Paper Tiger
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Posts posted by Paper Tiger
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Cpl Steiner
I see your logic now and it could work the way you're describing. But your example is missing something to make sure that your test is properly set up. What are the parameters, 'Ext before X', or 'Exit after X' of your SECOND objective? In my example above, those two timers control the timing of the units movement TO that second objective.
For something so fundamentally important to scenario design, the manual's vagueness on this matter is almost unforgivable.
birdstrike
yeah, it seems that a group needs a certain critical mass to arrive at the objective before it will start moving to the next order. I've no idea how much that might be though. These commands only tell the computer to TRY to reach the objective in the time specified.
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Hopefully, I'll have a nice new monitor before Friday so I'll be able to post some screenshots from the missions I'm working on at the moment. This morning, I spent the whole session working on the campaign finale and the map is so beautiful. It certainly looks good on my busted monitor anyway but tyhat's with all the brightness and gamma settings set at 0. And yet it's still a bit too bright. I can't imagine how bad a screenshot would look.
The session was spent co-ordinating the AI attack on the town and then finding the right balance of forces for them to do the job effectively. I noticed that fps drop quite drastically when you're looking at a building. When I moved the camera to the board edge I was getting 70+ fps even with all the action going on. However, swing it around and it rapidly drops to 10-12 fps. This really is my first attempt at designing a MOUT mission so I've never seen this demonstrated so clearly before.
I've almost got the AI attack plan nailed down now so I should be able to get it more thoroughly tested tomorrow. I'm not going to try to balance this one as it's impossible to predict what the player will be bringing to this one. Some of you guys will get there with almost nothing while others will bring 75%+ of their core forces intact. Since nobody will be bringing the full 100%, I'm going to test it with the full OB and make sure that it's winnable without being neither easy nor difficult. I can't see that taking too long to do so I should be starting work on 'Saudara' this weekend.
I'm very happy with all the missions so far in this campaign except 'Heavy Metal'. I like it but I think it's a bit too wild for most people's taste. It certainly is very different from all the other missions in the game so I might have to rework it before releasing the campaign too. Basically, it's an enormous tank battle with a Republican Guard company caught in the middle of it. The action is insanely intense and it's usually decided within 20-25 minutes. I've played it both with the full OB and the reduced OB after playing through the other relevant RG missions and got wins so it's definitely not too difficult. But the pace of the AI attack is unbelievably fast. Yes, I can slow it down but that'll be helping the human player too much. I'll give it another spin over the weekend and see how I feel about it.
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Yeah, a pretty wordy post, sorry. I was in a bit of a hurry when I typed that up. I have no idea what happens when you try to use both. Obviously, Cpl Steiner's method works for him too. If you apply my logic to his method, I don't understand how it could work so perhaps everything I wrote above is rubbish.
The above method DOES work for me though. I don't have time to do experiments with the AI just now as I'm very busy with my own creative project.
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That's interesting. I am entirely self-taught with the editor so there are inevitably some gaps in my understanding. I thought that these two commands were mutually exclusive. I thought it was about "when do I look at my next order?".
Let's see if I can explain this with an example.
A1] I create a set up zone for a group and give them an 'Exit after 3 mins' command. It will sit in place and not look at it's next order until 3 minutes have elapsed. After 3 minutes, it then looks at it's next order.
B1] The same set up but with an 'exit before' command is meaningless because the group already occupies it's objective and so it will look at it's next order immediately. It's like saying to the unit, "okay, you've done that, now I want you to do this"
Now, let's look at that second objective. Let's place it very close to our original objective, say 1 minute at a walk from the set-up zone. There are two possibilities again.
A2] Objective 2 is given the movement command 'Exit after 5 minutes'. This means that it will move to the second objective and wait there until the game timer reaches 5 minutes. Then, it will look at order 3.
B2] Objective 2 is given an 'Exit before 5 minutes' command. It will move to it's next objective and then look at it's next order as soon as it has fulfilled that mission. So, after about 1 minute of movement, it's already looking at order 3.
Now, let's look at how these work together.
A1 - A2]
The group in A1 won't start moving to objective 2 until after 3 minutes has elapsed. That will only give them 2 minutes to fulfill their order. If they reach their objective in about 1 minute, they will sit there until the clock timer reaches 5 minutes and then look at order 3.
B1-B2]
The group in B1 will move to it's next objective at the scenario start and will have 5 minutes to complete that movement order. Since they'll probably do it in about 1 minute, when the scenario clock hits 1 minute, they'll already be looking at their third objective while group A1 is still sitting in the start zone.
A1-B2]
Group A will wait 3 minutes in the set up zone and then move to the next objective. When it reaches B2, it will immediately look at order 3.
B1-A2]
the unit will exit the set up zone when the scenario starts and then move to location B where it will sit until the scenario clock reaches 5 minutes. Then it will look at order 3.
There's a lot of subtlety built into this system. Just how it takes for them to travel from point A to B is determined by their stance etc so there are a lot of possibilities there.
In he B1-B2 example, if the group encounters some enemy units during it's journey, it knows it has 5 minutes to perform this action so it will take it's time and move carefully, return fire, maybe even a flanking move, etc. However, A1-A2 gives the units only 2 minutes to do the same so it will not be so effective at returning fire, avoiding casualties etc.
So that's how I interpret the order system. Obviously, it doesn't seem compatible with Cpl Steiner's version but his version obviously works too... sigh... ah for a decent manual...
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Yes, that should work just fine.
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I've spent the last two days working on 'Breakout' and it's nearly finished. I started experimenting with some rather bizarre tactics as the Blue side to counter the AI attack and I found a way for the reserves that start on the board to give the AI a very bloody nose. Yes, they still lost but the Special Forces would have nothing to do so I had to redesign the AI attack. Blue also lost some ATGM assets. The reserves had a platoon of AT-4s but they were so green that they couldn't hit a thing. Rather than clutter the game up with useless, ineffective units, I decided to let them go and gave the Blue side something more effective instead.
Now, the new AI attack will slaughter the reserves or lock down the blue board edge if they don't come out and fight, making a Blue advance to the red board edge in less than 2 hours an impossibility. I played it through a couple of times this morning and I got the victories without any real trouble but that was with both the SF companies at full strength. So far, I'm finding that the Special Forces go through their missions without taking heavy casualties. Even 'The Farm' is doable without your core forces taking more than 25% casualties (and it's TOUGH!) so I expect if it's easy to win a phase 2 battle with your core forces at full strength, then the situation will be challenging with reduced forces.
With 'Breakout' near completion, I'm going to return to 'Hasrabit' tomorrow and get it finished, hopefully before the weekend. And that means that there's just 'Saudara' left to do. Finally, the end really is in sight. I'm hoping to get the campaign finished over the Easter holiday. I'm waiting for The Louch's feedback on the battles I sent him but I don't anticipate anything too negative there so, barring anything unexpected cropping up, I don't think that next weekend is unrealistic anymore.
I'll try a full playthrough before I release it just to see how badly the core units get beat up in the phase 1 battles. But, even if the phase 2 battles prove to be completely unwinnable, rebalancing the primarly missions won't take long.
I'm really anxious to get closure on this one as soon as possible. I haven't played anything but these missions since I started and I really want to play some missions as the US side again, especially the 'Ghost' and the 'TF Narwick' campaigns. Then, I'm going to try designing a campaign on a much more intimate scale than this project, say just one US company through 3-5 missions. Definitely no more 'Battalions in conflict' missions from me for a while. I love the 'red on red' game but I need a US fix sometime soon.
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I'm not sure if it's a bug. I never mix the two movement orders 'Exit before' and 'Exit after', I choose one of them. It's possible there's a conflict and the 'Exit before' is getting the priority here so try changing your AI order to 'Exit after' 1:20 hours and don't enter anything for 'Exit before'. I'd be surprised if that doesn't solve your problem.
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I stopped playing QBs quite a while ago because of these issues. I remember more than one occasion where I received a FO playing as red but no artillery and the odd occassion when I got some artillery but no FO. I even got 3+ FOs but no artillery in one situation but I don't recall a single time when I got both so I just decided that that was enough.
Try some of the scenarios man, there are some beauties as well as a couple of campaigns. I can't imagine you'll return to QBs for a long time after playing some of them.
With regards to your question about getting QBs fixed, it's definitely on their list and probably very high up on that list too. But don't expect an improvement anything anytime soon. The rest of the game is fixed and it's fantastic. A working game was obviously a much higher priority for fixing than the QB system for
the most obvious reason.
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No screenshots this weekend as my monitor is buggered and I've had to alter the grahics card settings drastically to see anything. So I'm pretty sure any screenshots would look pretty crap just now. Hopefully, I'll get a new monitor on Wednesday.
Anyway, I think I've finished 'The Guards Counterattack' now and I'm hoping to get it playtested later today. I think I've taken care of the frame rate issue. I further reduced the number of enemy vehicles and broke the Blue reinforcements into smaller packages, some of which arrive much later in the game. Anyway, I played it twice this morning and it stayed in double figures throughout the mission. It's certainly not an easy situation to win without taking lots of casualties but I did it this morning without taking unacceptable losses. And that's the point of it. Winnable without being excessively difficult.
However, I test compiled the first two Republican Guard missions 'The Guards..' and 'Hill 142' and found that the Hill scenario was way too tough with the reduced core forces. So now, Blue carries his entire OB from 'The Guards...' into this mission. I tried again and it was just perfect. At first I thought it was way too easy but that impression soon got corrected and I lost 3 tanks. I'll see how my playtester gets on with these two together. Hopefully, this will be the end of the work on the phase 1 scenarios.
I got back to work on the phase 2 battle 'Breakout' and found that there were some problems with the AI plan where one AI group didn't leave it's set up zone. I reworked the AI plans and tried it out a couple of times and it seems to be pretty good. Since I've been playtesting it with the Special Forces core units at full strength it has to be easy for Blue to win it. Later I'll try again with a test compile and see how Blue fares.
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secondbrooks. In answer to your questions...
1. For CMBB I designed and played my own scenarios but never released them as I didn't think they were good enough.
2. When I'm not working on my own creations I much prefer to play the community produced scenarios. I don't know why but I rarely play the stock ones that came with the game although I did like Ceorge Mc's "Al Amarah". And I liked 'Al Huqf engagement' too. I HATED 'ATGM ambush' with a passion though.
3. So far, only one called 'In Harms's Way' but that was a LONG time ago 1.04 I think. However, if you include campaigns, my current effort contains 10 scenarios which is quite a substantial effort.
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If you're interested, I redesigned the scenario in such a way as to avoid the frame rate drop without cutting the forces back. And the battle plays a lot better for it too. I played it twice this morning and frames never dropped into single figures for anything more than a fraction of a second.
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Yes, I saw this happen too but just once. I had FRAPS opened so I was able to catch this shot of the guy on the ground but one second later, he levitated (extermely quickly but visibly) back up to the balcony on the 5th floor above him. (out of the picture)
He kept doing this for quite some time but I couldn't get a shot of him during the levitating phase so it didn't make for a convincing case.
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Hmm, some can live with it, some can't... that's what I was expecting to hear. I can live with it as long as it's no less than 5-6fps and for a short time only but I really don't like it much myself so I'll be working hard to redesign the situation to keep frames above 12fps. The main fps killers in this one seem to be burning wrecks and the arrival of reinforcements. In the first case, there is an easy solution, less vehicles.
I've played the situation several times and the arrival of reinforcements causes frames to drop by about 50% for 2-3 minutes, probably as the CPU is performing all those new LOS checks for them. This doesn't happen in all the scenarios in my campaign so perhaps it's just that, in this one, they enter the board in a location from where they actually have good LOS. I can try to work around that.
Anyway, I won't be happy with this one until it's running MOST of the time at 12fps+.
MikeyD: I use FRAPS for keeping track of frame rate.
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While I'd LOVE to see more burnable terrain in CMSF, I shudder to think what it might do in terms of frames per second. Although it looks really cool, I'd like to be able to toggle off the smoke from burning wrecks as 20-30 of them KILLS your frames. Imagine what a burning village or field would do to your performance.
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I have to ask this as I'm currently designing a mission for my campaign and I've found a really good combined arms action but there's a problem. Once the battle really gets going fps drop to single figures and sometimes quite low single figures until the action is resolved. I can reduce this lag somewhat by reducing the forces on both sides but that will spoil the battle. How many of you will play a battle that lags a bit for 20 mins or so in the middle?
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Well, I tried my new situation this morning and I got a total victory after 1hr 20 mins without suffering unacceptable losses to my core units so I guess the situation is almost balanced. The game length is currently set for 2 hours but it will probably come back to 1hr 40mins to give the player some time pressure. If I can do it in 1hr 20mins with my crappy tactics in Real Time, then 2 hours is WAY too much time. With 1hr 40mins, there's more than enough time to get a total victory and still allow you to do it carefully. It's easy enough for me to justify it in the storyline too for that matter. Failure to accomplish the mission within the specified time simply means that those units will be unavailable for their next scheduled action and that will have consequences.
However, I still found that the frames dropped to around 5-6 after I managed to kill the BMP-1s that accompany the infantry assault. I've already reduced the number of vehicles on the Red side by more than 25% and reducing that further will alter the balance of force too much in favour of the human player
After a few minutes, the FPS did start climbing again as the body count soared and there were less units spotting. I think I'm going to leave this one as it stands and just warn people that this particular situation is heavy on your CPU for a short while. For most of the time, it plays just fine at around 12-16 fps. It's actually a very interesting situation and I don't see how I could reduce the forces or the map without seriously affecting the challenge and the feel of the battle. As it stands, it's a real combined arms mission and I want to keep it that way.
I've also removed the minefields from the game as the AI just walks right into them and gets slaughtered. In the playtest this morning, one of the fortified hill positions managed to hold out for the entirety of the situation and that really shouldn't happen. It was definitely the minefield that was responsible for that so they're gone. Removing the mines will certainly make the game slightly tougher for the human player but I think it means that it will just take longer for Blue to recapture the fortified ridgeline. Hopefully, it will be ready for playtesting this weekend Mr Louch...
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My monitor is in the workshop being serviced today so I haven't been able to do any playtesting but I have been working on the briefings on my laptop. However, I just wanted to add something about how I am playtesting these missions.
I have exclusively playtested each situation in Real Time and in one sitting. I have NEVER once created a save point in the game and gone back to it until I got a win. Instead, these are all 'honest' playthroughs. I have to confess that I'm not a brilliant tactician, although I'm definitely improving, so if I find a situation challenging, most of you guys will probably find it much easier. For example, that new tactic I mentioned in my last post about tank handling is just simply 'shoot and scoot'.
At the moment, most of the situations have just one AI plan and that's probably not going to change very much before the campaign is released either. I can't imagine how to 'top' the attack plan in 'The Barrier' and if I put in another less effective plan, even with a 'use rarely' order, some of you won't see the primary plan. But even with just one plan, I rarely see the situation play out in exactly the same way. For example, I've seen the AI do some pretty clever things in one playtest of 'Ambush!' but not repeat that action in the next. Besides, I just don't believe that there are many people who will play this campaign more than once so what's the point of having 2 or more plans?
I have created a number of different versions of certain scenarios so that the game is dynamic. The alternative missions will definitely be tougher than the optimal version but still winnable, perhaps except for one iteration (of 5) of 'Buying the Farm'. But you're going to have to stuff things up really badly to find that one.
Fortunately, I've got the monitor back so I'll be able to implement those changes to 'The Guards Conterattack' tomorrow morning and see how it plays. When I was riding home in the taxi yesterday evening, I had an idea how I could take advantage of these changes to make it even more challenging.
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Whew, this one really is a toughie, both on the player and the frames! I played the situation three times (albeit, not all the way through) this morning and it was extremely tough to recapture the fortified position from the AI side, never mind capturing my own objective. So, instead of cutting back the AI force, I added the remaining Tank platoon to the OB making 10 in total. The ensuing battle was extremely violent and I lost a few tanks but the map was littered with around 40 burning wrecks and the frame rate plummetted to 3-5 fps. That's barely playable for me although I can tolerate it if it's only for a short period of time. Since the extra tanks arrived with the first set of reinforcements, by removing them altogether this situation can be deferred until later in the game. So, I'm either going to have to cut back Red (very likely) or keep the extra tanks in the player's OB and get a performance hit from the burning wrecks.
Playtesting this one has been a real education for me regarding the use of combined arms. It's simply useless ordering infantry to assault an enemy held position without some sort of support vehicle in this one, even with lots of suppressing fire. On my last playtest, I hit upon an idea how to use my tanks to better effect. It required a lot of micromanagement but it was very exciting and highly effective too. That's how I got all those burning wrecks on the board.
Since I was only focussing on one platoon of tanks at a time, this new tactic makes me think that the situation will be winnable with just six tanks and two mech companies as long as I reduce the number of Red vehicles. I think I have a nice solution to the frame rate problem but I'll have to wait until Thursday to try it out.
Because I always play RT, I have a tendency to leave certain parts of my force inactive for a short period of time while I concentrate on one particular aspect of the battle, the assault on a bunker, a flanking move or whatever. Most of the battles in this campaign are quite large, this one easily being the largest, and so I'm playing most of them this way. I'd imagine that the WEGO players will find these situations much easier to manage as they'll be able to concentrate on each part of the board each turn. The downside of WEGO however, is that you won't be able to micromanage your ATGM teams or tanks to their best effect so perhaps it will all balance itself out.
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Actually, if this threoretical toggle could switch off smoke from burning wrecks too, it might help maintain higher frames in some situations where there are a lot of vehicles. This morning, I was playing something with a LOT of vehicles and when I killed them, they turned to burning wrecks and my fps dropped drastically. Perhaps I would use this option if it turned off the smoke from burning vehicles too.
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I think I've found my final version of this scenario now. It's getting yet another new name as there are now six 'kings' instead of three so that title is utterly inappropriate now. Since the player receives two Guards mech companies and two platoons of T-72's, it's going to be called 'The Guards Counterattack'. The time limit is now 2 hours and it will have to start earlier in the morning. Otherwise, their next scheduled battle will take place too quickly after this one finishes. However, that's not a bad idea to play around with. I'll think about that problem later. It is nice watching the skyline turn red as the battle reaches it's conclusion. I'd like to keep that. Perhaps, I could have this particular task group as the 'fire brigade' rushing from one hot spot to another.
So far, it's a very challenging opener for the Republican Guards units. But I'll have to play it through a few more times to see if I can find an easy way to win this one. I was consistently losing two T-72s each time I played last night and this morning so therefore, I added another platoon to help out. Finding that fine balance of forces between Blue and Red is the challenge left to me now. After that, I'm going to get this one playtested and see if there's something I'm missing.
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It's good to know that somebody is trying to get this fixed, thanks for doing that. Sounds like it's a very low priority for fixing then...
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Darkmath:
"I would like to know how CMX1 AI works, how it reacts to player's move on the fly .
What could the AI in CMX1 do that the AI in CMSF could not, in specifical situations?"
I'm no expert on CMx1 AI behaviour (or CMx2 for that matter) but here's what I learned about it in CMx1. It appeared to be entirely driven by those VP flags. On the attack, the AI would advance towards the closest one first so a scenario designer could set it up so that they attacked location A first and then flag B afterwards etc, or he could place the flags so that the AI would attack both locations simultaneously etc. Since the TAC AI functioned quite realistically at that level of abstraction it certainly looked to be better than CMx2 AI.
As long as there was at least one flag on the board that was neutral or enemy controlled, the AI would DO something. When the AI controlled the lot, it pretty much stopped in the vicinity of the flag. When flags changed from friendly controlled to enemy controlled, other AI forces would then mount a counterattack, usually at the expense of defending their own VP location. However, this kind of behaviour is not unrealistic in terms of WW2 battles.
With CMx2 the AI will do absolutely nothing without an AI plan even when there are lots of VP locations being controlled by the human player. The VP locations mean nothing to the AI at all, neither do casualties or indeed anything else except it's current order. And it will plough on towards that objective or die in the process. However, a scenario designer can at least try and anticipate some of the player's reactions and make the AI at least appear to react or move from an attacking stance to a defensive stance etc.
The real problems the AI has, without reactive scripting anyway, is that there are too few orders available for the scenario designer to use. Therefore, most of the AI attacks will just be 'move to this location in x minutes or die trying'. With more orders, it would be possible to make this non-reactive AI system at least appear a bit more reactive.
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When I said that I'd have to redo 'Murder in the night' I had no idea just how much I was going to change it. Apart from the map and the night setting, absolutely everything has changed. It's no longer a meeting engagement but now, first a Red Assault and then a Blue Counterattack. And Red has a reinforced battalion to play around with too. As Blue now has two Republican Guard companies and a platoon of T-72s AND there is a reinforced fortress company onboard at the start, it's definitely the biggest OB I've worked with so far. And I'm getting really good FPS. The map's no titch either at 1400m x 800m. Perhaps it's the night setting that keeps the frames up.
Once I hit on the idea of a Red Assault on a fortified line with bunkers (not many) and those unbelievavbly crappy emplaced T-54s I just had to find an OB and an AI attack to go go with it. After playtesting most of the day today, I have both but it's now just a question of tweaking the arrival times of Blue's reinforcements to prevent it from being an easy win. A Company got slaughtered the last time I played it and I even lost two of my T-72s but I think that was more down to my sloppy handling of the mech units before the armour arrived. As for the armour losses, I got overconfident as they went on their killing spree.
I have been trying to give each battle in this campaign it's own particular flavour and this one certainly is different from the others. If I can just get the difficulty level right, I won't need another RG scenario to cull the player's core units before the final battle. It's been a long journey creating this campaign but the end is definitely in sight now. The maps for the final two battles are finished and I've even pretty much finished 'Hasrabit' too. Once this new "Three Kings' situation is finished, there's just really 'Saudara' to work on.
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Bob the fish
Please tell me that you can have a good playing experience versus the AI in the full game. Is is capable of mouting a serious attack?
The answer is a resounding 'yes' to both questions. I haven't played the demo scenarios because I only downloaded it to see if it worked okay with Vista. Once it powered up and everything seemed fine I bought the game the same day. I wouldn't expect too much from the demo.
If you buy the full game, be sure to visit CMMODS and download some of the scenarios there. There are a number of them with good AI attacks.
BF: for when AI triggers are implemented
in CMSF Scenario and Mod Design Forum
Posted
You might want to try posting this in the main forum. I can't remember ever seeing BFC reply to anything in this forum.