Combatintman

Great tips George, now that you point it out, it seems so obvious, but I'd never previously thought of just sitting there as the human player in testing and doing nothing to check the overall feel of it. This tip will now save me sitting and doing hard sums to work out ratios and translating those into force picks. The micro management thing ... certainly does lead to madness ... big handfuls is the approach I take.

Don't worry about the nuances of getting your FOs into position - anything that is offered up is a gamey solution in this regard. You need to first of all think about what your mission is. Then think about what you need to target in order to accomplish the mission. When you've worked that out, you need to work out how you are going to find it or where it could be reasonably be expected to be. On working that out you need to send stuff out (not FOs) to confirm or deny its location. Once you've done that ... then you move your FO into a position to observe the target. Then you need to make sure that you concentrate your firepower (not just artillery) to destroy that target. Then you collect tea and medals.

Sorry for a grumpy post but ... It is harder than you think - I did a fair whack of the work on the TO&Es and equipment for the Brit Module and it took a huge chunk of my time to do the research (and I was in a privileged position to do so). The level of detail required to generate a TO&Es for a Battlefront game is immense - I still have the research folder and it is a 4.28 MB file (and these are mostly text documents with no graphics). Why does it need to be right ... Search back through CMSF threads about ammo loadouts on British vehicles ... how many times was that queried? How many people offered opinions on how wrong the loadouts were? How many of those people were able to back their opinions up with fact? Reference your comment about necessary work for real World changes ... the British module was put together using the force structure in the mid noughties - look at TO&Es now - totally different. Bear in mind that for every vehicle (and there are plenty of new Brit ones now) you not only have to consider the art work but also: How many crew Ranks of the crew Weapons carried by the crew Ammunition loadout (every nature) etc etc Of course you should be pleased by that because it means that Battlefront are committed to getting the details right but - it is more than a reskin.

I think they are bloody hard to spot - I had to close to practically within bayonet range to spot Russian AT guns in one of the German Campaign missions. Second time out, even when I knew where they were, it took ages to locate them.

Aye to the above - I am much more methodical when designing scenarios than playing them and go through a similar process. As JonS says, getting the briefing right gives the player the best chance to come up with a decent plan and therefore requires the designer to jump through planning process hoops from both sides. By doing so, the mission brief pretty much writes itself which is a reflection of reality because of course one of the main outputs of planning is a set of orders. This ensures that the scenario is workable, balanced and achievable by the player.

A lot of it depends on the amount of information in the briefing and the complexity of the battle. It is difficult to go through the process properly for instance if the 'Friendly Forces' paragraph doesn't give you much detail about the forces available for the task. I wouldn't say that I go through the complete process every time I play, most situations can be covered by either balancing your force or concentrating it. Push out your recce and then just crack on. All you need to do is rule out COAs that don't work in time and space and that don't give you enough flexibility to bag the objectives to win. The natural tendency is to plan at the highest level and then 'wing' the lower level stuff and that is the approach I take - otherwise you end up spending more time planning than playing. A good plan will get you a long way towards victory but in many cases, the difference between defeat and victory will be down to your patience and how you micromanage your troops in contact.

I thought it was very good. Reference the graphics thing - he added context and framed it appropriately. Only quibble was the statement about campaigns - he said that the campaigns were both from the Soviet perspective.

My 2 Cents ... I helped test this and got hammered first time out as the German. Second time out I employed different tactics and got beaten again but by a much less devastating margin. At no time did I feel that the scenario was unbalanced. I enjoyed both games and will certainly play this again to see if I can get a win. Winning is certainly possible, other testers playing as Germans absolutely smashed the Soviets. My takeaways are - great replay value and I need to improve my game. The research that has gone into this scenario is impressive and although I didn't know it at the time, I have found the area of this map on Google Earth. I found it by accident as I am designing a scenario set in a few km to the west of this map. The map is a really good representation of the ground and again is worthy of praise. Now I know that this may seem like testers sticking up for testers but despite the challenge it presents, there is a lot to like in this scenario and had I thought it was unbalanced I would have said so in my test feedback.

These are pretty easy to solve ... 1. Set up zones have specific buttons (Allied 1, Allied 2, Allied 3, Axis 1, Axis 2 and Axis 3). So let us say your German force is going to attack from the West and can setup anywhere on the West edge of the map. Just click Axis 1 and paint the Western edge of the map. If however you have two German groups that are going to enter from the NW and the SW and you don't want the player to mix and match those groups during setup then you need to use 2 setup zones. To do this, just make your NW setup zone 'Axis 1' and your SW setup zone 'Axis 2'. Let's say that you have 3 German groups and the premise of the scenario is that you have a remnant group in the centre of the map that is surrounded in a village which is going to be rescued by a Panther Bn attacking from the NW and a Pz IV Bn attacking from the SW. Paint the NW area as 'Axis 1' and place your Panthers in there. Paint the SW area as 'Axis 2' and place your Pz IVs there. Paint the village areas as 'Axis 3' and place you remnants in there. By doing this, the player can individually select defensive positions for the remnants within the village but cannot move those remnants to either Axis 1 or Axis 2. Likewise for the other groups. If you don't want the player to be able to move units from their start positions, all you do is deploy the units in the unit editor without allocating a setup zone. 2. Elevation buttons - there is one button labelled 'Direct'. By clicking this you set the elevation for that single tile. However, what the editor will do is 'correct' all the other elevations as you have seen. Working around this is pretty simple. Let's say you want to set an elevated W-E road at 21m elevation with the base terrain being 20m. Use the 'Direct' button as follows: BASE 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 ROAD 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 BASE 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 Let's say you want to have a 22m high hill to the north of the road and an 18m depression south of the road but want to retain the base level of 20m elsewhere: 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 22 22 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 BASE 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 ROAD 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 21 BASE 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 18 18 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 Ok I had to edit this because of the way the forum formats this. The bold numbers are the ones that you put in with the 'Direct' button, ignore all the others as the terrain editor will allocate a suitable intervening elevation. Very rough and ready but this should get you started. The important thing is to see what works best for you and remember that you don't have to use 'Direct' for every single elevation change (it also has performance effects on the map) because the 'correcting' behaviour of the map editor will automatically reshape the ground to make any unpainted areas fit naturally to your directed elevation changes. Other people have different ways of doing this but this is the technique I use most frequently. Hope this helps.

acrashb - thanks for the info, I am aware of the dangers of both. Somebody asked how the code works - I gave the answer so don't shoot the messenger just because you don't like it. The issue is complex and is one of those that involves a trade-off. Example being, a moving tank receives a few ineffective bullet rounds at 800m. Do the troops get off, remembering that the AI can't re-embark troops once they dismount. Cue 'Tank Riders Don't Stay On' threads by the dozen. I can assure you and the OP that this issue came up in Beta testing, was discussed at length and the current implementation is as it is because it is currently the best compromise that can be achieved within the resources/codebase.

Not the official BF view but I did Beta test. The mechanics as I understand them are a mix of morale and movement. If the carrying vehicle is moving, the riders will never dismount. If the carrying vehicle is stationary, the decider for whether the riders dismount is related to the morale of the riders. The better their morale, the more likely they are to cling on.

Yep that is the scale of it - battalion equivalent is what you'll be handling. Not all missions are on completely open terrain but the bulk of the ground is open (ish). Time is the thing with this campaign - big constraint.

Bear in mind that this is a big map though (about 3.7 km x 2.5 km according to the screenshot). Adding a lot of the 'clutter' may total some systems. I've been working on a few maps and I have to keep scaling down map size or reduce 'nice to have terrain elements' just to get them to run.

Try Tankovyi Desant as the Soviet player. It is one of George's scenarios and is a really nice little scenario and very atmospheric. It was one of the most tested scenarios - not because there was anything wrong with it, just it was such fun.

I've got some ideas and a rough sketch of one but to be honest I think it will be a way off yet.

Doubtful - it takes ages to bomb up a tank.

Seconded - I played this when it was in development. It is a good little tactical challenge.

To specify a difference you need to tell us what to compare it against. However to compare with CMSF, QBs in CMRT are a huge improvement.

From the other side of the fence - I had a German platoon shredded by its Soviet equivalent even after the latter had been stonked by 105mm indirect and had been on the wrong end of direct fire suppression in a recent QB. Can't get more resilient than that.

Just set a target arc. If you 'have the drop' then wait until the enemy arrives in your engagements area. You do not have 'the drop' if your enemy is out of effective engagement range.

I think there is a workaround for this but it isn't foolproof. You can set a 'known to Enemy' or 'known to neither' objective. Make the name your password for a separate designer's notes document and bundle it in the .zip or .rar file containing your scenario. When the game is over the objective name will appear in the AAR screen. The player then has the password and can open the document. Trouble is that the name will appear whether the player wins or loses.

Or crop the map to the desired size and create it as an image overlay on Google Earth mapped to the terrain and view it there to get an idea for the lie of the land. It is what I do when making maps as I find trying to go with exact contour heights really painful. I just go with a sense of what is 'up', what is 'down' and to what degree they are different. Looks like this:

Thanks to the pointers above I've found some more stuff out. Theodor Tolsdorff was a vaguely famous individual and was decorated and promoted for his actions during this battle. What started out as a hunt around for an action that I could vaguely recreate and for which I had discovered mapping is turning out to be an interesting little project. Thanks again for your help in tracking down some of the detail. They have enabled me to go straight to the right pages in some of my books without spending endless hours trawling through various sources. Here are the relevant wiki entries for those interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilnius_Offensive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Tolsdorff

MikeyD - the map is maxed out and I need all of it to achieve the desired effect. I want to make the player to have to make some pretty big calls. The battle itself was an encircled German remnant group which then got some more remnants and was holed up in a perimeter waiting to the be rescued by the 6th Panzer Division. The sort of choices the player will be forced to make will be: When and what proportion of the encircled force is used to link up with the retreating remnants. How best to defend the pocket. How does the 6th Panzer Division break into the pocket. At what point do they all extract. I plan to tee this up by allocating target objectives to certain Soviet formations, creating balanced exit VPs and the use of about 3-4 Soviet AI plans. All of which will force the encircled force to defend. There will be a fair whack of concurrent activity going on throughout but that is the part that will need to be given the most thought in terms of both processing power and generating the right problem set for the German player. I could break it into a mini campaign but it wouldn't create the same tension. Regards

I've got a 4 x 4 km map on the go which I hope to finish. A lot of trees on there mind and I plan to use a lot of forces. I've got some thoughts about making it processor friendly in terms of the both the terrain and force sequencing. Hopefully I'll be able to pull it off as I think the scenario will be a belting challenge.