Der Zeitgeist

In the same way as the RESERV LOCATION needs to be hidden from the AI the REACTION LOCATION also needs to be in a place where no PLAYER troops are likely to 'GO' or be able to 'FIRE AT'...
In this scenario i place this location in the far back of the AIs side of the map.
This REACTION LOCATION could be 'constructed' in many different ways dependant on the overall scenario details. The IMPORTANT thing is that NO 'player' troops will be able fire at or see the 'inhabitants' of this location and likevise
the 'inhabitants shouldn't be able to influence the battle in any way either...And this location should preferably look like it fits into the terran...nothing strange looking...
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Inhabitants ? What Inhabitants ?...
I'll show you...
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The REACTION LOCATION works like this...
- It is some hidden location that will not see any combat
- It contains 1 AI unit (in this scenario a sniperteam) that is asigned to an AI-group (This is what 'cost' one AI-group).
- This location contains 1 AI TERRAIN OBJECTIVE (touch objective)....COST = 1 AI terrain objective.
This is my REACTION LOCATION in this scenario...
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It is 2 conected modular buildings without any external windows or doors lowered into the ground with the help of DITCH LOOK...Surrounded by a tall stone wall (no one will see these guys and they will in turn se nobody either...)
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It does not look terribly out of place....
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...and will not impact gameplay in any way...
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Here is a picture of the REACTION LOCATION in this scenario...
The idea is that the sniperteam will move into the next room once the player commits his reserv platoon to battle.

The second room contains an AI TERRAIN OBJECTIVE (touch)
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OK...how does this work ?

Hello...
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One thing that i have missed for a long time when designing scenarios is the ability to let the player COMMIT RESERVES if he needs to.
I have come up with an idea that i think works OK (it might not be a new one...).
This idea will 'cost' you as the designer 1 AI-group and 2 AI terrainobjectives (if you have some to spare...)
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- You will need a reserve location that is shielded from the enemy LOS/LOF
- You will need a 'reaction location' that preferably is somewhere that will see no combat.
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I am about to finish my work on my first scenario for CMBS - Debaltseve Devils - and will upload this to the repository during the weekend (it should be avaliable early next week i hope).
In this scenario i have used this RESERV idea. The reserves in this scenario will not be avaliable right away but will arrive some time into the scenario and will then be ready to be commited by the player.
If the player chooses to commit those reserves to the battle he will LOSE POINTS and a TOTAL VICTORY will no longer be possible...A victory will still be very doable but not a TOTAL ONE...
If the players advance stalls he will have the OPTION to commit those reserves and instead of a failed mission might be able to achive atleast a minor victory with the primary missiongoals achived...
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In this mission my reserves will arrive to the rear of my side of the map and the 'reaction location' is located at the very back of the enemies side...
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My reserves when they arrive...
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I think it will be important to make sure that the AI will not be able to see or target the PLAYER RESERVES. This can obvoiusly be done in a number of ways...In this scenario THIS works.
 
 

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This will result in...
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The AI sniper starts to move into the other room to TOUCH the terrainobjective at that location.
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As can be seen here the player looses 1000 points for commiting his reserves...
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NO MORE TOTAL VICTORY AVALIABLE !!
(The points in this last picture are not the ones that will be used in the scenario...The picture was taken during a test...)
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This might not be a perfect solution for the lack of a RESERVES function but i think it works pretty well...
If they designer wants to and have one additional AI-group and two more terrainobjectives to spare he could take this a step further...
Allowing the player to request (commit) either some more infantry or perhaps some armour support...giving different penalties to the player dependeant on what choises he makes...
 

I think this is something Battlefront needs to address. ADA vs Helicopter needs a defiant "re balancing" in order to be realistic, AH-64s specifically are way way too vulnerable. Adding the option to make fast jets immune to ADA during scenario creation is also sorely needed. 

U.S. Troops Can Now Call in Tomahawk Cruise Missiles for Close Air Support - And that’s not the old munition’s only new trick In a test on Jan. 29, a team of U.S. Marines called in an upgraded Tomahawk, called a “Block IV,” to quickly strike a nearby target—just like the Marines routinely do with their artillery, Harrier attack jets and Cobra helicopter gunships.
 
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/u-s-marines-can-now-call-in-tomahawk-cruise-missiles-for-close-air-support-2a8aa4a64428

Sorry took me a while to find it, not one of my usual reads. I won't vouch for the article, but it is an interesting thought anyway.

http://theweek.com/articles/538617/putins-greatest-fear--nothing-american-weapons

Phillip The point is that the armed forces of a NATO country were attacked. It is highly unlikely that the US and other NATO forces would have entered Ukraine under the auspices of the NATO Council to give poltical, lefgal and military cover to the mission. And it is unlikely that the intent f the mission was to fight Russia.
 
But something went badly wrong and, perjhps hrough a misunderstdig Russian Forces attacked the forces of a NATO State. That couuld well result in the invokking of Articles 4, 5 and 6 by the US whoose forces were probably involved. he USA woulld of course have to go back to the NATO Council and invoke Article 5. Historically this has oly happened once after the 9/11 terrorist ttack on he WTC.
 
In our Ukraine case the situation may be less clear cut. But if the US was operating as part of a NATO force when the first atack took place and fighting is on going the North Atlantic Treaty is highly likely to apply.
 
The Russians understan this and they understand, for the reasns outlined above that they don't have much timeto act being now art war with the US ad in every probabilty with NATO  as wel. If they wait ad let NAO mobilise hey will meet the same fayte Saddam Hussein did during the First Gulf War (1990 - 1) To sand any chance of victory he Russians must act quickly and aggresvely. They must press the attack uin Ukraine, they must attack th Baltic States and they must undertake air and naval action in the North Atlantic and the Meditteranean
 
Now you may regard that as Cld War thinking but you need to remember hat Russia's strategic problem in 2017 is exactly the same as it would have been during the 1980s and so is the problem fr the US. In both cases US reinfcements will have to deploy to Europe and Russia will have to delay them and attrite them while they are crossing the Atlantic. And Russia, as a continental (i.e. land) power must try to win the war quicckly before those fresh forces can be deployed. Effectively this is the race.
 
And don't forget both the Russian and NATO leadership (political and military) will have had the formtive experiences of their careers during the 1980s, the final decade of the Cld War. Don't forget Putin is a former KGB officer. The senior Russian generals in 2017 will have been junir or middle ranking officeers during the 1980s. Much the same can be said for Western military and politicl leaders. Sure, there will be 21st Century features to the war such as cyberwar s Philllipp mentions. But that does not chage the fundamental strategic premises unde which the war will be fought. The geography  is the same and it will affec war strtegy in exacly the same way as rthe Cold War. There will be new and untried weapons, technologies and tactics. As in 1914 and 1939 both sides will make many mistkes in the opening days. And, as in 1914 both sides will be pretty even at the start. Fighting will very likely be hard and bloody as portrayed in the game.It could very well become a vicious armoured slugfest.
 
If you cannot understand this /I can only conclude that you do not understabnd the strateegic and logistical issues or the politcal issues

.. from which we get the word "sabotage" because some disgruntled french factory workers used to put shoes into the gears of industrial machines to cause them to break down.
 
Ain't language great!

My feelings exactly. I finished the training campaign, but I probably won't continue with any actual campaign at this point, because the whole setting just feels too dark and foreboding right now.
It's the whole authenticity of the game that just feels troubling in a certain context. I felt the same when I first started playing CMSF in 2007. It was just like watching news coverage from the Battle of Fallujah or the Lebanon War.
 
I still have a lot of CMSF modules to play through, so there's enough fighting to do until hopefully things cool down in Ukraine.

What a strange request... myself, I play scenarios in a pretty much random order, picking tiny scenarios if I want something quick, tank scenarios if I want to see things burn, preserving scenarios with good PBEM potential for that etc. But hey, I'm not judging. Here's a list for you, anyway, took only a few minutes to check the scenario dates in the editor.
 
Morning Coffee - 0530 1 June
Ambush - 0900 4 June
Gagarina Ave Checkpoint - 0550 7 June
Going to Town - 1600 9 June
Phase Line Green - 0400 16 June
Hold the Line - 0500 16 June
Gauntlets Crossed - 1200 16 June
The Valley of Death - 1500 17 June
Into the Breach - 0645 20 June
Crossing the Dnieper campaign - 1530 20 June
The Shield of Kiev campaign - 0615 28 June
Taskforce 3-69 campaign - 1200 ? July (briefing doesn't give a more exact start date)
Dueling Shashkas - 1405 1 July
Galloping Horse Downfall - 0550 10 July
Platoon House Aleksandra - 0705 10 July
First Clash - 0530 14 July
Bridgehead at Kharalyk - 0600 15 July
Opportunity Knocks - 0110 19 July
Rollin' on the River - 0740 20 July
Cry Havoc - 0600 3 August
Objective Delta - 0505 15 August
August Morning - 0705 21 August
Brutal - 0920 22 August
Interdiction - 1515 30 August

Maybe one additional thing, from my (limited) experience:
 
Learn to use your infantry!
 
When I first started playing CMSF, I tended to rely on my armored vehicles way too much, trying too keep the infantry safe inside their Strykers. That way, I was simply not using dozens of eyes for spotting, and tons of potential firepower to supress any spotted enemy.

One can set his clock after it:
As soon as a good initiative brings progress, the USA is becoming extremely active to sabotage it. This time Kerry immediately jumped into a plane, flew to Kiev and is now even offering a bancrupt country direct weapon deliveries, while this good initiative is gaining momentum. What a ruthless politics of destabilization in such a phase!
 
I still remember well what had happened hours before the Ukrainian persident was ousted: an agreement with all involved parties, all opposition parties signed - the ink was not dry, the members from the meeting had not yet returned and the agent provocateurs already had started shooting.
 
For almost 18 months I observe this evil scheme now and I hope, that this time the European vassals have enough courage to reject the devastating US politics for Europe. A little hope may be that they no longer accept the US being part of their initiatives.

On-map indirect units have realistic probability of error applied.  This means that they produce oval impact zones (probability of error for range is generally greater than deflection) rather than circular impact zones, and that errors increase as range increases.  It is more realistic than off-map, which uses fixed circular error.

The nineties, for them that's submission. Maybe not for you. They look at this decade with disdain. Read Putin's speeches, especially the more recent ones. Its not that I love the guy, but I'm a realist. You must take into account perceptions of other people in international politics or else a lot of people will end up dead. They want to be treated as equals but US ambassador at the UN Samantha Powers told them: "you guys lost the cold war, why dont you just accept it". The mask fell. They are now certain that the West will never treat Russia with the respect it deserves (in their eyes) so they are acting accordingly. They were naive to think otherwise for so long but that's another discussion  You can impose your will on small countries, but you can try to impose your will on countries like Russia at everyone's risk. You must take their view into account and try to achieve balance. Yes, the world is an unjust place. 

The conflict did start in Ukraine?
 
In 1989 Russia accepted the German reuinification. For that to happen they had to withdraw their troops and NATO promised not to expand torwards Russia. Interestingly the Russians withdrew their troops but US and UK occupation troops stayed in Germany. Also no peace treaty with Germany has been signed. Fact is, the Russians also disbanded the Warshaw Pact. NATO was not disbanded.
 
Afterwards NATO broke all promises it had given to Russia and has been expanding since. Isn't it strange, that NATO was not disbanded, too, since the reason for it's foundation, the Communist empire, had disappeared?
 
NATO expansion (in western media it is even called enlargement, not expansion) since 1989 torwards Russia:  
Poland
Hungary
Czech Republic
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Slovakia
Bulgaria
Slovenia
Rumania
Albania
Croatia
 
Further expansion planned torwards
Cyprus
Makedonia
Bosnia Herzegowina
Montenegro
 
Victoria Nuland is the wife of radical Zionist Robert Kagan, who founded the zionist lobby organization PNAC (Project for the New American Century), a leading force behind the Iraq war. For a few years now, Kagan's Zionist warmonger friends have been lobbying for another US wars: their new "Foreign Policy Initiative" has been lobbying for attacking Syria and Iran. His wife Victoria Nuland admitted that the USA had spent 5 BILLION dollars for the coup in Ukraine! That's also clearly a hostile act against a souvereign country (Ukraine) and a breach of international law!
 
A leaked telephone call between Catherine Ashton and a Baltic minister showed, that the EU knew, that in Ukraine on Maidan very strange things happened, and that certain forces were shooting at both sides to make them clash. Israeli soldiers even openly bragged for leading militant groups on Maidan.  
This video is extremely elightening to understand how blatantly Western mainstream media and politicians turned things upside down when they reported about the protests in Ukraine:  
www.youtube.com/watch?v=E18jWXbZY8U
 
 
Recently the US foreign minister John Kerry admitted, that the USA had to force and blackmail the EU to support the economic warfare against Russia.  
American politicians are openly admitting they want a regime change in Russia. Is that friendly? That's also against international law.  
Even after Putin's first term, the Russians under Medvedev were still naive enough to fall victim to this trick:  

 
 
And they allowed the aggression against and destruction of Lybia to happen.
 
Who is the betrayer and aggressor?  

 
 
And last but not least the shooting down of MH17 which was blamed on Russia by Western media and politicians without offering the slightest evidences. By looking closer to the downing of MH17 many strange facts are coming to light. I find it strange, that you, as interested and well informed about modern weaponry, did not notice, that a BUG system consists of three vehicles and needs months of training of specialists.  

 
This story was not only spread in Ukraine but hugely in the EU, too:
 
https://magazin.spiegel.de/EpubDelivery/image/title/SP/2014/31/300
 
 
 
 
I can not understand, how anyone who takes a closer look at the developments in Ukraine can believe in the mainstream media narrative.
 

 
That things in the area could become dangerous was not that hard to recognize with some basic knowledge about NATO aggression and the status of Sevastopol in the Black Sea.
 
ps: I am sorry, somehow I cannot make certain links to appear as the others

There's a guy called Grau in the US that reviews Russian military stuff? Now that's funny.