Gung Ho, Hasrabit and other stuff

[Paper Tiger]

This is basically me just musing although there is some news in this post.

I'm in the final stages of putting together the first of three short campaigns, USMC Gung Ho. I thought there would be a very quick turn-around on this project because it was already largely finished and fully tested. I thought it would just require a new core unit file and a few tweaks here and there to take advantage of all the changes that have come over the last 10+ years. Well, was I wrong. One of the missions (CAAT Fight) was just absolute rubbish. I have no idea how I thought it was fun on any level. That required a whole new mission which I'm very happy with and much more in line with what I wanted. I ended up massively expanding two of the maps as well, (Watching the Detectives and Bridges if you're interested). The opener also got overhauled and expanded as well but not to the same degree that those two did. The AI forces in each mission have been reworked as well and the AI plans totally redone. So, it's been a lot more work to fix than I'd first thought.

Anyway, it's close to the end and if you're familiar with the campaign design process, this is when I, at least, start to look forward to my next project. I've been focused solely on Gung Ho for the last few weeks and the AI is done for all six missions and final testing is under way. But, at this stage, I feel like I've seen it all with this campaign so I've started looking at Hasrabit and boy, did I get a shock.

Hasrabit is basically my first real project and the AI design sucks! I opened up a few missions and had a look at placement for both and was very disappointed. Then the AI plans and was even more disappointed. I'd rate the current standard as unplayable but it's definitely fixable. The maps are actually quite good although a few of them would benefit from improving and expanding, particularly the armour clashes. I used to think anything over 1km in one direction was H-U-G-E.  And back then, it was. Computers are just so much more powerful nowadays that I can manage the massive firefight that results in the first five minutes of the Gung Ho finale without so much asd a hiccup. That would have dropped to about 2-3FPS on my old rig.

So, once Gung Ho is finished, I plan to get to work on Retribution and Hasrabit together. Red v Red is where the real fun is at for me so I'm excited to revisit the latter and to start work on the former. I expect the Brit version of Gung Ho won't take too long to finish though but no promises. I don't want to fight 'Meet the Flintstones' again for a L-O-N-G time.

Edited March 21, 2023 by Paper Tiger

[Paper Tiger]

This seems to be an appropriate thread to post the following musings. Obviously things didn't pan out the way I expected them to and work on both Hasrabit and Retribution has stalled.

Hasrabit is getting there but I have to admit I haven't enjoyed these missions nearly as much as I thought I would. They're just too damned hard and that's not fun for me any more. One hard mission in a chapter is fine but not all of them and that's been my problem, there are too many hard missions.

The new opener is a cakewalk if you do it right but if you don't, it's a nightmare. I'm not going to change that as it should be obvious what the commander in charge is supposed to do. However, the new 'Ambush' mission is proving really tough to win. I've added air support to the mission but it takes absolutely ages for it to come in and that's not fun. I'm losing this mission quite badly and often during play-testing so the difficulty has to come down. By how much though?

Strong Stand is finished and it's reasonably difficult but you get a LOT of fun toys to play with so I'm going to ease up the mid-game difficulty a bit and that's a day. The initial entry to the map will be challenging but that's fine by me.

The new Guards Counterattack is a beast. I've redone the AI attack plan and it's much more challenging now, so much so that I've removed a whole mech company from the AI OB but it's still very hard to get a win so I'm going to have to ease up the difficulty here.

Hill 142 is in a very strange place. The original was in a very bad condition so I've reworked it and now it's really tough to win. The trouble is that I'm struggling to find the hook for this mission, the feature that sets it apart from the others. It just feels meh to play.

The Barrier is another weird one but I have found the hook. I just need to get the AI working properly.

Now, Buying the Farm is my current favourite of the new missions but boy is it TOUGH. I really need to scale back the difficulty here but I want this one to be a bit of a stinker. But not frustratingly so. This is my chapter stinker and it's at the end of phase 1.

Silence the Guns is probably fine as is and so done but I will need to add more time as it's a bit too tight.

Heavy Metal is kind of stuck - I made an all-new map for this but that means that the original AI plans are lost so I've reverted to the old map and improved it so that I have at least the rudiments of an AI to work with.

Sadara is in a similar condition to Heavy Metal - I've improved the map considerably, especially the town outskirts which look really good now but haven't done any real testing yet. I expect it will take a while to rebalance but the original AI still works and just needs to be improved. This is the Guards finale so it can be a stinker.

Finally, we come to the finale, Hasrabit. I've greatly expanded the original map and reworked the town so that it resembles its real world counterpart. Like the previous two mission, no real testing has been done.

So there's till quite a bit of work to do on this but I'll get through it after I finish the Montebourg rework or at least while I'm doing it but Montebourg is the priority for now.

As for Retribution, we'll see. I'm finding Red v Red a bit too slow when using artillery and air strikes and I've grown to love them both in Gung Ho! and Montebourg. It's a nice idea and I've got some really good maps for this short-ish campaign and I haven't done anything with the Syrian Airborne formations so I'd really like to do this eventually.

Now, let's touch on Dinas. I'd really like to revise both my earliest campaigns to take advantage of the changes to the game engine and if I real the community correctly, Dinas is a very popular one so I really should revisit it.  That will be a massive amount of work to do so it's later next year at best. But having just finished making up an new core unit file for the Scottish Corridor and importing and placing all the units, I know how much work will be involved. Dinas has a nearly a regiment of core units and some of the actions are huge so placing is going to take a lot of time.

And that brings me to artwork - both Hasrabit and Dinas are completely fictional, as in the maps are all made out of my head (except Strong Stand and Hasrabit which are real places in Syria). I will have to redo the artwork for these campaigns completely as the original is definitely a bit naff now. Working with GIMP is okay now but it's certainly not fun for me so this is one of the things that deters me from working on this.

So that's where I am with this. It's not forgotten. I just don't enjoy playing and testing really hard campaigns any more and just want to have fun while facing a reasonable challenge. After all, the REAL difficulty comes from the accrued losses in each mission over the span of the campaign.

[Erwin]

For heavens sake plz don;t overdo it and burn out...  That unfortunately tends to happen at some point to all of our most talented modders and designers.  But, you're on the right track making your designs a little easier.  At we discussed there was at least one Dinas mission that I had to restart over a dozen times.  

9 hours ago, Paper Tiger said:

the REAL difficulty comes from the accrued losses in each mission over the span of the campaign

Agreed...

[Paper Tiger]

13 hours ago, Erwin said:

For heavens sake plz don;t overdo it and burn out...  That unfortunately tends to happen at some point to all of our most talented modders and designers.  But, you're on the right track making your designs a little easier.  At we discussed there was at least one Dinas mission that I had to restart over a dozen times.  

Agreed...

I'm exclusively focused on Montebourg just now but I do have ideas that are emerging as a result of me posting my thoughts above. While eating breakfast, I got an idea how to soften the difficulty of the Guards Counterattack mission and it might also make the mission more fun as a result. It won't be a lot of work either but rather than rushing off to make the changes now, it's in the book of changes.

I have a quiet period at work from now until the end of the year and instead of binging on other wargames (Command Ops 2, SGS series of Wargames, Rule the Waves 3, DC Ardennes Offensive etc, I'll be working on this.

It's a shame you can't remember which Dinas mission that was.  If you have any vague recollections or a better description of the issues you were having, let me know and I might be able to deduce which mission it is and change it.

[Erwin]

I recall one had to drive down a road in a valley that turned right while being attacked by RCL's and then encountering a farm that had to be overcome.  The final objective was a town across a river, and the challenge was a bunch of ATGM's on the left flank that usually massacred one's force.  There was a Syrian tank attack into that town at the end as well.  It might have been around Mission 11-13.  Regretfully, I cannot recall and I have long ago deleted all the savedgame files.  

[Danny03]

Paper Tiger

I'm really happy to hear that you didn't give up on the "Road to dinas" remake, it is my favorite user made CMSF campaign

(Hasrabit is the runner up). The force preservation and management aspect in "Road to dinas" is simply amazing. And the Regimental force presentation (when you can review your whole remaining force) at the end of Phase 1 is brilliant idea.

Erwin

The mission that you describe is exactly were I was unfortunately stuck due to force erosion (The two core infantry companies that were responsible for this mission took terrible causalities during the other battles before I got to that mission, so I had barely one platoon at the start of the battle and another two understrength reinforcing platoons which were the remnants of the second company).  

And the fresh T-62MV company had a really tough time dealing with the T-72 Turms that came as the counterattack. I simply couldn't get the first shot on the T-72 Turms while standing on a high ground and aiming on their side while they were rolling in the valley.  The T-72 Turms and the remnants of the ATGM's on the other side of the valley that I failed to knock off, spotted my tanks 1st and picked them off.  

A brutal map

Paper Tiger

When/If you decide to tweak the balance of the campaign while you redo it, could you look into the T-72 Turms/ T-62MV spotting disparities, I have the feeling that maybe the reason is the CMSF 2 balance changes. 

 

Danny

 

 

[Paper Tiger]

I suspect the Dinas mission in question is 'The Tumah Crossing', a late campaign mission. I'll bear that in mind when/if I ever get around to reviewing this. I have to admit to finding the idea increasingly appealing. I have improved quite a few of the maps already, some of which appear in Gung Ho! Of course, if I use them again, I'd have to improve them even further so that they're fresh. I already have some ideas for further improving the map for 'Petani' which is the map the 'Flintstones' map is based on.

 

As for Hasrabit, well, I have to admit that I'm kind of stumped here. I've been looking at it again today and have toned the difficulty down of the Ambush mission and now I have to make it fun. I've also made a few adjustments to the Guards Counterattack mission mentioned above but there's still a lot of work to do to get this mission finished, never mind the whole campaign. It'll get done but I'm concerned that we're already very far from the original Hasrabit experience now. The structure and the names may be the same but the game engine has changed so much since Hasrabit was made that it's an all-new game (I suppose it really is as it's now CMSF2)  Doh!

The missions that are left to do are HUGE though and need to be redone more or less from scratch, a prospect which doesn't exactly fill me with joy at the moment. It's possible I may have to ditch a mission, The Barrier, to get this one finished. I've reviewed the map and the OBs but it's just not clicking for me. It's certainly an interesting map, with several large hills in the desert but what can I do with it that is fresh and not just "another Guards mission"? But who knows what will happen as I continue testing -  we'll see. I get ideas as I work so I'm just thinking out loud at this point.

[Paper Tiger]

Well, I seem to find solutions quite quickly to problems when I think them out loud like in the post above. It seems like the solution to my problem is to make the AI less effective on the attack. I tried removing the heavy rocket artillery barrage from The Guards Counterattack and that helped a bit but the Reserve Infantry position still goes down to the attacker's overwatch fire. I will concentrate on making the Reserve Infantry defenders a bit more resilient as they still go down quickly to the Red attack. That's a more fun solution to the problem.

I can apply this same solution to the 'Buying the Farm' mission which has a similarly powerful AI attack. I guess I've been concentrating too hard on making the AI attacks effective. In both these missions, the defenders are utterly destroyed which I considered to be a good thing. I need them to be considerably less effective so that there's still some fighting going on when your core forces arrive to save the day.

That's much more doable.

[Paper Tiger]

Well, this will probably surprise you but I've made up a new core unit file for Dinas and have imported the new units into the first few missions and started play-testing them. I am going to focus on getting THIS finished before I do anything else, or at least that's my intention for the time being Why the change?

Hasrabit is the oldest of all my campaigns and there's an enormous amount of work involved in updating it. For example:

• Almost every mission has an AI attack and quite a few of these missions are meeting engagements which, as you would expect, are probably the hardest to pull off.
• The maps were very outdated and basically were 'Normandy in Syria' because, whether I like it or not, I really wanted WW2 with CMx1 and was trying to make it all feel as 'familiar' as possible*.
• The maps are green with LOTS of trees.
• The original OBs were the CMx1 OBs which are different from the CMx2 OBs for the same formations so both side's unitrs need to be repbought, replaced and regrouped.
• The AI placement is non-existent with units just plonked down in a place where they have good LoS but no protection and are easy to spot and kill.
• The AI that IS there is abysmal and sometimes doesn't even follow through to capture all the objectives - a small number of AI groups with large numbers of units, sometimes two+ platoons, just have three large order zones painted with some times on them. Sure, the AI does its best with that but I really didn't know much about the system when I made this and it shows.

Anyway, Dinas is mainly all player attacks against fixed defensive positions with only one AI attack mission in the 14-mission campaign and that's MUCH easier to manage and rework. Quite a few of the maps need to be reforested (not deforested) as orchards and that's what I've been doing these last few days. Most of the maps are ready and a small number are pretty much done already with new OBs imported and placed for both sides except for new AI plans. I've reworked some compounds because I've grown more familiar with Syrian residential blocks which are small compounds so I've integrated those in Suib and Sabatani.

With the exception of Petani, the opener, I've also elected to keep the maps largely as is unlike Hasrabit. Sure, compounds will be improved and orchards will be pretty ubiquitous in each mission  but otherwise, I'm trying to keep it as close to the original as possible. I extended the east map edges to give the player a larger entry zone for Suib and SAM Hill yesterday and it allowed me to add a new compound to make it more interesting. Dinas's set up zones are probably the weakest thing about the campaign so this work is really needed and largely done. But otherwise, it will be more or less the same.

I updated some of Dina's original maps for USMC Gung Ho! a long time ago, in particular Flintstones (Petani), Detectives (Sabatani) and Bridges (Farmers). While Flintstones is being expanded even further to make it all look and feel new, I've decided to use the original versions of Sabatani and Farmers instead so they might feel similar to some who have played Gung Ho! but are much, MUCH smaller and less built up.

So there we have it. Hasrabit is not abandoned, just delayed while I get Dinas working. Instead, i'm going to try and stick to my 'one company with support' per mission so that battles are manageable on real time without pausing (that's how I play) so no 2-3 companies of mech infantry missions. Yikes!!! There were only 2 - Sagger Point and Dinas itself so maybe Dinas might have 2 but Sagger only 1 with support.

 

* This attitude absolutely all changed after I was asked to do the NATO campaigns for CMSF and by then, I LOVED the Syrian theatre and still do, probably more than I do WW2 now funnily enough.

[Paper Tiger]

On 12/16/2023 at 5:09 AM, Danny03 said:

Paper Tiger

I'm really happy to hear that you didn't give up on the "Road to dinas" remake, it is my favorite user made CMSF campaign

(Hasrabit is the runner up). The force preservation and management aspect in "Road to dinas" is simply amazing. And the Regimental force presentation (when you can review your whole remaining force) at the end of Phase 1 is brilliant idea.

Erwin

The mission that you describe is exactly were I was unfortunately stuck due to force erosion (The two core infantry companies that were responsible for this mission took terrible causalities during the other battles before I got to that mission, so I had barely one platoon at the start of the battle and another two understrength reinforcing platoons which were the remnants of the second company).  

And the fresh T-62MV company had a really tough time dealing with the T-72 Turms that came as the counterattack. I simply couldn't get the first shot on the T-72 Turms while standing on a high ground and aiming on their side while they were rolling in the valley.  The T-72 Turms and the remnants of the ATGM's on the other side of the valley that I failed to knock off, spotted my tanks 1st and picked them off.  

A brutal map

Paper Tiger

When/If you decide to tweak the balance of the campaign while you redo it, could you look into the T-72 Turms/ T-62MV spotting disparities, I have the feeling that maybe the reason is the CMSF 2 balance changes. 

 

Danny

 

 

ALL of your concerns have been noted and hopefully addressed. There won't be any T-72 Turms in Dinas at all. And the mission in question was Tumah Crossing which was performed by  Company B, the company which attacked Sulit airfield (Syrian airborne) and bore the brunt of the attack in Jameelah. It is a spent formation by that point so another company will be used instead.

[AlexUK]

The Dina’s campaign is often mentioned as the favourite CMSF campaign. I never played it (always hoping for a remake for CMSF 2 - and here it comes). I’d be interested to know why you prefer the Syrian theatre?

[Erwin]

Very happy to hear that these campaigns are being improved.  I think that CMSF is also my favorite as I enjoy playing to minimize friendly casualties.  In the other game titles one has to accept that one will lose a lot of men.  Also, I get the impression that RL tactics work more convincingly in CMSF. 

While there are many tutorials on RL tactics for WW2 and the more modern titles, I often do not find them viable.  Not sure if that is a weakness in the game system - eg accuracy gets gets strange at long ranges or just that the map terrains create situations that are not common.  Eg:  In CM games one gets the sense that everyone should be equipped with SMG's as most battles are at short range.  In RL they are at much longer ranges and rifles actually were more useful.  

[Paper Tiger]

13 hours ago, AlexUK said:

The Dina’s campaign is often mentioned as the favourite CMSF campaign. I never played it (always hoping for a remake for CMSF 2 - and here it comes). I’d be interested to know why you prefer the Syrian theatre?

I hadn't read that it was a community favourite myself but that's interesting. I thought Red v Red was niche. I'll try to keep it as close to the original as possible without changing too much. But some changes are inevitable because the game engine has changed so much. For example, in the original opener, the rocket artillery pretty much won the game for you causing large numbers of casualties and breaking the Conscripts with POOR morale.  It was devastating and so I placed two companies of infantry in the village so that there was something left for you to fight. Now, the rocket artillery hardly makes an impact on the defenders causing a small number (single digits) of casualties and morale is eroded by one or two levels. So there's only one company in the village now and that's quite a significant change just there.

There are some things that are missing from the old engine that are important in the remake, like friendly fire at night which used to be a real issue in the Hasrabit 'Strong Stand' mission - you needed to shepherd your conscripts onto the battlefield very carefully or they'd start firing on each other and that was spectacular. That's no longer a factor in the new engine. Also buildings seem to provide much better cover for their inhabitants than before. But the positives FAR outweigh the negatives - the point is that CMx1 Dinas will not be quite the same as CMx2 Dinas. Hopefully it will be just as good if not better (otherwise what's the point?). So I can keep the rocket artillery in Petani and preserve some of the shock and awe that I was aiming for in the original. It means I'll be relying on better AI plans to make the defence more effective instead of numbers. 'He who defends everything defends nothing' is trumped by 'just add more and more troops to defend everything.'

 

As for why I prefer the Syrian theatre, well, that's hard to say precisely. I like both chocolate cake and carrot cake and all things being equal, I'd rather eat carrot cake. I just know that when I come back to this theatre after playing WW2, I no longer feel that  something is missing from the experience. What that is is not easy to define. But one thing that stands out is C2 when you're playing BLUE. I also really enjoy the helicopter sounds - it just sounds incredibly immersive when one is active - and really scary if it's not yours.

[Paper Tiger]

Core units have been imported into most of the missions and the RED side's forces have been updated to the CMSF2 formations to avoid any potential glitches in the future. There are only two missions left to do but that won't take very long.

All the maps have been updated, the only map still requiring some substantial reworking is the Tumah Crossing mission because the old map was rather empty and uninteresting to play on. I have a clear idea of what I want the map to look like and such a change will take several days of work off and on to complete but the work should be worth it.

I've also redone a lot of the building interiors. In the old CMSF game, the engine didn't fix internal walls at all and so quite a few buildings have windows and doors connecting them and they need to be removed. It's not sexy work at all but it needs to be done.

I'm not going to do map work exclusively as they're mostly all finished now but work on the AI in the phase 1 missions is underway. We're up to mission 3 just now.

After that, it's testing time, the FUN part.

One observation I made was that I was concerned that the update would not be as good as the original but after playing some of the originals to get a reminder of what the missions are supposed to do, I don't have that concern anymore. I was playing Jameelah, the AI attack mission and the AI was coming at me from the get-go. And there was only one small field between us!  It's like the decision will be reached by the 5-minute mark. That's way too fast so I reversed the friendly map edges so that the enemy has much further to travel. But no matter what I do, it will end up being better than the old campaign as long as I keep the fun alive.

The old RED OBs were massive as well with you fighting nearly a full battalion of reserve infantry in some missions. I know how to do much better now and with the new tools, I'm confident I can make the missions more challenging even with the enemy at 30-40% of its original strength. 

[Danny03]

double post

Edited January 17 by Danny03

[Danny03]

On 1/14/2024 at 6:52 AM, Paper Tiger said:

ALL of your concerns have been noted and hopefully addressed. There won't be any T-72 Turms in Dinas at all. And the mission in question was Tumah Crossing which was performed by  Company B, the company which attacked Sulit airfield (Syrian airborne) and bore the brunt of the attack in Jameelah. It is a spent formation by that point so another company will be used instead.

Great news, I really happy to hear that you decided to update the "Road to Dinas" campaign paper tiger. just curious how are you gonna make "Sagger Point"  playable with just one attacking company?

If I remember correctly it had a pretty large and dense city on the attackers right flank, which was usually populated by at least with one reinforced company. So, if the player will attack with just one company I believe it would be problematic to achieve a surrender.

note: I won this fantastic map twice with the AI surrendering, by sending 4 platoons to the right and 2 platoons to the left, and placing all the tanks in overwatch. Maybe it is possible to get a win by going only on one attack axis? 

[Paper Tiger]

9 hours ago, Danny03 said:

Great news, I really happy to hear that you decided to update the "Road to Dinas" campaign paper tiger. just curious how are you gonna make "Sagger Point"  playable with just one attacking company?

If I remember correctly it had a pretty large and dense city on the attackers right flank, which was usually populated by at least with one reinforced company. So, if the player will attack with just one company I believe it would be problematic to achieve a surrender.

note: I won this fantastic map twice with the AI surrendering, by sending 4 platoons to the right and 2 platoons to the left, and placing all the tanks in overwatch. Maybe it is possible to get a win by going only on one attack axis? 

I will be reducing the defending force considerably too so the balance of forces will be more in your favour than the 1:3 you faced in the original. (That seemed to be my preferred attack-defence force ratio back in the early days of CMSF1 rather then 3:1 that is the norm.) Now it will be much closer to 1:1. Of course, the numbers are not the whole story as the firepower ratios are in your favour.

Plus there are a lot of new tools provided to the player in the shape of temporarily assigned assets that were not in CMSF. They're brutal when used properly.

And there will be proper AI this time around too.

But if playtesting makes the mission even more implausible, adding a second company to your OB is not an issue. I'll do what needs to be done to make sure the player enjoys a favourable firepower ratio.

[MarkEzra]

Paper Tiger! One of the best scen crafters ever. Erwin gave you some great advice, take some time and relax a bit. Two things about CM scen... They're always slow to develop and great when we finally get to play them.

[Paper Tiger]

I've never been comfortable with praise and have issues accepting compliments when offered but I'm learning.  Thank you. Feedback on the other hand is very welcome. 

I'm actually semi-retired now and have much more time on my hands than I did ten years ago. I did spend the whole day on Sunday getting the entire campaign story worked out, organising it into four phases rather than two and tracking the consequences of a loss through the script until its resolved. An enormous job but I did that while listening to some classical music and prog rock albums from the 70s so it was pleasant. But that's an outlier. Usually, it's 1-2 hours a day, most days which is a good pace. But I am playing Dominions 6 just now so I'm not going to burn out. I am in no hurry to finish Dinas and I want to enjoy the campaign creation process as much as possible.

This game is a game for all moods: I enjoy making and improving the maps, I enjoy scripting AI plans and testing them and I enjoy just playing the game, seeing it all come to life. I even enjoy creating the artwork necessary and writing the briefings when I'm in the mood. They're all different types of activities so when I don't feel like 'working', I just improve the maps.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

Humility is one of the most underrated characteristics in this life.

The hours of enjoyment you've brought so many of us in this community with the content you've created is beyond measure.

You are very worthy of praise and I, for one, thank you for all that you do. You're one of the all time CM greats!

[Paper Tiger]

Let's have a little chat about where everything is at the moment with me and my work. As you've noticed, Hasrabit has not been completed yet and no progress has been made. I've been working on Road to Dinas instead and am beginning to encounter some of the issues that delayed Hasrabit. Namely that these two campaigns are OLD, and I mean really old. They were made when I was still in love with the European theatre in WW2 and many of my map designs were influenced very strongly by ASL scenarios. The inexperience really shines through with these two. Don't get me wrong, they both were innovative in some respect (Hasrabit used core artillery and Dinas had Red core units too.)

Like pretty much everybody else who wasn't on the Beta team, I didn't really know how to make a good AI plan back then and I spent a lot of time making Quick battle maps which I used for Hasrabit. Almost ALL the Hasrabit missions have QB AI plans, namely that I painted large set-up zones for a group and let the AI deploy the units in the group according to the desired parameters. AI attacks used these large blocks as well. I was still using this in Dinas as well so you can imagine that this is completely unworkable now. This all started to change when I joined the Beta team to work on the CMSF Brit module and I was no longer working alone on projects. I got a LOT of very useful criticism from an Australian captain which really shaped what I was to produce in the future. By the time I was developing the NATO campaigns, I had evolved an entirely new system of making AI plans which I still use today. And I started using more sensible force ratios.

The second thing these two campaigns have in common is that you're often attacking at ridiculous odds - attacker v defender ratio is 1:3. While I don't like making them like this anymore, I'm going to stick with it for these reworks because the REDFor is defending the entire map which means you'll always have a local superiority unless you are really far too aggressive. While AI triggers may alleviate some of these issues, overall, the AI is unable to react properly to the player's moves. In addition, your firepower is almost always greater so these numbers are not so much of a problem for me.

As a player, I've slowed down quite a bit and am no longer able to manage much more than a company and some support assets comfortably in Real Time. I also don't particularly want to play a 3+ hour mission either. And Dinas in particular had missons with 2+ mech inf companies with armour in support. This is affecting testing as I just can't motivate myself to manage such monsters in RT. Which brings me to my next point.

A fourth issue is the presence of MOUT elements in most missions which is not always enjoyable and can be a bit repetitive. Dinas has quite a few missions with small MOUT elements - for example, Sagger Point which features a very large hill with emplaced tanks and ATGM teams dug in with great LoS. But there's also a small village at the foot of the hill. Now, with two mech inf companies and tanks in support, this is doable. But I don't want to manage two companies + support anymore so am thinking about having the infantry clear the village and the tanks and support with artillery clear the hill. That's a rather long-winded way of saying that I want to tone down the difficulty of each mission and am concerned about the overall same-ness of many of the missions. A bit of MOUT is a good thing but not everywhere, all the time.

A last point, but an important one, is that these are essentially fantasy campaigns. While a few of the maps are based on real world locations (Strong Stand and Hasrabit in Hasrabit), almost all of them are just made-up. In Dinas, I seemed to be obsessed with river crossings, for example and many of the missions are fights for control of such objectives. This was me still under the influence of some ASL scenarios I played with friends in the 90s. Dinas and Hasrabit are both completely fictional locations and the maps are just a product of my imagination and not on any geographical reality. For example, Lakes in Dinas might work in a northern Syria setting but anyone with Google earth can see that no such feature exists between the Golan and Damascus. There's absolutely nothing I can do about that so I'm just going to remake them and hope that folks just enjoy them for what they are.

My plan is not to change very much with Dinas - I had already reworked some of these maps for Gung Ho! and I have expanded and redeveloped two of these maps for the opening two missions (Petani - Flintstones and High Chaparral - Orchard Road) so that they're not the same. But have resorted to the old Dinas maps for Sabatini (not Detectives) and Where Farmers Dare - (not Bridges) to preserve the feel of the original campaign. Besides, Red v Red is a bit better on smaller maps, especially with Infantry which doesn't spot nearly so well as Blue forces do.

I have redesigned the villages and compounds on the maps to get away from the ASL blocks I used back then. I've found some real world villages in Syria as templates and you'll really see this when you play Petani, Orchard Road, Where Farmers Dare and The Tumah Crossing missions.

For the time being, there will be no core artillery in the campaign and will instead give the player what he needs to get the job done. I might reverse this decision at some point.

I've also replaced the T-72Ms with T-55MVs which, in spite of being older, are just better tanks to work with. Plus I like the look and sound of them.

And that's where I'm at just now. Dinas will get finished first, then I want to rework the Scottish Corridor and then finally finish Hasrabit.

Edited February 2 by Paper Tiger

[Erwin]

It's good to see you are taking it easy now...  

[Vergeltungswaffe]

Now THAT'S an update.

 

[Anthony P.]

On 2/2/2024 at 6:35 AM, Paper Tiger said:

This all started to change when I joined the Beta team to work on the CMSF Brit module and I was no longer working alone on projects. I got a LOT of very useful criticism from an Australian captain which really shaped what I was to produce in the future. By the time I was developing the NATO campaigns, I had evolved an entirely new system of making AI plans which I still use today. And I started using more sensible force ratios.

I'd actually be very interested to read more about that if you've got the time to write another "little chat" about it!