Scenario design tips

[Guest Napoleon1944]

After working with the editor and desiging scenarios I have a few tips to share:

Make sure you align the map with the compass arrow accordingly. I spent hours with a map only to find that it was aligned wrong.

When placing units make sure weather is set to clear. You will lose track of your units in fog. Use snow if your vehicles and men do not use winter mods, then change back to historical settings.

Assemble your OB and place no more than a battalion at a time on the map, especially if you have to deploy the units in trucks or defenses.

When making high hills/mountains, make sure you start with the lowest height at about 4. It takes a lot of practice to get the elevations correct, especially when placing buildings on them. Large buildings need a flat surface. Roads and railway track need to be graded accordingly.

When assembling a higher than regular army, set the experience rating accordingly to eliminate changing them all individually.

Use Operations instead of battles to give you more flexibility with reinforcements if specific areas are not needed for them to arrive. Good for predawn or dusk to night battles.

Make the game area as small as possible to save CPU and game time.

Use a lot of terrain. Don't make the battlefield look like a meeting engagement on the Marchfeld or plains of Salisbury.

Start with designing small engagements.

Mix up some of the unit experience types to give a more random morale rating to troops. Add in a few veteran or green troops here and there.

Use boardgame maps to help with specific historical engagements.

Experiment and have fun!

[Olle Petersson]

Generally good advice! Thanks

Some comments

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Napoleon1944:

(I) Make sure you align the map with the compass arrow accordingly.

(II) Use snow if your vehicles and men do not use winter mods, then change back to historical settings.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>(I) Huh? In the map editor north is always up. Or do you mean in preview? I've never had any problem with this since the troops always face the enemy side by default. If I've set west to be Allied and east to be Axis, then the Germans face west and Allied troops face east (until I change their facing).

(II) Snow might make it easier to track troops, but the few times I've used snow I've found troop deployment to be more difficult since the snow hide terrain features and I have problems differentiating between grain, swamp, scattered trees, woods and tall pines (unless I keep fiddling with trees on and off, off being default for me).

Cheers

Olle

[Guest Napoleon1944]

Olle,

For the map compass I mean make sure it corresponds to the map you design the scenario from. Sometimes N is not always at the top.

Other tips: Enlarge the troops to +4 to better locate them on the edge of the map.

Remove the trees.

[Guest Rob/1]

Some ok tips, but I know I would never ues them! Not

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[Pak40]

"Use Operations instead of battles to give you more flexibility with reinforcements if specific areas are not needed for them to arrive. Good for predawn or dusk to night battles."

Be careful when designing Operations: they arn't good for object oriented scenarios such as capturing a bridge. There are no Victory Flags in operations. Therefore, the computer AI only moves towards the opposite(enemy's) side of the map, not towards objectives.

Battles, however, have the advantage of specifing objectives. For example, if the objective of the battle is to capture a bridge, then you can place Victory flags on or near it. This tells the computer AI that the bridge is important and it will try to gain control of the bridge area.

Another bad thing about Operations is that the front line is always straigtened and the defender is ALWAYS unfairly pushed back from gound that he successfully defended in the previous battle. It's very frustrating to play as the defender in an operation. Setting the "no man's land" to zero helps but does not solve the problem.

[Harv]

If I may add a little blub here, please see my tiny(?) rant at http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/Forum1/HTML/012664.html about naming your scenarios if you're planning on posting them.

Thanks,

Craig

[Guest Napoleon1944]

Craig,

Good point. Another idea might be to name your versions in the filename (ie Bastogne1) in case you ever update the scenario people can see what version it is by quickly glancing at the scenario name during gameplay.

[Aacooper]

Good hints, though I suggest making the map bigger than necessary (within limits). To be really slick, you should add extra terrain to the north and east of the map. That way, you can make it, test it, then easily cut out the extra terrain. It's hard to add terrain to the south and west, though, which is why I recommend starting off with a big map.

[Guest Napoleon1944]

Aacooper,

Good point. Its easier to subtract than add the terrain. I made that mistake too.