Paper Tiger
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Posts posted by Paper Tiger
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Sorry guys, I think I stuffed something up before I uploaded the campaign. I made a change to 'Strong Stand' to prevent the Red side from surrendering too early and I forgot to adjust the victory point conditions to account for it. The result is that you'll have to play an unbelievably flawless game to get a win and that's ridiculously hard to do (at least for me)
I finished my game this morning. Because I'd managed to defeat the initial AI attack with minimal casualties, I was feeling very proud of myself and as a result, I played the remainder of the mission quite timidly with my core forces. I wasn't so timid with my Reserves though and they took heavy casualties.
I managed to clear out the farmhouse and I'd very nearly cleared out the east yard and the peach orchard objectives when the game finished. I thought I'd done enough to get a victory so when I saw Total Syrian Defeat, I thought I'd won it. then I noticed that it was me who lost. I got 250vps for capturing the farmhouse but the AI had 1250 points, 1000 for keeping a small percentage of it's force intact and 250 for inflicting significant casualties on my force.
My reserve forces were in too bad shape for me to clear out the east yard and I'd lost one tank and two others were immobilised in crappy positions so their attack faltered. But I should really have wrested control of the peach orchard from them but I held back my Special Forces to keep my core force casualties low. But even had I cleared it out, I'd still have lost. So, as it stands, you can ONLY win if you control all three objectives AND do it without losing a lot of your force. OR, you concentrate on finding and destroying almost all the AI forces to deprive them of their Friendly casualty bonus.
That really wasn't my intention mto make this mission so difficult. Before I made this change, you had to work to get the win but you could get it with enough work and very satisfying it was too. However, just before compliling everything I added a little bit of extra force to the Red OB to prevent them from surrendering too quickly but I forgot to adjust the VP conditions when I did this. I actually did change it on my spreadsheet so it LOOKED like I'd done it. If I had changed the parameters, you'd get a win for controlling two VP locations and contesting the third but not a Total Victory from surrender unless you're bloody good.
So here's what I'm going to do. I want to decrease the bonus the AI earns from keeping his force intact (that's what I meant to do but forgot) or remove the extra forces from the Red OB. I'm going to check in here again later this evening and see if there's any feedback. If not, I'll recompile the campaign and upload a new version later tonight or early tomorrow morning. It really is a quick fix to make. Of course, if you guys think it's fine the way it stands then I'll leave it. After all, I did play the second half of the mission very badly. I deserved to lose.
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I'm completely up-to-date, with 1.08. Unfortunately, I don't have a save file, only that really cool picture
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Oops, RPG-29 it is, my mistake. Glad to hear you're enjoying it.
I'm about half way through 'Strong Stand' at the moment and will have to wait until tomorrow morning to finish it. Play time this afternoon was interuppted by my wife's discovery of a large dead rat at the back of the house. Since she's absolutely terrified of rats, even when they're dead, it was incumbent upon me as the 'man' of the house to get rid of the thing so I paid someone to come and take it away. What a hero.
Anyway, I got my absolute best result in the Special forces stand ever. I still took some casualties and lost a coule of RPG-29 teams but I've never done so well before. Usually, I lose about 30% of the force. However, I did play more carefully than I usually do. But it's not over yet. Now the rebel attack is beaten and it's time to rest my troops and assemble the rest of the reserves before launching my counterattack. And those reserves are a handful at night.
I don't know about you guys but I feel that playing a campaign is a completely different experience from playing a single mission. I'm spending much more time considering my set up positions than I normally do and I really FEEL those losses when they happen, even though they're unavoidable. It's making playing this thing a really intense experience. Yes, I know, I designed and set this whole thing up but playtesting the missions individually or even a short compliation really doesn't match up to the experience of playing the whole thing.
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I was playing a mission this afternoon and I found that one member of my ATGM team decided that it was more fun to jump back and fore across this wall rather than deploy with the rest of his team mates. He kept this behaviour up until he got shot. This would have been funny :eek: were it not for the fact that his teammates wouldn't fire their ATGM until the poor sod eventually got himself killed.
Those are his teammates behind him with the covered arc but they wouldn't fire their weapon. Is this a bug? Anybody else seen this behaviour?
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Okay, I've started working my way through my campaign and I must admit that I found 'Ambush' to be a bit tougher than I remember. Although I haven't changed anything about it, I found that my ATGM teams were finding it harder to get hits. I must confess that I didn't playtest this one again after 1.08 because it was so easy before and there are no conscripts in it. However, the new AI self-preservation routines sometimes make an ATGM team leave it's position and then they have to deploy the weapon again and sometimes it's in a place with poor LoS.
I still got a surrender result though and with acceptably low casualties. And my ATGM teams are almost intact too. But it was hard work to get this result and I did feel like it was going badly for a while. A vehicle crew got to the exit point and earned those 500 points. That shouldn't have happened. And unfortunately, most of those kills came from one squad, one of the good ones. But that result really won't hurt me later in the camapign. I occassionally got those numbers pre-1.08 too.
I would be really happy that 'Ambush' has turned out to be challenging but doable but it's followed by 'Strong Stand' and it's a really tough mission. And it is intended to be that way for a reason. However, some of you might get discouraged and think that, after two missions, this campaign is too difficult. Don't worry, the Republican Guards missions come after 'Strong Stand' and they're much easier and fun too, especially 'Hill 142'. And ALL the following Special Forces battles are epics, 'Buying the farm', 'Breakout' and 'Hasrabit'.
Okay, time to move onto 'Strong Stand'.
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Quote
"Let's say that I want the platoon to occupy a block of buildings.
I know how to play that part decently in micromanagement style (fire saturation+cover+short small team moves).
Now I "just" want to instruct the AI to run this in autopilot ("platoon A go occupy this block of building") while I am micromanaging some more interesting/complex part of the action."
Interesting, that's precisely the kind of thing I enjoy micromanaging and I certainly wouldn't want to 'hand it off' to the TAC AI. It's getting quite good but it'll NEVER be THAT good. Assaulting an enemy-occupied block of buildings is probably the most difficult/complex thing YOU have to do in the game. Usually, everything else you're doing in the mission leads up to that moment, it's the climax of the action.
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The map for 'Ambush' dates from the same time as 'In Harms Way'. In fact, it's very similar. It was originally a QB map but I liked it so much, I made it into a Red on Red meeting engagement. I have played this one over and over again. I often played this mission as a stand alone scenario and I ALWAYS enjoyed playing it. Short, quick and fun.
Anyway, my point is that I guess I have become extremely familiar with this map and know the best sites to place everything. I have even beaten it with ZERO casualties, but only once. Are you playing it WEGO? I'd imagine it's a bit tougher to beat in WEGO.
A word about casualties. Don't panic if you take quite heavy casualties, ie 20-30%. It's a Red on Red campaign so casualties will happen and they're planned for. The later missions were playtested with significantly reduced OBs so even if you lose a whole platoon in a mission, don't worry, you'll still be able to win the later missions.
In fact, replaying until you get the perfect result will result in making the later missions too easy and, with regards to frame rates, possibly unplayable too as you'll have too many units on the map. I'd imagine 'Breakout' would suck big time perfomance-wise with the nearly the full Special Forces OB. And the finale, 'Hasrabit' absolutely definitely will! Trust me, you'll get the best experience, both challenge and performance-wise with this campaign if you accept the result and move on.
But after saying all that, I agree with you, it's better to start again if you take lots of casualties in 'Ambush' though.
I guess if people are going to have lots of problems with these missions, I'll have to start an AAR so that you can see how I use these forces. Those AT-14s can get kills on M1s so, sited properly, they should have no problem killing the all armour in Ambush. And those RPG-27s are truly awesome too. Once you learn how to use them properly, you'll see just how powerful they really are. And there are so many of them. Each Special Forces platoon starts out with three of them. Their unbalancing effect in the campaign resulted in me introducing the 'no resupply' condition in the scripting.
I had so much fun playtesting these missions and learning how to use the equipment properly, I just hope you guys get some of the same pleasure that I did doing the same.
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woah! I remember when I bought SF thinking 'shame about the era but let me at that scenario editor'. I got to work pretty quickly and my first few attempts were DIRE city, man. While 'cleaning up' my scenario folder a few weeks ago, I found one of those early jobbies hidden away and I loaded it up and laughed out loud. It was hideously ugly. Shame I deleted it as I could have posted a picture.
And the AI sucked big time. I just thought it was really cool to see them following my instructions and bringing my map to life.
That's still one of my great pleasures in SF, loading up a new situation for the first time and watching the troops interacting with the environment.
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Huntarr has got it. I play exclusively RT and I've been playing some pretty big missions lately and it's quite doable if you hit the pause button when you feel a bit overwhelmed. I've been playing RT since the game came out and the micromanagement certainly hasn't killed the immersion for me. Quite the opposite actually.
But of course, we're all different.
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After posting dozens of screenshots in the WIP thread it seems a bit daft of me not to include some screenshots for this thread. I hope some of you will post yours too...
The map sure looks pretty but the mission's got teeth.
I should really have posted this next one with the original post but never mind... here are your boys...
And another from The Guards Counterattack mission.
Finally, just after dawn on the farm.
happy hunting
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Hmm, and here was me thinking that 'Ambush' was a walkover.
I gather from your post that you're playing WEGO? I have playtested everything in RT so micromanaging the ATGM teams was the way to go. While there is no specific order you can give to your ATGM Teams to make them fire ONLY on tanks, I have found that, since 1.08, the TACAI has been doing a really good job of prioritising it's targets to fire on armour first and vehicles second.And don't panic if some of the tanks get over the river. You're going to find that the RPG-27 is a superb tank killer. Your teams are very well trained and usually have good leadership modifiers as well to enable them to operate independently. You can succesfully complete the mission without any ATGM teams. I know 'cos I've tried it, but it is a LOT tougher.
BTW, there are some places on that map that will make excellent positions for your ATGM teams. No more clues
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The Hasrabit - by Paper Tiger. He is promissing to upload it this weekend!!!!
Uploaded
check out my post in the scenario forum for more details
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Finally, it's finished and it's available for download at CMMODS right now.
The Hasrabit Campaign is a ten mission, dynamic Red on Red campaign. It is set on the first day of a fictional coup staged by some dissatisfied army generals and the Syrian Ba'ath Governement. All ten missions take place within a twenty four hour period. The campaign starts at 10pm on the night of the 17th July 2008 and concludes at approximately 20.30pm on the evening of the 18th. The first few missions will take place at night illuminated by the light of a full moon. Then after the sun rises you will have to fight in the extreme heat of the day. Finally, the sun will set during the course of the final mission.
You play as Blue, and you control the forces loyal to the Government throughout the campaign. You have two sets of core units, a Republican Guard Battalion Group and a battalion of Special Forces. You will be doing battle with the forces of the rebel 7th Armour Division within the confines of the fictional Hasrabit Military district, located about 80km south east of Damascus. These two core groups will never appear together in the same mission as they are based in very different parts of the district. The Special Forces operate in the fertile Shuruk valley to the south east of Hasrabit, while the Republican Guard missions operate in the more rugged, arid hilly district to the south west of Hasrabit.
Although they do not appear together in any mission in the campaign, the results of one group's missions will strongly affect the direction of the campaign and so affect the other groups missions as well. The campaign is strongly story based, and it has two distinct phases. The first phase consists of all the night and the very early morning missions. This is where the campaign is at it's most dynamic and there are eight different variations of the final phase one mission. Then, depending on how you faired in phase one, you move into one of four phase two story lines. At this point, and to prevent the branching from producing an absurd number of variants, failure in a phase two mission will immediately eject you from the campaign.
Most of the missions last at least 90 minutes, quite a few last 2 hours with some extra time. Most of the maps are quite large, especially the maps for Republican Guards missions and you will sometimes have to control two or more companies during the mission. The Republican Guard missions are all combined arms missions where you will have to co-ordinate all four arms, infantry, armour, artillery and air support. While the Special Forces have no armour of their own in their OB, they will be acting in concert with a Reserve mechanised unit so most of their missions will be combined arms actions too. It is my understanding that this is how the Special Forces are intended to operate.
Although not nearly as modern or as sexy as current US equipment, the Republican Guards and the Special Forces field the very best equipment that the Syrians have. Your tanks are T-72 TURMS and the Guards battalion Group has a full company of them attached. Your forces, both RG and SF, are of a very high quality, mostly crack but there are some veterans in the force mix and even a small number of elite units. With the most to gain from the survival of the regime, the RG units are fanatically motivated while the SF units are extremely motivated. However, because the action takes place within such a short time span, all your units have a weakened fitness level. This is because they had to ride for 3-4 hours in their transports and then go straight into action and stay in action for 24 hours. It won't be so noticable at night but they will slow down during the heat of the day.
Further, with the exception of the first mission, most of your units will not be resupplied at the end of a mission. This means that you will have to manage your ammo throughout the course of the mission. This also seriously restricts the power of artillery in the campaign. You will have lots to throw around in the early missions but once that module has spent it's ammo, it's gone for the duration. It is also very unlikely that immobilised vehicles will return to action after a mission. Immobilisation is almost as good as a kill. Neither will vehicular damage be repaired so if the smoke launcher or the externally mounted ATGM weapon is lost, it is probably lost for good too. However, your tanks and a very few select units will receive a one time resupply at the end of the phase one battles. This is because the T-72 doesn't carry a huge amount of AT ammo. Trust me, they're going to need it all.
This is a very ambitious project as it attempts to be fully dynamic. It represents the end of literally HUNDREDS of hours of work. Although you will only play a total of ten missions in the campaign, there are a number of variants of those same battles that you will only find if you fail a mission. While most of them represent a slight, and usually temporary rise in the difficulty level of the subsequent missions, lose too many missions and you will find that the later missions become almost impossible to beat. Of course, you will only experience these variant missions if you fail a mission, accept the result and move on to the next mission. I hope that most of you will play the campaign in the spirit that the designer intends you to play it, ie, to accept the result of your missions and move on to the next one rather than reload and only advance after you have won a victory. You will have more fun if you do it that way. And of course, more kudos to you if you complete the campaign while following one of the more difficult branches to the finale.
Good luck and good hunting.
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It's still looking good for a release later tomorrow afternoon, (Indonesian time). It's taking a bit longer than I expected to write up all the briefings and get the tactical maps done. When I stopped last night, I had four of the ten missions completely sewn up. However, there are a LOT of branched missions and they'll need adapted versions of the briefings at least. Right now, there are 34 missions of which you'll only see 11, if you're lucky.
No, that 11th mission is not a new one, it's a resupply mission where I can resupply certain units. you'll know when you hit the 'Depot' mission, just hit Cease Fire and you're onto the next mission.
However, I have made some SUBSTANTIAL alterations to the campaigns architecture and some of the individual mission OBs to make the whole thing work. I have decided to make 'Heavy Metal' my rearguard action so the forces that are used in that one will not be available for Saudara. This means that Saudara won't be the apocalyptic clash of mechanised forces that I'd envisioned, my computer just couldn't run that. But I really LOVE what it's become and I can't wait to play it as part of the campaign.
I have also decided to lessen the impact of losing the airfield so that that particular branch isn't unattractive to the player. There will be both good and bad effects to bugging out of 'The Barrier' so it will give the player an important choice to make.
Syrian air support is basically just a way to make things go bang. They don't have a 'Mission type' option available to them, ie General, Armour and Personnel so you can't use the Apaches to take out enemy armour with atgm missiles unfortunately. I am going to post something about this in the main forum later. Therefore, losing the airfield in 'the Barrier' means losing some assets that are fun but not essential to your success.
I have made an huge alteration to the 'Hill 142' mission and a major change to the 'Farm' mission. The Hill mission wasn't necessary but you'll be glad that I made it. the Farm changes are only terrain alterations but they needed to be made before I started making the alternative 'Farm' missions, at the moment, there are 8 of them.
To keep things simple later in the campaign, the Phase 2 battles don't have any branches. Instead, failure in a mission results in an early exit from the campaign and you'll have to reload/restart if you want to see the Saudara and Hasrabit battles. But don't despair, I think I've managed to keep the whole thing doable. Obviously the more core forces you lose, the less chance you have of success in the later missions. I am actually concerned that I have made this campaign too easy but if I have, so what because I've really enjoyed playing them.
I'll post a message on the main forum when it's finished.
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Finally, I think I'm finished. I spent most of yesterday and today working on 'Saudara' and I've found my final version. It's both more and less than I was hoping for. Less, because I had a vision to create a meeting engagemant between two large mechanised forces for this map. But, even with adding to each sides OB incrementally, after about an hour of game time, it's seconds per frame time so that idea wasn't going to fly. Once I got over my initial disppointment, I had a second idea that turned out to be even better but I'm not going to say anything about it. I've playtested it a few times to get the timings just right and now it's all working just fine. And it's exciting as well.
I'm not planning on releasing the campaign until all the briefings are written and tactical maps and pictures are inserted. I've already scripted the campaign but I suspect I'll have to make some changes as now, ALL of the phase 1 battles have branches. (That means eight versions of 'The farm'!) The phase 2 battles have branches too but they're much simpler to follow than the phase 1 group. But since doing that's a bit boring, I will continue to playtest and tweak the missions until it everything else is ready. Unless something utterly unexpected crops up, it's not unrealistic to say sometime on Saturday this weekend. Since I live in Indonesia, that means early Saturday morning for most of you.
A word about 'the 11th mission'. I decided not to do that as it would require at least another week of playtesting and work to get it up to the standard of the other missions. Yes, it's got a really nice map but I just don't 'feel' anything for this battle and so there's nothing exciting about it. It would simply be a 'Stop the Rebel rush' mission and that wouldn't fit in with the other missions which are, hopefully, better crafted. We'll see very soon.
I'm hoping to include a small Word document with the download that will include details of Republican Guard and Special Forces units and their capabilities. However, I'm not going to hold up the release merely for something so trivial.
I have no doubt that the release of the campaign won't be the end of the story. It will probably need to be revised after I've read some of the feedback. However, I am really looking forward to starting work on something new. I'm a bit fed up hearing 'Harap, harap, harap' and am excited about getting back to using the US forces. Definitely something MUCH smaller, and MOUT to boot. I really am a novice with MOUT so before I do some serious Red on Red MOUT in a future campaign, I'd like to learn the basics by working on something very small with the US forces as the Blue force.
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I had abit of a sleepless night last night but while I was lying awake, I had an epiphany about how to finish this campaign off. I've been stressing over the amount of force that the player will take with him to 'Saudara'. Simply put, with light casualties, Blue will have the equivalent of five slightly reduced companies as his OB, and that's a frame rate killer no matter what I give Red. So, instead of trying to make the earlier missions more difficult and, consequently, less enjoyable, I've decided to split the Republican Guards Battalion group into two battles, a rearguard action and the assault on Saudara.
My first idea was to remove two of the companies from Blue's OB but then I thought, 'Hey, what about an 11th mission so that the player can see what happens to his core forces?'. So that's where we're going, two final RG missions instead of one. I already have a map for this rearguard action and I know which forces are going to go to it. I just have to script the battle and then rework 'Saudara' with the new OB. To save a lot of time, I'm going to playtest these missions with the 'full' OB. They should both be reasonably easy to beat with the full OB.
Okay, time to get started. Hopefully, there will be some screenshots to post later today.
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I have been playtesting the hell out of the Republican Guards missions over the last couple of days and they're mostly fine, except that it's actually been quite easy to complete the first two with almost negligible casualties. That's not good enough. Like the Special Forces missions, I want to cull your core force down to about 60-70%. (Not because I'm a sadist, but because I'm thinking about CPU performance.)
There's no way I want to start dickering around with 'The Guards Counterattack' again so I decided to up the difficulty level of 'Hill 142'. (Louchy, if you're still reading this, you won't recognise it since you playtested it.)
I have decided to have a one time resupply mission for the T-72TURMS as they don't carry very many AT shells! Tons of HE though but it's useless against tanks. So, at the moment, they've been removed from 'Hill 142' so it's just the infantry and their rides and TONS of artillery. I'm in the middle of a second playtest and it's looking like a really tough mission to do so I might have to put back one platoon of T-72s.
Other changes, the mission is now 1hr 50mins long and it starts earlier in the morning about an hour before the sun rises. But it's the map that's been altered the most. No screenshots just now, maybe tomorrow, but the changes I made today make this map even more beautiful to play on.
Hopefully, this will be the only change I have to make to the RG missions. Since 'The Barrier' and 'Heavy Metal' are both finished, I just need closure on the revised 'Hill' and then I can finish 'Saudara' and get this baby finished.
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From Webwing's post...
"It all depends on the Campaign and how it is structured IMO."
Perfect, I couldn't agree more. In my case, I am trying to create something different from the Thunder campaign. My campaign is basically one extended scenario lasting from 6-10 missions with branches. Since branching tests for only two possible outcomes, victory level, sculpting the victory conditions in each mission is very important.
Since we're talking about campaigns here, if you want to create a semi-dynamic campaign with branches, you really need to ensure that the player must earn the right to proceed down the optimal path. Sure, you will be able to hit cease fire and progress to mission 3 in the campaign but it won't be the same mission that you'd get if you worked for your victories.
The designer has the ability to create pretty much whatever he wants in the scenario editor because BFC have provided us with wonderfully flexible tools. I'm definitely trying to make 'em the way I want to play 'em. And when I finish, I'm going to share it with people and they can choose if they want to play it or not. (And since it's Red on Red with no US, that probably means most won't
) It's certainly not my intention here to debate what kind of campaign design is better for players. Rather, I'm responding to a potential problem highlighted by the OP that campaign creators might face and present a solution to that problem.
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A large victory point award for the AI still having X% of his force intact when,
a) the scenario ends, or
the player hits cease fireis the best way I've found to keep the player honest, especially when the AI is the attacker. In this case, if you press cease fire before the AI has finished it's attack, you've effectively 'run away'. And, it's still possible to take great care to keep the scoring system of the mission fair and honest using this method.
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I've finished with the Special Forces missions now. They're done. Now it's time to finish the Republican Guard missions. I spent most of today reworking 'Heavy Metal' before compiling all the RG missions. It has a new map and OB for Blue and it's looking like a beauty.
That's the view from the primary objective towards Blue's set up zones.
and that's the view from the eastern side of the map.
It's been playtested and it all works fine. It's also one HELL of a battle, way better than the older versions. Don't worry, you won't have to wait very long to see this. I really want this up on CMMODS by next weekend.
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Of course it's a real problem in a CAMPAIGN. It's very bad if the player can successfully advance through the campaign without fully completing the missions. Here's an example of something that happened when I was playtesting one mission in my campaign.
I was taking a hell of a beating from the AI and I decided to quit and move on to the next mission and lo and behold, I got a victory. Why? Because I'd already reduced the enemy force by 50% and prevented him from occupying his objectives while I had managed to preserve enough of my force to earn the bonus. Fair enough you say, but there was still 20+ minutes left on the clock, the AI is programmed to take it's time approaching it's objectives and I was about to get slaughtered. Why should I get a win merely for hitting the cease fire button long before the mission is over? I'd lost that mission big time and I knew it. Needless to say, this is practically impossible to do in my campaign now.
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Interesting. In a scenario, this really isn't a problem but it's a really big one in a campaign. But there's an extremely simple solution to this problem. Give the AI controlled force an even bigger victory point bonus for preserving his force. That's what I've done in my campaign. And trust me, it's set very high you'll have to kill almost everybody to get rid of that game winning bonus. It's not set like that because it's 'realistic' to do so, it's done simply to prevent players from achieving a victory by doing these sort of 'gamey' things.
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So far, playtesting the latest compliation of the SF missions is going really well. I have started adding pictures and briefings to the missions so it's already looking much better. I'm more than half-way through the first mission so I should be able to finish it tomorrow and go through 'The Farm' as well. The only possible 'tweak' I might have to make to this one is to delay the arrival of the Reserve groups for another 5-10 minutes. This morning, they arrived while the firefight between the Special Forces and the Rebels was at it's height and it slowed down to about 4fps until the fight was resolved. That's not going to affect the gameplay in any way as you shouldn't need to get the Reserves involved in breaking the initial attack.
It's looking really good for the 'no resupply' option in the campaign. I was consciously trying to preserve my RPG-27 ammo thsi morning and so far, I've done very well. You really won't have to worry about small arms though as you'll be able to resupply small arms from some of the Reserve units in the later missions.
I have only one real reservation left at this point and that's that I'm overly-familiar with the missions I'm playtesting. I know exactly what I have to do and my timetable is already set and so, I'm doing quite well in the playtests. However, most of you will have no idea what you're up against when you play it, at least for the first time anyway. So let me reassure you, I've definitely given the player enough to do the job at hand, and a bit extra just to make sure that it's still doable if something goes wrong. You just have to take your time and don't rush into things.
It's way too late to start getting people to playtest things for me now as I'm really hoping to get it all finished sometime next week. Depending on the feedback I get, I'll probably tweak the missions after you guys have played around with it. But I really hope I don't have to do that as I think 'Hasrabit' is almost finished as it is. I really want to move on to do something very different after this but I can't get started on anything concrete, (ie maps etc) as I'm SO focussed on getting this one finished a.s.a.p.
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I playtested 'Breakout' this morning and 1.08 doesn't appear to have hurt this mission as badly as it did the other two so it's nearly finished too. However, it really needs to be playtested as part of a compiled campaign as playing with one full strength company instead of two half strength companies isn't really the same. I'll start doing that tomorrow.
When I playtested it this morning, I was trying to minimise my artillery usage to see if it can be won without the anti-personnel barrages I usually use to soften up the enemy positions. I really don't want anybody to have any artillery to use in 'Hasrabit' but I don't want to do it simply by depriving the player of using it by removing it from the final mission's OB. So, I want to make the player decide whether he wants to keep his core force casualties quite low OR bring artillery to the final mission but lose more of your core force in doing so.
Anyway, my attempt to minimise artillery useage was a failure. I tried using shorter strikes on the key AI positions but I ended up having to repeat them as they weren't as effective as a medium length strike
I am also considering adding a single Apache to this mission too as it was a fun addition to 'The Farm'. However, I don't want to spoil the player by giving him too many AT assets in this mission. Part of the excitement of this one is locating and destroying the enemy tanks. I don't want to make that part of the mission too easy. But then again, as it is a phase 2 mission, you will have lost some of your RPG-27 teams either to casualties or to lack of ammo and you will need to bring some to the final mission. So, a proper compiled playtest with no resupply will be necessary to see if this is a good idea.
I'll play the compiled SF missions tomorrow and Friday so that I know what needs to be done to finish them this weekend. Then I'll return to the RG missions. It's getting close...
the player hits cease fire
Time
in Combat Mission Shock Force 1
Posted
blow56
I completely agree with you about the time limits for quick battles. I'm hoping they'll introduce the option to choose the length of your battle in a later patch or module.
However, with regards to scenario/campaign design, it's not about creating something that's realistic but rather something that's challenging, exciting or fun to play. I suspect that Real life combat would make for a very boring simulation if it were done accurately as most of the time, everybody is hiding, trying not to get killed. So I wouldn't let the time limit bother you too much.