Paper Tiger

Not to the best of my knowledge. However, I've already started work on such a campaign for a single platoon with support elements. Not only will it be for real time but it will also be designed for play by true iron man rules. I will probably wait for the Brits to do it though.

Oh yes, it certainly has gone. Once I had my final map all drawn up, the ideas for how to link all these missions together in a meaningful way just started pouring out. So much so that last night, I sat with my laptop and wrote out a long detailed summary of each Phase 1 mission and how they affect each other. It's not too complicated but it does mean that each mission has a REAL influence on the progression of the story line. Much more so than the missions in Hasrabit did. I got stuck into the new battle straight away this morning and it's shaping up to be a beauty. I have already found the right balance of forces and so far, after about 4-5 hours of playtesting, I really like what I'm seeing. I won't have to make many alterations to the map either as it's already quite 'rich' in posibilities. You'll only have a single BMP Mech Infantry Company and some engineers but you'll have a lot of artillery and helicopters to help you through it. It's looking VERY bloody and it has it's own unique feel to it. This map is definitely going into my Brit campaign as it's one of my all-time favourites.

The British 51mm mortar is used quite differently to the US 60mm mortar, so a model that works for one may not be appropriate for the other Probably a tad unfair to quote Normal Dude there as he's the skeptic and I'm the dreamer. Not being a weapons techie, I'm not sure what you mean when you say that they're used differently. Are you talking about doctrine?

Excellent. Then it won't be unreasonable to expect burning buildings.

I need a bit of help here chaps. I have been working on scenario where the Blue Force has 100% Intel on the Red positions at start up but when I fire up the mission, I get no intel at all. As usual, all the settings, FBE, EBE, wind etc as well as this setting were all picked before I started buying forces for either side. It's a Red v Red mission so I tried tweaking it so that it was the Red Force that has the intel, then fired it up from both sides and still got nothing. Then, after checking the settings Mark Ezra used in 'Blues for Allah', and found that they were identical, I thought, perhaps it's because I'm playing Blue as Syria. So I took out the Blue Syrian forces and stuck in some Marines, fired it up and... still no intel. BTW, it does work when I fire up 'Blues for Allah' so it does work on my computer. I'm stumped. I have absolutely no idea how to get this to work.:confused:

Did anybody else notice that there's a spot on the repository for the Brit module already? Maybe it's closer than we think. Well, knock me sideways with a feather. You're right. It's also featured in the top bar on their homepage too. I'm actually starting to get excited. Maybe it will be here for Christmas... And it looks like onboard mortars will be included too since the L9A1 (51mm Mortar) is listed under small arms and weapons rather than artillery support. Cool... Of course, if this allows us to use mortars onboard, BFC will have to patch the game to allow non-Brit pack owners to have this option as well (v1.2?). And we might finally see those US 60mm mortars that were included among the promotional screenshots too. Not to mention the M270Bi MLRS artillery module too...

We all know that water will arrive in the new CM game in all it's graphical glory. It's also inevitable that we will have to have some more varied atmospheric conditions for NW Europe, such as rain, fog and maybe even a storm? We will also see all-new terrain textures, trees and buildings etc and maybe even hedges? So these three elements will all be present in the game. However, what about fire? I am hoping that we'll see the return of burning terrain and flamethrower units in the WW2 title.

Scottish actually.

Ah, statistics! How we all love them. If those ten guys all have a 90% chance of failing to spot that MG then that means that really, there's only a 35% chance of them ALL failing to spot it. Even if my statistics are crap, and they probably are, it's just pure common sense that 10 people will have more chance of spotting something than one single guy whatever the 'numbers' might say. They're not dice. They can remember and they can also communicate.

Okay. Here's a look at the newest and final map for this campaign. Actually, it's not your first look it's a reworking of the 'Minuteman' map that was posted on page 2 or 3. Its' pretty much finished now, except for the alterations that inevitably get made after playtesting it, and I'm going to try and craft it to be mainly an infantry action. It will join 'Sulit airfield' as part of Group B's morning actions in Phase 1 bringing the final total of phase 1 missions to 8. It will take place at around 8am when you still have air support so there'll be helicopters in this one. Probably quite a few. It's actually not as large as you might think. It's about 1500m x 800m and I have plans to expand this map for my Brit campaign. It happens to be based on a real location in Syria as well.

As the v1.11 patch won't be released untl sometime later next week, I haven't been able to redo the three Perdition missions. I had also hit a bit of a creative block with respect to my new, final map but I solved that problem nicely last night. These last few days, I've been reworking the 'farmers' mission to make it more challenging. Since I discovered that I can give each AI group up to 16 commands, it means that I can script a better AI counterattack and so far, it's proving to be very effective. There will be four AI plans too. In the campaign, the Red force will be a Reserve Infantry formation stiffened up by some old tanks and with your full OB, it's quite easy to beat. But I have crafted a Special Forces version of this mission that I intend to release as a stand alone mission before the full campaign is finished. When playtesting the SF version, I could still get a win but at an enormous cost to my core force. A real 'Last man Standing' mission. Great for stand alone but an absolute NO NO for a campaign mission

How many here still carry the spirit of Alex Harvey? Ah, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band... 'Isabel Goudie' and 'They're burning Big Louie tonight' spring instantly to mind. I had forgotten about him until you mentioned him so later I'll have to do a search on Youtube to see if some of his music is up there. BTW, I'm not OLD... yet. With regards to my 'lots of Americans won't buy it' comment, the key phrase is 'lots of'. I have no doubt that some of you are as eager to buy and play this as I am as well. But BFC are in this business to make money so it makes sense for them to include some new US stuff to encourage these others to buy it too. And I don't care as long as the Brits are done properly. Then I'll definitely return to playing and designing stuff for Blue forces. BTW, it's a bit of a joke that we're going into the CMWW2 title AFTER the Yanks. Talk about rewriting history. With regards to Syrian stuff, yeah, sure, there's a lot that could go in but I'm pretty sure Steve hasn't changed his mind since he last stated that Syria already has 'more that they have in real life'. They might not even have a single T-90 in service yet so we're probably already in Lah-lah land as far as Syria is concerned. They're going to save up the good Russian stuff for CMSF2 in a temperate setting so don't hold your breath.

During one of the next "steps" in the CM series, "proper" water will be introduced. This means, dynamic flowing visually appealing water, and not just a static tile. Until then - there are some really GREAT inofficial mods out there. Martin That's a quote from a thread called 'Water' in the scenario forum. It doesn't state Normandy specifically but water will be 'in' that title.

I would imagine that one of the 'surprises' included in the Brit Pack will be the US Light Infantry formation and maybe some more US stuff. Otherwise, a lot of Americans just aren't going to buy it. I'm not expecting to see anything new for the Syrian side as the CM:SF title is ablout Modern Era combat against Syria and not against Russia or China or anybody else. However, I will be disappointed if they don't give the Syrians some trucks. There is absolutely no good reason for denying them to the Syrians other than the time it takes for BFC to 'code them in'.

Och noo! Here we go again with the long wait for something I desperately want to get on my hard drive a.s.a.p. 'Soon' meant about 4 months from an identical announcement of the Marines module to it's final release... four months of ...waiting... By the way, HATE the name. But what the hell, I'm still going to buy it.

Whew. After several false starts over the last couple of days, I finally found my final version of The Lakes mission this morning. I played it all the way through with Blue's FULL OB and I got very good fps so there'll be no need to include an option to skip it. Or at least, if that option remains, it will be an automatic loss and then you will have to follow a different branch to the end of the campaign. I also managed to win it without too much difficulty. It's extremely unlikely that you'll have the full OB in this mission so the difficulty is probably jusy right. Regarding difficulty, it's just not possible to make this balanced for everybody to play so therefore, like Hasrabit, it's going to be balanced for ME to play. If you won Hasrabit quite easily, then expect this to present a similar level of challenge. It is certainly a VERY different creature to play from Hasrabit though. I pretty much finalised the overall story of the campaign last week and that means that I know how many different versions of each mission are required and how they should be different. I've managed to link the three phase 2 battle together in such a way that depending on your success in the first two, you'll go to one of three different versions of The Lakes mission. I've playtested the potentially most difficult version of this mission and found it to be winnable. Now, I just have to create at least one more, possibly two, AI attack plans to keep you guessing. Some folks will definitely require two or more goes to get past this one. When you DO finally get around to playing this mission, please bear in mind that it is FIRST a tank battle and the infantry action is secondary. If you win the tank battle big then you will be able to utterly destroy the infantry in their strongpoints with scarcely a loss to your infantry force. However, I've tried to time everything so that the crucial phase of the tank battle won't be reached until about half way through the mission so if you sit around waiting for it to be resoved before taking on the infantry in their strongpoints that won't leave you much time to do it.

It's such a long time since I last played 'In Harm's Way'. Since it was made, there have been several improvements to the TAC AI so I would expect that it has become a tad more difficult. I'll have to review it sometime as it's a long time since I've played ANY scenario as the US side, just a couple of QBs. Anyway, the last few days have been spent solidly on developing the three Phase 2 battles and in particular, the beast that is 'The Lakes'. I am going to include a small 'interlude' after you complete the 'Bridges' mission so that you go to a tiny scenario where you can save your progress before progressing to this monster. It takes about 15 minutes to load up on my computer and sometimes, I get a CMSF EXE failure Out of Memory warning and the game crashes. I suspect that this is because either the game, or my graphics card, fails to clear out RAM after completing a mission. I might even include the option to skip this mission and chalk it up as a victory for you but at the expense of all the core units within that scenario. At the moment, that's a reasonably realistic result, except for the player victory when playing 'The Lakes'. I'm gong to have to tone down the difficulty quite substantially in this one or increase the force that Blue has to do the job. Since I don't like the latter idea, I'm going to have to spend a lot more time developing ths one so I'd like to keep it at one infantry company with some tanks in support. However, the good news is that while playtesting the phase 2 battles, I saw the AI use it's artillery dynamically during two of the missions. In 'The Lakes' mission, it absolutely killed me. Further, in that mission, the first artillery rounds started falling about 30 minutes into a 2 hour mission. I wasn't expecting that and I was very impressed. Hopefully, I'll have a couple more screenshots to post tomorrow morning.

Mine's only 22" but it's not how big it is, it's how you use it. I think the game looks MUCH better in widescreen mode. However, one word of caution; the higher the screen resolution, the more resources your CPU needs to show the game on your screen. If your already getting low fps in some missions, you'll get less with higher resolution.

I'll bet that you'll see a TON of scenarios made for the first game where the US is pitted against SS troops backed up by Tigers then. If they're in, who's not going to use them?

This has never happened to me so I don't know how to help you. Do the core units appear in the mission when you playtest it as a stand-alone mission? Also, have you created a seperate folder in the games file to store all your campaign files?

I guess they're just going to surprise us with it. My gut tells me sometime later next week as I think they really want to put CMSF to rest for a while so that they can get stuck into the Normandy module without distractions.

Aha, thanks for that. I've already changed it. BTW guys, you may wish to sub divide the Marines folder in the Repo so that you have separate folders for mods and scenarios.

'There's nowt weirder than fowks.' If I really didn't like this game for some reason, I'd definitely move on to something else and maybe return later to see if something has changed. That reviewer probably got paid to spend his time complaining about the game. If some of you guys have insurmountable problems with this game, why can't you go and play something else instead of 'haunting' these forums? Run to the light!

Well, downloading at work was a complete success so I've got the file now. However, I just noticed that when I posted a comment on the site, it used my real name. Is there some way to use my Forum name instead?

A Blue on Blue CAMPAIGN?! OMG, the lethality of such a creation. But it will almost certainly be a Marines campaign. I've been playing around with them in a couple of QBs and I have developed some good ideas for a smallish campaign, NOTHING like this monster here, say maybe between 8-10 missions, maybe a little more if I really get inspired. Anyway, I pretty much finished Orchard Road yesterday. I almost managed to get a win without losing a single tank so that means that it's about 95% there. I just have to tweak the AI set up a little as I found a couple of FOS teams hiding in a building with no LOS so I'll have to find that plan and correct that error.