Timed victory conditions

[womble]

It's been discussed a few times, that I've seen: having Victory Conditions based on time, but in a soft/sliding scale way: you get a bonus for getting to the VL early, or a penalty for not getting there in time, type of idea. To date, it has, in the discussions I've seen, been considered a desirable tool to have in the scenario design kit, but not yet available.

I thought of a workaround today, which might come in handy for scenario designers interested in having this sort of victory condition.

It mostly only works for the AI; a human player could easily subvert it.

The initial idea was a "patrol vs patrol" scenario, where you were the hunter, and the AI was patrolling an area. Your level of victory would be determined by how many "checkpoints" the AI's patrol(s) managed to reach; your eventual discovery, and elimination, of the enemy was pretty much a foregone conclusion. So you have to efficiently search for the enemy element(s) in various sections of the map and neutralise them quickly for maximum victory level. You'd effectively have a fixed score ("Destroy all enemies") that would be mostly a "gimme", but your victory level would be determined by how many Touch victory locations the patrols you were hunting had managed to reach. The AI moves at a consistent rate, with consistent timing, so the designer would be able to effectively say "if it takes 30 minutes it's a draw; longer and it's a loss, less and it becomes a win" or whatever seems to make sense, by assigning values to the VLs to change the ratio of victory points between player and AI.

That made me think: you could have an "artificial" AI victory point accumulator, somewhere obscure and out of sight at the back, possibly surrounded by impassable terrain, with a series of small, adjacent "Touch" VLs, and a single unit assigned to its own AI group with orders to move from one to the next at specified time periods by the AI plan. So you could give the AI a bonus to its victory points for the player taking "too long". Obviously there are ways to subvert this, as the player, if you know the timer mechanism is invoked, but some of those can be mitigated. Don't give 'em any TRPs so they can't indirect fire onto this out-of-the-way, out-of-LOS VP track; put concrete bunkers there for the "timekeeper" unit to shelter in if there's any chance of nearby collateral damage (air strikes or what-not). The impassable terrain would mean that routing troops wouldn't accidentally trigger the "Touch" VLs.

You could do the same with units that are associated with "Exit" VCs; have them lined up near an exit-permeable map-edge. You'd need one AI group per "timetick" for that way of doing it though.

Has this been done before? Is it any use to anyone?

[MOS:96B2P]

This sounds very interesting.  I think it would probably work as far as game mechanics go.  Getting a mission concept fleshed out would probably be the important part.  However, I have only made and released one small scenario (CMSF Consulate Evacuation) so my knowledge/experience is admittedly limited. 

 

What would really be useful is if some veteran scenario designers gave this a look.  Combatintman, JonS, Paper Tiger, PanzerMike and others.  They could give much more relevant practical feedback.  So the biggest contribution of my comment is probably to get this post bumped back up towards the top of the forum where maybe it will be noticed by a veteran scenario designer.  Sounds interesting.  Hope you get some useful replies.

Edited February 7, 2015 by MOS:96B2P

[womble]

I think the idea's root stems from the complaints periodically aired that there's not enough time to finish scenarios, and requests for a more "open-ended" finish to a mission. This could satisfy the ones who like to play slow and careful, because they would be able to offset the extra VP the AI gets for each (say) 15 minutes past an hour, as the "timekeeper" unit ticks along its track with reduced VP gained by the AI for destruction of the player's units in achieving the other VC goals set for them by the briefing (acting as the abstraction of the CoC and operational context).

Thanks for the bump

[Combatintman]

Well a way of doing it would be this:

 

Your enemy AI starts at the top end of the map and has to touch Objectives A through to E with A being closest and E being furthest

 

Objective A = 10 points

Objective B = 10 points

Objective C = 10 points

Objective D = 10 points

Objective E = 10 points

 

Objective C is the 'draw' threshold. All you need to do is allocate the right number of VPs associated with the 'Destroy' objective of the enemy AI group to trigger the draw (in this case it will be a figure around 30) and ensure that touch objective C is in the right place in terns of time and distance (so if 30 minutes is too long in your design concept - it needs to be about 20 to 30 minutes away from the setup zone/start point).

 

Granted this doesn't cover all of the issues raised and the maths is rough and ready but it does solve some of the design problems. 

[womble]

That's pretty much where I started thinking about it, Combatintman. A patrol where the AI starts off just with the objective of hitting its marks/phase lines. However, if the "timeticking" locations are at all subject to enemy observation, you won't be counting time with them, so much as combat friction. If the C objective is halfway down the table, there's a good chance that the AI won't even reach the D and E objectives just because the player has disrupted the timekeeping unit (say by a lucky mortar strike), even if everything else they've done is wrong/ineffective. It also requires the AI to advance into enemy positions, which isn't something it's terribly good at. Keeping the timekeeper element "at the back" and "out the way" means it really is a time counter, and using AI plan timed orders to advance it along the "track" means that the track can be as short as one AS per time tick you want to count, and it has the least chances of falling afoul of erratic pathing and unlucky happenstance.

[womble]

Another way of doing something along these lines would simply to have Occupy objectives (sequestered out of the way of accidental wanderings) with different points values, and a unit assigned to an order group that moves between them as time progresses. This way, the AI could be put on a timer, too, or the player disincentivised from hitting ceasefire early without having a base lump of AI VP to have to get over to get a victory.