[Help please. Road to Dinas]

Another incipient campaign? Yikes! I have completely forgotten about that one as well as that flu. That was nasty - three visits to the hospital before a doctor finally got the diagnosis right. I was also a tad sensitive back then about PC which I've since learned to give the middle finger to. A lot has changed in the last 11 years. That seems to be something I had planned after work on the 'Scottish Corridor' was finished and indeed, something 'new' for BFC came along shortly afterwards which would demand my attention for a while afterwards.

I'm glad to see I posted a fairly good concept for it as it looks like a good one and it will help reconstruct the idea in my mind. I've been looking at the maps I did for the NATO campaigns and it would be good to revisit them and do something Red v Red with them along those lines. The map I made for 'Charity' was a real labour of love. There are two maps that nearly 'broke' me, 'Charity' and 'Brew Up'. I still have the Charity map but the Brew Up map was a new final bonus mission for the Scottish Corridor campaign which was lost in the crash as well as that Dinas map and the German map mentioned that never made it to the campaign. I can't even remember what those latter two looked like. 'Brew Up' I will never forget though. It was so much work to do and the 'right' battle was proving equally challenging to find.

Right now, I am fully at work on a rework of the 'USMC Gung Ho' campaign which is almost an entirely new beast from the original as I've reworked the maps and massively expanded three of them and thrown out the original CAAT fight mission which I just don't get. How did I ever think that was fun?  I spent the entirety of Sunday and yesterday afternoon developing the new 'CAAT among the pigeons' mission which is both in line with what I wanted and is also a lot of fun to play so I really want to finish this before moving on to something new. What that might be though will be decided later, an update for Hasrabit was the most likely bet because I wanted to do something with the Republican Guards but this discovery might change that. 'Carry On Up The Khabour' sounds like something I might do though

[Electronic warfare]

Well, I've done a bit of reading on the subject (and by that I mean a very superficial dive) and I think I've come up with a system that makes sense to me.

I will have STRONG EW for Blue in the very early missions of a campaign but have it degrade as you progress through the campaign with mission losses being particularly harmful to it. And I'll stick with there being weak EW for RED when the Special Forces, the Guards and the Airborne are fighting. (I've already noticed one or two 'interesting' combo effects when the US has poor EW capabilities which will make some missions more 'exciting'. I guess I'm just going to have to get used to the delay on strikes fore BLUE.)

[Electronic warfare]

Apologies if this topic has been discussed before but this is a new feature for me and I'm trying to get a grasp of how it should be used in a CMSF2 scenario.

From my old board wargaming days, I remember playing games like SPI's 'The Next War' and 'Red Star White Star', both of which had EW in a 1980s setting. But it was hardly ubiquitous in the theatre and often was not there at all so I'm thinking, in the 2000s, why not just let BLUE have STRONG all the time and Syria none at all? Why have weaker settings? Is EW really that common or is it something that should only apply in certain situations? My thinking is that it should only apply in rare cases rather than every BLUE v RED Mission.

I'd like to have an active RED EW setting when you're fighting the Special Forces, the Republican Guard and the Airborne but otherwise don't see how the other formations could use it. Besides, the delay it brings is a real pain when you're used to calling in strikes in 3-5 minutes.

[A question about mods]

10 hours ago, kohlenklau said:

EDIT: Oh crap, this is THE Paper Tiger. I just embarrassed myself by giving cooking tips to a chef. My pardon!

Because of this very hassle with numbers versus little images, one thing I usually do as a habit is to lay down all the options for a particular flavor object on my map in the pattern of the offered options some place convenient.

Like the telephone poles

1    2   3

 

or

 

1  2  3

4

etc.

Then I can see I want number 3 for this map, I can clone the one I want, adjust delete etc.

 

No worries. While I'm not exactly a noob when it comes to the editor, I'm in the process of relearning everything, for example, how to get mods to work, etc - the simple things that once were second nature to me. I'm still accidentally making selected units reinforcements instead of placing them in an AI group for example. Of course I can see the mistake instantly and correct it but it's still not quite automatic with me yet.

I've gotten into my stride with creating AI plans like before: it just came back to me last week - the old fashioned way that suits an old dude like me best, paper, pen, in and out of the editor to place units etc, and building it up that way.

[A question about mods]

10 hours ago, 37mm said:

As far as I understand the text/font/script system, such a mod would be impossible however I think you might be remembering this pdf files image...

https://cmmodsiii.greenasjade.net/?p=6139

 

Still, mods can be useful for scenario editing from time to time. I remember once needing to look under some forest tiles, so I alpha'ed away the tree tiles allowing me to better see the terrain tiles.

Ah yes, that's what I remember. Thanks for that. It will be very helpful and save me a lot of time. I've greatly expanded some of the maps I'm using for my USMC project and I'll have to populate these 'empty' sites with flavour objects. At the moment, while I'm relearning, I'm just putting down one of everything and choosing the one I want and duplicating it which takes a lot of time.

[A question about mods]

Downloading now. 

 

Cheers

[A question about mods]

If I remember correctly, there was a UI mod that displayed little pictures of the flavor objects in the boxes instead of the generic numbers. Is this a real thing and if so, where can I find it? It's pretty tough placing flavor objects without them. I've searched both the Scenario Depots and these boards for posts about such a mod but get nothing.

 

On the topic of mods, I believe there's a HQ Flames mod available? I can't see it anywhere either.

[WIP - The Road to Carpiquet Campaign]

I wouldn't STEAL your maps. I guess that's one possibility if I find the task of remaking these maps too onerous. The Nan Red map wasn't particularly big and was a lot of fun to make but the large Tailleville and Carpiquet maps were both a lot of detailed work. I'm in the process of expanding a map for the USMC campaign and it's taking ages, that's three days work and it's 75% complete - I start to H-A-T-E a map if it becomes too much work  at least until I start playing on it anyway and then I appreciate the effort.

If I DO indeed borrow from you, don't worry, I would give you the credit.

[WIP - The Road to Carpiquet Campaign]

Well, sad news. I lost all the maps when I had another catastrophic hard drive crash around 2016 (it literally burned out). Funnily enough CD storage is not as permanent as I once though. Disks corrupt quite quickly out here in Indonesia so the back-ups were useless and the flashdrive I was using back then was wiped and given to my sister-in-law before the crash. 

However, I found the research materials I used at the weekend which had all my notes in it with campaign OBs for both sides for all the completed missions as well as some hand-drawn maps so it's not impossible I might be able to reconstruct this from scratch. It might be shorter than the above but we'll see.

I feel a certain obligation to finish this as it feels unresolved and that irks me but if it's too much work, well, we'll see. It's a massive pain to lose all that work. Nan Red, Tailleville, the Going to Church mission, the assault on Carpiquet and the finale were all finished with multiple attack plans done. But with the hand-drawn maps to help me, I guess I could remake them all in time.

[Help please. Road to Dinas]

As it happens, the latest version of the campaign extractor did the job on Hasrabit so I now have two large campaigns to rework over time.

 

The Hasrabit maps are actually pretty good but far too small for what I need now so I'll have to extend them quite a bit before I can rework them.

 

So, the plan is, get the 6 mission USMC campaign finished first and then do the British Forces and NATO versions of this campaign. I'll post more about that once I've finished the maps and have most of the battles working properly. I have no idea how long this is going to take but I'm hoping later next month (April) for the first version and the Brits and Germans to follow not long after that.

After that, I'm going to focus on Hasrabit as it's OLD, most folks won't have played it and you also get to play with Republican Guards and Special Forces with all the goodies that come with them. Of course, map reworks come first and as I'm learning from my current project, that's 2-3 days per map, with 10 maps so that's about a month of work on maps alone. I generally do map work in the evening though so I'll start work on these next week. Since this is Red v Red and easier to do than NATO v Red, I expect reasonably quick progress on this because you're not hampered by any of those 'silly' considerations like civilian casualties or cultural sensitivity. It's just 'get the job done'.

Then finally, Road to Dinas. It won't need quite so much work to redo as the maps are generally big enough. It's the AI that will need a lot of love as there are a few AI attacks and there's also some new kit that could be utilised. I had to use US air forces for Hasrabit as there wasn't Syrian air power in the early versions of the game. Nor were there Shilkas which are a bit of a game changer. But I've learned a few tricks since I released this campaign so it should benefit from my experience.

[Revising The Road to Montebourg campaign]

Yes, subbing the old captured French tanks was the first change I made. The original Montebourg campaign was developed while the base game was in development so I wasn't able to use them first time around. IIRC, there was no allied air support when the game was first released either which is why there's no air support in the base campaign either. That's changed too. 

The Vehicle Pack will be necessary because I'm using flamethrowers this time as well. The Airborne and Glider Infantry both get them in their missions in phase 2. I've yet to see these in action as I've been importing the new core units and placing them but that work is all done now and so proper playtesting begins today. 

[Revising The Road to Montebourg campaign]

9 hours ago, Erwin said:

Looking forward to it.  Appreciate you sticking with the renovations.  But, hope you have time for new stuff too.

There will be something new. I've already got an idea which I'm going to work on quietly. However, I've now got access to all the maps and missions from both Hasrabit and Road to Dinas and I'd really like to bring them up to date.

The main issue with 'new' is that I'll have to learn how to use GIMP with a reasonable degree of competence to create the artwork for anything new. I'll achieve that by bringing the old campaigns up to date (the art work for Hasrabit is ghastly - I think I used Paint to do that). I was really surprised just how good some of the maps for Hasrabit were. The titular village is surprisingly detailed and looks really good as is but the real problem is that the map is tiny, about 600m  x 600m. Plus there are just too many trees and forests, not to mention large swaths of glowing yellow wheatfields on these maps. Very NW European. I don't want to have many trees but rather have plenty of orchards. And there are far too many tall walls around buildings too. I want the maps to look more like they did in my NATO campaigns missions.

While I'm importing the new core units into Montebourg, I'm also working on reworking my CMSF USMC Gung Ho! campaign and the maps are all being reworked as the above suggests and some considerably expanded as well. Since the tactical maps no longer reflect the reality of the revised maps, I'll experiment with a new format for operational and tactical maps.

BTW, unlikely but if any of you think, 'Gung Ho!' I missed that one.' and download it, just wait for the revised version to come. It was made back before I did the NATO campaigns and uses the old attack at 1:3 odds rather than the later attack at at least even odds or better. I missed the USMC because I was working flat out on Dinas which is a monster and so I wanted to play around with the USMC on some revamped Dinas maps. It won't be a long wait.

[Revising The Road to Montebourg campaign]

To catch up, I've imported and placed the core units in all the phase 1 and 3 missions and am now preparing to import them into the phase 2 missions (From Hell to Le Ham). These are more tricky because there are German core units in all these missions so I have left these until last. I should have the German core units done by tonight and have them imported tomorrow which means testing and AI plans can begin in earnest this weekend. And do I have some new ideas...

I have to admit, I really like what I can do with AI triggers. They were just making an appearance when I last played the game and I was initially disappointed that they didn't 'branch'. But I can see how useful they can be in some of the AI reworks I've done for my CMSF2 campaign already.

Once I've redone the AI plans, I'll create the variants and then will compile a new revised Montebourg for the scenario depot. They're not all getting extensive AI reworks, just the ones which I feel would benefit most from some extra attention, like Turnbull's Stand for example which has an AI attack.

[Reworked The Road to Nijmegen Campaign is now available]

Thanks for the link. That was great play. A fourth down play takes some balls.

I don't have any special favourites when it comes to the game but I enjoy the game itself. I still got that old adrenaline rush watching that play.

 

Of course, Scottish folks like myself (i.e. OLD) are particularly fond of  this moment of glory from our own history...

(And before that, I used to think that Archie Gemmill was overrated and constantly complained that he got picked to play for the national team. All was forgiven.

 

[Reworked The Road to Nijmegen Campaign is now available]

Unusual tat. Is it permanent? It's a play but I can't quite work out  the details. Is there some significance to that particular play?

And yes, I'm back and that's the first fruit. For the time being, I'm importing the new core files units into Montebourg (I've just finished 'Labrynth' which I was dreading doing) and after that, I'll import the new core units into The Scottish Corridor. Once that's done, I'll really get to work revising these two. I've learned a lot since I made Montebourg so reworking the AI plans should be 'fun'. It's the work I love best. 

[uncam: Combat Mission campaign extractor]

I missed the latest version and downloaded the version in the OP. The 'new' version did the trick nicely with Hasrabit. I guess I'll be able to rework it as well.

Thanks again.

[Help please. Road to Dinas]

I found Hasrabit there and I tried it out last night. I was surprised at how good the maps were, and they're quite big too. That was my first real work with the scenario editor and I thought the maps would be small and frankly a bit crap. They're certainly not authentic, lots of trees for example, but they still looked good now. Unfortunately, it's borked. The OBs appear to have been scrambled, units out of their set-up zones and there are some US units, 'Take a look at that!', as well. A real shame as that's where you got to play around with the Special Forces and the Republican Guard.

Since it looks like 'Hasrabit' has been lost, I might try to create a new RG/SF campaign but make it much shorter. I've been scanning around Google Earth and have found some interesting battle sites so I might be able to put them to good use.

[Help please. Road to Dinas]

Hey, I also found a mini campaign there I'd completely forgotten about - 'The Road to Perdition'. I've had a look and it looks like it uses 'Dinas' maps so it might not be worth redoing but it's always good to have options. Perhaps I reworked and expanded the Dinas maps. That's something I did for 'Gung Ho!' If that's the case, I can use the improved, expanded maps in the Dinas rework instead.

[Help please. Road to Dinas]

That's brilliant. Thanks. I've downloaded the dynamic version and have unpacked it. It really is a monster. Redoing that will be a lot of work, but FUN work.

I'm going to have to be careful and not get too carried away and take on too much at the start. I want to get 'Montebourg' redone and also work on my smallest campaign, Gung Ho! before I start work on this project. But now that I have the whole thing, minus the core units file, it's a definite project for this year. It will be a CMSF2 rework so I'll be able to add water and bridges as well as wire fences to replace the rural walls I used on my early maps.

[Help please. Road to Dinas]

I would be grateful if any of you who have the linear version of my CMSF campaign, 'The Road to Dinas' could PM me. I lost (almost) all my CMx2 files in a hard drive burn out a few years ago (and wouldn't you know it, CDs are not forever either - a perfect storm of bad luck). I'd really like to revisit this old campaign and update it if possible. 

[A brief introduction to my previous work]

Blue v Blue wargames is an intriguing idea I've played around with especially since we got Brits and NATO forces to play off against each other. 

[A brief introduction to my previous work]

I've pretty much erased my Steam library from my hard drive to make way for some CM titles so I am planning to spend a LOT of time working on campaigns for these titles. I've gotten the bug again and I've already started zooming around in Google Earth for some interesting locations to have a fight.

One of the best things about the modern era game is that you're not constrained by history. My Syrian Civil War scenario for Hasrabit and Road to Dinas was pure baloney but who cares? Some of Hasrabit's maps were based on real world locations, especially Hasrabit itself. (It's not called Hasrabit IRL). Dinas has a mix of some maps based on real world  locations and some fictional. I prefer real world now as it helps to guide me. So, once I found a few good looking locations for a series of actions, I'll start producing maps. I already have the germ of an idea for a new Red v Red campaign but it's really just an idea right now. But it's certainly going to happen.

[A brief introduction to my previous work]

It's always good to get feedback. Thanks for taking the time to post it. A few thoughts before I start work...

That's why I've never played H2H. I doubt I'd enjoy the game nearly so much against the AI if I had because a human is going to use the forces given in a much more effective manner than a devious AI scripter ever could. I enjoy playing against the AI because when I started playing computer games back in the 80s, the AI in wargames was rudimentary at best.

I actually started out designing missions for CMSF by cramming the objectives with massive AI forces because Blue v Red was such a mismatch, or at least it appeared to be that way coming from a CMx1 perspective.  When I was invited to join the team, there was an Australian Major on the team who remarked that the attacker was supposed to attack at 3:1 odds and not 1:3. I took his advice to heart and worked hard to create better AI behaviours as well as just learning how to best utilise the stuff the AI already had. In almost all my campaigns, you'll find you outnumber the AI by at least 2:1, often 3:1 and sometimes even more. He also helped me to understand how to use combined arms effectively in my missions which changed the way I played and designed.

 

Montebourg was designed to be as you described it. The Hell in the Hedgerows mission was a catastrophe for the GIR and the 2/8 INF took a big hit at Ecausseville as well so those missions needed to stand out. But otherwise, it was designed mostly to be fun.

The Scottish Corridor was a challenge to make as they were very hard battles which the Scots barely pulled off, often at great cost. It wasn't intended to be so brutal but I suppose it reflects the reality better. Like the actual action, it wasn't a lot of fun for the participants involved. The battles should get easier once you've broken through the German defences though and there was one, 'Ten out of Ten' ,which was fun to play. When I read an account of the advance into Grainville, 'Going to Church' and the storyteller said that he turned his Churchill tank round the corner and saw the church was right in front of him, I checked my map and found that it that happened as he described it too. The graphics might not be spectacular but the editor does allow us to recreate the environment pretty well. I also made the mistake of giving folks on the Expert track an additional challenge which was 'unkind' of me. It also had a Green track which allowed you to see through most of the campaign but without the extra time IIRC

Nijmegen was a mix of very hard and not so hard. There was a mission in that campaign that I considered to be my best, 'Breakout from the Neerpelt'. I spent absolutely ages trying to get that one as near perfect as I could.

If I can get my hands on the original 'The Road to Dinas' cam file, I'll unpack it and make a new core units file and rework it over time. But I'm going to finish Montebourg first and get to work on a small campaign for CMSF2 at the same time. I wasn't thrilled with Shock Force when it first came out as I prefered the CMx1 WW2 setting but I wanted to support the team and so gave it a try. It grew on me and now, I have to admit, it's probably the best of the CM series of games I've played so far. Modern Era is just so much more interesting, not to mention cool. And Red v Red is about as good as it gets for me.

[A brief introduction to my previous work]

I'd say the chances of it getting updated are very high indeed.  But I'm going to have to find a copy of the campaign first as I can't download it from the Scenario Depot. It's an old campaign and so all the files were lost when my computer crashed a few years back. But the campaign extractor is my new best friend which has allowed me to return to my CMSF work.

There appear to be a lot of new features in the v2 game, including water, fortifications, more AI groups and on-map MORTARS. (I always wanted those) so it would be a lot of fun to rework this monster campaign to bring it up to date. More AI groups is not a trivial improvement either, having only 8 meant that I couldn't refine the AI as much as I was able to in CMBN.

[Revising The Road to Montebourg campaign]

It's been a long weekend here so I've been able to spend three consecutive days working on this. I've just finished working on the Brecourt mission and completed it with only one casualty. To be sure it wasn't a fluke, I ran it again (it's only 15 minutes long) and won again, this time with 4 casualties. If you know roughly how that action panned out in real life, the same tactics will serve you well here but if you just rush in, it probably won't work out so well for you. Neither will it work if you take your precious time.

Of course, this is not Easy Company's assault but rather an homage. And it just feels right. BTW, if you have already played the revised version of the campaign, you might notice that I've redesigned the trench network to better reflect the historical set up.

So, Missions 1 and 2 are done as well as Turnbulls' Stand. I'm only going to rework a few missions so it may happen quicker than I'd thought. The main task is importing the new core units to each mission. That's not as small a job as you might think