Dinas Rework in progress

[Paper Tiger]

I'll post my progress on this campaign in this thread from now on. For those who don't know anything about this campaign, it was my second Red v Red campaign made for CMSF way, way back in the days of the release of the USMC module and its setting is a Syrian civil war scenario where some Syrian generals attempt a coup. The premise is that the coup is launched with thunderclap surprise and so rebel forces are put into action as soon as they mobilise. While a good number of divisions will 'wait and see', the regime has a number of divisions that are 100% loyal so the rebels are on the clock as the more time they take to accomplish missions, the more time the regime has to assemble its own forces to oppose them.

This means that time limits will be reasonably strict to reflect that pressure and so casualties are to be expected to accomplish your goals. However, the campaign gives you quite a large core force of which one company and support (usually tanks) is drawn to perform the mission.

One point is that some of these maps are very large and so it would seem like it's a bit of a stretch just to have a single company when a battalion would be better. For example,

A single company? To take THAT?! Are you HIGH?" And this...

In both these situations, the friendly forces arrive in small packages and so the action unfolds over time. My plan is not to change the nature of the campaign too much and keep the player's forces small and have lots of artillery support as well as as many 'cool' toys as I can find in the Syrian OB to play around with.

Edited February 4 by Paper Tiger

[David Jaros]

I would be happy to play it if do not use Syrian bmp's with thermal vision and rest of broken stuff 

[Paper Tiger]

That first picture is from 'Suib', mission 4 of the campaign, which I'm currently doing the AI work for. (I'm working on missions 3 and 4 just now with 1 and 2 more or less finished) As you can see, it's quite built up and so you'd expect at least a battalion to take that objective in under 2 hours. However, it's not quite the herculean task that you'd think and you can do it methodically.

 

The second picture is the opening mission, Petani, which some will have seen before in Gung Ho!. It's been expanded and improved even further with a small village complex further up the hill but it still works with a single company and tanks in support. There is a small farmhouse complex atop the hill overlooking the villages below and so your first objective is to capture that in preparation for the main assault on the objective. While waiting, your forces should attempt to interdict any attempts to reinforce the village down that road. Therefore, missions like this will be broken down into 2-3 smaller 'chapters' rather than dividing the map up. Of course, you will be free to do what you want with what you've got and not follow the 'story'.

[Paper Tiger]

There are no NIGHT missions but a couple start shortly before sunrise and maybe one on a clear night with a full moon which looks beautiful  but I haven't decided yet. There are BMP-1s and they seem to work fine in the low light. Otherwise, it's daylight (or moonlight) all the way.

[Danny03]

Almost forgot to ask you: Are you reworking the linear version of the campaign? If I remember correctly it had a dynamic version too, which I never played.

[Paper Tiger]

12 hours ago, Danny03 said:

Almost forgot to ask you: Are you reworking the linear version of the campaign? If I remember correctly it had a dynamic version too, which I never played.

The dynamic version. I forgot all about the linear version, you win? - you go to the next mission or you lose? - game over. Is that right? Very simple campaign structure. There will only be one version as the original campaign was made back in the good old days of dial-up Internet connections (50-60kb/s - the fun!) and so a 14M download was better than a 64M download. I think most of us have progressed beyond that by now. 

[Paper Tiger]

A quick observation of how projects evolve as I develop them. I am working on missions 2 and 3 this week, Sabatani and Suib and they're both infantry-centric assaults on an urban area defended by infantry attacking across a river. The two missions were so similar that I went to bed last night thinking that I'd just ditch Sabatani. But when I woke up this morning, I decided to remove the river from the Sabatani map. Once I did that, I liked it a lot better but I took a look at the old ASL-style compound to the north of the urban area and decided that had to be redone as well. I need things to look more realistic when I play now.

Here's the OLD Sabatani map with the ASL compounds to the north of the road as well as the dry river bed and bridge.

So I went to Google Earth and scanned around and found a small but rather interesting area in the vicinity of the Golan and so I deleted the original buildings, walls trees etc to the north of the main road and replaced them with an all-new farm complex and a tiny lake which I really like the look of. So Sabatani has been saved from the chopping block by a morning's map work. This afternoon, after work, I fired up the mission and gave it a spin and it looks like it will be sufficiently different from Suib to justify keeping it in. And there's no river crossing battle here either.

Here's the reworked map with the new farm complex and the small lake. (This is a real place). I've also broken up the HUGE grain fields and replaced them with some other crops. Instead of the empty ground, there are some sheep/goat pastures as well to the front of the small town which fill the map out quite nicely.

Edited February 6 by Paper Tiger

[OldSarge]

The new Sabatani map looks really nice! I suspect those fields are going to be hotly contested. 

[Danny03]

On 2/6/2024 at 6:09 AM, Paper Tiger said:

The dynamic version. I forgot all about the linear version, you win? - you go to the next mission or you lose? - game over. Is that right? Very simple campaign structure. There will only be one version as the original campaign was made back in the good old days of dial-up Internet connections (50-60kb/s - the fun!) and so a 14M download was better than a 64M download. I think most of us have progressed beyond that by now. 

Ah, so just to be clear, my comment about the lack of force due to attrition in "The Tumah crossing" mission might be irrelevant since I played only the linear version of the campaign. I avoided the dynamic version after reading the briefing  

On a side note, I'm not exactly sure how the dynamic version works. Correct me if I'm wrong on this: If I am "too successful" in a few consecutive missions I get one (maybe even a few in a row) impossible mission/s.  Could you elaborate a bit on the spike difficulty in that case: You already mentioned some early air support to the AI. Is a company of veterans replacing one of  the companies of conscripts for the defenders possible? Better ATGM teams?.

Is the difficulty spike applies to only one or a few missions in a row? 

 

Danny

 

 

 

 

 

[Paper Tiger]

At the moment, if you win every mission in the dynamic version, you get the optimal experience - you're achieving all your objectives in good time and so the regime is off-foot and reacting to your moves. There might be one or two missions where the optimal version will have something special but I haven't decided that yet as I want to get all the vanilla missions done and then get the variants made. Since the variants will usually be harder than the optimal version, you will want to try and keep on the winning track but any such 'punishment' will be a rare event.

My plan is to divide the campaign into four phases of 3-4 missions and each phase culminates in a finale which you MUST win to stay in the campaign.

 

Phase 1 has 3 missions - Shock and Awe

Phase 2 has 4 mission - Red Awakening

Phase 3 has 4 missions - The Crossings

Phase 4 has 3 missions - Agony of Doom

 

The phase names are provisional. You can see some ASL influence there as well.

For phase 1 - Shock and Awe, you will have to win Sabatani or the campaign ends. Losing will usually mean less time to accomplish a later mission and they will have an additional influence of the phase finale. So losing a phase 1 mission reduces the mission length by 10 minutes per loss - lose both missions and the finale is 20 minutes shorter. There are other effects on the finale as well. The experience of Sagger Point will differ if you lose a phase 2 mission so you might have air support or the enemy might have air strikes depending on how you did in the earlier missions.

Winning the phase finale means all is reset so if you were behind schedule in phase 1, a win in Sabatani resets the clock and you're back on track.

In phase 4, losing any mission will end the campaign before the finale.

That's the plan at the moment but it will be a while before all the missions are completed and tested before I get around to the variants. but this simpler structure means that I can make each mission have more impact on following missions without turning the campaign script into a nightmare of variants.

Edited February 7 by Paper Tiger

[Danny03]

Thanks for the fast reply Paper tiger. 

So the dynamic campaign is beatable by players that aspire to achieve as many enemy "surrenders"  as possibly, and you are not punished for this kind of success. I think this unfortunate misunderstanding made me to avoid the original dynamic campaign.

A little request if possible: Please don't cut out the "review your force condition" mini missions between the phases. Really liked that feature

[Erwin]

Something that needs to  be made very clear in the briefings is if and when resupply occurs for the offboard arty as well as the onmap units including repairs).  Unless I suppose you want the player to be unsure about ammo resupply.

We already chatted how that has been confusing in other campaigns.  EG:  In the current German campaign am playing it says that offmap arty is shared with another mission.  One assumes it will be mission 2.  But, Mission 2 has fully supplied arty.  So, presumably ammo will be short in another mission.  But, one has no idea which until one starts it.  (Also, in the German campaign it's unclear if the ammo in Mission 2 needs to be conserved at it is shared with another mission.)  

[Paper Tiger]

11 hours ago, Danny03 said:

Thanks for the fast reply Paper tiger. 

So the dynamic campaign is beatable by players that aspire to achieve as many enemy "surrenders"  as possibly, and you are not punished for this kind of success. I think this unfortunate misunderstanding made me to avoid the original dynamic campaign.

A little request if possible: Please don't cut out the "review your force condition" mini missions between the phases. Really liked that feature

Well, I can kill two birds with one stone here. Including the Depot missions where you can review your core units is definitely doable, in fact, it's a very easy ask. I wasn't planning on having it in the new campaign because it's not necessary anymore but you're not the only person who liked this feature so why not? Bit there will only be one per group and not after each phase as I'll explain in a bit. I'll have to update the depot map as it offends me a bit.

 

9 hours ago, Erwin said:

Something that needs to  be made very clear in the briefings is if and when resupply occurs for the offboard arty as well as the onmap units including repairs).  Unless I suppose you want the player to be unsure about ammo resupply.

We already chatted how that has been confusing in other campaigns.  EG:  In the current German campaign am playing it says that offmap arty is shared with another mission.  One assumes it will be mission 2.  But, Mission 2 has fully supplied arty.  So, presumably ammo will be short in another mission.  But, one has no idea which until one starts it.  (Also, in the German campaign it's unclear if the ammo in Mission 2 needs to be conserved at it is shared with another mission.)  

At the moment, each company performs 2 or 3 missions at most throughout the campaign so there won't be much in the way of ammo resupply between missions. I have yet to decide where this will occur but if I'm using the depot missions, that would be the logical time for an ammo resupply. Even so, you will receive some non-core units in most missions including at least one truck and some Gaz jeeps so you'll get some ammo resupply from these even if they are a tad fiddly to use.

As I've mentioned as well, there will be no core artillery in Dinas - instead you'll be allocated artillery from regiment each mission so this is not an aspect you'll have to manage. The reason for this change is that it makes testing individual missions much less complicated and reduces the need for lots of compiled mission testing. I spent MONTHS working of the original Dinas campaign and I don't wish to spend months more if possible.

Secondly, as I've already told you, you should create a thread to bring up issues with the CMSF2 campaigns as they are official campaigns. I am responsible for the CMSF1 NATO campaigns and the only one I have a real interest in revisiting is the Khabour Trail, the Canadian campaign for which I made all but one of the missions. But it's an official campaign so it's not on my to-do list. I might just do it for my own pleasure though.

[Paper Tiger]

I actually spent half an hour reviewing the opening two missions of the German NATO campaign this morning and you are correct that the ammo is restocked between missions even though there is no resupply between missions in the campaign script and they are indeed core artillery units. Since this was all tested and WAD for the CMSF campaigns, there has probably been some change made to the engine which affects this.

Anyway, the matter is moot for two reasons:

First, your point is that it was not spelled out to you how many missions the core artillery was meant to last and that's fair enough. It was an old campaign and the first I made as a beta tester so I own that error.

And second, there is no core artillery in Dinas. I stripped them out very early in development.

[Paper Tiger]

A quick update on last week's progress. I spent the week working on two missions, (3 and 4 in the campaign). As mentioned above, early last week, i was wanting to cut one of these two missions because they felt very samey. But i decided to rework the maps and try something different with them. I was very happy with the result in Sabatani and the force ratio is almost 1:1. Considering what you have and the quality of it, you're definitely at an advantage.

And so at the weekend, I turned to Suib. I wasn't happy with the map and the compounds so I decided to revamp the map, removing the large orchards and replacing them with fields of vegetables and grain. I also removed the poor quality compounds to the east of the river and replaced them, once again, with actual Syrian village compounds. I also reduced the height of the hills at the back of the map and gave it a whole new RED OB. I now have two AI plans and another very reasonable force ratio so I feel like I've done a good job on both of these. I enjoyed playtesting them too and had to relearn a lesson - namely that I WANT to kill the player's units. I had an impulse to quit my run and change the AI to reduce the lethality and remembered that I WANT to make the AI tough if you are too hasty.

[Paper Tiger]

I've now moved onto mission 5, SAM Hill. Don't think that I'm finished with 1-4 yet. They all have AI plans and forces ready to go but I know I can improve them further, especially Sabatani and Suib but I've seen enough of them for now and will return to them later.

SAM Hill has a map which I really don't like. I've tried it but it just irritates me because it just doesn't look real. It looks like something I just pulled out of my posterior with no real art or skill. I had already tried improving it by expanding it further to the east and adding a small village and some fields to give the BLUE deployment area some depth but I still didn't like it. So, once again, I returned to Google Earth to see if I could find something better and sure enough, I found exactly what I wanted  - a small military base near the border with Jordan. It fit the bill perfectly so I ripped out all the elevations on the map and started work on the new base. It's not going to take long to do, it's just a hill winged by a berm with some weapon sites on one side of the hill and a small number of buildings near the entrance and at the back and that's already all done.

There's what looks like a small barracks area near the site in Syria so i'll add that tomorrow and that's the new SAM Hill map finished. 

Edited February 12 by Paper Tiger

[Erwin]

Looks like this will be a much improved version of Dinas. And the original was very good.

[Paper Tiger]

13 hours ago, Erwin said:

Looks like this will be a much improved version of Dinas. And the original was very good.

I really wonder how many folks have played the original campaign with the new CMSF2 engine because I suspect it would be a very different beast to play now. In particular, infantry units appear to be far more resilient and have their survivability increased substantially when in a building. In Petani, the opening rocket salvo used to be enough to send half of the conscripts with Low/Poor morale running and make the rest jittery. Now it cause 2-3 casualties, if you're lucky, and the rest are 'concerned' but otherwise okay. If anyone has played Dinas with the new engine, I'd really like to hear from them about their experience and whether they won it or not.

Both Hasrabit and Dinas are very old campaigns, made with the earliest iterations of the game engine and I suspect they are 'gone' for good. Thus the total rework required. I HOPE it will be better but there's always someone who will think the original was better, and maybe it was but the engine changed that.

Edited February 13 by Paper Tiger

[Danny03]

I played the original campaign only on the new CMSF2 engine (twice) since I skipped the original cmsf.

Like you mentioned, I had a WTF moment during the first mission when the entire enemy force remained sitting inside the city after the massive artillery barrage.  I guessed that the briefing wasn't taking into consideration the new engine and the new cover mechanic system  

Overall I enjoyed the campaign and didn't have any problems until the mission that I mentioned earlier where I was stuck (twice) due to core erosion and in my opinion an unbalanced company rotation.

[Paper Tiger]

56 minutes ago, Danny03 said:

I played the original campaign only on the new CMSF2 engine (twice) since I skipped the original cmsf.

Like you mentioned, I had a WTF moment during the first mission when the entire enemy force remained sitting inside the city after the massive artillery barrage.  I guessed that the briefing wasn't taking into consideration the new engine and the new cover mechanic system  

Overall I enjoyed the campaign and didn't have any problems until the mission that I mentioned earlier where I was stuck (twice) due to core erosion and in my opinion an unbalanced company rotation.

That's what I thought. Thanks for that. Another really important engine change that came along much later was the lethality of MGs. When these campaigns were made, MGs fired in a random direction from the target itself so casualties were much lower. When it was changed. MGs became exponentially more lethal.

I'm finding the Green and Conscript Reserve Infantry formations to be performing FAR better than their early CMSF1 counterparts. There's no Friendly Fire either so managing them carefully at night is no longer a concern. That REALLY changed Strong Stand, mission 2 of the old Hasrabit campaign, where you needed to herd them into the action very carefully otherwise they'd open fire on your Special Forces or each other. Wild. But that's a feature of Hasrabit that is lost forever due to changes made to the engine.

[Erwin]

6 hours ago, Paper Tiger said:

There's no Friendly Fire either

That's news to me.  You sure?  When did that change?

I know that ricochets (even of small caliber) can cause friendly casualties.  That can make dense unit ops dangerous.  So much lead flying around ricocheting off buildings etc.  

[Paper Tiger]

12 hours ago, Erwin said:

That's news to me.  You sure?  When did that change?

I know that ricochets (even of small caliber) can cause friendly casualties.  That can make dense unit ops dangerous.  So much lead flying around ricocheting off buildings etc.  

I forget that most folks around here weren't playing CMSF1 back in the days before the Marines module was released and friendly fire was a real feature in the game as evinced by my anecdote about playing 'Strong Stand'. Hasrabit was made before even AI pre-planned artillery was a feature. (It was revised shortly after it became a  feature and so you find it very sloppily implemented in almost every mission in Hasrabit, an over-correction rather like how movies made with colour in the 50s are riotously colourful just to show off that 'we've got colour now!!!' 

High explosives and ricochets still cause friendly casualties but your units do not misidentify other friendly units and fire upon them anymore. This only really applied to the Syrian side as their C2 is nowhere near as good as your average Blue force.

That's my point, that both Hasrabit and Dinas were made when the game engine was a very different creature and the rework can't be 'the same but better' but has to be a whole new thing. If folks really liked original Dinas, especially back in the very early days, they might not enjoy the rework nearly so well. When this feature was removed, I have absolutely no idea as I was too busy with 'new' Blue v Red and WW2 campaigns to do much more than just add pre-planned artillery strikes to Hasrabit. I certainly didn't retest the mission beyond seeing that the artillery strikes were WAD and so missed the change. Last year is the first time I recall ever thinking about revisiting these two early works and I remember being disappointed that friendly fire was no longer working.

Edited February 14 by Paper Tiger

[Paper Tiger]

I spent most of this last week reworking the SAM Hill map. For some reason, I just hate that map and can't play on it so it's been a massive job to overhaul.  I finished it yesterday and have tested it a couple of times and also got the Sulit Airfield map and mission updated. I'm currently reviewing the Sagger Point mission, the half-way point in the campaign and the Phase 2 finale, with probably the most ASL-style map of the entire collection and I just KNOW that I'm going to have to rework it massively. It's too yellow, there are too many hills, the fields are horrible and unnatural and some of the compounds could do with being made more realistic. Unlike SAM Hill, it's not a bad looking map at all but it looks completely artificial and I don't enjoy them like that any more. Although I'm not going to redo most of the elevations, this is going to be another SAM Hill-like rework so that's my job for next week.

Sulit Airfield was pretty simple with just some prettying-up of the map, adding some hedges and fences and redoing the player set-up area so that it looks like Syrian farmland. As it happens, Syrians farm right up to the berm of military airfields so I've done that here. However, I'm going to take it a bit easy for a while as the SAM Hill rework took quite a lot of time to do and I want to play something else for fun for a while.

Edited February 16 by Paper Tiger

[Chibot Mk IX]

On 2/13/2024 at 9:10 PM, Paper Tiger said:

High explosives and ricochets still cause friendly casualties but your units do not misidentify other friendly units and fire upon them anymore. This only really applied to the Syrian side as their C2 is nowhere near as good as your average Blue force.

PT, FYI, misidentify other friendly units and fire upon them can still happen during night battle.

 

[Paper Tiger]

That's interesting but the friendly fire I'm referring to is gone from the game. It used to be that units could misidentify a friendly unit and fire on it with everything and it was brutal. Perhaps most of you have never experienced this in your game because the feature was removed long ago. When this happened though, I have no idea.

I can fire up the original version of Strong Stand which was an excellent showcase for this feature - a night mission which had a couple of companies of conscript reserve infantry arriving to reinforce a battle. You had to be extremely careful how you brought your conscript reinforcements into the battle space as they would misidentify your Special Forces as well as other conscript platoons that were out of initial C2 and a full-blown firefight between these formations ensued. I first noticed this feature was missing when I returned to revise Hasrabit last year - I was expecting it to happen but the conscripts never fired on each other.