Campaign And Battles

[mav1]

How big are the battle maps going to be? Iam hopeing for at least 10km x 10km, this will allow for more strategic battles. Will you be able to create your own campaign? Operations in combat mission didn't work that well because it relied on the ai to place the units. Which usualy placed units in daft positions, especially afv's.

[hellfish]

I think Steve said 2x2 km-ish.

[mav1]

Will there now be a rpg element with the campaign. Units that fight through the campaign will gain experience (faster reaction time, more accurate shooting, and better spotting). Units that perform well in battle (units that have take flags or have large kills), improve faster and have higher morale. But units that perform badly(rout in battle or suffer heavy casulties), will peform worse in the next battle (but can improve again). It would be good to move soldiers unit to unit, you can add some veterans to a green unit to beef them up or add green soldiers to veteran units so that they gain experience faster. Snipers with a lot of experience and kills would become deadly accurate at long ranges.

[Kurtz]

mav1, have you read these threads? They should give a good idea what CM:Shock Force is about.

http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=52;t=000124

http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=52;t=000289

[mav1]

Only 2x2km, Iam disappointed.

[Sergei]

Originally posted by mav1:

Only 2x2km, Iam disappointed.

Don't take that as a hard set limitation - nobody really knows what the limits will be in the game. Maybe you can do 10x10, maybe not.

Though, from what Steve has said, the game is aimed at portraying EXTREMELY small engagements - like one company, or even less on a side (but it'll be possible to go bigger, if hardware permits). You don't need a very big map for that. And with the smaller tile size, it'll be a chore to do even a 4 square km map. Much more work than in CMx1 (hopefully the editor is improved).

[mav1]

Thanks for the info Kurtz, very helpfull.

[mav1]

Thanks for the info Sergei, Iam feeling happier now.

[mav1]

Would'nt it be easy to set up the campaign as a set of interlocking battles. You could have a grid where you can create a set of battles next to each other like one big map.

You would create and set up each battle of the map as you do now. The difference being you can play one turn for each battle map and then move to the next battle map. Being an interlocking map you can move troops from the edge of one map to the next so that they appear in the other battle map in the next turn.

Also it act's like an operation map where unit's get resupplied, adandoned vehicles reused and enemy vehicles captured and possibly used by it's new owner.

The beatiful thing about this system is that the campaign map can be big as you want it to be, since only one battle map can be played at a time.

Aso each battle becomes part of a huge campign with the chance of creating huge lines of advance in some battle maps, while other battle maps are quiet.

When all the turns are complete you can add your reinforcement's into any battle map you want. While not been able to move the troop that are all ready there. (option can be provided for those who want to move these troops after every battle game end).

The problem with an interlocking battle map campaign is that one battle map can be over loaded by units, almost slowing the computer to a stop. So an option need's to be provided to specify the total amount of unit's that can appear in each battle map depending on the power of your computer. But the benefit is that you can create huge campaign's.

You could create the whole of Syria if you wanted to, with hundreds of thousands of troops involved.

[ July 10, 2006, 07:59 AM: Message edited by: mav1 ]

[mav1]

Well is it a good idea or a crap idea? There must be someone out there to give my idea a right good bashing. Go on you know you want to.

[ July 12, 2006, 06:21 AM: Message edited by: mav1 ]

[LongLeftFlank]

I'm sure this has been discussed under the CMC forum or somewhere, but I'll take a crude shot.

If I understand aright, you've artificially divided your battlefield into a chessboard grid of individual battles (squares). The ability for outcomes in one square to affect neighboring battles must either be:

(a) ignored

( abstracted in some manner, or

© handled via a CMC type system (which is in effect, a different "meta-game")

If it's a deep thrust along a mountain road or some other kind of restrictive terrain in which your flanks are assumed to be reasonably protected (i.e. the grid is one square wide), then your model works fine. Each battle only depends on the outcome of the previous one.

A grid might even work for a WWI or Kursk style assault on prepared positions in depth, in which the axes of attack are well defined for each unit and units aren't expected to have the stamina or mobility to outflank the neighboring defenders. They simply struggle onward to their Day 1 objectives and stop.

Otherwise, using the grid system, you'd need to fight all your active battles in parallel, turn by turn. Whenever one battle concluded in a given turn, the victor would be able to schedule some or all remaining units to enter neighboring battles as reinforcements (perhaps outflanking the opponent). These units wouldn't have had a chance to rest or refit, so you'd need to manually "tweak" their remaining ammo, casualties, damage, fatigue, etc. Very time consuming unless CMSF allows a way to "snapshot and clone" a force at the end of a battle.

A much cruder alternative might be to set up some kind of Wolfram cellular automaton (JasonC, where are you when we need you?), wherein battles are fought row by row (groups of 8 if it's chessboard), and then the OB and axes of attack for each new row of battles is determined by the outcomes of battles in the 3 adjacent squares of the previous row.

Or something like that.

[mav1]

Yes everytime all the turns are complete, in each turn, the computer would rest, refit and resupply all your units like in operations, so you wont have to manually refit your units yourself. The difference being you can't move your units like you can after a battle in opereations. To me this was strange because it left a gap of time between battles. I much prefer a system were units are actually are resting or sleeping rather than an artifical time being created between each battle. Or another way is to remove the unfit unit after the battle for it to rest and put back in the game later on as reinforcements or at the start of another battle.

Yes your right each battle has to be played each turn, with each battle with the same turns so that all the battles are syncranized with each other. Each battle forms a grid of a campagain.

I know it might be a pain for some fighting each battle for one turn then having to go to another battle. So you can change the turn limit for each battle to your liking. so that you can play 10 turns before you move to another battle. You would lose some sycranicity between each battle but it wont effect the game too much.

The problem with the new cm campagin game is that the battles are too artifical with the flag in the middle of each battle.

I can't think of another way of formimg a large scale campaign, than the idea I have given. So do you have ideas longleftflank?