Updating Hasrabit

[Paper Tiger]

As some of you will already be aware, I've decided to fast track revising my ancient 'Hasrabit' campaign and I've been busy with it since last weekend. I tried out the very first mission, Ambush, and didn't like it and my initial reaction was to abandon the original opening map and create an all-new Ambush map. I started work on it on Wednesday and I finished it earlier this afternoon. It's really big and very detailed but, well, I suspect you can already see why this map isn't going to work in this campaign...

It just doesn't look like any of the other maps in the campaign. It actually looks like the maps I made for the NATO campaigns. So I'm going to use this in Retribution which will come a bit later. I'm not teasing you by showing that in a thread purporting to be about Hasrabit, it's just that it's the end result of 3 days of work and I'm very happy with the end result. I'd LIKE to use it but the other maps would all look utterly incongruous beside it and I certainly don't want to redo them all.

Hasrabit is an old campaign and so I'm not going to change very much with it because otherwise, what you'd get wouldn't be 'Hasrabit' - it would be a whole new campaign using similar forces. So it's going to be an update instead. I'm going to improve the old maps for sure and make them look more Syrian, adding water and bridges for example and redesign the compounds and villages so that they look much more realistic. And bye bye to the vast glowing fields of wheat, the lush, green grass and the dense forests that made the maps look more like NW Europe. I'll expand a few of them, particularly the ones with armour clashes but otherwise, they will all stay pretty much the same. I'm also going to stick with the totally made-up background story as again, this is Hasrabit and there's no such place or governorate and so I'm just going to let it be. 

I've also decided to keep the original Ambush mission but take out the artillery strike on your starting positions and also remove all the trees and the mud which was everywhere and replace them with orchards. That huge yard will also get removed and redone with something that looks more Syrian. I suspect that the river will also have to go but we'll see how I feel once real play-testing starts because the bridges are a pretty bad bottleneck which the AI can't handle very well..

Which brings me to what will definitely change - the AI. I was rather surprised to find that the AI attacks in almost every mission and that's going to be fun to do. The old AI plans are atrocious though as are the set-up and positioning of the AI's units. The player set-ups look really terrible too with very narrow set-up are areas with units all crammed together so all that will change. I now have 16 groups to work with and can give them far more orders with some special ones which were not in the game the last time I played. And, of course, some triggers.

So, that's the plan as it stands. I've made up the new core units file and I've already started improving the existing maps. So, I'm going to import the new units and get down to some serious play in against the old AI plans and OBs before I rip them out so that I know the original intention behind the mission and try to stay faithful to it. I'll probably add shots of the 'finished' maps here as I go. I suspect that by the time I've finished this revision, I'll have relearned all the skills I formerly had and will be able to do a better job of the new campaign I plan to follow it with.

[Halmbarte]

Tag...

H

[BorderDragon]

Exciting! Hasrabit was one of the first RvR campaigns I've played and is still very memorable. It offers a unique experience where the player is forced to be creative when given a force of mixed technical capabilities. I remember fondly of attaching a special forces squad to my reserve platoons to help spot in the night during the second mission, and, in the third mission, using a combination of smoke and berm drills in order to use the TURMS-T tanks to its maximum efficiency, then using them to help spot. It was a first where tanks, of all things, were used to recon for my IFVs and infantry... 

Anyways, can't wait to see where you take this campaign. 

[Paper Tiger]

That all sounds very familiar as I've been working on the opening two missions over the last couple of days. That reassures me that the decision to keep it as much like the original Hasrabit as possible is the best way to do things.

Anyway, I had originally planned to redo Ambush entirely and made up a whole new map which you can see at the top of this thread. I'm glad I decided to stick with the old map as I've been able to redesign it using the new ideas I had that inspired the  map above. Bear in mind that this is a NIGHT mission and so I've switched to daylight for screenshots.

Here's the old map:

Not a bad map at all but I wanted to make the opener a bit more realistic so here's the new Ambush map

And here it is from a different viewpoint

The two sides of the river are both real world locations but not close with each other. Gone are most of the trees and the elevations have been reduced substantially. It's mostly finished now. I expect I'll rework one or two areas as playtesting goes on. The large empty areas are necessary though so the one you see in the first picture won't change. They also look quite good at night anyway. As you can see, the large workshop area has been replaced with more realistic looking compounds and there is now a small hamlet on the other side of the river. The map has been extended somewhat but it's still quite small. Since it's a hazy night mission, it feels big enough though. And I've erased about half a million flavour objects from the original map. I'm definitely of the opinion that less is more in that respect.

And that brings me to the OBs. Both have been stripped down slightly with the Special Forces only having two platoons and some support and the REDFor has been similarly stripped down. Otherwise they'd just be far too OP for the player to fight against. The v4.0 engine allows me to do things with the AI on attack that I was never able to do before and it's a game changer. So OBs have been reduced by about 33% for both sides and the mission has been extended as well to allow for more time for the situation to develop.

I usually return to the opening mission of a campaign several times as I get deeper into it so there will be more than one AI attack plan by the time this is finished. Now it's time to get playtesting mission 2, Strong Stand.

[MOS:96B2P]

2 hours ago, Paper Tiger said:

The v4.0 engine allows me to do things with the AI on attack that I was never able to do before and it's a game changer. So OBs have been reduced by about 33% for both sides and the mission has been extended as well to allow for more time for the situation to develop.

+1.  Lots of interesting things can be done with the AI.  Looking forward to this. 

[Paper Tiger]

Well, it's been a really busy week this last week and because it's the last week of Ramadan, it's quite noisy at night, fireworks, drums etc, (silent through the day though) and so sleep suffers a bit. And that means I can't really focus to do a good job of AI planning. So instead, I've been reworking the existing maps to improve each of them and make the compounds and villages much more realistic. They're all real world places in Syria although from wildly different parts but the difference it makes in night and day. While they look like NATO maps now, they still strongly resemble the original maps which is a considerable improvement. And it hasn't required an enormous amount of work either. The best change made so far is The Guards Counterattack which looks pretty realistic in the moonlight. Screenshots will follow later but boy, is that a brutal mission!

That map has been expanded quite a bit too as has the Barrier mission which has been reworked as a Prevent enemy forces from exiting the map edge mission. I'm happy with how the changes look too. They make the map look more interesting.

Another mission that has been substantially reworked is the Buying the Farm mission. I was looking for a large warehouse feature in Google Earth and had the idea to make it a railway yard instead and so the entire thing has been redrawn, trees removed and elevation changes substantially reduced and rail lines added with bridges over them. It looks really good and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I've added a couple of new missions to the campaign to create a story line with consequences that matter including a new opener, which is tiny, but a lot of fun (for me anyway) and should allow the player to indulge himself letting rip with the heavy weapons in a civilian area, a welcome change from the usual Blue v red restriction. Called 'Overkill', winning this mission deters the civilian population from rising up and joining in the revolution at least for a few hours anyway. This allows me to create a variant of the opener which is much easier if you win Overkill. This required a new map but it's very small and I finished it this morning. Funnily enough, it started out as an experiment to see how the Special forces AA, Grenade and HMG vehicles work and I was so happy with the result that i decided to make this the new opener instead. So you have a single platoon and some new vehicles to play around with.

Immediately after that, I decided to do a whole new map for Heavy Metal because I just felt I couldn't use the old one. It was too small and too artificial for what I need but I found a location to the SE of Damascus which fits the bill perfectly for a large mech/tank clash and have got it 50% done. It's an arid map so it's pretty open and flat but there are lots of berms which break LoS up.

I have created the core unit file and done the admin for the campaign so that I know who goes where and when and have imported the new units into all the existing missions except heavy Metal so I've done a LOT this week, just no new AI plans which is the real work. With regards to the core units, I've decided to try out a couple of platoons of T-90s to accompany the Republican Guard. Now you have just two mech companies with attachments instead of three but I figure the T-90s will more than compensate for them. if they're too OP, I'll swap them with the T-72 TURMS again. There are three SF companies but one is designated for a special series of two missions on the same map (the second new mission) which it's unlikely to survive so there will be one company with attachments in each mission, usually Reserve Infantry and some tanks from the very bottom of the barrel, just like original Hasrabit.

So, Ramadan ends mid-week next week and I have a week's holiday so the sleep deficit should get paid back quite quickly. Then I'll be able to focus on doing AI plans and testing done on some of these missions. I guess I'll have a better idea of how long this is going to take after we get back to work after the May Day holiday. I'm hoping it won't be too long as I'd like to have this wrapped up by mid-June. That's probably a tad optimistic but we'll see.

[Paper Tiger]

Here's the new opening map: Overkill. Once again, it's a night mission but I've set the timer to 7am so that you can actually see something:

It's a small map with very small forces on both sides. While it's intended to be easy, you can't just rush in, you'll need a reasonable plan.

It's a real world place too. I was tempted to expand the map to include all of the terrain around that strange round hill to the east of the village but I'm beginning to get tired of doing map work for this campaign and want to get stuck into doing the AI and actual play-testing.

That's the all-new Heavy Metal map. It's another real-world place, and yes, there are large open areas with orchards scattered around within these berms. I expect it will change a bit as I test it but that should do the job.

 

Now I'm reworking the Saudara map and expanding the Hasrabit map considerably. The former is a completely fictional map so I can do what I want with that but Hasrabit is real and so it's getting expanded considerably to include the open, farming terrain to the east of the city as well as the compounds. I guess I'll have most of that map work done before the holiday begins.

Edited April 17, 2023 by Paper Tiger

[Paper Tiger]

That's Ramadan finally and officially over so I can probably expect to get an uninterrupted night's sleep once again. When I'm a bit sleepy, i tend to spend more time working on maps and I've now updated all the maps for the campaign. I even reworked the 'Breakout' which I was kind of dreading doing as it was the most ASL-like of all the maps. I also got 'Overkill' finalised last night so that one's behind me. Now I'm on holiday for about 10 days and today I got started on serious AI planning. This is the plan going forward.

I'm going to focus on getting all the Special Forces missions up and working so that I can compile them and test them together. This shouldn't take long as the maps for all of them are now done and I've already imported all the core forces and placed the enemy forces. Today, I worked exclusively on 'Ambush' and it became very obvious early in serious testing that the river and the bridges were going to have to go. The AI really struggles on the attack even in the best of circumstances so add two bottlenecks across a river and have a mech infantry company try an assault across it and you're really flogging a dead horse. So the river was removed as well as the bridges and it plays much, much better. This is the type of mission that I'm likely to play over and over again while working on the campaign, short and small, fun but dangerous, so it'll get iterated upon as testing goes on.

Tomorrow, I'll get started on Strong Stand and the airfield missions and that will be all the Phase I SF missions done. However, the Phase II missions are almost entirely new because of the extensive map reworks as well as me rationalising the campaign so that there is some consistency to the friendly board edges. so will take a lot more time to test.

Here's the old Breakout map:

Here's the new one from the same angle.

And from the other end

Gone are the elevations, the mud, the foliage and about half a million flavour objects. I've added a river (the player has to move across it so there's no worries about the AI being able to navigate across it). Gone is the massive, boring workshed complex and it's been replaced with a real-world farm complex, only a few kilometers west of 'Hasrabit' as it happens. I was lucky to find a large, square farmhouse to replace the old one too so I'm happy with the result. 

[Paper Tiger]

Strong Stand and Adan Airfield are both done now, AI plans made and tested and victories scored in both missions. With extensive use of triggers in both missions, they make the Adan mission feel alive with units reacting to your moves. They're scripted not to be 'John Wick' efficient but to behave realistically. But they'll still fight.  

This is Adan Airfield. I've reworked the Minakh Airfield map and made a whole new mission from it. There will be two versions, the Attack version, which will be the new opener (because the result will have consequences for the rest of Phase I) and the Defend version in Phase II which is intended to be a real tough one and will similarly have consequences for all the Phase II missions.

I suspect some folks are going to rage at me for giving you 40 minutes to capture the airfield. I just forced a surrender with just over 9 minutes on the clock so it's more than doable.

Here's the Strong Stand map:

It's been extended a fair bit and the compounds have all been reworked to make them more realistic.

That's not a small amount of work but it's all done and the mission appears to be doable too. The original version was a real dog to play, 2+hours fighting in the dark against a numerically superior mechanised force that was well trained and equipped. It's a Light Infantry action and Special forces are just not that good against mechanised forces and, to be honest, i was finding the prospect of testing it a bit daunting so I decided to rip it all apart and start again with a whole new Red OB with new AI plans. Now it's a lot of fun to play.

So that's all the Special Forces phase I missions finished. So it's on to Phase II now which will take a bit longer as the maps have been changed so substantially that they'll need a lot of testing to get right. The Phase II missions are

Adan Airfield (Defend)

Buying the Farm

Breakout, and

Hasrabit.

After that, I'll get to the Republican Guards missions.

Edited April 22, 2023 by Paper Tiger

[Paper Tiger]

I have to say that the game engine has improved massively while I've been absent. Today, I really got my teeth into my first proper AI assault and the new orders really, really make a huge difference to the AI's effectiveness. It's still nowhere near as good as a human opponent but it's about as good as an AI can get and it means that I can keep the numbers roughly even, with BlueFor outnumbering RedFor. Of course, a substantial part of that force is going to get wiped

In the original 'Buying the Farm' mission, a small force of reserve infantry started in the centre of the map and were attacked immediately by a mech company. Later, when we were able to add Artiilery Fire zones to our AI plans, I subjected the poor sods to a massive artillery barrage. In the meantime, your Special Forces were building up and getting ready to come to the rescue.

I wanted to maintain as much of that as possible but I was struggling to get the AI to attack a well-defended railway station surrounded by berms. No matter how big the barrage (and it was getting really stupid) when the attackers crossed the berm, they were mowed down. There was nothing for your Special Forces to do so the berms had to go and what a difference that made! Now the AI artillery barrage has been massively reduced to sensible proportions and the AI clears the station very efficiently with few casualties. I tested and tweaked the AI attack all morning and early afternoon before finally bringing in the core forces and play testing.

It's still 'Buying the Farm' but it's tougher and more fun, at least for me. I might have to rename the mission though as it's a railway station instead of a large square block of 1-story buildings, perhaps 'Repo Men' as the AI takes control of the station and it's your job to repossess what was stolen. Now I just need to make sure that it's winnable without being too bloody, a three-hour slog or too demanding of your core artillery assets. As before, you'll have some very shaky reserve infantry forces and some bottom of the barrel tanks to help you win the fight. 

[Paper Tiger]

I've had a really bad cold this week and didn't make the tremendous progress I was hoping for but regardless, I soldiered on and got something done while I was sniffling and coughing and dosed up with the really potent medicine they prescribe out here such non life threatening illnesses. (I'm not complaining though) When I'm feeling really, really crap, I work on maps as it requires almost no concentration so I started adding some new terrain features to the Guard Counterattack mission (that name's going to have to change - it's SO ASL!) as well as making other similar tweaks to other missions, in particular to the Breakout mission which I'll talk about below.

But the MAIN work has been on the two Phase II Special Forces missions, 'Buying the Farm' and 'Breakout'. Since observing the AI carry out its plan is quite easy work when you're feeling sick, I can settle back with a cup of tea and make  notes and the necessary adjustments. I had big ambitions for the AI attack in the Farm mission but I have had to temper them as the AI really, REALLY can't make any sort of attack across a bridge. I can't get them to manage the crossing unopposed either as it's an absolute mess to watch as the vehicles just get confused and just mill about. I really don't like to undo hours of work planning and adjusting AI plans to reposition the forces for the assault and was even trying to justify leaving it in to myself as making the player's job easier. But that's just a poor excuse for crap scripting.  But it's not for nothing as I will be working on the AI for the Republican Guards later and there are no bottlenecks on their maps so the experience will serve me well when I get around to that.

'Breakout' is a much simpler beast to script. It's another 'living' battlefield experience but you'll be on the clock on this one - find the AA guns, knock them out and exit your forces from the map. Getting the timing right on this one will be challenging - it's not a hard mission to kill the guns but getting off the map is a different story. While having too much time will just make it a filler mission.

[Paper Tiger]

Not going to lie, I'm kind of burned out on doing infantry-centric missions at this point. I don't know if it's the cold and the resulting poor quality sleep or if I've really just played too much of the same kind of missions for too long. Whatever the reason is, I know that I just can't face playtesting either Farm or Breakout any further without doing something else instead. Fortunately,  the campaign has a mix of Infantry (Special Forces) missions and Mech (Republican Guard) missions to mix things up for the player so I'm going to avail myself of that option as well and do some work on the Guards missions for a few days before returning to work these two.

Besides, working on the AI attack plan on the Farm mission has got me enthused about reworking the AI in these set of missions. The AI attack plans in The Guards Counterattack mission are abysmal. (Although there are four of them and some are very aggressive which compensates a bit) You're still fighting an entire battalion in the original version of this mission which is just too much. While I've already removed an entire company from the AI's OB, that might change if the T-90s are just too OP for the AI to go up against. The tools exist now to make the AI much more effective on the attack (though nowhere near as devious as a real opponent) and I've got far more experience with the editor now so I don't need to rely on maxing out the AI's OB to create a challenge.

I seem to recall sneaking along the board edges to get LoS on the enemy in the earliest versions of this game and I don't want to be doing that again. I'm looking for a better experience this time around.

I'm a bit disappointed because I'd rather hoped to have almost all the SF missions in the bag before I return to work next week but what's the big rush? I need to spend quite a bit of time playing each of these missions properly before I can make it available for the community so I'm just going to go with the flow and accept that it's time to work on the Guards missions for a few days instead. It's not like it's time wasted.

Edited April 28, 2023 by Paper Tiger

[Paper Tiger]

Just a quick post to reassure you that I am still working on this. However, Age Of Wonders 4 dropped last week and I've spent all my game time playing that and will likely be playing a lot of it for some time to come. I'll be working on this in the evenings in the future as I don't generally 'play' games then. It's also good because it prevents burnout from being a thing.

Edited May 7, 2023 by Paper Tiger

[Paper Tiger]

Well, thanks to Age of Wonders 4, not an enormous amount of progress has been made but I've been working on the first two missions and have finally gotten Overkill and Ambush to where I want them. I'm considering taking out the Adan airfield missions as they are not part of the original campaign and the second one involves a large AI attack and these attack missions are a lot of work to get right.

I've toned down the difficulty of Ambush quite a bit - the new AI fire plans mean that the player will get ripped to pieces by the superior firepower of the attacker. It's an ambush mission - the AI is not supposed to know you're there and to blunder into your well-set ambush. Best guesses aside, I don't really know when the player will launch his ambush so I'm not going to script in fire plans for AI groups and just let them start firing once they know the enemy is there the old fashioned way. But I'm taking this experience with me to the Montebourg rework to make German AI attacks much more effective.

Testing the Guards Counterattack mission is quite hard work because while it's an AI attack, it's also quite a long mission as you have to counter attack, obviously. The opening AI assault is brutal and I'm happy with that but I have yet to win it - the T-90s are not as OP as I'd feared so I'm going to stick with them. The Barrier mission is a meeting arrangement and is going to be a lot of work testing too. I've reworked the original map and extended it quite a bit to improve LoS and added some terrain features to an otherwise barren map. A lot of apparently arid Syria land appears to be worked by farmers so I've worked a couple of features in from real world locations to make it look more interesting.

The AI is defending in Hill 142 so that won't be nearly so much work to finalise. Obviously, Heavy Metal is a complete reboot and another meeting engagement and then there is the final Guards mission, Sadara, which is like Hill 142 but much bigger.

The final mission, Hasrabit, is another large AI attack and quite a beast to manage so there's still a lot of work to do there.

So, it's a lot of work but I'm slowly working my way through it. Slow and steady wins the race (Tell that to Usain Bolt)

Edited May 28, 2023 by Paper Tiger

[Lmurfe]

Would just like to send a thank you very much and good luck on this project.

I truly enjoyed everything you have made sofar and will probably love to replay Directors Cut Hasrabit

You campaign creators are in my eyes the next coming of christ!

[Paper Tiger]

Well, work on this is going much more slowly than I thought. I haven't given up on it but have to confess that I find that playing Red v Red isn't as much fun as playing Blue v Red - it takes absolutely ages to call in air support and high calibre artillery, nearly 30 minutes which is a long wait. Recon is also not as much fun as a result so I'm doing a bit of a rethink on how to approach certain missions.

The sheer number of AI attacks in this campaign is pretty overwhelming as they're hard to do well and I prefer to have more than one plan. Almost every mission is an AI attack or a meeting engagement (even worse!). I've already turned Strong Stand from a meeting to a player attack and will do the same with Hill 142.Anyway, I opened up a few of the maps and got back to work this morning and have a better idea where to go with this. It's going to get finished later rather than sooner.

[Paper Tiger]

A quick update on progress - I've been trying to decide how best to get this project moving and one of the reasons why it's proving hard to do is that some of the new missions are just too damned hard and just not fun for me to play. I don't enjoy playing really, really hard missions any more and prefer something doable with proper planning and a little bit of luck. So I'm dialling down the difficulty in some of the missions so that they're not all hard.

I thought I'd get this finished quite quickly as it's already a working and finished campaign and just needed some AI improvements but it's turned out to be much more work than that. I forgot that pretty much every mission has an AI attack and they're a lot of work to get right. I want to do a good job with this and try to use as many of the improvements to the game engine since Hasrabit was released. I did a quick and dirty v2 back in the days to add AI fire plans and well, I was a bit over-zealous with that feature and that has required quite a bit of tinkering alone.

Apart from the finale, 'Hasrabit', the Special forces missions, both Phase 1 and Phase 2, are all pretty much done with new OBs for both sides, AI plans and very extensive map reworks. The first three missions of the campaign are tested and finalised now and am trying to get the Phase 1 Republican Guards missions into a similar state. As I mentioned in an earlier post, almost all the RG missions are AI attacks or meeting engagements and they're really hard to do. 'The Guards Counterattack' mission is almost there but I've decided to make 'The Barrier' mission an AI-defense mission instead of the meeting engagement it was. Now it's the AI that is forming the titular barrier and that should make it easier as it doesn't take so long to devise a good defence with 2-3 AI plans.

I've been scratching my head what do with Hill 142  - the delay calling in Syrian air strikes is appalling and so I'm pondering redoing the entire mission to skip the long recon phase. There was no Syrian air support in the original version and so adding it has changed the balance. I find it only works well in very slow missions with long waits for things to happen or if it is available from the get go in which case, it's often too OP.

As for the Phase 2 missions, there are only two RG missions and they're both proving tough nuts to revise. 

Heavy Metal - now I've decided to go back and use the original map with some tweaks like I have done with The Guards Counterattack for this one to avoid having to redo it completely. That means I will be able to tweak the existing AI plans instead of crafting whole new ones. I will keep the new map shown above for a future project - I have some ideas but I'll hold on until after this gets finished.

Saudara - I've completely redeveloped the small built up area and expanded the map but otherwise it's not going to change that much. 

That's where I am at the moment. I have to admit that I'm enjoying the newer, easier versions and the ideas are coming along slowly for the Hill mission. There's no rush to get this finished, there's no release date to consider so I can take my time. If it gets too much again, I'll maybe do some work on the German version of Gung Ho! to reinspire me.

Edited August 10, 2023 by Paper Tiger

[Lmurfe]

I remember save scumming every single mission since if you lost a single squad you were pretty much at a loss for the rest of the campaign. Losing a squad was pretty easy I recall since alot of the fighting was door to door. I dont remember if I finished your campaign but I think I gave up in the later parts due to losing to many men and only having a couple of squads with like 15% combat power still in the fight. I DO remember that I loved the campaign even thou I would say it was impossible if you didnt save scum (atleast for me) and would love to replay it with some overhauling especially if you add a couple of refit and rearm points through out the campaign. 

 

Im a real sucker for RED campaigns so keep up the great work and I hope to see it release soon!

 

Is it possible to make the core units be replenished by lesser quality troops? Like if you lose 50% of a special forces platoon you recieve 60% of a mech inf platoon to replace them and so on?

Edited August 10, 2023 by Lmurfe

[Paper Tiger]

The campaign covers about 30 hours of real time so there won't be any replacements for losses. However, the Special Forces don't fight alone in most of their missions so I'd suggest you let the help do the door-to-door.  There's no option (that I'm aware of) for replacements to be of lower quality. It's a good suggestion though. Fortunately, you can combine two or more depleted units into one large squad now with the new engine so at least you're not stuck with several 1-man squads running around in later missions anymore.

The Guards are on their own in their missions though so I'm trying to keep the difficulty of their missions down. Once I've got the RG missions all crafted, I will compile the missions into mini campaigns to test them to see if the campaign is viable.

I prefer the Red v Red myself but I'm missing hearing artillery and air strike call-in voice acting when playing and the Syrians also have very poor co-ordination of artillery and air strikes in particular. After Gung Ho! and the new German version I'm working on, the contrast is striking - the voice acting helps to create the impression of a living battlefield and the call-in times are really short, sometimes just 2 minutes for battalion mortars and less than 10 minutes for sir strikes called in with an air controller. But the actual balance of forces is better and there are fewer constraints  on your actions in a mission so that you don't have to worry about civilian casualties so I really let rip with Red v Red MOUT. 

[Paper Tiger]

Well, well. It turns out that a single platoon of T-90s isn't really that much of an upgrade. I thought they'd be much tougher in action and so decided that a single platoon would suffice where a company of T-72 TURMS served before. Not even close. Well, that's going to make the Guards missions a tad easier anyway.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

That mirrors my experience.

T-90's are nothing great and what we've seen recently in the real world seems to bear that out.

[37mm]

22 hours ago, Paper Tiger said:

I prefer the Red v Red myself but I'm missing hearing artillery and air strike call-in voice acting when playing... the voice acting helps to create the impression of a living battlefield and the call-in times are really short

Most sound mods these days fill such gaps.

I myself try to ensure there's something for every nation calling in artillery... be they Syrians or Afghans or Italians or, for H&E, even Vietnamese.

[Paper Tiger]

As I said elsewhere, I have been a bit stumped as to how to proceed with this. My initial plan was not to change too much so that it was still Hasrabit but the problem is that it is such an old campaign that that is no longer possible. This campaign was made way back with the earliest versions of the first CMSF engine and I was still learning the craft of scenario design. Some of the AI work was abysmal and many of the maps were basically ASL-inspired, especially the compounds. And so many trees!

As you can see from the screenshots I've already posted, I've spent quite a bit of time updating the maps so that they are much more 'modern' with realistic compounds and villages, much more like you'll find in USMC Gung Ho! But I have been struggling to find a  way to make The Guards Counterattack mission workable. I tried toning down the AI attack and that worked - a bit. The problem is that the map is too small and in the time the AI has, it can wipe out everything and occupy all the best positions so that any counterattack is going to be a tough and bloody affair for the player, regardless of the superiority of his equipment and training.

The AI also attacks with two mech companies (previously three) with tanks in support and they absolutely murder the defensive forces even without the somewhat generous artillery support. The notion of removing one mech company didn't appeal to me at all as I want to keep as much of the old as possible. So, what to do?

Well, the solution is quite simple - I need to extend the RED map edge considerably further so that the AI has much further to go. This also allows me to add a second, frontal defensive line to the  map and have the first mech company dismount to attack that line while the second waits and then goes after the back line. This appears to work very well indeed and means that the AI will still be fighting in front of the ridge when your Guards arrive. Perfect. Not only that but it's fun to play again as it's not OTT difficult.

Obviously, that means this is going to take a bit longer to get finished but it's back on track. It is also re-inspiring me and giving me some fresh ideas about how to develop future missions in the campaign.

Edited January 5 by Paper Tiger

[Erwin]

Looking forward to this. 

 

[Paper Tiger]

9 hours ago, Erwin said:

Looking forward to this. 

 

I'm going to take a bit more time with this one. It's currently an evening project as I'm back to work properly next week and so can't devote so much time to it again. But this is what I'm focusing on for now.

After this particular revision is done, I think it will have to be something all-new, at least from the mission design side - I have a folder of maps from the Canadian campaign ready to adapt for such a project. I think Retribution would be a good idea - basically Red v UNCONs and eventually BLUE if/when there's a NATO intervention. This is a dream at the moment though but I like the idea of doing something 'new' rather than just updating what I've already done.