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Paper Tiger

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  1. Upvote
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from sttp in Revising The Road to Montebourg campaign   
    To catch up, I've imported and placed the core units in all the phase 1 and 3 missions and am now preparing to import them into the phase 2 missions (From Hell to Le Ham). These are more tricky because there are German core units in all these missions so I have left these until last. I should have the German core units done by tonight and have them imported tomorrow which means testing and AI plans can begin in earnest this weekend. And do I have some new ideas...
    I have to admit, I really like what I can do with AI triggers. They were just making an appearance when I last played the game and I was initially disappointed that they didn't 'branch'. But I can see how useful they can be in some of the AI reworks I've done for my CMSF2 campaign already.
    Once I've redone the AI plans, I'll create the variants and then will compile a new revised Montebourg for the scenario depot. They're not all getting extensive AI reworks, just the ones which I feel would benefit most from some extra attention, like Turnbull's Stand for example which has an AI attack.
  2. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Meltpile in Reworked The Road to Nijmegen Campaign is now available   
    Unusual tat. Is it permanent? It's a play but I can't quite work out  the details. Is there some significance to that particular play?
    And yes, I'm back and that's the first fruit. For the time being, I'm importing the new core files units into Montebourg (I've just finished 'Labrynth' which I was dreading doing) and after that, I'll import the new core units into The Scottish Corridor. Once that's done, I'll really get to work revising these two. I've learned a lot since I made Montebourg so reworking the AI plans should be 'fun'. It's the work I love best. 
  3. Upvote
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from MOS:96B2P in Reworked The Road to Nijmegen Campaign is now available   
    Unusual tat. Is it permanent? It's a play but I can't quite work out  the details. Is there some significance to that particular play?
    And yes, I'm back and that's the first fruit. For the time being, I'm importing the new core files units into Montebourg (I've just finished 'Labrynth' which I was dreading doing) and after that, I'll import the new core units into The Scottish Corridor. Once that's done, I'll really get to work revising these two. I've learned a lot since I made Montebourg so reworking the AI plans should be 'fun'. It's the work I love best. 
  4. Upvote
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Lethaface in Reworked The Road to Nijmegen Campaign is now available   
    Unusual tat. Is it permanent? It's a play but I can't quite work out  the details. Is there some significance to that particular play?
    And yes, I'm back and that's the first fruit. For the time being, I'm importing the new core files units into Montebourg (I've just finished 'Labrynth' which I was dreading doing) and after that, I'll import the new core units into The Scottish Corridor. Once that's done, I'll really get to work revising these two. I've learned a lot since I made Montebourg so reworking the AI plans should be 'fun'. It's the work I love best. 
  5. Upvote
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Gumboots in Reworked The Road to Nijmegen Campaign is now available   
    Unusual tat. Is it permanent? It's a play but I can't quite work out  the details. Is there some significance to that particular play?
    And yes, I'm back and that's the first fruit. For the time being, I'm importing the new core files units into Montebourg (I've just finished 'Labrynth' which I was dreading doing) and after that, I'll import the new core units into The Scottish Corridor. Once that's done, I'll really get to work revising these two. I've learned a lot since I made Montebourg so reworking the AI plans should be 'fun'. It's the work I love best. 
  6. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from PIATpunk in Reworked The Road to Nijmegen Campaign is now available   
    Unusual tat. Is it permanent? It's a play but I can't quite work out  the details. Is there some significance to that particular play?
    And yes, I'm back and that's the first fruit. For the time being, I'm importing the new core files units into Montebourg (I've just finished 'Labrynth' which I was dreading doing) and after that, I'll import the new core units into The Scottish Corridor. Once that's done, I'll really get to work revising these two. I've learned a lot since I made Montebourg so reworking the AI plans should be 'fun'. It's the work I love best. 
  7. Thanks
    Paper Tiger reacted to Rokko in uncam: Combat Mission campaign extractor   
    Wow, stop making me blush! Your campaigns are works of art, by the way
    Can you retry with the most recent version? I just checked with a file I found on this forum by googling and it got unpacked with no issue.
    Or alternatively, send me the file causing issues, it may be a different version of the campaign than the one I found.
  8. Upvote
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from A Canadian Cat in uncam: Combat Mission campaign extractor   
    I'm a bit hesitant to make definite statements about what I'm going to do at this point but I'm getting re-inspired. I'd like to look at CMSF2 soon but first, I want to get some issues with my CMBN campaigns sorted out.
    I'm concerned about the difficulty of The Scottish Corridor mission, especially the finale, Fair and Square. I'd be happy to hear some feedback on that before making any real plans. 
    I think Nijmegen is in a good place and would prefer not to have to do a lot of work on that apart from fixing an issue witha bunker in the Mook Bridge mission. The Irish Guards missions were extremely hard work to build and test because I wanted them to be really special, especially 'Breakout from the Neerpelt Bridgehead', my favourute mission from that campaign.
  9. Upvote
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from sttp in Revising The Road to Montebourg campaign   
    It's been a long weekend here so I've been able to spend three consecutive days working on this. I've just finished working on the Brecourt mission and completed it with only one casualty. To be sure it wasn't a fluke, I ran it again (it's only 15 minutes long) and won again, this time with 4 casualties. If you know roughly how that action panned out in real life, the same tactics will serve you well here but if you just rush in, it probably won't work out so well for you. Neither will it work if you take your precious time.
    Of course, this is not Easy Company's assault but rather an homage. And it just feels right. BTW, if you have already played the revised version of the campaign, you might notice that I've redesigned the trench network to better reflect the historical set up.
    So, Missions 1 and 2 are done as well as Turnbulls' Stand. I'm only going to rework a few missions so it may happen quicker than I'd thought. The main task is importing the new core units to each mission. That's not as small a job as you might think
  10. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from AndriiRev in Revising The Road to Montebourg campaign   
    Some of you may have noticed that I've poked my head up again after a very long absence. I've just been very busy with real life and wanted to spend some time playing games rather than designing content. But this game is a bit like crack for me, it's just so addictive and watching Usually Hapless play this campaign on Youtube got me back into it. (Yes, it's ALL your fault Hapless  )
    I've done a bit of work fixing things and now want to turn my attention to my first campaign for CMBN, the Montebourg campaign. It's the oldest and was made using v1.0 of the engine meaning that there are only 8 AI groups and no air support. There have also been a number of changes to the game which mean that I can experiment with some of the new stuff while reworking this one.
    It's not going to be a total overhaul but it will no longer work for players with only the CMBN base game so it's a Repository jobbie. I'll let you guys know what you'll need but it will probably require the full Monty as I want flamethrowers in it. It's also worth saying that anything new in it will be historically accurate and not just added in for the laughs. So no SS with JgPZIVs. Pity.
    So, I'll keep you up to date with my progress on this. I'm not looking to do a LOT of work. It's mainly to reacquaint myself with the scenario designer and writing AI plans.
     
    Mission 1
    I have no plans to change anything at all about the opening mission at all. It's fine as is.
    Mission 2
    There is a 'new' short 'Brecourt' mission. It's not really new though as it was in the revised version on the Repository. I'll need to tweak this one as the game seems to have become more lethal since I last played it but otherwise, it's good to go.
    Mission 3
    The first mission to get a full rework is Turnbull's Stand. I'm reworking the AI attack as there were only two AI plans and they were terrible. I've made a number of revisions to the map itself to reflect the reality of the day so it's a bit more open with less bocage and more hedges.
    I've spent pretty much all morning and most of the afternoon learning how to script an AI attack using the new tools and the first AI plan is almost done. I want a second one with an entirely different focus but it should be much faster to do as I'm not 'learning' anymore. Then, I'll mix it up so that there's four attack plans.
     
    And that's where I'm up to. There's no timetable on this. I'm not in any hurry but by posting about it here, I've kind of declared my intentions and am far more likely to stick with it.
  11. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Jambo in A brief introduction to my previous work   
    I guess I look like the new kid in town but I used to be a bit active around here a while back. For reasons I won't go into in this post, I took a long break (10 years) and am back cautiously getting reacquainted with the new game.
    First, how do I roll? I really like to play missions on realistic-looking maps. I don't like to play anything that is too easy or too difficult so I work for a challenging but fair difficulty a lot of the time and I like to play with all the bells and whistles - that means the player gets artillery, air support and any of the other things that a player would want to play with.
    So what have I done? let's look at the unofficial Repository stuff first.
     
    Hasrabit - 10 missions Red v Red
    Player controls Republican Guards and Special Forces against Rebel Syrian army units
    Road to Dinas 16+ missions IIRC, Red v Red
    Player controls Rebel Syrian army forces against the RG and SF. Basically, the other side.
    Right from the start, I worked with a twin-story mode in all my campaigns where you play with two (or more) formations with thair own stories, some cross-over and each with a finale for both. I've stuck with this format almost exclusively.
    Road to Dinas got me noticed and I was invited to join the Beta team and from then on, most of my content was on the 'disks' that you bought. However, I did make up a short campaign for the USMC called 'Gung Ho!' which I'll talk about later. Not to be too modest but my stand-alone scenarios were nowhere near as good as my campaign stuff and there were very few of them. Campaigns are MY thing, the medium I'm most at home with. So, onto the official campaigns. There are a few of these ...
     
    CMSF NATO
    I was asked to head the creation of three NATO campaigns for that module. I produced the concepts and campaign plan for all three and was a major contributor to the German campaign. The Canadian campaign is almost entirely my own creation with one mission from MikeyD included so that I couldn't say that it was ALL my own work. I didn't contribute anything to the Dutch campaign other than the design. Not that there was an issue or lack of interest in the Dutch, but rather that there were other testers who all wanted to contribute.
    This marks a shift as well for me as I was previously doing Red v Red where the two sides were fairly matched and casualties weren't really a thing. With the player having all the tools you'd like to play around with, I had to resort to low tolerance for friendly casualties. After all, when it's not an existential war, the Western countries tend to frown on taking heavy casualties and don't particularly like to cause civilian casualties either. Both of these strongly factor into the NATO campaigns. This was not going to be an issue for WW2 though.
     
    CMBN
    The Road to Montebourg - 18 missions
    This was a monster but I was so excited to be playing with a WW2 theatre again that it wasn't as much work as you might think.
    The Scottish Corridor - 14 missions + a hidden bonus
    I started getting creative with the campaign scripting and so this has a complex structure.
    The Road to Nijmegen - well, it's a long one
    This was the last of my official campaigns. It's an absolute monster and pushed me to the limits. I playtest all my own content very thoroughly in Real Time and so the large battalion-sized Irish Guards missions took an age to get right. The Breakout from the Neerpelt mission was one of my personal favourites and I spent ages tweaking it to get it to where I was happy with it.
    The difficulty here was mainly derived from maintaining your forces so that they were battle-worthy in future missions. While there were still casualty awards for both sides, the real problem for the player was the attrition of your forces. These campaigns were all long so husbanding your forces was very important.
    With regards to difficulty, there were some real 'pigs' in the historical WW2 missions because, historically, the Allies lost these actions or were hurt very badly winning them. A good example was the Hell in the Hedgerows in Montebourg. Or the entire Scottish Corridor campaign  Otherwise, challenging and fun is my gig. Hopefully, you'll be seeing more in the not-too-distant future.
  12. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from tecumseh in Help please. Road to Dinas   
    That's brilliant. Thanks. I've downloaded the dynamic version and have unpacked it. It really is a monster. Redoing that will be a lot of work, but FUN work.
    I'm going to have to be careful and not get too carried away and take on too much at the start. I want to get 'Montebourg' redone and also work on my smallest campaign, Gung Ho! before I start work on this project. But now that I have the whole thing, minus the core units file, it's a definite project for this year. It will be a CMSF2 rework so I'll be able to add water and bridges as well as wire fences to replace the rural walls I used on my early maps.
  13. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from LuckyDog in A brief introduction to my previous work   
    I guess I look like the new kid in town but I used to be a bit active around here a while back. For reasons I won't go into in this post, I took a long break (10 years) and am back cautiously getting reacquainted with the new game.
    First, how do I roll? I really like to play missions on realistic-looking maps. I don't like to play anything that is too easy or too difficult so I work for a challenging but fair difficulty a lot of the time and I like to play with all the bells and whistles - that means the player gets artillery, air support and any of the other things that a player would want to play with.
    So what have I done? let's look at the unofficial Repository stuff first.
     
    Hasrabit - 10 missions Red v Red
    Player controls Republican Guards and Special Forces against Rebel Syrian army units
    Road to Dinas 16+ missions IIRC, Red v Red
    Player controls Rebel Syrian army forces against the RG and SF. Basically, the other side.
    Right from the start, I worked with a twin-story mode in all my campaigns where you play with two (or more) formations with thair own stories, some cross-over and each with a finale for both. I've stuck with this format almost exclusively.
    Road to Dinas got me noticed and I was invited to join the Beta team and from then on, most of my content was on the 'disks' that you bought. However, I did make up a short campaign for the USMC called 'Gung Ho!' which I'll talk about later. Not to be too modest but my stand-alone scenarios were nowhere near as good as my campaign stuff and there were very few of them. Campaigns are MY thing, the medium I'm most at home with. So, onto the official campaigns. There are a few of these ...
     
    CMSF NATO
    I was asked to head the creation of three NATO campaigns for that module. I produced the concepts and campaign plan for all three and was a major contributor to the German campaign. The Canadian campaign is almost entirely my own creation with one mission from MikeyD included so that I couldn't say that it was ALL my own work. I didn't contribute anything to the Dutch campaign other than the design. Not that there was an issue or lack of interest in the Dutch, but rather that there were other testers who all wanted to contribute.
    This marks a shift as well for me as I was previously doing Red v Red where the two sides were fairly matched and casualties weren't really a thing. With the player having all the tools you'd like to play around with, I had to resort to low tolerance for friendly casualties. After all, when it's not an existential war, the Western countries tend to frown on taking heavy casualties and don't particularly like to cause civilian casualties either. Both of these strongly factor into the NATO campaigns. This was not going to be an issue for WW2 though.
     
    CMBN
    The Road to Montebourg - 18 missions
    This was a monster but I was so excited to be playing with a WW2 theatre again that it wasn't as much work as you might think.
    The Scottish Corridor - 14 missions + a hidden bonus
    I started getting creative with the campaign scripting and so this has a complex structure.
    The Road to Nijmegen - well, it's a long one
    This was the last of my official campaigns. It's an absolute monster and pushed me to the limits. I playtest all my own content very thoroughly in Real Time and so the large battalion-sized Irish Guards missions took an age to get right. The Breakout from the Neerpelt mission was one of my personal favourites and I spent ages tweaking it to get it to where I was happy with it.
    The difficulty here was mainly derived from maintaining your forces so that they were battle-worthy in future missions. While there were still casualty awards for both sides, the real problem for the player was the attrition of your forces. These campaigns were all long so husbanding your forces was very important.
    With regards to difficulty, there were some real 'pigs' in the historical WW2 missions because, historically, the Allies lost these actions or were hurt very badly winning them. A good example was the Hell in the Hedgerows in Montebourg. Or the entire Scottish Corridor campaign  Otherwise, challenging and fun is my gig. Hopefully, you'll be seeing more in the not-too-distant future.
  14. Upvote
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from sttp in Revising The Road to Montebourg campaign   
    Some of you may have noticed that I've poked my head up again after a very long absence. I've just been very busy with real life and wanted to spend some time playing games rather than designing content. But this game is a bit like crack for me, it's just so addictive and watching Usually Hapless play this campaign on Youtube got me back into it. (Yes, it's ALL your fault Hapless  )
    I've done a bit of work fixing things and now want to turn my attention to my first campaign for CMBN, the Montebourg campaign. It's the oldest and was made using v1.0 of the engine meaning that there are only 8 AI groups and no air support. There have also been a number of changes to the game which mean that I can experiment with some of the new stuff while reworking this one.
    It's not going to be a total overhaul but it will no longer work for players with only the CMBN base game so it's a Repository jobbie. I'll let you guys know what you'll need but it will probably require the full Monty as I want flamethrowers in it. It's also worth saying that anything new in it will be historically accurate and not just added in for the laughs. So no SS with JgPZIVs. Pity.
    So, I'll keep you up to date with my progress on this. I'm not looking to do a LOT of work. It's mainly to reacquaint myself with the scenario designer and writing AI plans.
     
    Mission 1
    I have no plans to change anything at all about the opening mission at all. It's fine as is.
    Mission 2
    There is a 'new' short 'Brecourt' mission. It's not really new though as it was in the revised version on the Repository. I'll need to tweak this one as the game seems to have become more lethal since I last played it but otherwise, it's good to go.
    Mission 3
    The first mission to get a full rework is Turnbull's Stand. I'm reworking the AI attack as there were only two AI plans and they were terrible. I've made a number of revisions to the map itself to reflect the reality of the day so it's a bit more open with less bocage and more hedges.
    I've spent pretty much all morning and most of the afternoon learning how to script an AI attack using the new tools and the first AI plan is almost done. I want a second one with an entirely different focus but it should be much faster to do as I'm not 'learning' anymore. Then, I'll mix it up so that there's four attack plans.
     
    And that's where I'm up to. There's no timetable on this. I'm not in any hurry but by posting about it here, I've kind of declared my intentions and am far more likely to stick with it.
  15. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Lethaface in A brief introduction to my previous work   
    I've pretty much erased my Steam library from my hard drive to make way for some CM titles so I am planning to spend a LOT of time working on campaigns for these titles. I've gotten the bug again and I've already started zooming around in Google Earth for some interesting locations to have a fight.
    One of the best things about the modern era game is that you're not constrained by history. My Syrian Civil War scenario for Hasrabit and Road to Dinas was pure baloney but who cares? Some of Hasrabit's maps were based on real world locations, especially Hasrabit itself. (It's not called Hasrabit IRL). Dinas has a mix of some maps based on real world  locations and some fictional. I prefer real world now as it helps to guide me. So, once I found a few good looking locations for a series of actions, I'll start producing maps. I already have the germ of an idea for a new Red v Red campaign but it's really just an idea right now. But it's certainly going to happen.
  16. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Falaise in A brief introduction to my previous work   
    I guess I look like the new kid in town but I used to be a bit active around here a while back. For reasons I won't go into in this post, I took a long break (10 years) and am back cautiously getting reacquainted with the new game.
    First, how do I roll? I really like to play missions on realistic-looking maps. I don't like to play anything that is too easy or too difficult so I work for a challenging but fair difficulty a lot of the time and I like to play with all the bells and whistles - that means the player gets artillery, air support and any of the other things that a player would want to play with.
    So what have I done? let's look at the unofficial Repository stuff first.
     
    Hasrabit - 10 missions Red v Red
    Player controls Republican Guards and Special Forces against Rebel Syrian army units
    Road to Dinas 16+ missions IIRC, Red v Red
    Player controls Rebel Syrian army forces against the RG and SF. Basically, the other side.
    Right from the start, I worked with a twin-story mode in all my campaigns where you play with two (or more) formations with thair own stories, some cross-over and each with a finale for both. I've stuck with this format almost exclusively.
    Road to Dinas got me noticed and I was invited to join the Beta team and from then on, most of my content was on the 'disks' that you bought. However, I did make up a short campaign for the USMC called 'Gung Ho!' which I'll talk about later. Not to be too modest but my stand-alone scenarios were nowhere near as good as my campaign stuff and there were very few of them. Campaigns are MY thing, the medium I'm most at home with. So, onto the official campaigns. There are a few of these ...
     
    CMSF NATO
    I was asked to head the creation of three NATO campaigns for that module. I produced the concepts and campaign plan for all three and was a major contributor to the German campaign. The Canadian campaign is almost entirely my own creation with one mission from MikeyD included so that I couldn't say that it was ALL my own work. I didn't contribute anything to the Dutch campaign other than the design. Not that there was an issue or lack of interest in the Dutch, but rather that there were other testers who all wanted to contribute.
    This marks a shift as well for me as I was previously doing Red v Red where the two sides were fairly matched and casualties weren't really a thing. With the player having all the tools you'd like to play around with, I had to resort to low tolerance for friendly casualties. After all, when it's not an existential war, the Western countries tend to frown on taking heavy casualties and don't particularly like to cause civilian casualties either. Both of these strongly factor into the NATO campaigns. This was not going to be an issue for WW2 though.
     
    CMBN
    The Road to Montebourg - 18 missions
    This was a monster but I was so excited to be playing with a WW2 theatre again that it wasn't as much work as you might think.
    The Scottish Corridor - 14 missions + a hidden bonus
    I started getting creative with the campaign scripting and so this has a complex structure.
    The Road to Nijmegen - well, it's a long one
    This was the last of my official campaigns. It's an absolute monster and pushed me to the limits. I playtest all my own content very thoroughly in Real Time and so the large battalion-sized Irish Guards missions took an age to get right. The Breakout from the Neerpelt mission was one of my personal favourites and I spent ages tweaking it to get it to where I was happy with it.
    The difficulty here was mainly derived from maintaining your forces so that they were battle-worthy in future missions. While there were still casualty awards for both sides, the real problem for the player was the attrition of your forces. These campaigns were all long so husbanding your forces was very important.
    With regards to difficulty, there were some real 'pigs' in the historical WW2 missions because, historically, the Allies lost these actions or were hurt very badly winning them. A good example was the Hell in the Hedgerows in Montebourg. Or the entire Scottish Corridor campaign  Otherwise, challenging and fun is my gig. Hopefully, you'll be seeing more in the not-too-distant future.
  17. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Lethaface in uncam: Combat Mission campaign extractor   
    I just burned out after CMBN Market Garden, I guess. Even before starting the maps, the RESEARCH that was required to make a campaign like the three I made for CMBN was a massive undertaking. I'm going to take it VERY slowly but yes, I plan to make some new content. I doubt very much I'll ever make anything like 'The Road to Nijmegen' again because some of the missions in that featured an entire reinforced battalion and that exceeds my pain threshold for RTS. I can DO it but I miss so much of the action in RT because I'm too focused on what platoon X is doing and that's a lot of the fun in CM for me. I like to get the camera down to ground level and see the action from my pixel troops' POV rather than the God view.
    I expect you'll see campaigns with reinforced company sized actions and a few smaller reinforced platoon missions to change the pace from me. But there's quite a lot changed with regards to AI scripting - more groups is always going to result in better AI plans but the triggers were relatively new when I last played and I didn't see much need for them. I'd like to see what some of the other guys have doe with the new scripting and see if it's better.
  18. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Petrus58 in Help please. Road to Dinas   
    That's brilliant. Thanks. I've downloaded the dynamic version and have unpacked it. It really is a monster. Redoing that will be a lot of work, but FUN work.
    I'm going to have to be careful and not get too carried away and take on too much at the start. I want to get 'Montebourg' redone and also work on my smallest campaign, Gung Ho! before I start work on this project. But now that I have the whole thing, minus the core units file, it's a definite project for this year. It will be a CMSF2 rework so I'll be able to add water and bridges as well as wire fences to replace the rural walls I used on my early maps.
  19. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Vergeltungswaffe in Help please. Road to Dinas   
    That's brilliant. Thanks. I've downloaded the dynamic version and have unpacked it. It really is a monster. Redoing that will be a lot of work, but FUN work.
    I'm going to have to be careful and not get too carried away and take on too much at the start. I want to get 'Montebourg' redone and also work on my smallest campaign, Gung Ho! before I start work on this project. But now that I have the whole thing, minus the core units file, it's a definite project for this year. It will be a CMSF2 rework so I'll be able to add water and bridges as well as wire fences to replace the rural walls I used on my early maps.
  20. Upvote
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Chibot Mk IX in Help please. Road to Dinas   
    Hey, I also found a mini campaign there I'd completely forgotten about - 'The Road to Perdition'. I've had a look and it looks like it uses 'Dinas' maps so it might not be worth redoing but it's always good to have options. Perhaps I reworked and expanded the Dinas maps. That's something I did for 'Gung Ho!' If that's the case, I can use the improved, expanded maps in the Dinas rework instead.
  21. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Lethaface in A brief introduction to my previous work   
    I guess I look like the new kid in town but I used to be a bit active around here a while back. For reasons I won't go into in this post, I took a long break (10 years) and am back cautiously getting reacquainted with the new game.
    First, how do I roll? I really like to play missions on realistic-looking maps. I don't like to play anything that is too easy or too difficult so I work for a challenging but fair difficulty a lot of the time and I like to play with all the bells and whistles - that means the player gets artillery, air support and any of the other things that a player would want to play with.
    So what have I done? let's look at the unofficial Repository stuff first.
     
    Hasrabit - 10 missions Red v Red
    Player controls Republican Guards and Special Forces against Rebel Syrian army units
    Road to Dinas 16+ missions IIRC, Red v Red
    Player controls Rebel Syrian army forces against the RG and SF. Basically, the other side.
    Right from the start, I worked with a twin-story mode in all my campaigns where you play with two (or more) formations with thair own stories, some cross-over and each with a finale for both. I've stuck with this format almost exclusively.
    Road to Dinas got me noticed and I was invited to join the Beta team and from then on, most of my content was on the 'disks' that you bought. However, I did make up a short campaign for the USMC called 'Gung Ho!' which I'll talk about later. Not to be too modest but my stand-alone scenarios were nowhere near as good as my campaign stuff and there were very few of them. Campaigns are MY thing, the medium I'm most at home with. So, onto the official campaigns. There are a few of these ...
     
    CMSF NATO
    I was asked to head the creation of three NATO campaigns for that module. I produced the concepts and campaign plan for all three and was a major contributor to the German campaign. The Canadian campaign is almost entirely my own creation with one mission from MikeyD included so that I couldn't say that it was ALL my own work. I didn't contribute anything to the Dutch campaign other than the design. Not that there was an issue or lack of interest in the Dutch, but rather that there were other testers who all wanted to contribute.
    This marks a shift as well for me as I was previously doing Red v Red where the two sides were fairly matched and casualties weren't really a thing. With the player having all the tools you'd like to play around with, I had to resort to low tolerance for friendly casualties. After all, when it's not an existential war, the Western countries tend to frown on taking heavy casualties and don't particularly like to cause civilian casualties either. Both of these strongly factor into the NATO campaigns. This was not going to be an issue for WW2 though.
     
    CMBN
    The Road to Montebourg - 18 missions
    This was a monster but I was so excited to be playing with a WW2 theatre again that it wasn't as much work as you might think.
    The Scottish Corridor - 14 missions + a hidden bonus
    I started getting creative with the campaign scripting and so this has a complex structure.
    The Road to Nijmegen - well, it's a long one
    This was the last of my official campaigns. It's an absolute monster and pushed me to the limits. I playtest all my own content very thoroughly in Real Time and so the large battalion-sized Irish Guards missions took an age to get right. The Breakout from the Neerpelt mission was one of my personal favourites and I spent ages tweaking it to get it to where I was happy with it.
    The difficulty here was mainly derived from maintaining your forces so that they were battle-worthy in future missions. While there were still casualty awards for both sides, the real problem for the player was the attrition of your forces. These campaigns were all long so husbanding your forces was very important.
    With regards to difficulty, there were some real 'pigs' in the historical WW2 missions because, historically, the Allies lost these actions or were hurt very badly winning them. A good example was the Hell in the Hedgerows in Montebourg. Or the entire Scottish Corridor campaign  Otherwise, challenging and fun is my gig. Hopefully, you'll be seeing more in the not-too-distant future.
  22. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Lethaface in Help please. Road to Dinas   
    That's brilliant. Thanks. I've downloaded the dynamic version and have unpacked it. It really is a monster. Redoing that will be a lot of work, but FUN work.
    I'm going to have to be careful and not get too carried away and take on too much at the start. I want to get 'Montebourg' redone and also work on my smallest campaign, Gung Ho! before I start work on this project. But now that I have the whole thing, minus the core units file, it's a definite project for this year. It will be a CMSF2 rework so I'll be able to add water and bridges as well as wire fences to replace the rural walls I used on my early maps.
  23. Thanks
    Paper Tiger reacted to Chibot Mk IX in Help please. Road to Dinas   
    Hi PT, here it is
    https://community.battlefront.com/topic/133243-cmsf1-scenarios-campaigns/
    click the 2nd link 
    https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1mu30n0qsjw3sk0/AABb-_fnlr21dLxGVv6a7VAVa?dl=0
     
     
     
     
  24. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from PIATpunk in A brief introduction to my previous work   
    I've pretty much erased my Steam library from my hard drive to make way for some CM titles so I am planning to spend a LOT of time working on campaigns for these titles. I've gotten the bug again and I've already started zooming around in Google Earth for some interesting locations to have a fight.
    One of the best things about the modern era game is that you're not constrained by history. My Syrian Civil War scenario for Hasrabit and Road to Dinas was pure baloney but who cares? Some of Hasrabit's maps were based on real world locations, especially Hasrabit itself. (It's not called Hasrabit IRL). Dinas has a mix of some maps based on real world  locations and some fictional. I prefer real world now as it helps to guide me. So, once I found a few good looking locations for a series of actions, I'll start producing maps. I already have the germ of an idea for a new Red v Red campaign but it's really just an idea right now. But it's certainly going to happen.
  25. Like
    Paper Tiger got a reaction from Centurian52 in Revising The Road to Montebourg campaign   
    Some of you may have noticed that I've poked my head up again after a very long absence. I've just been very busy with real life and wanted to spend some time playing games rather than designing content. But this game is a bit like crack for me, it's just so addictive and watching Usually Hapless play this campaign on Youtube got me back into it. (Yes, it's ALL your fault Hapless  )
    I've done a bit of work fixing things and now want to turn my attention to my first campaign for CMBN, the Montebourg campaign. It's the oldest and was made using v1.0 of the engine meaning that there are only 8 AI groups and no air support. There have also been a number of changes to the game which mean that I can experiment with some of the new stuff while reworking this one.
    It's not going to be a total overhaul but it will no longer work for players with only the CMBN base game so it's a Repository jobbie. I'll let you guys know what you'll need but it will probably require the full Monty as I want flamethrowers in it. It's also worth saying that anything new in it will be historically accurate and not just added in for the laughs. So no SS with JgPZIVs. Pity.
    So, I'll keep you up to date with my progress on this. I'm not looking to do a LOT of work. It's mainly to reacquaint myself with the scenario designer and writing AI plans.
     
    Mission 1
    I have no plans to change anything at all about the opening mission at all. It's fine as is.
    Mission 2
    There is a 'new' short 'Brecourt' mission. It's not really new though as it was in the revised version on the Repository. I'll need to tweak this one as the game seems to have become more lethal since I last played it but otherwise, it's good to go.
    Mission 3
    The first mission to get a full rework is Turnbull's Stand. I'm reworking the AI attack as there were only two AI plans and they were terrible. I've made a number of revisions to the map itself to reflect the reality of the day so it's a bit more open with less bocage and more hedges.
    I've spent pretty much all morning and most of the afternoon learning how to script an AI attack using the new tools and the first AI plan is almost done. I want a second one with an entirely different focus but it should be much faster to do as I'm not 'learning' anymore. Then, I'll mix it up so that there's four attack plans.
     
    And that's where I'm up to. There's no timetable on this. I'm not in any hurry but by posting about it here, I've kind of declared my intentions and am far more likely to stick with it.
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