Work in progress - The Hasrabit campaign

[Paper Tiger]

A word of warning for anybody else who's planning to create a dynamic campaign. You have to make several different versions of the same situation and if it's VERY dynamic, there will have to be lots of branches. I discovered this this morning when I was making up the different versions of 'Buying the farm' and I found that I needed four, with/without option A and with/without option B! And that's just about halfway through the game. That's a bit much so I'm going to rework the story a little bit to prevent too many branches. I had a nice idea about air support this afternoon that means that I only have two branches in the game and it will make one or two scenarios REALLY important. No clues for now.

I continued working on 'The Farm' scenario this morning and it's looking good. I managed to get a really exciting battle going and now, it's just down to timing the arrival of reinforcements so that Blue is struggling to survive the AI attack and then launch his counterattack. I hope to post some more screenshots this weekend.

[Pandur]

The Reserve Militia units are not part of the core forces but will be added to some of the scenarios to bulk out the Special Forces.

And I'm also getting to see some of those Grenade Launcher platoons in action.

:cool:

but you can't afford to squander the conscripts as you'll need their help.

thats right, first they help me and than they are in point of whatever local counterattack i may launch on remains of enemy forces.

everything is looking most awsome. you are doing a good job!

[Paper Tiger]

Pandur

-thats right, first they help me and than they are in point of whatever local counterattack i may launch on remains of enemy forces.-

LoL. Good luck with that. The units that survived the attack were all broken and their order boxes were blank when I selected them. They are also REALLY unfit so they can't move very far. But they are actually quite good fighters against another Red force. The level of lethalilty of the firefight feels more like a WW2 firefight. I really enjoy sitting back and watching the action when the AI is attacking the victory locations. The TAC AI has improved so much that I get some nice surprises when I watch it's attack.

Playtesting this situation again this morning, I managed to get a draw but I had to stop 15 minutes before the scheduled scenario end (1 hr 30 mins) to go to work and I know I'd have recaptured two of the three objective zones without taking heavy casualties before the time expired. Perfect! I am going to play again tomorrow with the ammo level of the air support reduced quite a bit as I got two HEAVY strikes from the same plane on the same target which helped me a bit too much. 'Buying the farm' is nearly finished which is a bit of a shame because I'll have to devote my time to another situation. They're all good at the moment but 'The farm' is definitely my favourite at the moment.

[Paper Tiger]

Here's one for you Pandur. That's what a heavy strike does in 'The farm'

It's a bit more effective than a strafing run. I thought this next one was nice. One of my Special Forces AT teams approaches the berm around the field. (from this morning's playtest)

This one is from the same playtest. The farmhouse objective is about to fall to the Rebel infantry but the first of the reinforcements have just arrived.

About 30-40 minutes later, my forces are cautiously approaching the farmhouse. It's been a real struggle to get there...

[Paper Tiger]

Oop, posted THAT one twice. Here's what should have been there

[Pandur]

the heavy strike looks impressive, like a VBIED droped from above

hows is it working out with the ammunition!? soon RED can rearm, wich is awsome, but is it actually possible to realy finish the big missions now without extra ammo!? i just remember the insane firepower output of the syrian SF´s. i mean these guys can emty their total ammo load in about 3-4 turns if things get hot at close range and than their simply dry.

i had quiet some red on red quick battles where i was in the defense and about every group i had ran out of ammo.

[Paper Tiger]

So far, no problems with ammo but the Special Forces are attacking in 'The Farm'. I haven't started to playtest the other SF situation because it's at night and it has lots of low walls.

Today, I did some work on the Saudara map and set up an AI plan. It seems to play very well but I was a bit concerned that it was very easy. That was because I was playtesting with Blue's full OB. So I compiled all six Republican Guards scenarios and played them through to see how Saudara played. . That proved to be very interesting. The first two situations were quite easy and my casualties were light. 'Hill 142 Part 1' played through okay too but I was a bit impatient to get it finished and took a few more casualties than I should have. So far, so good. I was actually thinking that it was too easy. Boy was I wrong.

The 'Phase 2' scenarios, 'Heavy Metal' and 'Hill 142 Part 2', were WAY too tough. My forces got slaughtered in 'Heavy Metal' (the new 'Valley of Death') and normally, that would have dumped me out of the campaign with a loss. But I scripted it to be non-dynamic just to see what happens to reduced core forces. I didn't even bother playing Saudara as I had nothing in the way of a starting force.

Although I got slaughtered in 'Heavy Metal' I don't really want to change it because I was only playing it half-heartedly and didn't really use the infantry very well at all. And it was a very close thing too. I'll replay the game save again later and see if I can get a win and if I can, then that's fine.

So, the upshot of all that is that I'll have to rework the two 'Hill 142' scenarios so that the player has a chance of getting through to Saudara.

[Paper Tiger]

I spent the entire day reworking 'Passed off' because I had an idea for a killer AI plan. Yes, it worked as I expected but my fps dropped to 1 or 2. Clearly, that wasn't going to work so I reduced the AI forces and worked on developing a new plan. This was a bit more challenging because the attacking AI doesn't have a significant material advantage anymore. Nevertheless, by the end of the afternoon, I think I've found one that will provide a significant challenge for the human player, at least until the reinforcements arrive.

A word of caution for anyone editing maps. I was reducing the 'Hill 142 Part 2' map and before I started, I forgot to erase the AI artillery missions and as a result, some ended offboard. This resulted in a great loss of frames when the artillery was firing. I have to re-do Hill '142 Part 2' as it's very unlikey that it will be playable post 1.06.

[Wiggum]

Sounds great !

With this campaign and 1.06 i know what i will play in the future...

[Paper Tiger]

Wiggum:

Thanks for the encouragement. So far, all the scenarios but one run on my rig at 12fps+ minimum except in a few instances when one side receives reinforcements and the processor suddenly gets hit with a large number of fresh calculations (everything's fine again after about a minute). Or when there's a particularly intense firefight. That's what happened in the above situation. So I'm hoping that 1.06 isn't going to make too many of them unplayable.

As a further note, I replayed the save game of 'Heavy Metal' last night, this time more carefully, and I got a total victory so I'm not going to change anything with that one. Because you get dumped from the campaign if you lose a phase 2 battle, it should make the player a bit more cautious about how he uses his core forces in the 'easier' early scenarios.

[Paper Tiger]

Well, I've refined the AI attack plan in "Passed off"' very thoroughly over the last 24 hours and, this morning, it beat me. When I playtest, I always 'pretend' that I don't really know what the AI is going to do and set up to be strong in one area and weak in others but never ALL in the one place where I know it's going to go.

It meant playing and playing and playing many times over and observing the AI's behaviour and timing very carefully. But it's finally done and with good fps too. Now I have to create a second plan as I think people will feel a lack of satisfaction with their result and will want to replay to get a better one. The other plan, already being sketched out, will be drastically different from the other and have equal weight of being selected so that reloading won't give you any guaranteed advantage.

I'm very happy with this situation as the AI doesn't have a large material advantage over the human player, slightly less than 2-1 actually. The human player has more than enough than he needs to win the game so there's no cheating, just making the AI use it's assets as effectively as possible.

[Pandur]

When I playtest, I always 'pretend' that I don't really know what the AI is going to do

it never worked for me

[Paper Tiger]

What a pleasant surprise. I installed the 1.06 patch and nervously loaded up 'Passed off' and watched the frames as the action unfolded. Not only was there no slowdown but I got an overall improvement in fps. There was the usual intense firefight when the two infantry forces found each other and, pre-1.06, I was falling to 3fps for a minute or two because of the volume of fire. The same action with 1.06 never fell below 6-8 and stayed mostly in the double figures.

Then it was time to load up and try "Buying the farm', my favourite scenario. Wow, that really rocked! The Militia Company was slaughtered in short order by the attacking AI. They attacked the farmhouse and the workhouse victory locations and cleared out the die hards who were in the buildings. WOW! Then, when the Special Forces arrived, there was no slowdown at all. Frames stayed steady. Before, reinforcements slowed down my frames drastically for about 1 minute. Hopefully, that's all in the past.

Other than that, I got no actual work done today but I know that I'll be getting to work on 'Strong Stand' tomorrow, another Special Forces situation on a medium sized farm map at night. There are lots of trees and LOTS of low walls so that should be a lot of fun.

It looks like I'll have to revisit the 'finished' situations to see how the new vehicle AI changes things. The BMP-2s seem to fire their AT-5s at tanks instead of their cannons and that will change the way some of them play. I might have to give the AI MORE tanks!!!

[Paper Tiger]

This morning I playtested a couple of situations and was surprised to find that 1.06 has altered the scenarios somewhat. First, in 'Murder in the night', I opened it up and the moon was full. It should be less than half full and have already set. So I opened it up in the editor and checked the time and the date but nothing was different. Then I did a map preview and it was dark again. So I opened it up to play again and it was dark. Then, the AI used a plan that was previously disabled. So, after slaughtering the AI, I opened it up with the editor again and found that all four plans were 'use sometimes' when there should only two, one 'use frequently' the other 'rarely'.

Republican Guard Infantry spot a bit better in the dark now thankfully. One squad spotted a tank at 100m which is a huge improvement over 1.05. Before, they couldn't see a vehicle a few metres away from them. Also, the BMP-2s always fire their AT-5s at tanks now so the scenario is acting like I intended it to.

Then I tried 'Hill 142 Part 2' and the map was different, the previous uncut version. I was unable to play on that map without ridiculously low fps, (ie 1!) but I decided to try it out with 1.06. Frames were still very low, sometimes down to 4fps but almost playable but then, after about 5 minutes it just crashed. That's the end of that version of the situation. Fortunately I have another copy of the reduced map in the scenario folder (and the original that still has the village in the QB folder) that I've been working on so I'll go with that one instead. I have a plan to alter the terrain on that new map extensively so it will look different from the screenshot posted on the first page.

I started work on 'Strong Stand' and even with it's rudimentary AI plan and OB it played okay. Most of the time was spent editing the map and it's looking like a really good place for a battle. Now I need to create a battle that does it justice. It's going to need a lot of work to get it anywhere close to the standard of 'The Farm'. Fortunately, tomorrow is a holiday here (Chinese New Year) so I'll be able to spend most of the day working on that situation. Like 'The Farm' and 'Passed off', it will probably grow through extensive playtesting until the situation is really tight.

[Roter Stern]

A Red-on-Red campaign makes me a happy panda! Even if it doesn't take place in my beloved Eastern Block

If you need another pair of hands play-testing some of these I'd love to help out, so feel free to drop me a line - I'm hurting for new RvR stuff to play these days

[Pandur]

I'm hurting for new RvR stuff to play these days

maybe you wana try my currently still un-named scenario in a few days.

it´ll be huge

but i keep the map verry plain and compact(not smal) to make up for this. its about 1200 broad and 1900 long/deep.

if all works out it will be massive. inf, APC´s, tanks, ATGM´s ... all assembled to duke it out.

my biggest problem righ now, is to get an AI plan going. my luck is that i just need one.

iam more or less finished with the map, some minor touches maybe but overall its done. now i need the AI plan.

[SgtMuhammed]

There are going to be a lot of new scenarios come out now that 1.06 is out. A lot of us were waiting to release things that were built using the test betas.

[Paper Tiger]

Whew, I spent the whole day, and most of the evening working on 'Strong Stand'. More about that later. But on Wednesday, I ran another playtest of 'Passed Off' and lost again because of THIS GUY!!! watch out for the Lone Gunman...

Boy, those vehicle crewmen are tough cookies. That's him touching the phase line for a victory. The fun part is that he died about three seconds later. I was careless and I lost.

The action in this scenario gets pretty intense sometimes.

I guess it's nearly finished now but I've had so much fun playing this one since last weekend that I want to enhance it even more.

Anyway, yesterday, I started work on the second of the Special Force missions called 'Strong Stand', or SS for short. I wasn't able to do any playtesting on this one before as there are lots of low walls and it's also at night. The original plan was for a single Special Forces Company with AT-14s to defend a farm against a determined Mech Battalion Group attack.

I played through various iterations of it the whole day without any success and I was starting to think "nice map, shame about the battle". No matter what I did, how I set up or approached the situation, I was getting slaughtered. Those Special Forces are really good but 'They're no supermen". Not like the single US infantry PLATOON in "In Harms Way".

Then, once again, when I took a break from it to eat dinner, I had an idea to make it work. So, after hastily shoving the remains of my meal down my throat, I returned to it and got my idea working. And boy, did it work!

I was a bit concerned that it was going to be a clone of 'The Farm' but at night. I really want each battle to have it's own particular flavour and so I changed the victory conditions so that both sides are fighting for different objectives but in such a way as to make it logical for the player. Obviously, the west of the farm is important to the Red side while the east side is important to the Blue side. You're going to have to fight through Red's positions to get to your own objectives.

I also whittled down the forces on both sides to stop it from turning into a monster, and I'm going to whittle Blues forces down even further later today. I also scripted a new AI plan with new groups to take account of the changes and fired it up and it all worked beautifully. I have my battle, now I just have to hone it and add another AI plan.

In the battle, you get one company of Special Forces and you must hold the board until the first of your reinforcements arrive. And the cavalry is.... ta dah!... a bunch of nervous conscripts with the crappiest equipment the Syrians have, including a small number of really pathetic T-55s. Then your mission is to fight back and recapture the lost ground and occupy your objectives.

I was a bit worried that fighting a battle with conscripts would be really boring but, because it's Red on Red and not Syria v the US, the conscripts are not nearly so useless. They require much more careful handling than the most players are going to be used to but that's your challenge. The real work I have now is to get another AI plan working and playtest it through to the finale. I only played the first hour last night but I really liked what I was seeing so I'm sticking with it.

The map is also a beauty since I spent 2-3 hours expanding it, adding terrain features for both sides to fight over and LOTS of flavour objects. What a difference a few of them make. They are a LOT of work to get positioned in believable groupings but I think the effort is worth it.

The Louch:

Thanks for the offer. I think getting somebody else to playtest these scenarios would be a very good idea as I have my own playing style. I am slightly conservative but a more aggressive, high risk player might blow the scenario apart without any problems simply because he played it differently from me. That was one of the problems I was facing yesterday with SS. I was refining the AI plan to counter one of MY moves and later, it occurred to me that if the player sets up differently, he'd be able to slaughter the AI as it quickly moved with passengers mounted to their first objective.

The missions don't look like Eastern Block I'm afraid but so far, they're so intense that I don't think you'll care too much.

Hey, Pandur, if your rig can run a map that size, you shouldn't have any problems running the scenarios in this campaign. There's no map even close to that size, although the original Hasrabit map was pretty close. And it had this, (still does)...

I always wanted to do something like that with the scenario editor.

I've also noticed that all the extra work I put in creating my maps has finally paid off with 1.06. It's the patch I was waiting for and the maps really have a life of their own. Players will have to examine the terrain carefully when they're setting up, do a proper recon first because nothing is as simple as it first appears. I playtested 'Ambush' again yesterday morning and although I won, I took some losses because the AI behaviour is improved and the terrain helped the attacker. Yes, 1.06 is the best thing that happened to this game.

[Paper Tiger]

This weekend I managed to complete 'Strong Stand' and it's a beauty. It's the closest thing I've come across so far that really FEELS like CMBO. I'm not going to say much more about it, other than it's really intense. I think some people will love it and others will hate it.

Then today, I returned to Hill 142 Part 1 to work on it again. After playtesting it a couple of times, I changed the map adding two large orchards on either side of the village. Then, I tried to get the AI to deploy in the buildings but it wouldn't happen. I cut down the groups deployment zones so that they included buildings only but when there was a half tile in that set up area that was outside, thats' where they'd set up. Bummer, it looks like this is a new bug introduced by 1.06. If so, it's not going to kill this campaign as the MOUT operations that will be included will be when the player is the defender. If necessary, I can rework the map so that there are no half tiles although that's a lot of work.

Further playtesting got me to thinking that it's too tough at the moment but then I noticed that the sun wasn't rising as it used to before 1.06. That was causing some big problems for the player as the entire battle is fought in reduced light conditions. Another bug? I noticed that it got darker when the moon set in 'Strong Stand' but the sun doesn't rise anymore. This will hurt this mission in particular.

If these are bugs, it's a real shame because it will be at least another 4-6 weeks before we can reasonably expect another patch, possibly a LOT longer.

[Paper Tiger]

that's the new "Hill 142 part 1' map at 6.00am in the morning. The new orchards are not there JUST for eye candy but I don't want to give anything away. I'm going to spend some more time editing the map to get it looking beautiful close up too, adding lots of flavour objects etc. And then I have to work out a new OB for Red so that it's not quite so tough for the Blue player.

so far, I'm making very good progress and it's looking good for an early March release. However, I've had to drop 'Hill 142 part 2' for the time being and draw another map as the old one kept crashing after about 4 minutes. But, except for 'Hill 142 Part 1', all the Phase 1 battles are now finished and after I finalise the OB for The Hill, I'm going to do another test compile to see how things play out.

At the moment, it's not a campaign like the one that came with the game. Instead, it's more like an adventure where you can get dumped out of it early. With that in mind, I don't really care just how hard the situations are on the core forces but each extra mission will be a reward for success in a previous one. There will be LOTS of branches now that I'm confident with the campaign scripting. I have some ideas that I'll keep quiet about how to make this special.

This topic seems to have turned into a bit of a developers diary.

[Paper Tiger]

Because I don't think either of the issues that affect this scenario will get fixed and released anytime soon (no AI set up in buildings and no sunrise) I'm going to have to re-script the story and move this battle to a later time. I playtested it a couple of times again this morning and it's WAY too tough for the player in the dark. In 1.05, with the same set up, I was able to blow through this one with minumal casualties but now I'm losing in excess of 60% of my force and still losing. I even KNOW where the AI is and what they have/haven't got and I'm still losing.

My last work this morning was to move the start time to 5.30 and reduce the Red forces somewhat but I didn't have time to do much more than test the first ten minutes. There seems to be enough light to play the situation at that time and who knows, maybe the bug only affects sunrise and not the jumps in light level afterwards.

[Paper Tiger]

I get the feeling that 'Hill 142' is going to take a lot more work to get everything just right because I'm having to learn completely new tactics as a player. Today, I started using area fire and getting RPG units to target buildings and I was getting good results. Before 1.06, I rarely used area fire with Red units as they didn't really have the ammo to do this. Now they can and it adds so much more to the game. Red v Red MOUT wasn't a very satisfying experience before 1.06.

I'm really anxious to get this one finished a.s.a.p as I had an idea for a campaign last night that is very exciting and I can't wait to try it out. It will fit into my Syrian Civil War story quite well, the fighting in Damascus. Since the Marines module is probably still a few months off in the future, I'll do some real RedvRed MOUT in the next campaign.

The Hasrabit campaign will be structured like a season of American football. There will be the regular season games where you must play 6 games but there will be at least 14 different situations in Phase 1. Depending on your results in each game, you'll take a different path to the final phase 1 battle, of which there are several versions. Win that and you're through to the play-offs with your team, injuries and all, where a loss will dump you out of the campaign. Then, phase 3 will be the championships and the superbowl, at the moment, two very different battles.

[Roter Stern]

The terrain looks stunning, great job!

...I'm still waiting for an email with a few of your scenarios

In case you didn't know, you can click the -icon above to get the email address, it's just not a good idea to post an email plain text on a forum for spam-crawler reasons.

[Paper Tiger]

The Louch:

I'll try and get something out to you after the weekend. I think it would be a good idea for someone else to tackle a couple of the missions before I go ahead and release it. You'll probably get 'Hill 142' and 'Passed off' if I get a second working AI plan for it finished this weekend. I'm VERY confident about the others that are finished. 'Ambush', 'Strong Stand' 'Murder in the Night', 'Buying the farm' and 'Heavy Metal' are all done and won't need playtesting 'cos I've played them every which ways that I can think of.

I'm hoping that I'll get 'Hill 142' finished before the weekend so that I'll be able to concentrate exclusively on the remaining Phase 2 and 3 battles over the next three weeks. 'Heavy Metal' is a phase 2 battle, so there's 2 more to go. I already have the maps for the two climactic battles, one for the Republican Guards at 'Saudara' and the Special Forces in "Hasrabit'. Then I can get this thing finished and out in the first week of March.

To save some time, I'm only going to playtest the 'normal' versions of each scenario. Because there are definitely consequences to losing some battles, there are a number of different versions of a few phase 1 battles and they will be more difficult than the normal version. If you beat the tougher version though, you'll be back on track again. You're through to the playoffs but your team is a bit more beat up than if you'd played the normal version.

[Paper Tiger]

I got absolutely nothing done yesterday but I made up for it this morning. The entire time was spent playtesting 'Hill 142 part 1' and it's really shaping up to be a beauty. I changed the weather setting to clear and the sun rises on time and it gets brighter and brighter as the scenario wears on. The map also looks much better in clear weather so all-in-all, it's a change for the better. I have enhanced the map again, adding some important new terrain features and all new victory conditions to make the player fight for the village. It's not an easy situation to win at the moment and I haven't won yet but it should be solid by tomorrow night. It has two distinctly different AI plans and that should be enough for a campaign. I got some nice action screenshots this morning too but I'll have to prep them for uploading first.

I also started work on the new map for 'Hill 142 part 2'. It's a radical departure from the previous version and it should provide another completely different environment for a battle. It has the north west corner of 'Hill 142 part 1' as it's south east corner and expands into the valley. I hope to post some screenshots this weekend.

BTW, I sometimes get free periods at work when I have nothing to do except surf the internet so, no, I've got nothing better to do than hang around here and post about my campaign. It keeps me happy and I like to look at the pictures too.