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Help please. Road to Dinas


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I would be grateful if any of you who have the linear version of my CMSF campaign, 'The Road to Dinas' could PM me. I lost (almost) all my CMx2 files in a hard drive burn out a few years ago (and wouldn't you know it, CDs are not forever either - a perfect storm of bad luck). I'd really like to revisit this old campaign and update it if possible. 

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That's brilliant. Thanks. I've downloaded the dynamic version and have unpacked it. It really is a monster. Redoing that will be a lot of work, but FUN work.

I'm going to have to be careful and not get too carried away and take on too much at the start. I want to get 'Montebourg' redone and also work on my smallest campaign, Gung Ho! before I start work on this project. But now that I have the whole thing, minus the core units file, it's a definite project for this year. It will be a CMSF2 rework so I'll be able to add water and bridges as well as wire fences to replace the rural walls I used on my early maps.

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Hey, I also found a mini campaign there I'd completely forgotten about - 'The Road to Perdition'. I've had a look and it looks like it uses 'Dinas' maps so it might not be worth redoing but it's always good to have options. Perhaps I reworked and expanded the Dinas maps. That's something I did for 'Gung Ho!' If that's the case, I can use the improved, expanded maps in the Dinas rework instead.

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I found Hasrabit there and I tried it out last night. I was surprised at how good the maps were, and they're quite big too. That was my first real work with the scenario editor and I thought the maps would be small and frankly a bit crap. They're certainly not authentic, lots of trees for example, but they still looked good now. Unfortunately, it's borked. The OBs appear to have been scrambled, units out of their set-up zones and there are some US units, 'Take a look at that!', as well. A real shame as that's where you got to play around with the Special Forces and the Republican Guard.

Since it looks like 'Hasrabit' has been lost, I might try to create a new RG/SF campaign but make it much shorter. I've been scanning around Google Earth and have found some interesting battle sites so I might be able to put them to good use.

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  • 2 weeks later...

As it happens, the latest version of the campaign extractor did the job on Hasrabit so I now have two large campaigns to rework over time.

 

The Hasrabit maps are actually pretty good but far too small for what I need now so I'll have to extend them quite a bit before I can rework them.

 

So, the plan is, get the 6 mission USMC campaign finished first and then do the British Forces and NATO versions of this campaign. I'll post more about that once I've finished the maps and have most of the battles working properly. I have no idea how long this is going to take but I'm hoping later next month (April) for the first version and the Brits and Germans to follow not long after that.

After that, I'm going to focus on Hasrabit as it's OLD, most folks won't have played it and you also get to play with Republican Guards and Special Forces with all the goodies that come with them. Of course, map reworks come first and as I'm learning from my current project, that's 2-3 days per map, with 10 maps so that's about a month of work on maps alone. I generally do map work in the evening though so I'll start work on these next week. Since this is Red v Red and easier to do than NATO v Red, I expect reasonably quick progress on this because you're not hampered by any of those 'silly' considerations like civilian casualties or cultural sensitivity. It's just 'get the job done'.

Then finally, Road to Dinas. It won't need quite so much work to redo as the maps are generally big enough. It's the AI that will need a lot of love as there are a few AI attacks and there's also some new kit that could be utilised. I had to use US air forces for Hasrabit as there wasn't Syrian air power in the early versions of the game. Nor were there Shilkas which are a bit of a game changer. But I've learned a few tricks since I released this campaign so it should benefit from my experience.

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On 2/16/2023 at 4:27 AM, Paper Tiger said:

Hey, I also found a mini campaign there I'd completely forgotten about - 'The Road to Perdition'. I've had a look and it looks like it uses 'Dinas' maps so it might not be worth redoing but it's always good to have options. Perhaps I reworked and expanded the Dinas maps. That's something I did for 'Gung Ho!' If that's the case, I can use the improved, expanded maps in the Dinas rework instead.

Apparently you also started work on another Red versus Red campaign called 'Retribution'...

 

 

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Another incipient campaign? Yikes! I have completely forgotten about that one as well as that flu. That was nasty - three visits to the hospital before a doctor finally got the diagnosis right. I was also a tad sensitive back then about PC which I've since learned to give the middle finger to. A lot has changed in the last 11 years. That seems to be something I had planned after work on the 'Scottish Corridor' was finished and indeed, something 'new' for BFC came along shortly afterwards which would demand my attention for a while afterwards.

I'm glad to see I posted a fairly good concept for it as it looks like a good one and it will help reconstruct the idea in my mind. I've been looking at the maps I did for the NATO campaigns and it would be good to revisit them and do something Red v Red with them along those lines. The map I made for 'Charity' was a real labour of love. There are two maps that nearly 'broke' me, 'Charity' and 'Brew Up'. I still have the Charity map but the Brew Up map was a new final bonus mission for the Scottish Corridor campaign which was lost in the crash as well as that Dinas map and the German map mentioned that never made it to the campaign. I can't even remember what those latter two looked like. 'Brew Up' I will never forget though. It was so much work to do and the 'right' battle was proving equally challenging to find.

Right now, I am fully at work on a rework of the 'USMC Gung Ho' campaign which is almost an entirely new beast from the original as I've reworked the maps and massively expanded three of them and thrown out the original CAAT fight mission which I just don't get. How did I ever think that was fun?  I spent the entirety of Sunday and yesterday afternoon developing the new 'CAAT among the pigeons' mission which is both in line with what I wanted and is also a lot of fun to play so I really want to finish this before moving on to something new. What that might be though will be decided later, an update for Hasrabit was the most likely bet because I wanted to do something with the Republican Guards but this discovery might change that. 'Carry On Up The Khabour' sounds like something I might do though :D

Edited by Paper Tiger
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Thanks for bringing this to my attention. After reading my concept, I think it's a really good idea and also have identified the first two missions in the campaign (Suburban Hell and Al Hasakah). So I have created a new folder called 'Retribution' and shifted in five maps for the time being. I think this will indeed be my next project after 'Gung Ho!' and it will consist almost exclusively of Red (player) v Uncons missions, at least in the first two stages.

I put an enormous amount of work into creating those maps and it would be nice to get a bit more mileage out of them and to use the Syrian Airborne, a formation I haven't done anything with.

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Just realized that "Die Kunst Des Krieges"campaign is also yours(!)  

Is "NATO Die Kunst Des Krieges SF2" (dated 3/11/2019) the same as the "Die Kunst Des Krieges" dated 6/25/2020?

Have noticed many different versions and updates of the same campaigns and scenarios since CMSF1 and am trying to delete the obsolete versions.

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Not quite. It's certainly my concept and I did six of the missions for it:

The Borders are Burning

Ghost Towns

Al Bab

Minakh Airfield

Audacity

Bridges of Valhalla

I don't know about the revisions. I was absent when the reworks were done although, I have to say, looking at the missions I did, not much has changed. I suspect my AI set up and planning systems were too much of a PITA for others to tinker with. It would have required somebody to redo the AI from scratch if they'd made any changes to either of those systems. There are still only 8 AI groups and I recognise the AI plans as mine.

I'd say that the latest version is the one to work with. I can't see any reason why newer versions wouldn't be better in some respect.

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6 hours ago, Paper Tiger said:

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. After reading my concept, I think it's a really good idea and also have identified the first two missions in the campaign (Suburban Hell and Al Hasakah). So I have created a new folder called 'Retribution' and shifted in five maps for the time being. I think this will indeed be my next project after 'Gung Ho!' and it will consist almost exclusively of Red (player) v Uncons missions, at least in the first two stages.

I put an enormous amount of work into creating those maps and it would be nice to get a bit more mileage out of them and to use the Syrian Airborne, a formation I haven't done anything with.

I dare you to keep the awesome name of "Carry On Up The Khabour" for a grim, Syrian Civil War campaign!

News of more Red vs Red content is always good news as such content tends to be peak CMSF (and arguably peak CMx2).

 

The Syrian Airborne have been a favourite for the SF2 content creators as (modded) they've been used as ANA by the likes of @Zveroboy1 and as "Imperial Cavalry" (think proxy pseudo-ARVN) by the Heaven & Earth team.

They use proper AK-74's in SF2 (rather than the AKS-74U they used back in SF) but do come with one major issue.

There was a day 1 bug where (because of squad TOE changes between the games) the Syrian squads would only carry 100 rounds of their squad MG. This tended to make them even more brittle after they had fired off those hundred rounds.

That bug has since been fixed for most of the Syrian Army but, unfortuantely, has NOT been fixed for the Airborne (or the Special Forces).

The issue is exacerbated by the lack of ammo dumps & no MG rounds carried in Syrian trucks.

As a result, content creators have had to provide players with alternative access to extra MG ammo.

IIRC @Zveroboy1used a walled off BMP-3 in one of his scenarios, the H&E team tended to use APC's or UAZ's (these little cars carry a useful 500 MG rounds).

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Their MG ammo is bugged? Since I'll be using both, I checked both the mech and the non-mech airborne and you're right - 100 rounds each. :(  I guess I'll have to work around the issue then. I'm not sure I want BMP-3s in all my missions so those little cars will have to do when they're choppering in. I guess it's not too much of a fantasy to say that they were choppered in. The 'why' is obvious.

Yup, 'Carry On Up The Khabour' would really be in very bad taste for a Syrian Civil War campaign :Dbut with our British tongue-in-cheek humour, it's not actually bad for a British Forces campaign. I probably won't do that now as I'll be using the Khabour maps for the Syrian airborne campaign instead.

Red v Red is where the game really shines for me too. I've got a system for keeping Blue v Red 'interesting' but sometimes, you just want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Edited by Paper Tiger
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8 hours ago, Erwin said:

Been enjoying one of your scenarios in "Die Kunst..."    After playing a lot of WW2 as well as CMBS and CMCW, suddenly CMSF2 seems easy lol.  But, maybe CMSF2 engine and features makes CMSF1 scenarios seem easy.

Interesting observation. Unpacked campaign missions are purposefully not as difficult as stand-alone missions because, unlike the stand-alone, the consequences carry forward after the mission. And the German Panzergrenadiers were a particularly fragile unit to work with in a campaign - (only 7 men but still a fun formation to work with.) I purposefully dial down the difficulty a notch or two when making campaign missions, particularly the missions that come later in the campaign because, inevitably, a lot of the actual testing of any mission is done as a stand-alone, the complied testing coming towards the end of development.

I'm actually testing missions 5 and 6 of Gung Ho just now like this and need these missions to be reasonably easy to beat with the full core force because the campaign player won't have anything like a full roster when he plays these missions. At least Gung Ho! is not an official, paid-for campaign so customers can't (reasonably) complain that 'they paid for this content, that it's their hobby that they should be able to complete it without all the stress', so I can get away with making it tougher this time.

Otherwise, if it's an engine comparison, I'm actually finding CMSF2 more difficult to manage because units no longer utilise cover as effectively as they did before. It's been 10+ years though so it's likely it's me that sucks.

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On 3/7/2023 at 12:26 PM, 37mm said:

That bug has since been fixed for most of the Syrian Army but, unfortuantely, has NOT been fixed for the Airborne (or the Special Forces).

I thought this had been fixed by now ugh. This is a real shame. For scenarios you can find workarounds but doesn't this make them unplayable for QBs? It is one of theonly semi decent Syrian formations too. I will never understand why we can't get hot fixes for small issues like this.

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On 3/12/2023 at 9:26 AM, Zveroboy1 said:

I thought this had been fixed by now ugh. This is a real shame. For scenarios you can find workarounds but doesn't this make them unplayable for QBs? It is one of theonly semi decent Syrian formations too. I will never understand why we can't get hot fixes for small issues like this.

Yes QBs aren't nice on them. They also lack RPG ammo 😅

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