Questions about RobO's Campaign Generator

[Krautman]

This tool is just awesome, it makes excellent use of the opportunities offered by CMBB, to create a year-long campaign with units gaining (or losing) experience and all that you could miss from the original game. I highly recommend it to anyone here, especially to those who don't have a human opponent. Thanks, Robert, for the great work.

However, i had some difficulties using the spreadsheets. I'll have to remember them now since i don't have internet at home, but i'll give it a try.

In the rules, it is said that the commanding officer gains experience if he performs well in a battle and gains 60 favour or more. This i did in my last battle, and thus i expected my CO to gain XP. I'm leading a Gebirgsjäger Company, and its Hauptmann is, as you might expect, my CO(carrying my last name). In the spreadsheet, he is on top, and is designated as unit type "IT", as are the other platoon/section HQs. Now, The spreadsheet does not recognise him as the CO, not awarding him the hard-earned XP.

How can i get the spreadsheet to accept him as the CO?

The rules also offer you the opportunity, besides the automatic bravery awards for outstanding performance, to decorate your soldiers yourself in return for some favour points. I command 24 units, and thus am allowed to "buy" max 2 awards with my favor. How do i do that? Neither in the core force sheet nor in the favour sheet, it seems to me.

I hope someone can answer these questions. I'm looking forward to starting my next battle. After my first infantry company, fighting in the area between Don and Donetz, was wiped out in minutes by defending smg squads, i now command a Gebirgsjäger unit of army group south. They are doing fine, some of them have already been awarded the EKII for bravery. They expect to arrive in Baku in a couple of weeks, and their commander is already planning for the victory parade in moscow...

[ November 03, 2004, 10:17 AM: Message edited by: Krautman ]

[Alech]

Originally posted by Krautman:

How can i get the spreadsheet to accept him as the CO?

The CO must have the trem HQ in his name and be the first HQ on the roster. I think...

[Iraqi Tank Commander]

Hi, where can I grab RobO's campaign generator? I'm looking at cmmods.com right now and I see his name but I only see the Tarkus steel mod associated with his name and not the campaign generator.

[Krautman]

Hi you with that rather strange login name, try this to get RobO's Campaign Generator:

http://www.roqc.cdgroup.org/

It is well worth the download, have fun!

And if you should find answers to my questions posted above, could you post them here?

[Krautman]

Alech, could you give me the original english name for the Gebirgsjäger company HQ? (I own the german cmbb, maybe ROQC needs the exact english unit name).

[Robert Olesen]

Hi Krautman, glad you like ROQC.

Alech is correct. It has to be the first unit in the list and the name in the "Unit Type" column has to contain the phrase "HQ", e.g. it could be

Company HQ

or it could be

Hauptmann Krautman (HQ)

or whatever you feel like as long as it contains HQ.

The commendations are specified in the core force sheet column labelled 29, just type in 1 or 2 for the unit(s) you want to give these to. I guess the rules could have been clearer on this (section 5.8.4 page 63).

Send me the spreadsheet if you can't get it to work.

[Krautman]

Thanks for your answer, Robert. I renamed my company HQ and the Hauptmann got his additional XP. I then changed the platoon/section leaders designations and inserted "HQ" there, they also got and XP bonus. Is this according to the rules or is the bonus only available to the commanding officer?

And the second issue, about player-awarded bravery medals: The core force sheet column 29 was what i had already thought to be where to give the awards, but upon trying to enter "1" or "2" (after the battle, all other parameters had already been typed in), a small window appeared telling me that "protected cells cannot be modified", IIRC. I then tried to give the awards using the favour sheet, but that wasn't it either. I use Open Office, maybe that's the problem? My ROQC version is 2.20.

[Robert Olesen]

Oops

You need to unlock those cells. And to do that you need to unprotect the sheet (Tools > Protection). The lock setting is in the last tab of the "Format Cells" dialogbox.

You should protect the core force sheet afterwards to protect yourself against accidental overwrites of formulas.

Sorry about that. I'll get an update up as soon as I can.

[Robert Olesen]

Oh, and that bonus is ony for the officers (HQ units in CM). Those are the ones that should have HQ in the unit name. It's in the rules: Section 5.8.2 and a somewhat difficult to find entry in 3.7.5

[Robert Olesen]

I managed to throw that update in right away. Look here

[Krautman]

Thanks, Robert. You're so busy answering questions about your ROQC right now! But it's good that the feedback helps you to always improve it. Hope you get some plain praise too!

[Robert Olesen]

Thanks, Krautman. I get lots of praise (e.g. just take a look at the first post in this thread ), and I'm glad that I do. It tells me that I'm not the only one with a need for a tool like this.

[Death Commando]

Hi,

Got a question. What is the quality of my support forces? On the setup it gives me random and once I start buying my support what quality are they green, regular, vetern or crack. Are they always going to be regular or same quality has my core forces during the campaign?

Thanks

[Robert Olesen]

You buy your support in the QB setup and there you can pick any quality that's available (which depends on the battle setup).

There are a few other units thar aren't really support units, e.g. the exploiting force. You by these in the editor and the rules specify a quality for these. But I don't thnk these are the ones you're talking about.

[Ardem]

I just found this the other day, and I got renewed vigor in playing CMBB again. It is awesome, I can't wait till I come home from work and give my Mechanised Company a workout.

Although I feel sometimes the Dice rolls are rigged and both the excel spreadsheet and the AI in CMBB are working together, call me paranoid!

LOL Nice work Robo, keep it up.

[Robert Olesen]

The dice rolls are most definitely not rigged, nor does the AI take the spreadsheet into account when making it's plans, so I guess that leaves paranoia :eek:

Welcome Ardem, I'm glad you like it

[Yskonyn]

Sounds like I've got something so checkout in my free (read: non-MP) time!

Thanks Robert!

[Ardem]

Hi Robo I got a thought for you and your generator, its to do with Intel, I trying to nut this out so I can play a battalion campaign with maps do give a aar and all on a website.

The thing is I want to keep track of my whole battalion, but I want to only fight with two companies at a time or less dependant on the info.

So I got around the fact in not calculating experience for those in a battle before the battle I set the infantry to 0 on the left hand side so no exp is calculated in a battle.

So I thought this would be good trying to figure it out.

Intel

Objective is a raid, enemy strength roughly 700 points (the intel could be 100% wrong or 100% right dependant on a roll) So I choose to send in only a company with some support.

The real roll comes in checking if the Intel was right first if so it just substitute the figures. If not you could bump it up or down like you do in the combat modifier.

I simulate this at the moment by halving my battlaions points and modifing the enemy handicap to extremes all over the place. Only problem is I don't know what coming up a raid or an attack.

Anyway is just a thought to create some more atmosphere and unique scenarios, also the favor has to be modified due to bad intel, which is the worst thing at the moment.

[Robert Olesen]

Ardem, I'm not quite sure what it is you're asking me to do.

But it seems to me that the simplest way to do something like you're doing is to keep two spreadsheet series - one with the full battalion and one with the units you use in a particular battle. Just roll the before battle dice, copy the full sheet and delete the units you don't use (this will presere all the extra info you need, like intermediate die roll results). You'll then need to transfer the battle result back to the full sheet and it'll give you some problems moving from battle to battle, but you can probably handle that. Actually, you can simply roll the after battle dice in the sheet you used for the battle - there are a few die roll modifiers that depend on core force size, but that's not too significant. Than when you're all done, copy the core force info after the battle to the full sheet, reset the date, clear the dice and start over again.

That should work reasonably well.

But be aware that the battle size is dependent on the size of your core force so it may change once you reduce the core force by deleting some of it.

Also take a look at the Auto sheet. Unprotect it and play around with some of the die roll modifiers - that should give you the intel effects you want. But be careful not to delete any of the formulas I made - better to use an empty cell for an intermediate calculation and add the result into an existing modifier. Or unlock some cells and use them to manually input some die roll modifiers. The gray cells are useful for this.

Also, the Raid die is in E6 of the Auto Sheet. A roll of 6 converts an Attack or Hold operational order to a Raid.

Was that helpful?

[ November 30, 2004, 01:13 AM: Message edited by: Robert Olesen ]

[Ardem]

Hey robo ok this is what I am doing, I will give you a run down how I do it, whether its something you want to incoporate in your rules and spreadsheet its up to you.

I first created two minor dice roll table (paper not as wise with excel like you are <smile>)

Intel

Company 1250 Points Die roll 1

2 Companies 1500 Points 2,3,4

Battalion 2000 Points 5

Oversized Battalion 3000 Points 6

Raid -2 to roll

Exploit, Delay -1 to roll

Attack +1

Assault +2

Was Intel right roll Die Roll 1 YES

Raid, Exploit -1 2 YES

Attack, Assault, +1 3 YES

Probe +2 4 A

5 B

6 C

Enemy A B C

Die Roll 1 -25% -50% +50%

2 -10% -50% +50%

3 0 -25% +25%

4 +10% -25% +25%

5 +25% -10% +10%

6 +50% -10% +10%

Step process

1/ Roll spreedsheet to determine Battle type

2/ Roll Intel

3/ Choose forces from your battalion to accomplish mission

4/ Roll was intel right roll

5/ Modify spreadsheet under auto to adjust roll figures for force adjustments and over point value on field of play.

What would be really helpful for me is in the spreadsheet is a did force participate in battle Y or N Column if N then no experience is calculated to the force, should be easy enough.

I believe this give greater scope to the Fog of war in battles

<edit> sorry formatting went to hell on this page, I will email it to you.

[Robert Olesen]

Originally posted by Ardem:

What would be really helpful for me is in the spreadsheet is a did force participate in battle Y or N Column if N then no experience is calculated to the force, should be easy enough.

Well, column "5" (N) in the core force sheet should do this for you, though it only affects individual units, not the point total of the available units for the battle. Just clear the OK in that cell for the units that don't participate (and remember to set it manually for the coming battles when required, as you now deleted the formula). The only two values this cell is allowed to contain are "OK" and "" (empty).

[Ardem]

Which is column 5? is column 5 the one where its got Unit OK which is calculated as OK on 100% number of units and equipment OK.

If so, your right that would make it easy, and keep my xp so it doesn't disappear if I make 0 in men.

I probably used my allocated allotment of questions, but is the enemy force modifer (+10%,+25%) is that taken into account for the difficulty modifier.

Anyway I only just started but got a webpage for my AAR don't expect much at the moment, finished off my second mission last night so update that when i get home.

Was a battalion size battle ouch it took ages, also if anyone wishes to play in this make believe campaign and post their aar your quite welcome to email me, movements foward on the strategic map is based on wins and completing missions and dice rolls due to robos type of offensives.

http://nanosphere.dyndns.org

[Robert Olesen]

Yes, that's column 5. And you probably sjouldn't have to set the number of men to 0 if you use column 5. Though I could be wrong there - not sure of any side effects, this haven't been tried before. I still think the safest approach is to copy the full spreadsheet for a given battle and then delete the men that aren't in the battle.

No, you haven't used up your allotment of questions, but I don't understand this one - what difficulty modifier?. The enemy force handicap is a result of one of the two difficulty die rolls, it is not used as a die roll modifier in itself.

That web page looks good - except that there are no links in the Links section

I'll add a reference to it on the ROQC site. You should post your rule changes on that page as well.

Btw, did you send that email? I don't think I got it. Give it a recognizable subject when you do so I don't mistake it for spam.

[Ardem]

yes there is links

Na I was playing Mission 2 till 2 in the morning it tooks me almost a whole day to complete a battalion to battalion battle, 3 minutes between each AI sorting LOL.

Ok I made a extra column on the spread sheet, I at the very end, it says "Did they participate" if OK then i slightly modified your formula in Column 5 to add a new check.

Works like a dream.

Reducing your troops to 0 is no good, you loose all the XP for it.

Difficult modifier when playing around with the auto dice rolls to get the correct enemy points, I noticed under favour I was getting a -31 in difficulty and it wasn't correct so after playing with the rolls a bit it set it to 0.

If you want the spreadsheet to see the change I make for column 5 just ask but it nothing super.

Also anyone out there feedback you like to see in the AAR's let me know and I will try and do it.

I think with your great system and with a bit more flavour added it will create a unique system.

[Robert Olesen]

Ah yes, I see the links

I must have been looking the other way this morning

No, I don't need to see that spreadsheet. It sounds like a straightforward change. Any changes in the Auto sheet would be more interesting. Also, I don't see why you get that -31 Favor problem.

And I still think you should explain your rules changes on your site.

The Mission AAR's look odd in when using Opera 7.54 - It's readable, but the format isn't quite right. Try it, it's easy to download from www.opera.com

MS IE works fine but I'd rather not use that program unless I have to.

Great stuff, now let me find time to look into the details. Btw, you should announce it at MZO Centrals CM Strategy forum - it has some other good action reports