Combatintman

Mission 4 briefings and maps are now done. Eye candy for Mission 4 follows: Real World Google Earth overhead view: Same view in CMSF: Oblique looking S-N (Blue end of the map): Oblique looking N-S (Enemy end of the map): Looking ahead, Mission 5 testing went well but I need to tweak the Victory Points. This has been done but I need to replay it to make sure that the Victory Points stack up properly (they should do). Enjoy.

I'm told that the business never really recovered after 08 May 1945.

Mission 3 briefings and maps are now done. The Mission 4 second playtest has gone well and survived a tweak to the enemy AI plan so with any luck I'll have the briefings for that done by close of play today. I have the bones of Mission 5 ready to go and have played through some of the initial moves successfully so with any luck once I flesh it out the testing can go ahead and will run through smoothly. If things go well I should have this all done and dusted by the weekend. The concern of course is compiling the campaign script which is something I've never done before so hopefully it will be as easy as the manual says!!!

Mission 3 graphics to whet your appetite: Actual Google Earth overhead: CMSF overhead: Oblique from the enemy side of the map (E-W): Oblique from the friendly side of the map (W-E): Probably not quite the finished article as I intend to add some telegraph poles but otherwise this is how it will look.

Mission 3, after a lot of redesigning, finally plays more or less as I want it to. I have to confess that I was losing the will to live with it at one point. This one has taken a hell of a lot of testing (at least 10 plays) but after revamping the enemy (which I thought would do the trick alone) and then tinkering with the Blue arrival times (still needed work) then finally the Blue Orbat I achieved a near perfect play through. Will push on with the briefings and maps now before revisiting Mission 4. Luckily I have already had a thrash through Mission 4 and I probably just need one more test to get that right.

Not much time to be honest but enough to know that my preference was to be unbuttoned, I crewed an FV436 in Gulf War 1.

Agusto - thanks for the pointer - as it happens, Google Earth coverage has largely been restored as of about a fortnight ago.

To replicate the experience - see who's coming up your drive by looking through your letter box. Vision blocks are painful for situational awareness.

Thanks for the picture - where was it taken? I haven't shown you the maps further up yet (Mirmandaw and the Wadi). My Wadi map has a two or three step elevation change which will be enough for the purposes of the mission as it is at the extreme north end of the map.

sburke I nope your nope - conditional AI triggers would be great for scenario design - takes the pain out of designing a scenario to challenge players of differing abilities or levels of aggression when coming up with an AI plan (such as working out where somebody will be in an hour or trying to plan a decent AI screening plan in advance to contact scenarios). Triggers increase replayability and other good stuff and might encourage more people to get into the game of designing scenarios which would benefit everybody.

Mission 2 briefings and maps are all done now, the Mission 5 map is done and one test of Mission 4 has been successfully completed. All in all I am pretty pleased with progress and am hoping I can kick this out of the door in about a week or so. My big hurdle is Mission 3, I need to rework this and having hacked through this quite a few times I need to muster the motivation to revisit it - hopefully my wife will make this easy for me by electing to watch Harry Potter or some similar nonsense on the telly.

Good resource - thanks for the pointer.

Mission 2 test was successful so I'll finish that off today by knocking the briefings and maps together.

Another bone ... this is the Operational Map for the Campaign. The five missions will take place as follows: IED Compounds Gereshk Yakhchal Mirmandaw Dar-e-Mandah Did some more work on the last map (Dar-e-Mandah) today - not far off being done now. Testing of mission 2 continues - having some problems with it but I think I've made the changes I need to make to get it to work. The shell of mission 3 is there as well but I will need to do some work on this to get it to play how I want it. Anyway - enjoy.

BlackMoria - all I can say is .... legend. My last test took me about 6 hours to slog through and involved going back to a couple of previous saves. I have always managed to lose at least 2 vehicles and have two immobilised and suffered more casualties (usually about half a dozen). I am astounded that you had so much time to spare at the end as all of my testing has triggered a surrender with anything between 5 minutes on the clock to the last safe moment. I absolutely concur with your point about ammunition - you have obviously noted that there are no restrictions on firing less the Pink Palace and the bridges preserve objectives but the balance is exactly as you say - with only limited HE/HESH rounds, you really have to choose your battles. I would certainly be interested to see how you played it - any chance of a PM, I don't need the save games just your scheme of manoeuvre. In return I can talk about the testing and the way my plan evolved as I put this together if you like.

Kirkee Tim ... this campaign will not do justice to what you did out there and while I've had a good crack at the maps ... based on your photos I am not going to come close to replicating the ground. This campaign will be a while off yet - well it has been a while as it stands - it is something I am determined to finish.

The scenario is up at the Repository so that is my belated Xmas present to you all. If anybody wants hints and tips on this one I'm quite happy to post them with the usual spoiler alerts.

Going back to the opening line of this thread, the irony of having the 'maligned' Godlike image to illustrate the point is killing me here - be careful for what you wish for. As some have said - if you want to be down and dirty lock your view to the unit and tab around but don't foist it on others as a default setting. I apologise for being grumpy at this time of year but some of what is being requested or suggested can be solved by individual playing choices. You have to accept that certain compromises have to be made, don't like randomly shooting at woods? Then don't issue the 'target' command.

Some more eye candy - this is the Mission 2 map which is half way through testing. Map size is 3008m x 1008m. Starting off with the CMSF overhead - please note that some of the east end of the map is cropped from the image because it was too wide to capture ... This is the Google Earth real overhead showing the full map area ... This is an oblique screenshot from the Blue end of the map (west to east): This is an oblique screenshot from the Red end of the map (east to west): Enjoy ...

Ok - third attempt to upload was this morning ... I really hope it appears for Xmas for you guys. Buzz - You may need a lot of play time for this one - my last test involved heaps of saves and took the best part of a morning and early afternoon to slog through to the end.

With any luck this will appear in the Repository soon - just submitted it ... hopefully it'll come good the first time ... we'll see!!!

Ok - just played this through again with some tweaks - I've swapped out the XV Squadron Tornadoes and given Blue a pair of Apaches. Despite my efforts to tweak the victory points, I don't think anything other than a tactical victory is possible. I'm just going to update the mission brief to reflect the changes and will then upload this to the Repository. I hope you enjoy it when it gets up there, but beware this is a really difficult mission.

There is a bug in one of the Marines Campaign missions but I don't think it is this one. Unfortunately I haven't played this in a while so can't help you otherwise.

Blimey, thanks for the comments. To answer your question, basically all I do is go into Google Earth and create a polygon with my desired map area. From there all I do is use the measuring tool along from the edges. Obviously some compromises are inevitable due to the map editor tools particularly when laying out roads. Generally with roads I try to get the entry and exit points correctly measured and try to make sure that any crossroads and junctions are in the right places. The rest of the road I just fill in to join up the mensurated points. Sometimes this is not possible due to the angles of certain roads - you can see this in the NE portion of the CIMIC House map - I straightened the angles out to make building placement a lot easier. For some areas I change the orientation of the Google Earth view - again this is mostly for reasons of alignment of linear features. As an example, if most of your linear features run say at a NE-SW angle I will tilt the Google Earth view so that the linear features run either N-S or E-W in CMSF. Otherwise you are always battling against running linear features at angles and associated buildings and the like and it is a real pain in the backside. For this campaign and the CIMIC House mission I have not had to resort to this but some of my missions have benefitted from this approach. If I have done this at any point, I usually make reference to it in the Designer's notes. It is time consuming for certain types of maps - I shudder to think how long the CIMIC House map took but others are quite easy. I have been able to do 500m x 500m maps in about 4 hours. I now have the luxury of two computers which helps the process a lot as I can have Google Earth permanently open on one while I have CMSF running on the other. The mission 1 map above is one I did a long time ago so I can't recall how long that took but the mission 5 map that I'm working on at present that you'll get to see in due course will probably round out at about 12 hours work. Given BF's announcement about 30km maps for the Eastern Front module, I shudder to think how much work that will involve but I'm sure the overlay function helps it a lot.

Making good progress with this - Mission 1 is tested and good to go, maps for Missions 2, 3 and 4 are done and the map for Mission 5 is about 3 or 4 hours from completion. With any luck I'll have this done and released over the Xmas - New Year holiday timeframe.