. There's been no such posting about an ice storm though so one can only assume that work is still going on to finalise this baby. It would be nice to get an update though (hint hint) as the weekend is rapidly approaching again and the Xmas holidays start next week.

Usually, I end up making an ass of myself when I contribute to discussions about the AI but I always learn something from the experience: here goes... First up, that particular AI group consists of infantry and vehicles, right? If the next objective consists only of building tiles then there's nowhere for the vehicles to go so they do squat. I've done that once or twice... Second, how about changing the Exit Before for order 2 to 'Exit before 02.00', and for order 3 '03.00' etc. Perhaps they just don't have enough time to do the order and 'give up'. And finally, I usually use Assault instead of Max Assault. The Max Assault order seems to work best with Infantry only AI groups. I rarely ever see vehicles in a group move when they have a Max Assault order whereas they do when you use Assault. Hope something there helps... good luck

It's one of those GAZ jeep thingies... but you're right, it does look like a cow though. No doubt we'll get cows with the WW2 module. Beef flavour objects!

Whilst that very well may be true for some of the people that frequent this forum, we're not all like that. Some of us do a lot of unacknowledged work for the community and indirectly for BFC itself, and would like to be kept abreast of the latest developments.

the Russian ambassador hoped for an end to world conflict, the Chinese ambassador hoped for improved relations with the West and the British ambassador, he asked for a small box of crystallized fruits." Ha! Scoff if you will but HE probably got what he wanted. Seriously guys, I am more than happy to wait for the patch as I find the game very playable as it stands. Yes, even with the less than optimal vehicle pathfinding routines. If a delay means that we get some cool new feature then by all means, hang on to it until you make it as good as you can. What I hate is having no information about what the patch is going to fix/change. I really don't understand why this has to be such a BIG secret here. Fine, I can understand why BFC don't want to say WHEN something will be available, but what's in it? Knowing what's coming makes the anticipation even sweeter. But NO info until after some patch arrives? That really sucks.

Still no v.11 patch but I'm confident that we'll have it in time for the holidays, hopefully before this weekend. After writing most of the briefings and debugging the campaign script, and testing it to see that the branches work okay, I returned to playtesting last week. With the Phase 1 battles all finished and still waiting for the patch, I moved on to improving both the 'Bridges' and 'Farmers' missions. That just left me the 'Lakes' mission from Phase 2 to do and that's phase 2 completed too. So I got started on it on Saturday. Fortunately, the AI vehicle pathfinding doesn't screw up on this one up too badly so I have been able to move this one nearer to completion too. However, it will still require a fair bit of playtesting after v1.11 comes along as I need to develop a second AI attack plan. Here's another one. While it's designed primarily to be a tank action, there'll be plenty for your infantry to do as well. A quick word to those of you who are a bit nervous that their rigs won't be able to run battles on maps this size. I am including two 'Save Point' missions that immediately precede the two monster map scenarios; this one and 'Orchard Road'. It's TINY and loads in a few seconds and here you can save your progress before moving on to loading up the monsters. Should these missions prove unplayable on your rig, you will have the option to return to the save point and 'choose' not to play it by losing the Save Point mission. The campaign script will simply skip it and count it as a loss. Not perfect but at least you'll get to play the rest of the campaign. Finally, yesterday, I returned to the Phase 3 battle Jameela and did quite a bit of work on that mission. In fact it got a complete overhaul. In this mission, you have to defend a small village against a determined attack by a Mech Infantry Company backed up by some tanks. The terrain REALLY favoured the defence and it was quite fun but way too easy. It was proving difficult to get a good attack to work and my initial solution was to give the AI a large amount of artillery and air support. The air support pretty much gutted your tanks force at the start and, as a result of this, the AI was able to get into the village. But it just didn't feel fair. I know war is not fair and you actually get the chance to screw the AI like this from time to time too, but in a campaign, where you carefully husband your forces through several difficult missions only to have them blown away by air support at the start of the mission would probably piss most of you off. Anyway, I started tinkering around with the elevations and I was looking at the map in the 3D preview mode and I 'saw' what I wanted the map to look like. So, back to the editor and out came most of the trees and the elevations were flattened out and the dry river bed with it's two bridges alos went. After a couple of hours work, the new map was ready for a quick spin and it's stunning. Now I just have to rework the AI plans to take account of the terrain changes and I'll have a second working mission to playtest. It's now SO far from the original 'In Harms Way' map that, apart from some flavour objects, it no longer resembles it in any way. Anyways, what this means is that I don't have much work left to do now. There's only one mission left to do any REAL work on now and that's the finale. I will still need at least 3-4 weeks to playtest everything compiled after I get the patch and there will inevitably be some slow down in work over the Xmas holiday but I am really hoping it should be available after the New Year.

The Javelin would be wonderful for dealing with the T62 anchoring the center in the first scenario, but, alas, you don't get one. * * * SPOILER * * * * * Your air support will take care of it very effectively with minimal expenditure of ammo.

I would imagine that the long delay getting the 'fixed' campaign out to us is because we'll need the v1.11 patch to play it. After all, a fixed Marines campaign has absolutely no value to those who don't have the Marines module.

Hey, that looks terrific. Downloading the 'Old School' mod as I already have your earlier mod installed. That will keep all the Red vehicles in the game looking the same. Thanks for sharing this.

AI will not recognize Destroy objectives and will also get no points if the player destroys it Yup, I did some pretty extensive testing of this today and the AI just ignores the 'Destroy' objectives. Occassionally, one would get taken out accidently by a vehicle blowing up next to it or an artillery strike but otherwise, zilcho. Using pre-planned artillery strikes to destroy these targets seems a tad unfair to the player as there is absolutely nothing that he can do to prevent them from getting destroyed either. I was hoping that the AI's big guns, i.e. tanks, would fire on 'Destroy' objectives when they had LoS to them AND were unthreatened. If it DID do this, then we would be able to give the AI a limited ability to use Area Fire. Perhaps BFC could figure out a way to make the TAC AI consider these 'Destroy' objectives for a future title module or patch?

4000x2000? Is this possible? I thought the max map size was around 2kx2k. Ali, I'm going to assume that you tried to do this and found that you couldn't, just like I did a few months back. The secret to getting it to go bigger than 2kmx2km is to expand the map in BOTH directions along the same axis, i.e. press the + button on both sides of the X axis. If you just keep expanding to the right you can only go 2km but you can still go 2km to the left too. Same with the Y axis. If you already know this, my apologies to you. Working on big maps is a DOG!!! Placing flavour objects on said maps is also a HUGE amount of work because you can't hop back and forth between the main editor screen and the 3D preview. I'd also like to add my voice to the praise for Pete Wenman's maps. I have always found his maps to be of the VERY highest quality and I've made some nice QB maps from his large rural maps. And of course, George Mc draws beautiful maps too. I have most of his work (not Armour Attacks) in my scenario folder and I plan to play a few of them AFTER I get my current project finished but his maps always look beautiful and realistic. And we shouldn't overlook hcrofts maps either.

I can understand how this works when it's an objective for a Human Player but how does the AI react to this condition, if at all? The AI doesn't really seem to go about destroying buildings and if it does happen, it's probably an accident due to an artillery barrage or airstrike. Therefore it seems to be a bit of a waste of time giving it to an AI opponent. However, if this did work, I can see some exciting potential in it. Anybody done any tests on this?

I'll let you guys know when we move to the Final Candidate stage. Steve I guess we're still not at the final candidate stage yet then? Sorry to appear impatient, I'm sure I'll be very happy when it finally arrives and in the meantime I've got plenty to be getting on with while I'm waiting.

daviduk I remember the first screenshots of Marines equipment appeared on BFCs webste about 5 months before the final release of the module. Similarly, in the month before the Marines module arrived (Septemeber) , BFC were showing off a short video of British equipment on their own site at Youtube. Steve has said that the Brit module probably won't be ready until around the end of January, again, about 5 months after the first promo pics appeared. Since we have yet to see a single screenshot of the WW2 module it's probably safe to say that it's at LEAST 6 months away.

"...the special versions that will be needed for those who choose to accept a result and not follow the optimal path to the finish." I nice way to say get stumped As it happens, I am scripting and designing this campaign to be WAY more dynamic than 'Hasrabit' so you'll get a surprise when you read the announcement when it's finished. But I'm not giving it away yet. Still no v1.11 and I'm not convinced that we'll get it for the weekend either. But I'm still hard at work on this. As it happens, it takes 4-5 days just to write all the briefings for a campaign and I left all that work until the end when I was making Hasrabit. This time, all that work, including the artwork, is pretty much finished so once that last mission is finalised it'll be good to go immediately.

In a non-dynamic campaign I would simply exit the player from the campaign if he failed one of the missions and he would have to resort to the auto save that he has from the start of the mission. There's nothing much you can do about the final mission. I would just leave it up to the individual player to decide if he wants to rest on his laurels from his earlier victories. After all, he did win four out of five missions. Personally, I'd reload and try again until I got the satisfaction of a win in the finale as would many others I suspect. Hope that helps. Good luck mate

Ach, I must confess that I'm a bit disappointed that we still haven't got the v1.11 patch yet. No doubt it will be worth the wait but it has meant that the serious work that needs to be done on the last three or four missions has to wait until I get it. I figure I'll need between 3-4 weeks to get this thing finished after I get the patch installed. But in the meantime, I haven't been idle. Instead, I have spent the whole weekend getting the briefings written and the artwork done and it's looking good. Almost every mission now has at least 2 AI plans to improve replayability, some even more. Now, I just need to get Jameelah and the Lakes missions AI attack plans working properly and then it's on to Dinas, the finale. I reckon the first two missions will take 3-5 days to get finished and then I'll have to do some compiled playtests to see what you're likely to have and then, it's finale time. I already have a pretty good idea what I'm going to do with the finale. The maps' been done for a while and indeed, I've played on it a couple of times. I reckon that's another weeks work. So it won't be ready for Xmas as I'd hoped I'm afraid, but I'm REALLY going to push for a date just before the New Year.

BillyR: Try asking again around February.

Just a quick screenshot from this morning's playtesting session. That's from 'Sulit Airfield' and this mission, as well as 'Petani' and 'Persik' are now all finalised. That means that the briefings and all the artwork, tac maps etc, have been finished as well as the special versions that will be needed for those who choose to accept a result and not follow the optimal path to the finish.

I just noticed over 3K views of this thread! I probably account for 3-5% of those views alone. I hadn't noticed that before you mentioned it. This thread has been 'alive' for quite a long time as well. Hopefully though, it will become unnecessary very soon and then I can start another one. Well, we're still all waiting for the v1.11 patch and it is putting a cramp on things as all but one mission is pretty much finalised for compiled testing. And that unfinished mission is the last mission in the campaign. I really need to playtest the whole thing a couple of times to get a feel for what's doable in that last mission. You don't want to fight your way through 15 missions just to get to a totally unwinnable finale. well, I don't anyway. Since the sucky AI vehicle pathfinding hurts the AI as much as it does me, I'll have to wait for v1.11 to finish work on the missions that have a serious AI attack in them. The 'Jameelah' mission in particular is suffering from this as at present, the infantry tends to run ahead of it's vehicular support and gets creamed before they can provide fire support. This is because they're still struggling to navigate their way along a road with a couple of trees on the verge or merging together. No doubt, v1.11 will put this to rest and then I'll see how effective that attack really is. I am not sure that I will issue a new version of the Perdition mini campaign as I have had to substantially rework both the 'Tumah Crossing' and 'Perditions Flames' missions to get the AI to reliably use it's artillery assets during the missions and that meant all-new AI groups as there were no spare groups. And while I was at it, I changed the Red OBs somewhat to provide a better challenge. So perhaps I'll just leave 'Perdition' alone for the time being and just concentrate 100% on getting this monster finished.

It looks a bit more convincing if you use the Marsh to Water tile mod that Pete made. Since there's no official water tile in CMSF, and Marsh is the only impassable terrain tile, it's the only one we can use. You'll find a LOT more 'marsh' in the next Perdition mission. It'll look much better if you use Pete's mod.

Because I've been playing this game almost exclusively Red v Red for the last year or so, I am really surprised when I'm testing these small missions and find that a single US Marines Platoon with LAVs has WAY more firepower at it's disposal than an entire Syrian Mech Infantry Company. (Perhaps not a Mechanised Airborne Company though.) And one thing I really like about playing as Blue is the wide variety of Infantry Support vehicles that you have to play around with. Sometimes, a tank is just overkill in a mission and after the Mech Infantry's rides, there really are only tanks available to back up your boys as Red. Yes, there's the BDRM ATGM vehicle and it's quite potent in an anti-infantry role. But it's very very fragile, especially against tanks. I like the tanks but they are sometimes just a bit too tough for the mission I had in mind. There are a couple of missions in this campaign where I have contrived the story line to justify a Mech Infantry only action. (Persik and SAM Hill are Mech infantry actions only). And there are some missions where your tank support is substantially delayed to allow you to develop the battle with your infantry first. (Where Farmers Dare and Burning Bridges are a couple of examples of this). Otherwise, you'll always have some tanks at your disposal pretty much from the start. The BMP-3 would be great as a support vehicle in this campaign but I just don't see any way that I could justify it's inclusion in the Rebel forces OB. Ali Baba : With regards to extracting the maps from the campaign, I don't think there's any way for us to do this at the moment. The best you can do is keep the game save at the beginning of a mission and treat it as a 'scenario' that can only be played against the AI. As long as you haven't exited the set-Up phase, the AI hasn't yet chosen it's AI plan so it could potentially provide a different experience for you. I do plan to release some of these maps as stand alone missions later though so you'll get your hands on some of them at some point in the future.

Well, I'm at work again and have bugger all to do so I might as well post an update. I have been playtesting the hell out of the new mission and it's called Persik. (Yah Michael, seperti Dewi...) I played around with a couple of versions that had a small armoured counterattack coming in late in the game but it was eating into my AI group allocation and really didn't enhance the experience in any way so it went out and instead, I have developed a more detailed defense. Since it has two quite different AI plans, it will keep you guessing if you really stuff it up the first time. After tweaking the victory point locations to make you work for that win all that was left for me to do with it was win it with the core forces. And I did that quite easily this morning so that's it pretty much finished. Since the cat is already out of the bag on this one, my next project is going to have much smaller Blue forces, probably as small as a single platoon. I have already developed a couple of maps for this but I'm definitely going to reuse some of the Dimas maps in this project. The new Persik map will definitely go in as it's not too big for a single platoon action, at least if the Brits can split their squads up nicely like the Stryker MOUT or Marines Rifle platoon can. I guess I'm getting a bit burned out playing missions with company+ sized forces and since I play in real time, it should be easier to control a battle at this level. Further, with many fewer units on the map, I should be able to make the maps super detailed.