Paper Tiger

So, how about entering into a discussion about how this fundamental game feature is designed to work... <sigh> I guess I should have known better. Never mind, I'm not going to obsess over this issue so I'll leave it alone until the next time I'm creating a scenario and I see the AI doing the same thing.

Taki Are you using area fire on these buildings? A significant quantity of area fire on a building will probably reveal some hiding enemy units and make them less able to react to your moves. If you think the building is occupied, HIT IT! And it's been said before...don't drive a stryker up in front of a suspected enemy position and dump your infantry there. Poorer quality troops will give away their positions more quickly than good quality troops. Scenario designers are fond of using better quality troops when creating US v Red AI missions to make it difficult for you so if you feel that Syrian fire discipline in the game is unrealistic, blame the scenario designer. No Spotting of hiding units waiting in Ambush for over 5 Minutes on 30m with about 15 Eyes facing that Direction= absolutly unrealistic actually, no, it's not. They're hiding! Try it yourself, get a friend to hide in a building and then you go outside and try to spot them from 30m for 5 minutes. Good luck. Your problem stems from lack of preparation (no area fire on suspected enemy positions) and overly rash tactical moves (unloading infantry in front of suspected, unprepped enemy positions.)

Taki It sounds like you're going too fast in 'Strong Stand'. The briefing tells you that you must hold the assembly area until the reserves arrive and then begin your counterattack. The Reserves have tanks, nothing to get excited about but they'll beat the living crap out of those BRDMs that you're counting. Red Rage has found a very effective way to beat this mission and there are other ways to win it as well. But moving too fast and not waiting for the reserves is an almost impossible task. With regards to casualties, you can lose between 33-50% of your forces and still win the campaign. I playtested the final missions with half the original OB and still won... ONLY JUST! but I did win. The less casualties you take, the easier it will get. With regards to ammo, you have more than enough to see you through as long as you don't try to do it all yourself of course. Just make sure you use Buddy Aid to retrieve ammo and the RPG-29s when you can and you'll be alright. I would advise you to restart this mission and slow it down. After you beat off the initial rush and you're waiting for the reserves to arrive, give your forces buddy aid and reorganise them.

Hmm, I'm not going to let this one go away yet. I would really like to have this issue sorted a.s.a.p. and I really can't see how it's a difficult fix. The AI should set up it's units facing the player's FBE when it deploys it's units. And when the scenario designer places them himself without set-up zones, they should 'remember' their facing and keep it. In this latter instance, they DO remember their facing as they are facing the same way the next time I open the mission up in the scenario editor. However, when I fire the scenario up the AI takes it upon itself to swivel them around in their locations to present their backsides to the enemy... a very defiant gesture I'm sure, but not very effective for spotting . Whatever system the game is currently using must be more complex than the above. And this issue is going to come up more and more frequently as map sizes grow. So, how about entering into a discussion about how this fundamental game feature is designed to work...

I did a couple of tests this morning to confirm if it was the objective zones that was responsible for the peculaiar facing. I returned to my 'Flames' map and deleted all of Blue's objective zones, but not Red's and fired the mission up. Once again, units were still facing all different ways so I returned to the editor and removed all of Red's objectives too bar the Blue board edge objective. I fired it up again and ... squat... exactly the same. Wht I am seeing is that units on the north edge of the map are facing south while those on the south are facing north, and in both cases, usually deep into their own set up zones. So I don't feel as though I'm any nearer to solving this problem. PLEASE!!! BFC, explain to us what's going on here. This is making scenario design on large maps quite frustrating. How does facing work?

New Mission 4 - Opening the road I have been very busy this weekend playtesting all the phase one battles and I had a blast. But it became apparent very quickly that phase one needed another battle to complete it and so I have started work on a new mission 4 - called 'Opening the road'. It will now come before 'First Blood' and uses the 'Hit and Run' map. I am going to make this one mainly an infantry bash but you'll have some IFVs in support just to keep it interesting. This means that the campaign structure has changed quite a bit since I started work on it and the story line is developing quite nicely too. There will be four distinct phases to the campaign: phas 1 - the early morning missions where you have to clear the roads of poor quality reserve infantry, then phase 2 - the assaults to capture the bridges over the river Tumah where the resistance will be much stiffer, then phase 3 - the night actions where you'll encounter the 3rd Armour division and finally, phase 4 - the 'Perdition' phase, the battles for Dimas. The first playtesting of the early missions taught me that the Blue artillery is just right and so won't require any changes. You're going to have to use it in the early missions but just how much you use is up to you. There will be resupply but not for a while. That should make the early battles interesting. The phase 1 battles will be very dynamic but this time, I'm going to try and keep things much simpler that they were in 'Hasrabit'. Hasrabit had a large number of branches which resulted in eight different versions of 'Buying the farm'. There's no way I want to do that all over again so I'm going to try and keep it to a maximum of four. There will have to be four different versions of this new mission ranging from fairly simple to tough, but after that, it'll be much simpler and there'll be more opportunities to get dumped from the campaign.

I ran a quick test yesterday afternoon and I got mixed results. I opened up the 'Flames' map, the map where I first noticed this behaviour, and painted another AI objective zone right down the entire Blue board edge. Then I loaded it up, waited a minute or so for the AI to orientate it's units and then cease fired. When I reviewed the map, the first, and most forward placed unit I looked at was facing the blue board edge at last. Woo hoo! I thought, problem solved but ...no. I looked at a few other units and found that they were all facing the wrong way. However, this time, I followed their facing and found that in each instance, they were facing one of the objectives. Unfortunatley, all the objectives on this map are 'shared' i.e. the same for Blue and Red so I can't say if it chooses to face the Blue objective or one of it's own. To determine that will require further testing and, as you can imagine, editing and loading up maps of this size isn't funny, so I can't do this too often without me 'wasting' my quality CMSF time. However, we seem to be on the right track.

I keep trying to remember to test this but I think the AI is orienting on the farthest forward objective Woo hoo. That makes a lot of sense. I'll have to test this out myself and see if it works. If it IS this, then it's a very simple fix for the scenario designer. Thanks for that.

Steve I have the save file as I was really surprised by that too. (file size - 2.8MB). Where do you want me to send it?

I'm bumping this since you guys are getting a v1.11 patch made up. I would really like to see this problem addressed once and for all. As map sizes get bigger and bigger, this issue is going to become more and more noticable.

I was in a hurry when I posted that but let me just elaborate. The BRDM was given a series of short MOVE orders along the narrow road. Prior to v1.1, I could issue the same vehicle a single FAST order and it would tear up that road no problem without any diversions whatsoever. Now, even short MOVE orders are ignored and when it reaches it's next waypoint on the road, it goes off the road again. This is clearly demonstrated in the picture sequnce above. (But hey, it get's there in the end, it just takes 2-3 minutes longer than it used to) Perhaps this is exactly the kind of thing you've already fixed? However, I'm a little bit surprised that you're not interested in the driving through buildings issue though.

Rokossovsky The maps look really great. I loved the maps from the Hasrabit Campaign as well. Could I persuade you to put the maps up on CMMODs? I'm a bit nervous abut doing this as I am concerned that someone would poach the map, make a few changes to it and do a Blue v Red mission and get everyone raving about how good his scenario was. I want to make that Blue v Red mission first so that means that you'll have to wait until I get round to doing my Marine campaign. But after then, I fully expect to release a large QB map pack with the Hasrabit maps and some of the new ones from Dimas, especially the village ones which are IMO, reaaly beautiful. So, when I'm a bit stressed out from playtesting missions, I'm going to relax a bit by converting my existing maps into QB maps and trying them out for fun.

Either way, I have to admit I'm pretty unimpressed with the poor state of the marine campaign. They had their own timetable to release this when ever they felt it was ready How did glaring errors like the paths in the mountain or (if nobody can get past DtD, that issue) get through to the release?! I hope I'm not coming across as being negative with my earlier posts . I do understand how much time is needed to fully playtest a dynamic campaign and get it running properly and I for one, am really glad they released it when they did.

This sounds great to me. I really don't expect you guys to provide a service like this for free and the rates sound very reasonable to me. Most scenarios average out at a lot less than 100kb so, for most folks, that's a huge amount of free scenarios every month as well as a couple of decent mods. So count me in. What about The Front Line?

Will the unlucky people who dont own the Marine Module be able to play "The Road to Dimas" I might be persuaded to do a separate version using the crappy old BRDM-1 ATGMs in place of the much better BRDM-2s if enough people want it. However, I probably won't be so easily persuaded to playtest that change. That's the only Marine module unit in the campaign so far so it's not a big change to make.

here's the same vehicle emerging from the building a few seconds later and finally it emerges. Fortunately I saved the game when I saw this and before I started snapping screenshots.

Here's an example from my morning session. This vehicle has been given a number of short MOVE commands along a narrow road through a wheatfield. It won't stay on the road But wait, there's something else happening here that's a bit weird. I noticed that this vehicle had backed up through a building and was able to move througth the building to the other side again

That's weird as I've had a LOT of experience writing scripts and compiling campaigns, especially when testing them, and I've never seen this problem at all. If it's permissable, I'd be willing to have a look at the script for you if you post it to me. I still think the problem is in your script and it's more than likely one of the branches that's missing something. Hasrabit had a huge number of branches but I had a flow chart like yours to keep it all clear.

Okay, I'm going to chime in here as I don't want some of the things I'm seeing in the game since v1.10 to persist past v1.11. Vehicle pathfinding has definitely changed especially with respect to usage of roads. I have two missions in progress that, prior to v1.1, had vehicles moving rapidly along narrow roads through orchards or between two low walls that worked just fine. And they had Fast movement orders too. As long as I left a reasonable delay (around 10-15 seconds) between units moving along that one road, there were never any problems. After reading Steve's suggestion about reducing the speed I tried an experiment yesterday by giving a BRDM-2 ATGM vehicle a normal move order to move along the orchard road and it did it. However, even after a 30 second delay, no other unit was capable of repeating this move. Their first action would be to turn left off the road. Then I set the experiment up and repeated it, this time with a BMP-1 at the front, same conditions and the very first thing it did was turn left, drive off the road and generally wander around trying to find the road again. I definitely wasn't seeing this behaviour before v1.1.

We're trying to figure out why it's terminating at DtD It's not difficult. It's the campaign script. Just open it up and you'll see that you don't have a name for the 'next battle if win' (automatically goes to the end of campaign victory screen) and/or 'next battle if lose' (to the end of campaign lose screen) for DtD. It's a 2-3 minute fix. It's almost certainly a scripting error that's responsible for the failure to branch at the mountains mission that always takes you to Pooh. Again, 2-3 minute fix.

Thanks for the support guys. It keeps me motivated. I've pretty much finished 'Hit and Run' now. It took a day or so to learn how to use those BRDM-2 ATGM vehicles in the role I had in mind for them but once I did, I slaughtered the AI. Now we can't have that happening so I had to SUBSTANTIALLY reduce the Blue force. It's a large map and the Red force is about what you'd expect for a map that size but you have a rather pathetic-looking Recon platoon and a couple of ATGM vehicles. And I've managed to work the AI to ensure that the action will be very intense for a few minutes and then it's 'run like hell' time. I'm not going to say much more about it for now but it'll be interesting to see how many tanks you guys get to kill before hitting the 'cease fire' button. I got four this morning with almost no loss to my tiny force. It's definitely unlike any mission I've designed or played before but it's short, a lot of fun, and very challenging (for me anyway). However, I'm finding the vehicle pathfinding in 1.10 to be less effective than 1.08 and it's significantly affecting the gameplay in both 'Hit and Run' and 'Where Farmers Dare'. Hopefully v1.11 will be out before Xmas so hopefully it'll be sorted by the time you guys get to play this. The map has been 'filled out' somewhat with the second battle in mind. I will start working on the second battle at the weekend. But that's already pushed the number of missions up to 14 and some of these maps are quite big. This is definitely the most ambitous project I've done for CMSF yet.

If you're looking at restarting, you may want to wait a while before you do so. So are you hinting that there's a new updated version of the campaign in the works?

-Routed troops running backwards to safe area, not just disappearing with a (!). I would understand this in abstracted CMx1 but disappearing soldiers in 1:1 simulation isnt up to the realism of the rest of the game. This has come up before and the reasons for not having this feature are quite simple. You would be introducing YET another level of split squad behaviour. And hell, you would potentially have hundreds of individual units doing this in a mission, and the TAC AI would then have to 'control' these fleeing troops in a realistic manner eating up CPU cycles. Or you can have it abstracted like the way it is now. I'd like to keep it simple thank you. The Kill List will make a reappearance at some point in the future. My guess would be for CMx2 WW2 but we'll have to wait and see. I'd really like this feature too. Flags? This would reduce some of the uncertainty of who controls what objective. Personally I prefer it that way but I can understand other player's frustration with it. Perhaps if this feature were ever to be considered, it would best be a feature for the lower difficulty levels of play and not Elite or Iron.

I drive some MGS, Stryker and Inf around one building where the Enemy is suspected. Then i drive a stryker infront unload the Units and try to engage. If you suspect that building to be occupied by the enemy and you have an MGS, just put a round or two into that building before you unload your infantry in front of it. The MGS is good in this role. The solution to your problem is very simple: use area fire aggressively and generously, especially when playing as the US. Hell, I use it a LOT playing as Red. You can't reliably spot units that are hiding in buildings so you're going to have to blow some of your ammo doing this to keep your casualty levels low. Combine this with Normal Dude's overwatch tactic and you'll definitely see your casualty figures decrease drastically and have a great time playing as well.

I'm afraid I can't provide you with a detailed statistical analysis but I can definitely tell you that, yes, quality makes a big difference to weapons accuracy. Green and conscript troops throw up a lot of very inaccurate fire, scary to watch but at medium to close ranges, almost ineffective. Raise the experience level and you'll find their fire is more accurate. With regards to other things, ATGM team's fire definitely becomes more accurate as their experience level increases. Lower experienced crews crash their missiles more frequently while Crack almost never do that. I have noticed that higher experience level troops also spot faster, especially vehicle crews. Conscript tanks don't spot a lot even when up close. Crack tanks tend to spot extremely quickly and react to threats faster. Can't say about finding better cover or getting hit less frequently. Probably not.