Need guidelines for victory points allocation

[Zveroboy1]

Ok so I am trying to design a couple of scenarios taking place in Afghanistan using CMSF; it is not going too badly for the mapping itself, the force setup even the AI plans but when it comes to victory points, basically I have no idea what I am doing.

 

That's why I need some guidelines regarding victory points allocations.

 

It seems there are several ways of doing it but the thing that puzzles me the most is how you can have two opposite philosophies so to speak. For casualties for instance, you can either reward the player by giving him a victory point bonus when he keeps casualties below a certain threshold, but you can also reward the opposing player when he inflicts casualties. Isn't it better to use only one of these two mechanisms? And if so which one in what circumstances?

 

By that I mean that if say blue force gets a bonus when keeping casulaties low, the effects will get compounded because at the same time red force won't get the points. It seems it works the same way with preserve/destroy.

 

Any tips/hints welcome regarding that but also victory conditions in general.

[JonS]

http://community.battlefront.com/topic/109190-the-sheriff-of-oosterbeek-%E2%80%93-a-scenario-design-daraar/page-12#entry1445450

[ASL Veteran]

I will typically use all of the available victory conditions.  I will generally start with terrain objectives as about 40% of points available, casualty destroy points about 40% of total points available, and then I'll use the threshold victory points for about 20% of the points available.  After some experimenting I will then adjust from there.  Where threshold victory points are of the most value are when you have a battle with assymetric forces.  In other words, if one force will, with some level of certainty, defeat the opposing force in the scenario then you use the threshold victory conditions to even out the score at the end.  So the force that is expected to win the firefight will win the firefight, but that force may not win the battle in terms of victory points.  Sometimes I won't assign any terrain victory points for one side and heavily weight terrain victory points for the other side.  It all depends on how you think the battle is likely to play out when someone plays your scenario.

 

Ninja'd by JonS 

Edited January 9, 2015 by ASL Veteran

[Zveroboy1]

Thanks that was helpful. I need to study that link, it looks really thorough.

[Combatintman]

Zvereoboy1 - great to hear that you've taken the plunge into the scenario editor and I look forward to seeing your missions.

 

Victory Points have for me always been really difficult to get right so I do feel your pain. It was not until the advent of the WW2 titles that I was even aware of the mathematics behind it so the first point to make is that you must understand the maths.

 

The puzzle of opposing philosophies is not such a puzzle when you get your head around the fact that you control the philosophy and I think you may be under the impression that you have to populate all of the values in the parameters screen, or balance one out with the other, or double up. JonS's example in his linked thread explains these concepts really well and pretty much answers the question by saying that you do not have to double up or balance out if you don't want to.

 

Given the limits on objectives it is actually counter-productive to double up by, for example, having a Red 'Destroy' objective which is also a Blue 'Preserve' objective. As an example, in my last released scenario 'Into the Green' I wanted to penalise the Blue player for inflicting unnecessary collateral damage (specifically using air/aviation/artillery/mortars to whack red forces in certain compounds). Unfortunately, the number of compounds vastly exceeded the number of terrain objectives available and I had to make 3 of those objectives 'touch' objectives to fulfil other scenario requirements which reduced the number even further. My solution was to use my remaining 5 or 6 Blue objectives as 'Preserve' and on 5 or 6 compounds that I did not want smashed. I then allocated other compounds I didn't want smashed as Red 'Destroy' objectives which are 'Known to Neither'. This achieves the same effect because the game allocates the points on the basis of the effect rather than who does the destroying.

 

My approach to VPs (which again is pretty much how JonS explains it) and scenario design as a whole is to sit down at the start and have a clear idea of what you want your scenario to be and while it is important for all aspects of the scenario, I think it is especially important for VP allocations.

 

If you want any help with your scenario but don't want to give out spoilers feel free to PM me and I will gladly kick ideas around with you and give the mission a test if you like.

 

A word of warning - Red 'Occupy' objectives may not work in CMSF (this has been reported as a bug - they certainly don't work for me and the some of the Beta test team) so I would suggest that you think of workarounds for this.

[Zveroboy1]

Yes but this is what I am talking about. How do you decide when to substract points to a side's total by using destroy with a negative value and when do you decide to add points to the total with preserve for instance?

 

Similarly when do you decide to award points for destroying units and when is it preferable to give points to the opposite force for staying under a particular threshold?

[Combatintman]

There is no subtraction (or AFAIK negative numbers) - if you set say a building as a Blue 'preserve' objective for 150 VPs and the building is destroyed Blue does not get the 150 VPs and if you set another building as a Blue 'destroy' objective for 150 VPs and it is not destroyed Blue does not get the 150 VPs. In this instance if Red has already gained 300 VPs, the result is a draw.

 

The decisions you are asking questions about are yours alone - but to give you a pointer let's say you have a mission where Blue has to run a supply column to a besieged FOB an you are designing a Blue vs Red AI mission.

 

Key factors are going to be:

 

Ammo consumption (in the real world more consumption means more supply runs = more effort sustaining the force, inefficient use of resources and greater risk to personnel and equipment conducting the supply trips).

 

Preservation of the supply trucks - no trucks = no ammo = mission failure.

 

Blue personnel casualties = never popular with the folks back home.

 

FOB remains in Blue hands = no good resupplying somewhere with nobody to resupply.

 

On top of that we want to give an approximation of the ISAF ROE so let's add in the fact that we want to minimise collateral damage.

 

All you do now is work out how important in the overall scheme of things these things are and work out what are acceptable/fair results. Once you've done that you weight the points accordingly using the VP formula.

 

Again JonS explains this a lot better in his Sheriff of Oosterbeek thread.

[Zveroboy1]

Ok scratch that, for some reason I thought it was possible to assign a negative value to a destroy objective.