Paper Tiger

Here's one for you Pandur. That's what a heavy strike does in 'The farm' It's a bit more effective than a strafing run. I thought this next one was nice. One of my Special Forces AT teams approaches the berm around the field. (from this morning's playtest) This one is from the same playtest. The farmhouse objective is about to fall to the Rebel infantry but the first of the reinforcements have just arrived. About 30-40 minutes later, my forces are cautiously approaching the farmhouse. It's been a real struggle to get there...

Pandur -thats right, first they help me and than they are in point of whatever local counterattack i may launch on remains of enemy forces.- LoL. Good luck with that. The units that survived the attack were all broken and their order boxes were blank when I selected them. They are also REALLY unfit so they can't move very far. But they are actually quite good fighters against another Red force. The level of lethalilty of the firefight feels more like a WW2 firefight. I really enjoy sitting back and watching the action when the AI is attacking the victory locations. The TAC AI has improved so much that I get some nice surprises when I watch it's attack. Playtesting this situation again this morning, I managed to get a draw but I had to stop 15 minutes before the scheduled scenario end (1 hr 30 mins) to go to work and I know I'd have recaptured two of the three objective zones without taking heavy casualties before the time expired. Perfect! I am going to play again tomorrow with the ammo level of the air support reduced quite a bit as I got two HEAVY strikes from the same plane on the same target which helped me a bit too much. 'Buying the farm' is nearly finished which is a bit of a shame because I'll have to devote my time to another situation. They're all good at the moment but 'The farm' is definitely my favourite at the moment.

They definitely don't hunt down enemy units in the objective zones. I was watching them this morning while I was playtesting a situation and the enemy overran the objective zone, which also happened to be a victory location. However, a couple of friendlies got isolated in a building and, as long as they kept their heads down, nobody bothered them. Being IN their objective zone doesn't seem to alter the way the AI units interact with the enemy. If they can't spot them, they won't do anything. I think SgtMuhammed's method would do a good job of flushing the opposition out of buildings but as long as the human player's troops are in good order and hiding, they could still be missed.

A word of warning for anybody else who's planning to create a dynamic campaign. You have to make several different versions of the same situation and if it's VERY dynamic, there will have to be lots of branches. I discovered this this morning when I was making up the different versions of 'Buying the farm' and I found that I needed four, with/without option A and with/without option B! And that's just about halfway through the game. That's a bit much so I'm going to rework the story a little bit to prevent too many branches. I had a nice idea about air support this afternoon that means that I only have two branches in the game and it will make one or two scenarios REALLY important. No clues for now. I continued working on 'The Farm' scenario this morning and it's looking good. I managed to get a really exciting battle going and now, it's just down to timing the arrival of reinforcements so that Blue is struggling to survive the AI attack and then launch his counterattack. I hope to post some more screenshots this weekend.

Secondbrooks: -Problem is that defenders have 2 platoons in seperate defence positions and i basically can take them both out one by one, when i want and in what order i want. AI should be able to act dynamically acording to situation, to make mission even somewhat tough- Second problem first. That problem is down to the scenario designer. If he sets up two AI platoons in positions where they can't provide mutual support for each other then of course you can do that. So it's the designer's intention to put them in that situation. That might be a dodgy proposition in real life too. Of course, you can try to anticipate what the player will do and script a counterattack. Once you get a feel for the map, it's possible to do that but it's still difficult to time it right. Sometimes it will work and people will think that you're a genius for making the AI do that and sometimes it won't. You can also script a withdrawal too. I haven't done much in the way of AI defensive behaviour scripting but if I were designing a situation like that, I would have to consider the placement of AI forces at the start very carefully. You must try to maximise the resources you give the AI side, place them in positions to close down avenues of approach, set up hidden positions with ambush orders and force the attacker to approach the objective from the direction YOU want them to. When I'm designing a scenario, the AI side is MY side and I want it to win. The kind of AI scripting you're looking for doesn't exist in the game yet and probably won't for a long time.

You might get better results if their group is given an 'active' stance. Otherwise, there's no way to tell an AI controlled tank to use it's main gun. Same with buttoning/unbuttoning. I think that's entirely the domain of the TACAI, perhaps part of the ammo conservation logic. However, if they 'see' infantry in a building, for example, if they're firing, I've seen them use their MGs. Maybe there will be some tweak in their behaviour in a later patch.

Pandur: OMG no, not at night although I'm going to. No, they're in 'Buying the farm', a post dawn scenario, so they should behave themselves better than at night. But yes, you will still have to be careful when you approach them. I saw some friendly fire this morning. Once the patch arrives, I'll be working on the other Special Forces blockbuster which takes place at night and I'm going to try adding some conscript cannonfodder in that one too. That's definitely one of the bigger challenges of playing Red on red, you're not just fighting the bad guys so you have to manage the battle carefully. That won't be to everyone's taste however. The Reserve Militia units are not part of the core forces but will be added to some of the scenarios to bulk out the Special Forces. And I'm also getting to see some of those Grenade Launcher platoons in action. I was watching one in action this morning and it was really cool. The core units are the Republican Guards and the Special Forces units, but you can't afford to squander the conscripts as you'll need their help. thewood: no, I'm playtesting exclusively in RT. However, if I get a LOT of slowdown with 1.06, I might have to to finish it. handihoc: I have a single core Pentium IV 3Ghz 64bit processor, an nVidea 8600GT graphics card and 1Gb of RAM so my kit is nothing special. The processor is the weakest link in the chain with a Vista rating of 4.3. So far, EVERYTHING can be played on my kit with all the settings maxxed out so if your kit's better, you shouldn't have a problem with it. Having said that, all bets are off until I've seen how much slowdown I get with 1.06. If it's bad, I'll have to postpone work until I get a new processor and motherboard, and reactivate Vista... ho hum. The 'Saudara' map is the only potentially unusable one as it's HUGE, 1500m x 1200m so I'm going to cut it back this weekend and make it play on an east west axis rather than a north south one. That should help a LOT, and I've got a copy of the original to be used as a QB map later. I designed it for a manoeuver battle between two mech forces and it would be the perfect finale for the Republican Guards battalion if it works in 1.06. If not, I might drop it or wait until I get a new processor. Thanks for the comments guys. It keeps me motivated to push on with it as hard as my schedule allows. I'm not going to let it grow into a monster.

Rokossovski -Now that I have made my pronouncement on the subject, I assume the developers will scurry to carry out my will.- I wish ! I get the feeling that this is only an issue for those of us who design scenarios rather than exclusively play them. I know Battlefront have a position on this as I read a thread Steve posted a LONG time ago saying that there were definitely plans to improve it. That's fine but I'd like to know if there are plans to fix what's obviously not WAD. From reading the manual, it's obvious that it's not. I think the AI artillery is a very important aspect of the game as, the way it stands just now, it unbalances it in favour of the human player. Firing off everything in the first minutes isn't exactly satisfying and to get a result, the scenario designer has to place the target zones close to or on top of the human player's set up zones. Except in a very few situations, I would imagine most people would complain solidly to a designer if he did that but that's pretty much all the AI artillery is capable of doing at the moment. Also, if the AI is given a module larger that a mortar, it fires forever and in some cases, it is still firing when it's own troops are approaching the zone. Okay, maybe that's bad scenario design on my part but I'd like to be able to do it without reducing the amount of ammo the module has.

posted January 31, 2008 04:40 AM quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally posted by SgtMuhammed: No patch for you! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Patch Nazi? - Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I first noticed this when I designed a simple AI plan for a Red force moving along a road into an ambush. There was nothing fancy at all about the plan, move from point to point asap and of course, it pretty much did that and got whacked! So, to make the situation a bit more challenging, I decided to have the AI act a bit more cautiously. After all, it's moving at night into enemy held territory so it's not going to behave the way it did in the first example. So I gave the AI more time to perform it's order and changed it's stance. WOW! I got stuffed, almost my entire force wiped out because I was expecting the AI to do the same thing, only more slowly. Some units worked their way around under cover and came at me on my flanks. Only the stance and the timing changed, the waypoints remained the same and my units in the same set up. Two COMPLETELY different results. You might be able to avoid too much of the bunching up behaviour by making their objective box even bigger. I'm having some very good results with this in another scenario under development. I had given the AI companiies very long, thin objective zones thinking that they'd space out and line up but that wasn't happening. This morning, I made the boxes even longer and much wider and they didn't bunch up so much. In my campaign, the AI is doing most of the attacking (but not all!) so I have to make sure that there's at least 1 GOOD attack plan in there. I feel like I'm learning a lot while I'm doing this. And, it's fun to watch too.

Taki: -Better get your workload into a good looking RPG Like pdf like Webwing did and work more on the playabilitiy of the Scenarios then adding AI Plans.- I'm not sure I want to spend too much time designing a publication to promote it like Webwing. I just don't have that much free time available to learn the PDF skills necessary to make it interesting for you. Instead, I'm posting screenshots and progress reports in a thread I created in the Scenario forum. To my mind, the MOST important thing is their excitment level and the AI planning is absolutely crucial to success here. Otherwise, I can just create MONSTER AI forces and give them a plan to charge at the victory point locations. (Actually, that's EXACTLY how I playtest a new map )

Well, I'm bringing this one back up instead of starting another thread because I'd really like to hear what Battlefront's position is on the state of AI artillery planning. Yeah, I can live without it coming in later but if those 'Destroy', 'Damage' and 'Suppress' orders start working as the manual says, it will radically alter the way some of the scenarios I've been working on function. We are actually allowed to choose these on the interface but I can't see any functional difference between the three settings. They are all fire until the ammo is exhausted. If changes are a LONG way off in the future then that's fine, I won't have to change anything so that they're not made redundant by significant changes that appear in a monoth or two.

Oh, it's not but I am! That's one of the reasons why I can spend so much time posting on these boards. I have at least 1 hour free time every working day with free access to the internet, even more on Thursdays and Fridays. I just can't download anything.

Yeah, it IS a lot of work but the more I work on it the better it gets. I'm looking forward to playing it when 1.06 comes out too. I can't do much more with the Special Forces situations until the low wall bug is eradicated. It's strange how some scenarios 'grow' as you playtest them. This morning, I decided to overhaul the rudimentary AI Plan that 'Buying the farm' had and the new one was too lethal for the Special Forces. So I had an idea to add a Reserve Militia company with some support weapons to the Blue OB. They start the game onboard and they are really crap, the poorest everything, so handling them is a real challenge. Then, the Special Forces arrive later as reinforcements. When I playtested the first 30 minutes, it all worked beautifully and I think I now have my 'final' version. Now I have to figure out how to beat the AI attack with what's available. It's a really beautiful map and the more I play on it, the more I find this scenario is becoming my favourite. Now that I've added one Reserve Militia company to the Special Forces, I feel that I can add more in the other non-night time situations. They definitely won't be core forces because they get lost very quickly. It also solves the problem I had with the Special Forces, no machine guns. Yeah, they have some pretty cool kit and they're almost as good as US troops in certain situations but I feel the lack of heavy support weapons. Now I can add machine guns platoons and other goodies to the Blue OB. It also solves the problem I had with forcing the player to lose some of his core forces due to restricting their set up zones to areas targetted by a preliminary artillery barrage. I didn't really like this very much because it felt unfair. I don't have any qualms about doing this to your non-core forces. Now, the first 20-30 minutes of the situation are very exciting. When the first Special Forces company arrives, it has it's work cut out for it to stabilise the situation. I feel I really have my back to the wall playing this one. Then, the counterattack can begin in earnest when the second company arrives later. I love designing scenarios.

So far, what I'm reading makes me think that having 2 AI plans for a campaign scenario is about right. More is just overkill. If it were just a single scenario, I'd be looking for at least 4.

Agree about the C2 thing. I'm not sure what could be happening there as I usually have the opposite problem, instant spotting. What is the quality of your crews? Is it night? It might help to set a covered arc if you expect the enemy to be moving into an area. That certainly helps with spotting.

I'm curious to know how many of you will keep reloading a scenario in a campaign until you get the very best result before moving on to the next mission? The reason that I ask is that I'm currently designing a campaign and I'm wondering how many AI plans I should include for each mission. If there is only one, then each time you reload it, you'll get a better result until, theoretically, you get the perfect result. At the moment, each mission has at least 2 plans but I don't see the need for 3-5 plans if most people just accept the result and move on with the campaign. Personally, I prefer to accept the result and move on to see what the campaign has in store.

I've been doing a bit of work on a couple of scenarios with Red sniper teams and they seem to be very effective. They are good at suppressing the units that are under fire and they definitely get the occassional kill. I've seen at least one guy suddenly go red under sniper fire. All this at ranges in excess of 500m, sometimes more than 800m. Of course, I have to give them target orders otherwise they just spot.

Okay, I think I got that. It's just that I've been doing a Red on Red tank battle this morning and the opening exchanges of fire are almost exclusively ATGM shots. The tanks onboard are T-72TURMS v T-62MVs, certainly T-62 'somethings' and the opening range is just under 1km. Perhaps that's what they're carrying in their guns at the start of the scenario? I also assume that if an Abrams reacts differently to an enemy Abrams than with a T-72 TURMS, then the same logic applies for a T-72 TURMS v a T-62 in a Red on Red game? I'm more interested in what Syrian tanks do that what an Abrams does as I do mostly Red on Red.

Wow, 'Valley of death' is actually quite an appropriate name for the situation. I playtested it three times this morning and it's UNBELIEVABLY intense, possibly the most intense action I've seen yet in a CMSF scenario. Played in RT, the first 10 minutes are INSANE man!!!. I'm not sure whether I should leave it this way or modify the map or the AI plan to make it a bit less intense. Or maybe it's just my crappy tactics. Actually, I'm hoping to do a test complilation of the Republican Guard scenarios later this week just to see how the later scenarios really play. I've been using the full OOB in each scenario and that's fine when it's the first time the core forces are in action. But I always lose quite a portion of those forces in 'Murder' and 'Passed off!' So, I want to see how the two 'Hill' scenarios play with the reduced forces as well as 'Valley of Death.' Maybe it won't be quite so intense. I also won't be able to playtest the 'Saudara' map (the original Hasrabit map pictured above)until I've done this as Blue gets the entire Republican Guard Battalion group against another mech Battalion and that slaughters my processor. I shouldn't have a problem if all the Companies are at 30-50% strength though.

Steve: -The problem is that Red tanks, especially the older ones (which includes the T-72M1), have just about no chance of killing an Abrams from the front or turret side. This is not exactly akin to a Stuart firing at a King Tiger, but it's not far off. Since the ATGM shot is about the only hope they have, that's what they use. Sometimes they use HE instead, but that will go away with v1.06.- Does this mean that the TacAI for Syrian tanks reacts to ALL tanks like it's an Abrams? It makes sense since the game is designed primarly to be played Blue on red and that's the only tank Blue forces presently have. But in Red v Red situations, Red tanks will follow the logic that the enemy tank MUST be an Abrams and make the less than optimal choice too?

Chelco: In reality, I can't get the red TacAI to avoid these behaviors: -Sending more and more troops through paths which are obviously dangerous. More and more troops are sent right into paths where piles of dead red troops accumulate. -Not pulling out until it is just too late. It looks like the TacAI waits until a team is down to two or three men to order them out of there. This maybe a result of the high lethality and pace of the modern battlefield, but it would be more reasonable to make the TacAI to re-consider the path if just one man was shot (if one man was shot, it is likely very bad things will happen to the whole squad). Good points, that pretty much sums up what the TAC AI can't do very well. However, I have found that the two most important things for a good AI attack plan are stance and the length of time they have to perform an order. Stance is obvious, 'cautious', 'normal', 'active' and 'assault' all make a huge difference to how the AI group reacts while following your order. I rarely use 'max assault' as that usually means that after making contact with the enemy the group will never move again. Yeah, it will EVENTUALLY, but assault does it better. IMO the length of time the group has to perform it's order is the more important of the two though. Tell group 1 to move from point A to point B with only 5 minutes to 'Exit before' and it will perform the action very differently than if you give them 20 minutes. The units will use any terrain they can find between the two points and won't necessarily approach it in a straight line. The longer you give them to perform the order, the better, and more unpredictable, the results will be. Having said that, I really think that the TAC AI needs to be tweeked to prevent it's units from walking into an artillery barrage. That's not very good at all. I expect some of these things will get sorted a some point in the future.

Wow! I'm on the front page. I'm honoured. I'd really better get the finger out with this project then. Rokossovski: yeah, I'm planning to release the maps separately as quick battle maps but that will only happen after the campaign is all finished. I got a lot of work done yesterday thankfully. 'Hill 142 part 2' has it's OOB sorted now and I've played it a couple of times. I had to cut the map down from it's original 1600m x 1000m because it was too open and I suspect the number of LOS checks was holding things up. I have already finished battles with larger forces than this one but I was down to 1FPS for the first 15 minutes of the scenario. After I cut the map back and made 100% sure that the Red force set up out of sight of all possible Blue set up zones, I was back up in double figures again until the battle was joined in earnest. Then I was down to about 5-6FPS. That's not too bad because I'm playtesting the situations with the FULL Blue OOB and no doubt, the two companies will be reduced by the time this situation starts. So far, it's TOUGH! Actually, I've pretty much decided the story line now and that means that the scenarios with the Republican Guard part in the campaign are almost finished. They will be pulled out of the area before the fighting in Hasrabit begins. I just need to do the 'Valley of death' and then I just have the finale and the Special Forces to do. I have to wait for 1.06 to arrive before I can playtest those situations. I also want to see how good the new Syrian ability to re-supply during battles is before I start writing the script. I'm hoping that they'll have enough for 2 battles and knowing this will help timing the missions a lot. Does anybody know any Arabic? I'm a bit nervous that some of my made-up names might be offensive. (Example, Hasrabit is nonsense to me but it might mean something in Arabic.) Also, 'Hill 142' is a bit lame, I'd like to use the Arabic for 'The head of the serpent' and the 'tail of the serpent' instead.

Pandur: I will remeber that. but dont give us more spoilers Don't worry, it's not a spoiler because it's in the briefing. I think the player has to know when something is important so that he's willing to expend his core force units to get a victory and not just preserve it. Other than that, I'll heed your warning and not give out any spoilers. And to you other guys, thanks for the comments. I spend a LOT of time working on maps because I like them to look as realistic and as pleasing as possible. I'm looking forward to see how they play with the new ELoS system as I spend a lot of time building subtle (and not so subtle)undulations in the terrain. It's a bit of a shame that the 'Valley of Death' scenario has to happen in the middle of the day because dawn, and the long shadows really bring this map to life. It's beautiful but during the dayh, it looks a bit washed out. Hmm. But it's too unrealistic to have so many actions within such a short space of time. BTW, Valley of Death is definitely going to get a new name.

Yeah, I'd been thinking that about AI plans too. I guess two would suffice in most situations. Ambush just has one at the moment and I figure most people will breeze it and then have a save point for the more difficult mission that follows. There's not much air support so far and I'm not planning on letting it become an important part of the campaign. Stuff up on 'Strong Stand' and there won't be any air support at all because the air base will be threatened by the rebel advance. It's in 'Buying the farm' and I've had some good results from the heavy strikes, very spectacular. They usually come in after 10 minutes or so. I'm a bit wary about artillery against the AI as it often swings the game solidly in the player's favour. Blue will always have at least one module of mortars, usually more than one. I was planning to put in a couple of batteries of 122mm SPA but it's too powerful for the AI. It just walks/runs right into the barrage and that's it, game over. That mwould mean the real challenge was predicting where the AI was going to move and then killing them with the artillery because they couldn't react. I prefer to let the grunts on the ground do most of the dirty work. After all, in CMx1, the idea was that the big artillery barrage was finished and it was time to do the fighting. Of course, the AI gets LOTS! But then, it's not very good at using it effectively.