Combatintman

Just to let you know that I probably won't be around here for the remainder of the month due to work commitments so please don't think that any comments you may make in that time on this mission are being ignored. The good news is that if I get some free time I will be working on some of my other CMSF projects.

Or put another way - how many times have you opened a door to be faced with a brick wall? Also buildings that have no point of entry are generally the exception rather than the norm - I accept that there are some situations where this may be the case such as using a multistorey single block building to replicate a factory chimney. As JoMc67 said - if this is your intention then you need to say so somewhere in the briefing, designer notes or using a descriptive landmark annotation on the map. Otherwise people are not going to play it.

That's quite a lot - I'd restart the Campaign.

In which case I stand corrected - thanks for the info.

It is indeed possible but the issue is fighting over the same ground - damage to buildings inflicted in Mission 1 can't be replicated which kind of kills immersion.

Yes I agree about the oddness - I'm not convinced the AI handles technicals well at all.

I do all of my graphics in powerpoint sort of like this - FRAPS screenshot. Import as picture on to a slide and crop it as required. Annotate and add arrows/symbols as necessary. Copy and paste into paint. Resize to the required size and save as .bmp. Import into the mission. Examples of this approach as follows: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/112078-green-9-1st-bn-the-welsh-guards-helmand-2009/?page=1 http://community.battlefront.com/topic/115533-new-mission-into-the-green/?page=2

This ....

The time limits thing has been discussed before on pretty much all of the CMX2 boards. I will give you my tuppence worth but it is worth reading JonS’s Scenario Design tutorial to get further perspective. http://community.battlefront.com/topic/109190-the-sheriff-of-oosterbeek-–-a-scenario-design-daraar/ It is also worth reading my Planning Tutorial to get an insight as to how militaries plan and the importance of time as a factor in that planning both in terms of potential enemy actions and friendly force actions. http://community.battlefront.com/topic/120527-no-plan-survives-first-contact-with-the-enemy-planning-tutorial/ Warning this contains some ‘Into the Green’ spoilers (although some timings referred to are not exactly as played out in the mission). The essence of it is to use the card game analogy is that you can only play the hand that you have been dealt as both the player and the scenario designer. With all of my scenarios I think about the narrative/what I want to achieve first. This allows me to determine whether it is achievable before starting and if it isn’t achievable then I move on. The thought processes behind ‘Into the Green’ went something like this … When I read the books referenced in the Designer’s notes I thought that some of the typical Company level framework operations described would make a great CMSF mission. The essential elements of those missions involved cautious patrolling interspersed with sudden violent action. Another factor was the precarious nature of operating from a FOB which itself was often subject to attack and was heavily reliant on resupply. Finally the other factors that come into play in Afghanistan is the need to avoid collateral damage and to keep casualties low. In what was a departure from the norm for me, I opted not to fight it on the actual ground. The reason for this was quite simply that I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of creating it compared to the far easier process of creating a generic map reflective of the Green Zone. So with all of that established I had to look at the tools available to me and consider the constraints. As this discussion is about time let’s talk about that. CMSF gives you a time limit of four hours with the possibility of up to 20 minutes or so variable extra time. There are however nuances in that such as that once you get over the 2 hour point, mission time limits can only be set in 30 minute blocks (ie 2 hours 30 minutes, 3 hours, 3 hours 30 minutes). Another factor is the way in which the TO&E is handled in that if you want a Rifle Company you have to ‘buy’ the whole Battalion and strip out the bits you don’t want. Unfortunately you cannot strip out the higher headquarters elements which means that as I don’t want the ANA Kandak HQ to show up in this scenario the only device I have to stop this is to set it as a reinforcement that never arrives (ie it has an arrival time after the scenario ends). The problem here is that the latest time of arrival I can set a reinforcement for is 3 hours so straight away the maximum scenario length is 2 hours and 30 minutes with 15 minutes variable time. This gives me a starting point from which I can design the mission and in this instance I am pretty sure that I was aiming at a ballpark of 2 hours but in the end testing showed that it had to be longer. So from there I can start thinking about my map and the flow of the scenario. In this instance and in keeping with the narrative I was looking at the unit patrolling out, dealing with the Taliban ‘dicking’ (British military slang for insurgent scouts) screen before conducting compound clearances. The method I use is to put a unit on the map and see how long it takes to get from one end to the other at ‘move’ speed and my rough rule of thumb is a 1/3 – 2/3 rule. By that I mean that if it takes 15 minutes to traverse the map, the mission length needs to be 45 minutes minimum meaning that the player has 30 minutes to deal with deliberate tactical manoeuvre and minor skirmishes with Enemy recce or outposts. For ‘Into the Green’ I had decided on three compound objectives and again I have a rule of thumb for that which funnily enough is 15 minutes per objective. So we now have 15 minutes movement, 30 minutes deliberate movement/the recce/outpost battle, 15 minutes for Compound #1, 15 minutes for Compound #2 and 15 minutes for Compound #3 which rounds out as 1 hour 30 minutes. Now I have to work out my Friendly and Enemy Forces. Friendly Forces were pretty simple because I wanted to generate a Company Group mission and I had three compound objectives plus the requirement to defend the FOBs. If you work on the principle of a platoon per objective this means that there are more objectives than there are platoons. This creates the tension and choices that I want the player to consider because I wanted this mission to be challenging For the enemy force, I needed to replicate typical Taliban tactics and make the mission sufficiently challenging. This meant that I needed a ‘dicking’ screen, IEDs on avenues of approach, close-in defence of the objectives and some form of reinforcements/reaction force. Back to timings again. The AI has to be programmed, in that units execute orders within time windows or at stated times. It goes something like this … exit after 5 minutes or exit before 10 minutes. Or exit after 8 minutes and exit before 10 minutes. So now I have to work out what I want these forces to do and when I anticipate they should do them. So for units in the Green Zone on this mission, I envisage the reaction force as being called to assist the defence when the ‘dicking screen’ has identified that the Blue force is coming out in force. CMSF does not have triggers so I have to estimate it. We again come back to time and distance calculations in that I have to work out where I want them to set up to react and how long it takes them to get from there to the place I want them to be. Let’s say that it is reasonable to assume that it takes the ‘dicking’ screen 15 minutes to identify that the British are coming and that reinforcements are required. Let’s say it would take the group 10 minutes to get from where they are to where they need to be. Let’s say that it would take the British force 30 minutes to get to that same area. I appreciate these timings are ‘convenient’ but I’m trying to make this simple. So the solution is to set the first AI movement order at ‘exit after 14 minutes’ and ‘exit before 16 minutes’. This gets them to where they need to be in good time. The other component in this mission is the enemy vehicle mounted group. I want this unit to attack at a time when the patrolling group is too deeply committed into the Green Zone to help defend the FOBs thus punishing the player who has ignored their order to make sufficient provision for FOB defence. I also want to make sure that they arrive at a time that the British Force has probably used a lot of their indirect fire support (mortars, artillery, AH and air). So 30 minutes is long enough into the scenario for the patrolling force not to react but not long enough for indirect fire support to have been heavily used. So let’s make that figure 1 hour. This has the added advantage that the British player is probably committed to a fierce battle around one of the compound objectives and thus creates tactical problems/dilemmas for the player – exactly the effect I am trying to achieve. So I set the reinforcement time at 1 hour and then programme individual moves towards the FOBs in, say, 3 x 5 minute bounds/orders. This conveniently comes under my already calculated 1 hour 30 mission length. So now I test it – and test it – and test it which is what I did. As a result of that I had to make various tweaks to individual force elements, victory points, parameter and casualty factors and some timings. In the case of the latter I kept finding that I needed to send Landrovers out to resupply ammunition and that it was not possible to complete the tasks in 1 hour 30 minutes. By a process of testing I finally arrived at the final mission length of 2 hours and 30 minutes with 15 minutes variable time. Although I can’t remember how it ended up that way I had to keep in mind that this was my ‘hard deck’ to stop the unwanted HQ element arriving as a reinforcement at the 3 hour mark so I’m pretty sure that as part of that calculus I had to either strip some enemy out or add more Blue forces to ensure that we ‘came under budget’ in terms of time and make the mission achievable. In simple terms then – generally the mission designer has not pulled the mission length timing out of their backside – some due diligence has been applied. As others have said, if that is not to your taste then you have options: 1. Go into the mission editor and set it to 4 hours. However if you do this, potentially you could sit on the FOB for an hour and a half and completely smash the vehicle group without penalty. You could then go into the Green Zone and know that any moving groups will now have moved to their final destinations and therefore be easier to acquire and defeat. 2. Don’t play the mission. 3. Play the mission as intended and accept the fact that if you didn’t get a total victory or lost, then you probably need to improve your planning and execution. As for timing and realism, the planning tutorial explains their importance and remember that Napoleon (who lost at Waterloo because he did not defeat Wellington’s force before Blucher’s force appeared on his right flank) once said ‘In military operations, hours determine success and campaigns’.

Welcome to the scenario designer's club.

And thank you - here's where you'll find it: http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/cm-shock-force-2/cm-shock-force/green-9/

Finished!!!!! Just submitted it to the scenario depot - I'll post a linky here once Bootie does his magic.

Touché Good one mate ...

Why do you ask ... it isn't like you can aim off to compensate is it? It is certainly factored in to how smoke performs.

They were just tasters - you wont glean anything new out of them.

The thing to remember about the ANA over and above their relatively poor soft factors is that they lack body armour making them more prone to casualties. As this discussion is more about this particular mission why not check out the dedicated thread. It contains some spoilers but it may help you ... The bottom line is that this mission is not easy and was one of the reasons that development time was fairly long because I wanted this mission to have a very fine line between defeat and victory. Your descriptions and questions so far indicate to me that you might be better off stopping where you are, having a think about what is going wrong and restarting the mission with new tactics. Good luck with your endeavours!!

Check your PMs.

That is pretty much the way to do it - slow and sure and whack identified enemies with long range firepower where and when you can. The trick with this mission is not to pick fights you don't have to - so going full barrel at NAI's is possibly something that you should reconsider. Look for enemy there for sure but you don't physically need to send troops to them to clear them out. My guess is that your casualties so far are pretty high - you can still win this one but you can't afford many more casualties.

Chapter Eight is your friend here and the map on page 164.

Here is the full on link to the documentary ... http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/lost-platoon/

Here's a starter for ten

So ... over two years later - this sucker is close to release ... Here is the briefing screen ... All I need to do now is write the briefing and this should be good to go.

The unit is routing - I had a quick skim through the manual to check but couldn't find it.

To add context JonS's observations - I was a TA infantryman in the mid-1980s in a NATO-roled battalion before joining the Regular Army and I don't recall anyone having issued binos. They were certainly controlled stores/attractive items which meant that they almost certainly wouldn't be issued below Pl Comd level ... and this was the 1980s not the 1940s.

Essentially that is correct. The key points are that RCIEDs can be defeated by ECM and both can be defeated by killing the trigger man.