Future CM engine idea: progressive quick battles

[Bone_Vulture]

I was thinking of a way to add continuity to the otherwise separate quick battles: what if the computer could generate a new strip of terrain, depending on the outcome of the last battle?

Example: players pick their sides, and choose the amount of points, terrain, the type of the initial battle and the number of battles total. In this case it'd be a meeting engagement in a village, with three battles tops.

The first match ends to a cease fire, with Soviets holding all the flags. The Axis player would be given the choice to concede, or try a counter-attack. Then, either the axis player or computer would decide the type of the next battle, let's say a probe.

The map would be shifted a bit towards the axis side, so that the flags that were initially in the middle of the map would now be clearly on the Soviet side, with all the original buildings and damage remaining: new terrain would seamlessly be generated to fill the Axis side. Depending on pre-determined settings, the players could purchase a certain amount of reinforcements, or repair/replace some of their existing forces.

The outcome of this battle would again affect the type of the final battle: a succesful Axis probe might force the Soviets to counter-attack, or another Axis defeat would lead to a final Axis assault effort. The winner of this set of battles would be determined by the total amount of casualties, and amount of land/flags controlled.

I think this'd be a great way to make quick battles more campaign-like, allowing the player who suffers the initial defeat to make a comeback.

[Nippy]

Or in other words, a "Quick Operation" generator. I'm hoping for this in CMX2 or even CMAK is possable.

[SlowMotion]

If you want to try this kind of game play now without any changes to the game engine, one way to do it could be making one big map and extract smaller quick battle maps from that. The difficult/tedious part would be adding units from a battle to another.