Paper Tiger

I am designing a new Red on Red campaign and I've been trying to create a core force with a battalion of T-62 tanks. I can get the first company no problem but after that, I can never get a second company of T-62s even if I dicker around with the quality settings. Further to this point, it also seems that I'll get T-72M1Vs when the equipment settings are good or bad or anything in between if I buy three or more tank companies. The same goes with T-55MVs, the best tanks in the regular army. I can get them with equipment set to poor too. So, how about letting scenario designers cherry pick the tanks they want from the scenario editor instead of having it randomised? It seems like there's a LOT of randomisation going on in this procedure.

Thanks for that. So, three tanks with a full complement of ammo are too much then. There was originally a full company of armour in the Red OB and another platoon of AT-3s but I really wanted people to finish the campaign without too much difficulty rather than have to start from the beginning again. However, I've already made a couple of minor changes to the first two RG Missions for v3 which will probably make them a bit more difficult to get through with your tank force unscathed. I'm looking forward to hearing how you fare in the final mission though.

My god, girl, you're output is unbelievable. Now you've knocked out a campaign? Where do you find the time to do all this? It's taking me between 2-4 weeks MINIMUM, just to do one scenario/mission for my next project.

You'll find that your platoon and company commanders are your spotters for aircraft. The artillery FO can only spot for artillery. When I first started work on this campaign, it was possible for any unit, even a sniper, to call in air support but NOT the FO. I pointed this out in the main forum and they must have changed it as now it's only commanders that can call it in. Sounds like Saudara Part 2 is too easy then. When I playtested it I assumed about 50% core force casualties and not a lot of ammo left. Thus I gave the player the airstrike to even things out a bit. The core force tanks are the wild card. If you lose none in the earlier missions, and it can happen, it makes the later missions very easy. But sometimes you can lose 4-6 of your tanks and it's possible that somebody will have 1 or even no tanks in this one. I'm waiting for a few folks to finish the whole thing before I make up the final version that will probably only ever be played by me again. If somebody else cruises through this mission, I'll definitely toughen it up for v3.

Once the Brits arrive, I'll probably never play Red again. Because I'm not American, I can't really 'feel' for Blue forces in the same way you US guys can. I look forward to hearing some authentic UK regional accents and hopefully not that horrible 'British' accent you Americans think we all speak. Let's hear some Brummies and some Scouse accents as well as Geordies and my favourite, the Glaswegian. Maybe some time early in the new year.

Because of the way they have incrementally improved this game since it was released, it is possible to overlook just how much it has improved in the last nine months. When I started playing it when it was first released, I didn't have very high expectations and so I thought it was pretty cool but nothing extraordinary. But now, it's easily the best wargame I've EVER played bar none. AND, with the new module coming it's about to get even better. I can't wait to see just what this engine is capable of doing in another years time or when the WW2 module comes out. I think I've already spent more time playing this game even than I spent playing Civ 3 and Civ 4 combined and that's saying something. With the Marines module coming out soon, I expect I'll continue to spend all my time on this title for a considerable time to come.

Okay, I'll share what I've found with any of you folks who are interested in creating campaigns so that you don't make the same mistake that I did. It appears that when you make any changes to your core forces file, you must then re-synch all your existing missions with the new file before the changes will take effect. I just assumed that they would automatically synch with the new core file when I compiled the campaign. Wrong! Once you have added your core forces to your your missions, it is possible to edit some of their characteristics such as fitness level or experience etc for that particular mission only. This is done in the usual way, by opening it up in the scenario editor and making these small changes. However, these changes will not carry on to the next mission unless you edit them as well. It's a bit of a shame I didn't learn all this before I posted my campaign but never mind, there will be a next time. I'll post a final version 3 for posterity with some changes made inspired by the feedback I've received. It will have properly synched core forces that get weaker as the campaign progresses so it should work the way I intended it to.

gmfrank glad to hear you enjoyed it. The farm mission was always one of my favourites to play because you have to really work for that victory. I'll probably release it as a stand-alone scenario sometime soon. Normal Dude Wow, sounds awful. I'm not sure how you're doing the tank hunting with your ATGM teams. I usually find that's one of the exciting things in this mission. I usually move them quite slowly using Hunt and Hide commands. Once you've got the tanks, you can get on with the rest of the mission. And yes, the helicopter isn't really useful against the armour. But sometimes you get lucky. As for the number of tanks, well, I balanced this one by playtesting it many times. Occassionally, depending on the positions they take up during their attack, the Red tanks are able to spot you really quickly and other times they don't and you pick 'em all off without a loss. When you play it just once, the mission might seem quite unbalanced. But as long as you have the equivalent of one full Special Forces company, you can win it even if the ATGMs fail to get all the tanks. It's just very difficult and probably not so much fun to play. BTW, where do you find the time to design your own campaign and play somebody elses? the Fighting Seabea Are you talking about 'Saudara Part 1- Rearguard action'? If yes, I'm sorry but I didn't pick up that one of the Red ATGM teams starts with LoS to the reinforcements arrival zone. Every time I playtested that mission, I'd always activated that sucker long before the reinforcements arrived. When Bodkin reported it, I loaded it up and gave it a run through in my usual fashion and of course, there was no fire when the reinforcements arrived. Then I figured that it was something I was doing. So I loaded it up again and just sat and watched the clock. Sure enough, when the reinforcements arrived, they got wasted. So that's my fault. It wasn't intended to be like that. That's one of the problems with playtesting your missions by yourself. I always play that one quite aggressively by moving into the orchards as quickly as possible. So that ATGM team was spotted and eliminated every time. Therefore that problem was never spotted.

Hey, if the T-90 can give the M1-A2Seps a run for it's money, I'll be coming back to the Blue fold very quickly. I get the feeling nobody knows anything about the Airborne troops and most folks will be more interested in the Marines equipment but I hope the developer's will throw us a bone on this one. I'll try and keep this one alive for a little while until I give up hope.

Well, after reading the blog, I'm REALLY hoping that this will be one of the surprises. It would explain why there has been no official response to this question. This feature alone would make the module worth buying.

Okay, I am really excited about the new stuff too and I will definitely be giving the Marines a try out. But as I enjoy playing as Red, does anybody have any idea what we're getting with the Syrian Airborne Battalion? I know they're equipped with the BMP-3 but do thay have any special training, weaponry etc?

Ah, I know, I just found it... very cool.

Wow, this is good news. And here was me thinking that we were still 3 months or so away from this. Put me down for one, I can't wait!!! Pandur You're right. They're equipped with the BMP3. I'm hoping that they are a hybrid of Repubican Guard and Special Forces units. ie they are fully mechanised and can split their squads up into different teams. I guess we won't have to wait much longer to find out

Those vehicles remind me of some bugs from the movie 'Starship Troopers.' I'm assuming that you're a beta tester and those are Marine vehicles. Are you allowed to post screenshots like that?

"I think I gave the helicopters area fire / medium strike orders, if that helps." Wow, I've never tried that. When I want the air strike to focus on a vehicle I make it a point target, and of course Heavy. I'll have to give that one a try. If it works, this could open up some interesting possibilities in my next project...

76mm quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted by Paper Tiger: Since it is realistic to assume that the Syrian mechanised forces would cease to exist as credible fighting formations in the face of US air power, the game's real emphasis is on MOUT operations... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You make it sound like we should be glad that BFC included Syrian armor at all... actually, I remember reading a post of Steve's earlier this year where he pretty much said that. As a Red player, I am immensely grateful that they didn't decide to make the game THAT realistic.

It 's obvious that CMSF has primarily been designed to be played as the US against the Syrian AI. To give this hypothetical conflict some background, the game also has a storyline that has justified the designers desicion to omit a couple of important things in the game. The first, and definitely the most justifiable, is the lack of Syrian air power. The second is the AI's inability to use artillery in the game. This is also justifiable for a number of reasons. First, with regards to Syrian air power, I am in complete agreement with the developers when they say that the Syrian airforce would be eliminated on Day 1 of any conflict with the US. Therefore, implementing Red air power in any meaningful way in the game would be unrealistic and therefore a waste of valuable development time. Fair enough. I know that I'm in a very small minority of players who like to play the game as the Syrians and accordingly, I'll have to wait a long time for such 'fantasy' elements to be added to the game. In the meantime, I have slug88's red airpower mod to keep me happy until that happy day arrives. With regards to the second, I suspect that the US would also work very hard to eliminate most of the Syrian artillery assets before the troops went in so that the worst they'd have to face would be mortars. The rarity values of Syrian artillery in the scenario editor tend to bear this viewpoint out. Therefore, rightly expecting that most people will want to play as the US side, almost no attention has been given to developing the AI's ability to use it effectively in the game. Playing as the US side, the player has an impressive array of air and artillery assets at his beck and call and in my opinion, their use in the game has been superbly implemented. Since it is realistic to assume that the Syrian mechanised forces would cease to exist as credible fighting formations in the face of US air power, the game's real emphasis is on MOUT operations and in the course of these it is unlikely that the US player would face a serious organised artillery barrage. Therefore I can understand the design decision to keep the AI use of artillery fairly simple. For the last six months or so, I have played this game almost exclusively as the Syrian player and so these shortcomings are very apparent to me. And since the game's main focus is US v Syria, and it is played mostly by Americans, it's obvious why the developers feel that it would be a waste of valuable development time implementing these 'redundant' or fantasy elements into the game. However, judging by the scenarios being generated by members of the community, it's clear that there are plenty of people who are looking for a more challenging US v Syria experience than is realistic. People want to play more conventional type military operations against the Syrians and an important part of these operations is the use of artillery. But at present, the game can't do it effectively because the AI is incapable of using it's artillery beyond 'dumping' it all in the first 3-5 minutes of the mission of the game. I think most people would agree that it feels very unfair when the scenario designer targets the players set up areas with the AI's artillery. But if you don't do that, the AI artillery is almost ineffective. In my creations, I have used it to deny important terrain to the human player and to channel his advance but, after 5 minutes, the artillery is dead for the remainder of the mission and the human player is free to conduct his operations with 100% confidence that he will not be endangered by AI artillery again. I have posted about this topic before but apart from a reply from one of the beta testers who said that he was raising this issue with the developers, I have heard nothing about this. That was back in January and two patches ago. Yet still the AI artillery system is appalling. It doesn't even work in the way the manual and the scenario editor suggests it should, so when are we going to see some improvements in this extremely important aspect of the game? With the rest of the game working really well now, this should really be a very high priority for fixing.

slug88 I've got your mod installed and it looks really great. Thank you for sharing your work.

Ah, you're right. There is one ATGM team that starts the game with LoS to the reinforcement's entry point. But, as he happens to have very good LoS to most of the board, he's hard to avoid. I have to confess that I always 'discover' him very early in the mission so he's been eliminated by the time my reinforcements arrive. I'm surprised he didn't open up on you earlier in the mission. You must have been moving very stealthily. *******************SPOILERS****************** I playtested it a couple of times this afternoon. The first time, as usual, I found that ATGM team very quickly and he was killed quickly so that I could move B Company's infantry into the main orchard area. When my reinforcements arrived, they had no problems and were able to advance right along the road to the edge of the orchards without attracting any enemy fire. And that's ben pretty much my experience every time I've played that mission So, I quit the mission and loaded it up again and this time just sat and watched the clock tick down (VERY boring) and of course, when D Company arrived, they got picked off very quickly. So, you're right, I'll have to rework the map as you suggest to make it safe for the reinforcements to arrive. It's not fun when that happens.

bodkin I'll have a look into this later today. Personally, I hate it when that happens too. I must confess, I never saw this happen when I playtested it so either I killed the offending unit prior to the arrival of the reinforcements or I've missed something.

Well, it sounds like some of you guys are going to finish the campaign this weekend. That's good news. I'm looking forward to hearing the feedback on 'Saudara Part 2' and 'Hasrabit'. I'm going to hold off on doing v3 until I've found a way to make 'Saudara Part 1' more lethal. It LOOKS scary but it's quite easy to beat as long as you've kept your tank force in good order. Incidentally, how many T-72 TURMS have you guys lost so far? I usually found that I lost 1 or maybe 2 in the first two RG missions and then 1 or 2 again in 'The Barrier'.

Scipio, Yes, it's possible, and quite easy to do. When you set up a new mission, you select Red v Red in the data section and buy your forces. If you want to buy some air support for the 'Blue' side, you then change the mission to standard Blue vs Red and all the US units become available to the Blue side. Or Blue v Blue if you want the Red side to have air support. However, it doesn't work properly and perhaps that's intentional as, in the game, the Syrian side at present doesn't have any trained air support liaison officers in their OB. You don't get the TYPE menu when you're calling in your air support so you can only use the plane's HE and cannons. Therefore, there's no anti tank capability even though you have an Apache on call with it's full complement of ATGM missiles and the A10 just makes things go BANG spectacularly. And the spotters 'cross' is the worst imaginable. While the Syrians probably have a lot of 'cool' stuff to drop from their planes in real life, it's certainly true that the US forces would NEVER have to face any of it and that's fine by me. Since the vast majority of players play the game as US v Syria, and playing as the US, it's not an important omission and there are many more important things that can be improved before the time is spent to do Red air support properly. I also wonder if this same logic will be applied to the WW2 Normandy title and therefore there will be no air support available for the German side.

Last night I was doing some work on the core file in my campaign and I got a real shock. Most missions in my campaign have units with different stats because I haven't been synching the missions with the changes I've made to the core unit file. When I first started work on the campaign I gave all my core units in the core file the very best stats possible. i.e. +2 leadership modifiers for everybody... hurrah. Of course, that was just for fun and I soon changed that core unit file. However, there were a couple of missions that used that as their core unit file. As I continued to playtest the campaign I made several changes to the core unit file reducing the quality of some of the units and so some missions were created from these different core unit files. However, what I didn't do was go back and synchronise those earlier missions with the NEW core unit file because I thought that would happen when I hit the compile button. Tomorrow, if I have time, I'll try a third compile with all the core units in each mission synched with the final core unit file. Before compliling, I'll adjust the unit's fatigue levels in the later missions in the scenario editor, complie it and then try it out. I'll post the results when I have them.

Sorry, I was getting you confused with Peach Orchard when I wrote no reserves. If you lose The Farm mission, the Reserves are gone from the phase 2 operations. And they do have one important function to play in those missions but I'm not saying... You did really well to hold the mansion and, with 50 minutes still to go, it sounds like you're doing fine as long as you look after the two tanks you have remaining. You don't have any artillery left or air support do you? You might want to concentrate your next effort towards recapturing the pump house from the Rebels if they occupy it. That's not a waste of your time as they get VP's for occupying it. BTW, do you like the map? I think it's one of the better ones in the campaign.

Aha, that's much clearer. And quite different from CMx1 too. The leaders in the game only affect the units they're actually PART of. That's very different from what I thought was happening but it's still good. So, all other factors being equal, a squad with a +2 leader will spot threats and react much faster than one with a lower level leader. But giving a platoon a platoon leader with +2 while all the individual squads are -1 or worse won't make any difference to them at all. He's just going to pass on the C2 info to his squads much more quickly. Thanks for the clarification.