Paper Tiger

Artillery delivered smoke is a must-have. I expect we'll get it in the Marines module though and not a patch. Don't bother asking, it's 100% pure speculation. I'm good at that. And, I've got to say it... we need the AI to be able to use it's artillery assets more effectively...(runs for the door before getting hit by thrown fruit)

I rarely pop vehicle smoke myself unless the tactical situation demands a smoke screen for my advance. I definitely don't consider that gamey as the game won't allow me to do it any other way. Infantry smoke is a bit weedy compared to the vehicular smoke. Besides, The TacAI seems to be doing a very good job of using smoke defensively so I'm quite happy about that. I wasn't aware that we had unlimited smoke either. I thought it was just two pops. MikeyD: "Oh, and by the way. Reports from those in-the-know suggest its not really good for the long term health of your soldiers to be popping WP or burning aluminum flakes directly over their heads." But probably a lot better for their long term health than the sh!t that would otherwise be coming their way. So no matter how you define the word, smoking is bad for your health?

Groan... it looks like I'm going to have to completely redo 'Murder in the night'. I compiled all the Republican Guards situations this morning and started up the mini-campaign and I massacred the AI in the first scenario. So I quit the campaign and tried again and slaughtered the AI without loss once again. Clearly, the so-called killer AI attack plan has now become a pussy. And the strange this is that the only units in the Blue force that see any action are the three T-72 TURMS. They truly are the kings of the night against other Red tanks. So, I've decided to move the campaign forward in time a few days so that the moon is full. That should help the AI spot better at night. It also makes the map look beautiful too, just as I'd intended it to look. I absolutely don't want to give the AI more force. Instead, I'm going to try and find a way to make the most of what they've got at the moment. But if they have to have more, they're going to get more. I've also renamed it 'Three Kings' because it sounds way cooler than 'Murder in the night' even if the old title is a more appropriate name for this situation as it stands at the moment. I know that the T-72 TURMS received a spotting upgrade in 1.06 or 1.07 so that probably explains why the balance in this one has swung so much in favour of the human player. Also, my experience both as a player and a designer has grown through the creation of this campaign so I'm using the assets I've got in a more efficient manner. Also, the previous plan was a bit basic compared to the plans that are in some of the other situations. It's a night combined arms meeting engagement so I'm going to have to organise the AI to attack more effectively. Looks like this will be my project for this weekend. If I get get this one up to scratch then I won't need to create another Republican Guard situation before 'Saudara'

I'd really love to see these added as flavour objects too. I tried adding them to the map as destroyed red vehicles and as already noted, they count against the Red players casualty points. They also don't appear in the map preview screen and only with deploy Red and actually running the situation. I personally don't care about the polygon count. It's up to the designer to keep his map playable, that's his responsibility and not BFC's. For me, the more realistic the map looks, the greater the immersion factor.

I did a few experiments with ths a while back. I set up a 'racetrack' style map and gave the units in each track different orders. the Quick units arrived at the finishing line at the same time as the Fast units but in better condition. I haven't tried this yet but perhaps the TAC AI will handle the unit differently if it has a Quick or Fast order with respect to reacting to threats. Perhaps the Fast moving units will carry on regardless while the Quick moving units will become aware of the danger more quickly. 100% pure speculation mate. Oh, and yes, there definitely is an exhausted state. Quick moving units definitely tire. Either decrease their fitness or increase the heat or the distance of their run and you'll definitely see them tire. That affects spotting too.

I posted something about this somewhere else. As the game stands at the moment, the AI has no ability to resupply during a game regardless of the assets the scenario designer gives them while the human player can. That means that the only way to get the AI to present a serious challenge to a human player over a 3+ hour engagement is to give them a massive OB or lots of reinforcements which amounts to the same thing. With smaller AI forces programmed to conserve their ammo by the scenario designer, the US player can just sit back and plaster any likely targets with area fire for as long as he wants and then resupply and come back for an easy and VERY boring victory. However, I can understand WHY people want it if they're playing as the US side. They want to take their time and lose as few men as possible. But given unlimited time, any plausible scenario between US and Syria should always end in a US victory. That's fine by me in real life but in a game it's just boring. By restricting the time, the scenario designer can present the US player with a challenge rather than just a challenge to win with the situation with as few friendly casualties as possible. After all that though, I don't oppose this petition. the more options we have to play the game, the better it will get. Just don't complain to a scenario designer if he chooses to make the mission shorter than YOU'D like.

You're deinitely going to get something like the CMx1 system for the WW2 module. For the modern era games, it doesn't look like it. BTW, I pretty much exclusively played QBs in CMx1 too so it was my preferred play style. But since I came to CMx2, I'm MUCH happier playing scenarios or campaigns. You really shouldn't let the reduced QB functionality stop you from playing this game. These days, IMO only, I'm enjoying this game FAR more than I ever enjoyed CMx1. I still have CMBO on my laptop but now, it looks and plays like crap compared to CMSF. And I'm not slagging it off either, I LOVED CMBO.

I haven't been able to post for a while 'cos the ISP I use has been down for the last 36 hours. But I have been hard at work on this project nevertheless. I finished the new version of 'Buying the farm' yesterday evening. It is now significantly more challenging without being unfair. I got a total victory but I had to WORK my ass off to get it in the last few minutes so it's finished. I actually thought I was heading for a draw but I managed to get enough force into the last VP location to neutralise it for both of us. Since I controlled the other two the victory fell to me. That's a screenshot from the final moments. That's also one of the reasons why I wouldn't want to disable the smoke effect. The time I had remaining I used to beautify the 'Farm' map and also replay the campaign opener 'Ambush!" and it is more challenging too. Because 'Strong Stand' and 'Breakout' are post 1.06 babies, they won't require very much tweaking to get finished so, except for 'Hasrabit', the Special Forces missions are finished. The same goes for the Republican Guard situations. I am going to complile them all later this morning and do a run through to see how much of my core force I lose in the four missions. I just can't get a force balance that's right for 'Saudara' until I have a good idea what the player'll be bringing to this one. I don't want it to be impossible to win, just BLOODY hard! I don't want to have to create a new mission at this stage of the development project. It feels like I'll finally get it finished in another 2-3 weeks, certainly before the end of March. I'm quite anxious to get it finished so that I can play some of the other campaigns/scenarios that have been released. I haven't played ANYTHING at all other than these missions since I started work on this project.

Ahh! You have no idea how disappointed I was when I opened this thread and saw that it's from last year. I thought there were going to be a whole new batch of flavour objects coming.

Cpl Steiner, you're definitely right, I am trying to do this is a polite manner and keeping my tone reasonable. Trouble is, with reasonable and polite, you seem to have less chance of getting a response from BFC than if you attack the game. I suspect that somebody does read these threads but they are keeping such information out of the public domain. Unfortunately, I suspect AI artillery will be improved in the Marines module and not a patch so we might have a long wait for any improvements. I love the idea that the TAC AI could handle artillery. Indeed, if you read the manual, the TacAI is supposed to do be able to do this already. It states that this function is beyond the scenario designers control and entirely used at the discretion of the TacAI. But that's obviously not working. The system I outlined above would be very simple to use without having to write lots and lots of complex AI codes. It's almost identical to the system we already have only that the AI knows to fire on these 'Red' zones later in the game when the artillery reinforcements show up. Even such a simple system as this would be a MASSIVE improvement over the current system. It's very disappointing that the game doesn't allow the AI to fire artillery during a battle yet the human player can. I can fully appreciate that there were other issues that were far more pressing to fix before 1.07 but now, we're nearly there so this really needs some attention. There have been substantial improvements to the pathfinding routines, AI vehicle behaviour and even a whole new system of LOS introduced. Now, what about the artillery?

No, please repeat it. I haven't played with Blue forces for at least three months now so it's possible something got changed with 1.05-1.07. I do have considerable experience with Syrian artillery AI spotting though. I confess that when I started testing, I thought I was seeing that too. When the AI approached the village from point A, a particular artillery zone got hit first, when they approached from point B another did. But then, without changing anything, that stopped working and a completely different zone was attacked when they approached from point A or B. So I set up a special experiment. When I first performed my test, it was with the US as the AI player so I was VERY careful to ensure that there was only ONE unit that had LOS to a particular set of artillery zones. He was set up in a far corner of the board with LOS to some artillery zones on the far side of the village. They had NEVER been targetted before by the AI so I thought this would be a good test. Well, it didn't make any difference whatsoever. the same zones at the front of the village were targetted and the spotter had no LOS to those. I got the same result no matter where I placed my spotter, even when I made sure he had no LOS to ANY artillery zones either. It looks like it's completely arbitrary although I suspect that there might be a preference for the lower numbered artillery zones when the AI picks it's targets. But that really is 100% pure speculation. I've also set it up with the Syrian side too. No artillery spotter = no AI artillery barrage. It doesn't matter if one appears as a reinforcement later, they get squat.

It certainly can't hurt to have it as you don't HAVE to use it. I know I wouldn't. I really like the look of it in the game.

There'so way to do that once it's actually loaded. However, if you want to make sure that you get the one one you, I suggest making a copy of your QB maps folder someplace else, like 'My Documents' for example and then delete all the maps from the CMSF QB Maps folder. Then copy back in the ones you want and try them out. If you like it, keep it, if you don't delete it again. That's how I built up my current stock of QB maps. There's a really nice one that came with 1.06, I think it has 'mad' or something in the title. I'm at work at the moment and can't check that. It's one of my favourites at the moment.

It appears that I'll have to devote a bit more time to rebalancing the earlier scenarios after all. I just finished a full playthrough of 'The Farm' and I won it easily with almost no core force casualties. The introduction of ELOS allows the player to use far more detailed tactics both on the attack and defence, at least for those of us who play RT anyway. So, I spent the rest of this morning's session tinkering with the AI plans again and made a new version. I will give it a full playthrough tomorrow morning. The little that I saw of it this morning should significantly up the challenge level for your core forces. This morning, the first Special forces company arrived just on time to save the day in the battle for the workhouses victory location and that meant that the other two were easy. Given that the AI has no ability to react to the players actions, I'm going to program the AI to 'anticipate' your actions. It would be nice if casualties somehow affected the group's AI plan, example, move to the next order if the group's casualties exceed 60% whatever. I also wish there were some ability for the campaign designer to specify auto-save for the player to overwrite his campaign game save when he completes another mission in the game. At the moment, it's possible to just reload a mission if you're not happy with the result and try again until you get a better one. It's a lot of work creating a dynamic campaign and most of that work will be wasted if the player cheats and reloads until he gets the optimal result. I know that I will play the game the way I intend it and there are others who will too. I want this to be a story or an adventure and it will be scripted to be like one as much as it's possible to do so. If a player chooses to reload and stick to the optimal path through the campaign then I guess it's his loss.

Me neither I've just started a new thread in the main forum making some suggestions how to improve this crucial aspect of the game. Feel free to contribute before it slides of the front page again...

Now that the game has largely been fixed, at least for those of us who don't play online, PBEM etc, I am hoping that some attention will be given to the condition of the AI's use of artillery in the game. It seems there are a few other people who would like to see the AI be able to use artillery during the scenario instead of the 30 second delayed dump at the start. Here's how I think it could be implemented in the game. We already have AI plans for the AI groups. First, each AI plan could have it's own stand alone AI artillery plan attached. Even with absolutely no other improvement to the system, that would help a LOT. But I suspect thsi won't happen any time soon. Secondly, we could have the ability to create different types of artillery fire zones, an example being a) the preliminary opening barrage painted in yellow and then and in-game artillery barrage painted in red, (who cares!)that are ignored by the opening barrage. That would allow us to add artillery as reinforcements later in the game and these modules could be fired at these 'red' artillery zones. Now, that surely wouldn't require too much work to implement. I know that there a million and a half things that people want you to be spending your time developing but it really is about time the AI artillery got a bit of attention IMO only .

Actually, I missed this before this morning. It's taking a lot longer for Red artillery to arrive after 1.07. It's a very welcome change and it has really helped to make 'The Barrier' a tough mission. I was considering removing the artillery support from the Blue OB but now, that's not necessary as it takes around 23 minutes for the artillery to arrive. After all the work I've done on the Barrier and 'Breakout', I absolutely HAVE to redo all the old AI plans to make them more effective. I might even be able to downscale some of the AI forces too. I replayed the campaign opener 'Ambush!' this morning and it was MUCH tougher to beat with the new AI plan. I still won but my casualties were much higher so I'll have to rethink my strategy when playing this one. And the same applies to 'Buying the Farm'. I'm currently playtesting it with a new AI plan and it's definitely different. The effect of the new ELOS is definitely noticable in this one. I'm developing a whole new set of tactics that would never have worked before ELOS.

Yeah. I'd noticed that some flavour objects block vehicular movement. It looks a tad unrealistic so I don't place them so that they can obstruct movement in any meaningful way. Now, a roadblock flavour object would be really cool to have...

Way, way back, before 1.03, I tried that experiment. You'd think that it would work from reading the manual but it doesn't. LOS plays NO part in the AI artillery routine. The only thing that affects it is the presence of a dedicated artillery spotter for the Syrian side. You'll find that it will all start firing around 25 seconds after the scenario starts even when NO red units have any LOS to any of the target zones.

Hurrah! I finally finished 'The Barrier' this morning and it's just what I wanted it to be. I managed to get the AI groups co-ordinated for the maximum effect and I got slaughtered twice in a row. So I moved the phase line back even closer to the friendly board edge and replayed it and voila, it was winnable. After two more playthroughs I managed to get two Total Victories but I had to work to get them. Since I got it playtested almost everything except the two forces has been changed. There will be no more changes or tweaks to this one as it's as close to perfect as I could possibly make it. And that means that I can now concentrate exclusively on the phase 2 battles from now on. The six phase one battles are all finished but I still want to return to some of them and enhance them a bit further before the campaign is released. There are three phase 2 battles at the moment, 'Heavy Metal' which is finished, 'Breakout' which should be finished next weekend, and 'Saudara' which is about 50% there. Then the finale, 'Hasrabit'. I might possibly develop another Republican Guard mission for phase 2 but I before I do, I want to do another test compile of the RG situations and see how badly my core forces get hit. If they are still largely intact in phase 2 then I'll need another one. Otherwise 'Saudara' will be an unplayable monster. I can't really run a battle with each side fielding a full battalion with support elements onboard without a serious performance hit. Actually, I'd like to keep the AI force down to around two reinforced companies if possible. I'm hoping designing another scenario to do this won't be necessary though. As it stands, 'The Barrier' will really hurt B Company and 'Murder in the Night' can be pretty hard on A Company too, at least the first couple of times you play it. 'Hill 142' is a bit of a holiday for the Republican Guards though but make a mistake and it can quickly put the hurt on you. 'Heavy Metal' is INSANE. If you thought B company had it tough in 'The Barrier', wait 'till you see what's waiting for them in this one. I'm going to leave it as it is because I have never seen any scenario like this done yet, at leat not outside WW2. I have beaten it a couple of times with minimal losses but I had to be REALLY careful. Then, what's left after these four battles is what you take with you to 'Saudara'. Hopefully (from MY point of view) you should have the equivilant of a little more than a reinforced company and that would be just perfect for the planned AI OB. More than that and it would be quite an easy finish for the Guard and we can't have that can we? >fiendish cackle<

FRAPS. It's definitely free and it works well.

I've been hard at work with this campaign over the last two days trying out the older scenarios to see how they play with 1.07. The good news is that I haven't found any bad effects from the patch but I am definitely going to have to rebalance some of the pre 1.06 as the AI vehicles seem to be moving much faster. Other than playtesting the old scenarios I have continued working on 'The Barrier' and it's nearly finished. I am very happy with the way this one is turning out. Needless to say, the faster pathfinding meant that the pre 1.07 plan needed a bit more tweeking. I also moved that hidden phase line back a bit because the AI managed to touch it today and it really shouldn't be able to as long as you hold nothing back. I've pretty much synched the attack so it's not going to get any tougher now short of adding more forces to the AI and I'm definitely not going to do that. The mission must be both winnable and exciting. At the moment, it's almost as good as I can make it. I also started work on a new phase 2 battle for the special forces called 'Breakout' and it's shaping up to be a very nice battle as well. The map is still under development but it's looking good. It's located in the valley and it's very hot and hazy taking place around the middle of the day. This one is a meeting engagement and so far, it's very challenging. The Rebels have managed to outflank your special forces and threaten to encircle your forces. The two special forces companies are supported by a reserve mech company with some crappy T-55 1974 model tanks. When I started this one, there were lots of walls but it was proving too difficult for the pathfinding AI to move it's vehicles around so they had to go. Here's an early screenshot with the walls. The reserve units are very poor but I'm getting really good battles with them. The tanks are rubbish when pitted against the US or even the Republican Guard but against other earlier tanks, they're good enough for an exciting fight. Smoke seems to be denser with 1.07 and I'm seeing the AI use it a lot in this situation to very good effect. And out of this smokescreen come the attackers. Then the special forces arrive and move towards the battle. I'm using The Louch's special forces mod. It looks much better than the stock black uniforms. This situation is benefiting from my experience with developing the AI attack in 'The Barrier'. In fact, after I finish this one, I'm going to return to the older ones and rework the AI attack plans. It means that this definitely won't get finished for at least another 2-3 weeks but hopefully it should get finished before the end of March.

I've resurrected my old thread in the main forum in the hope of getting this important issue some attention from BFC or the beta testing group. I'm really happy with the game as of 1.07 and I really can't believe that there's some other core game issue that's a more important priority for 1.08.

I'm resurrecting this thread (again) as I don't want to start a new one. Now that the game is sorted with 1.07, when are BFC planning to do something about the condition of AI artillery? Can we expect to see some improvements to this core game element in the next patch? At the very least, can we get the system that's outlined in the manual?

Oops! Misread your original post. You want AI artillery support for later in the game. Sorry, the game doesn't allow us to do that in spite of what the manual says. This is a bit of a sore point as it's been brought up on the main forum a couple of times since the New Year but it never got a response from BFC. BTW, that thread was called 'AI Artillery - not WAD'