Work in progress - The Hasrabit campaign

[Paper Tiger]

I've spent the last two days working on 'Breakout' and it's nearly finished. I started experimenting with some rather bizarre tactics as the Blue side to counter the AI attack and I found a way for the reserves that start on the board to give the AI a very bloody nose. Yes, they still lost but the Special Forces would have nothing to do so I had to redesign the AI attack. Blue also lost some ATGM assets. The reserves had a platoon of AT-4s but they were so green that they couldn't hit a thing. Rather than clutter the game up with useless, ineffective units, I decided to let them go and gave the Blue side something more effective instead.

Now, the new AI attack will slaughter the reserves or lock down the blue board edge if they don't come out and fight, making a Blue advance to the red board edge in less than 2 hours an impossibility. I played it through a couple of times this morning and I got the victories without any real trouble but that was with both the SF companies at full strength. So far, I'm finding that the Special Forces go through their missions without taking heavy casualties. Even 'The Farm' is doable without your core forces taking more than 25% casualties (and it's TOUGH!) so I expect if it's easy to win a phase 2 battle with your core forces at full strength, then the situation will be challenging with reduced forces.

With 'Breakout' near completion, I'm going to return to 'Hasrabit' tomorrow and get it finished, hopefully before the weekend. And that means that there's just 'Saudara' left to do. Finally, the end really is in sight. I'm hoping to get the campaign finished over the Easter holiday. I'm waiting for The Louch's feedback on the battles I sent him but I don't anticipate anything too negative there so, barring anything unexpected cropping up, I don't think that next weekend is unrealistic anymore.

I'll try a full playthrough before I release it just to see how badly the core units get beat up in the phase 1 battles. But, even if the phase 2 battles prove to be completely unwinnable, rebalancing the primarly missions won't take long.

I'm really anxious to get closure on this one as soon as possible. I haven't played anything but these missions since I started and I really want to play some missions as the US side again, especially the 'Ghost' and the 'TF Narwick' campaigns. Then, I'm going to try designing a campaign on a much more intimate scale than this project, say just one US company through 3-5 missions. Definitely no more 'Battalions in conflict' missions from me for a while. I love the 'red on red' game but I need a US fix sometime soon.

[afreu]

Sounds excellent. Keep it going.

[Paper Tiger]

Hopefully, I'll have a nice new monitor before Friday so I'll be able to post some screenshots from the missions I'm working on at the moment. This morning, I spent the whole session working on the campaign finale and the map is so beautiful. It certainly looks good on my busted monitor anyway but tyhat's with all the brightness and gamma settings set at 0. And yet it's still a bit too bright. I can't imagine how bad a screenshot would look.

The session was spent co-ordinating the AI attack on the town and then finding the right balance of forces for them to do the job effectively. I noticed that fps drop quite drastically when you're looking at a building. When I moved the camera to the board edge I was getting 70+ fps even with all the action going on. However, swing it around and it rapidly drops to 10-12 fps. This really is my first attempt at designing a MOUT mission so I've never seen this demonstrated so clearly before.

I've almost got the AI attack plan nailed down now so I should be able to get it more thoroughly tested tomorrow. I'm not going to try to balance this one as it's impossible to predict what the player will be bringing to this one. Some of you guys will get there with almost nothing while others will bring 75%+ of their core forces intact. Since nobody will be bringing the full 100%, I'm going to test it with the full OB and make sure that it's winnable without being neither easy nor difficult. I can't see that taking too long to do so I should be starting work on 'Saudara' this weekend.

I'm very happy with all the missions so far in this campaign except 'Heavy Metal'. I like it but I think it's a bit too wild for most people's taste. It certainly is very different from all the other missions in the game so I might have to rework it before releasing the campaign too. Basically, it's an enormous tank battle with a Republican Guard company caught in the middle of it. The action is insanely intense and it's usually decided within 20-25 minutes. I've played it both with the full OB and the reduced OB after playing through the other relevant RG missions and got wins so it's definitely not too difficult. But the pace of the AI attack is unbelievably fast. Yes, I can slow it down but that'll be helping the human player too much. I'll give it another spin over the weekend and see how I feel about it.

[handihoc]

Regarding fps, yes, dense urban terrain is a killer, along with a mass of units both vehicle and inf. I find generally I get a very smooth 30-45fps, sometimes higher, in small rural engagements, but in high density urban it can drop to 10 and below. 10 is still smooth enough to not be a major problem, anything below 7 for an extended period is a killjoy.

Of course, I can change graphics settings to improve it, but I love the eye candy and don't want it reduced if I can possibly help it.

[Paper Tiger]

Handihoc:

yeah, it tends to hover consistently around 10-12fps and that's not a problem for me. It means that it will take a bit longer to get this one set up as nicely as the others in the campaign as Blue potentially has a full battalion of Special Forces infantry available to it in this one. Of course, a significant part of that force will get worn down in the missions running up to this one but some really good players might get there with 80%+ of their force intact. I might try to up the difficulty of 'Breakout' so that there will only be about a company and a half on the board. Otherwise, the AI is doomed to fail in the final mission as I can't give it much more force than it already possesses without slaughtering the CPU.

Unfortunately, I got no work done this morning as I had to go out and buy a new monitor. It took the whole morning but it was worth it because it's a beauty. (Samsung 931BW) When I got it all set up, I had time to have a look at it before I went to work and I was right, any screenshots taken with the old busted monitor would have been too dark to display. Once I got the settings normalised again the image was so beautiful, very sharp and clear. And then I had to leave for work... I'm really looking forward to getting back to work on the game tomorrow with the new monitor. Expect to see some more screenshots this weekend folks.

[Pandur]

i see there is quiet some progress! still looking forward to this, looking superb!

[Paper Tiger]

I've spent most of the day redesigning 'Heavy Metal' and getting the AI attack plan for 'Saudara' working. Cpl Steiner brought up an interesting point about AI attack plans in another thread. It seems that I've been doing it all wrong so I'm going to have to rework ALL the AI attack plans in the campaign so far. Fortunatley, that won't take long but I'll have to retest everything to see what difference it makes to each battle. Probably quite a big one in most cases. I am SO glad that I didn't rush this campaign to completion now. I'm a little wary of releasing it before the 1.08 patch is released as it's going to affect firepower v infantry in buildings in a substantial way.

'Heavy Metal' is going the same way as 'Murder in the night' did, a complete overhaul. Fortunately, I had some really good ideas for improving this one before I started this morning so I implemented them with the new AI and I got a terrific battle going. It's easy to win with the full Blue OB but there's no way anybody's taking the full OB to this one so it should be tough.

'Saudara' is looking like a fine finale for the Republican Guards. The map is a real beauty and I'm working on ways to reduce the Red forces so that I can keep the challenge high without punishing the CPU. I was really alarmed when I first playtested it, at the start it was running at around 3-5fps! But that was because Red's force was WAY too big, too much artillery and the AI pathfinding was struggling to deal with all the low walls on the map. So, almost all the Red vehicles have been taken out, I cut back the strength of the companies and removed almost all of the low walls outside of the small town. I loaded it up again and it remained in double figures MOST of the time although it's still slow for the first 2-3 minutes, probaly as the map is big and the Red units have to make a lot of LOS checks as they advance into the village. It didn't slow down much when Blue's reinforcements showed up so it's looking GOOD.

After playtesting it a many times, I knew how I was going to to set up the battle. I changed the set-up zones, the reinforcement schedules, the length of the battle etc. I think I've figured out which terrain is important to both sides and how to get the AI to exploit that terrain. When this all comes together I expect I'll be able to further reduce Red forces to improve CPU performance.

[Pandur]

But that was because Red's force was WAY too big

may i ask you, what do you consider as way to big!?

i ask becouse i currently finalize a scenario so i can run the first playtest and see if its actually playable. last time i tried it it was not, but i redid the RED force.

without giving away spoilers i can say that it has currently about 450man Blue and 320 RED (i hit ceasefire in setup to get the total mancount), there is movement, but not too much(player attacks), spotting ranges are long though.

i hope that workes out.

[Paper Tiger]

I usually start by giving Red a full mech Infantry battalion with a company of tanks so it's not just the ground pounders but their carrier vehicles as well. There might also be some support elements added to this too, a MG, ATGM or Grenade Launcher team for example. By the time I'm finished with a situation, I've usually paired it down to about 50-60% of that with a nice mixture of forces. When you finally get to play this campaign, you'll see a good example of this in 'The Barrier'.

Running a scenario that starts out that size is just doable on my computer as long as it's in non-urban terrain so I never had any real problems playtesting most of the missions in this campaign. However, 'Saudara' and 'Hasrabit' both have lots of buildings on the map and thus the 3-5fps start so I've had to be a bit unkinder to Red in these ones. Thus, the need to up the difficulty of some of the earlier missions so that the player doesn't take too large force into the final battles.

[Paper Tiger]

While redesigning the AI attack plans for some of the earlier missions, I played through 'The Farm', previously my favourite mission in the campaign, and found that I was bored with it because it didn't have any armour on either side. Having spent ages working on combined arms missions, a pure infantry bash was just too slow and unexciting. So, I spent the whole day yesterday and this morning redesigning the mission to include some armour for both sides. There's hardly any as this really is an infantry-centric battle and I don't want to lose that feel so there will only be a smal number of tanks in this one.

The air strikes have gone from this mission now. A 'Heavy' strike from am F-15 is unbelievably devastating and pretty much exterminates all infantry in a 100m+ radius of the blast. But curiously, vehicles, especially tanks, are completely unharmed. I tried hitting a T-55 with a heavy strike and there was a huge explosion. After the smoke cleared, the tank was sitting at a wild angle on the edge of the crater but it was still fine. So I hit it again, same result. Two big craters and an even wilder angle. The third one got it though.

I'm experimenting with adding helicopters to this one but they really are unpredictable and almost completely ineffective against vehicles and targets in buildings. However, I had given them 'poor' equipment so I've changed that to 'excellent' and I'll see what that does tomorrow. Needless to say, it's back to being one of my favourites again.

'Saudara' is definitely my favourite situation at the moment. I've got it all set up now and I tried a playthrough yesterday but with the full RG OB. I was able to get a win just with one full company of tanks and a single mech company. It wasn't difficult either so it's probably close to being balanced. After I get 'The Farm' redesigned tomorrow, I will compile of all the RG situations culminating in 'Saudara' and again with all the SF situations culminating in 'Hasrabit'. I need to get a good idea of how badly the core forces are going to get mauled before I can finish the campaign finales. I suspect the RG missions will take a heavy toll on those core forces but not so much on the SF cores.

[Paper Tiger]

I've spent the last couple of days finishing off the updated version of 'The Farm' and reworking the AI attack plans for the campaign opener 'Ambush'. I've managed to incorporate tanks into 'The Farm' without changing the overall feel of the situation, ie, an infantry-v-infantry action, so I'm very happy with it again and I don't want to change anything else. The helicopters are a bit wild and of little use against vehicles (I'm using the Kiowa(?), not the Apache although I might change that) but they're fun so I'm keeping them in.

Then, I returned to 'Ambush' to see how the new AI plans worked. I've had to spend a lot of time redesigning the attack as the first time I played it, the AI was taking it's own sweet time getting it's attack in gear. The mission ended just as the attack was beginning to develop. Now, I've got the pace picked up again but it's very easy to beat. I might just leave it that way as I don't want to frighten people off of the other missions with a really difficult opening mission. However, make some bad set up decisions and you'll be in real trouble. Before I went to work today, I managed to beat the AI without taking a single casualty. Perhaps that's a little too easy.

Fortunately, I have a four day break this weekend so I've compiled two mini-campaigns, one with all the Republican Guards missions and the other with all the Special Forces missions. I will be playtesting the complied missions over the next four days to see just how badly the core forces get beaten up. I'm very confident that the later Republican Guards missions will be doable so I don't expect to have to do much work on them anymore. The only thing I might have to do is make them more difficult! However, I expect the difficulty of the phase 2 Special Forces battles will need to be toned down a bit as I've been playtesting them with the full OB.

I need them to be very difficult however as I don't want anyone to be taking more than the equivilant of two full companies to 'Hasrabit', otherwise the final mission will suffer from a performance hit. It looks like 2 companies or less is the ideal I'm aiming for. Since it's a Red on Red campaign, high casualty rates in some of the individual missions should be expected so it's not unreasonable for me to do this to your core forces to make the final mission playable.

[Paper Tiger]

Compliling the mini campaigns certainly hasn't been a waste of time. I got started on the Special Forces missions today and decided that I wanted to redo the map for 'Ambush'. The water tower went as it was too dominating a terrain feature, especially as I was able to deploy ATGM teams on the roof. Red didn't have a chance. I also changed the trees from Type D to Type E and thinned them out because the existing foliage was too dense to follow the action. After these changes I recomplied it and started again and got a nice win with very few casualties. Nevertheless, because it's a campaign and I was trying to keep casualties as low as possible, it was still a very tense game and it looks really good close up....

Then, after completing the first mission, I advanced to 'Strong Stand'. It's been a while since I played this one so I had forgotten quite a lot about it. The new attack plans work well but I was shocked by the terrible frame rate hit when the reserves arrived on the scene. It wasn't too bad when the first company arrived but when the second group arrived, it dropped to 2fps. So, I opened it up in the editor and reworked the reinforcement schedule and restarted the campaign again. I couldn't believe the difference. Not only was there no slowdown but I found that the second company was actually superfluous to requirements. I managed to get a total victory without using the second group at all so they're now gone. I had an absolute blast playing this one. It's not kind to your core forces but they managed to complete the mission with time to spare. The reserves require careful handling but the mission is doable. And it feels like a WW2 Russion Front situation too. So, I'm up to 'The Farm' now so I'll see how that plays out with the reduced OB later this evening. So far, it's looking good.

I had to have a wee go with 'Saudara' again for a bit of fun. Here's a quick piccy...

Welcome to Saudara. It's WAY too easy for Blue to win with the full OB but I'm hoping that it will be really challenging with the reduced OB. I'm hoping to see how that works out later this weekend.

[handihoc]

I really like the first screenshot. The detail is incredible, wood grain on the pallets, rust and markings on the drums, gaps between the stones on the wall, dry weeds between the sandbags, density of the foliage . . .

I rarely get to appreciate closeups like that when I'm playing, I'm too intent on the action. But it's more evidence of the care and attention to detail that has gone into creating CMSF, which I'd wager, like me, most players miss.

[Paper Tiger]

Yeah, I like it too. The detail really is incredible. After I've spent a few hours designing a map, I love getting the situation set up and watching units and tanks especially, move around inside my creation. I have spent a lot of time carefully placing flavour objects to make certain important locations on the map look more realistic. When there are lulls in the action, I like to get down to the lowest level and follow my soldiers about.

[Paper Tiger]

I tried out the new version of 'The Farm' last night and got my ass handed to me. I led a masterful defence of the first objective, launched a daring counterattack to recapture the second and then got absolutely slaughtered trying to capture the third. The AI tanks were just too tough for me to handle so they had to go. However, Blue is getting to keep his. More later...

I spent the whole day working on the Special Forces mission again which was fun. I got a scare when I was playing 'Ambush' again as my ATGM teams were having a bad day. But the Special Forces are equipped with those wonderful RPG29s so they saved the day. I ended up with 3 KIA and 9 WIA. However, 2 of those KIAs were due to a bad blunder I made when I was getting impatient. Ther was no excuse for that as there's plenty of time to do everything.

Then I was back to the new version of 'Strong Stand'. The first time I played it I got absolutely slaughtered as I failed to place my AT assets in good locations. So I had to reload and start again. The second time, I managed to get a Red surrender with 20 minutes still on the clock so it's definitely balanced.

There is more than one attack plan for 'Strong Stand' so you have to guess where the big push is going to come. I guessed wrong and had to redeploy quickly. There's something awesome about watching the approaching dust clouds, especially when you know what's causing them.

Then I returned to latest incarnation of 'The Farm'. Unfortunately, it was still completely unwinnable. I managed to get a draw today but it was bloody! The new tanks look good on this map but they really didn't help me very much, perhaps due to my sloppy tactics.

The fighting around the work sheds was extremely intense.

But that was my force spent. The last objective was absolutely unassailable so I didn't even bother and waited for the clock to run out. So I'm going to have to rework this one again before moving on to 'Breakout'. At least the first two Special Forces missions are completely finished. I've increased the length of the situation to 2 hours, my first 2 hour mission, but I think we're all going to need it. Hopefully, I'll get 'The Farm' finished and winnable tomorrow.

[Paper Tiger]

Well, if I've learned anything from playtesting these missions this weekend, it's that the later ones are insanely difficult to win and that's not good. Especially the Republican Guards missions.

However, on a positive note, I have arrived at my final version of 'Buying the farm'. When I decided to remove the heavy airstrikes and give the Blue side some crappy tanks to replace them, I had no idea how difficult I was going to make this mission. On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the very best result I could get was a draw and always bloody ones at that. I was feeling a bit despondant about this mission yesterday evening and almost decided to return to the all-infantry version with the air strikes back in.

I really didn't want those air strikes as I couldn't get them to deliver just one heavy strike. One strike would be perfect but no matter how bad I made the ammo for the unit, I got two heavy strikes and that's too much. I couldn't understand why this mission was so difficult for Blue when they had so much force at their disposal. Then I decided that it was my tactics that were at fault. So I loaded it up again this morning and tried something different and, voila, a total victory with acceptable losses. I'm not going to say how I did it, that will be for you guys to figure out for yourselves. Since I was careless and made a few really stupid mistakes, the price in casualties was higher that you should get so that's all the Phase 1 Special Forces missions balanced.

Then I played around with 'The Barrier' to see what effect the new AI timings made on the AI attack. The results were very impressive but I lost the game twice in a row. Again, I was trying some new tactics and that was what was responsible for the AI victories. I have another idea how to improve the AI attack but that's for later.

Finally, I fired up the compiled RG missions and tested them out. Again, I made some stupid mistakes and some of my squads got slaughtered but I managed to get a win. But when I advanced to the next mission I was appalled at how badly my infantry had been beaten up. The first company to arrive on the map had some empty vehicles and some squads were down to 1 man only. The second company was fine though but I felt quite dispirited about the condition of the first. I'd imagine some of you guys would be put off by the difficulty. I know I am. So I'll have to find some way to make 'The Guards Counterattack' a bit easier.

It spoiled the 'Hill 142' experience for me anyway. I think it's a really excellent battle but you need a strong infantry force to do well here. I'll definitely have to tone down the difficulty of this one too.

I've mentioned 'making stupid mistakes' quite a lot in this post as an excuse for losing. I think it's fine that mistakes are punished but at the moment, they're being punished too harshly. It's pointless to make missions that require near perfect play to get a win. I certainly can't do that most of the time. Some of these missions would make first class stand-alone scenarios but, as they're part of a 10 mission campaign, they're WAY too difficult.

I've had so much fun designing and playing some of these missions but playing them with substantially reduced core forces reduces much of their fun. The maps are beautiful but the missions are probably too tough. Since playing a campaign is a substantial investment of our time, it should be a fun experience for us.

So what does this mean for my campaign? I'm happy with the first three Special Forces missions. They're working fine compiled and I suspect, with a little more work, I'll manage to make 'Breakout' doable too. To make the final Special Forces mission 'Hasrabit' playable framewise, I need to kill your core forces and I'm on target for the 40-60% casualties rate that I want. But I really need to find a way to make 'The Guards Counterattack' much easier on your infantry while preserving the feel of the mission. I have an idea how to do that but that'll require more playtesting. So it's not looking good for a finish before next weekend I'm afraid.

Since I wasn't planning on releasing it before 1.08 is released, I suppose that's not a big problem. The good news is that it should be great fun to play for you Red on Red fans when it finally does arrive.

[Wiggum]

Iam as Red vs. Red fan have to say Great work !

[Paper Tiger]

Interesting. After I recovered from my initial despondency, I figured out quite quickly how to make the RG opening scenario much less lethal. But first, I had to find out if part of the problem was my rather crappy tactics so I fired it up again this morning and implemented the tactics that I'd learned playing 'The Farm' and it went very well. Except that I lost two tanks very quickly.

So, I concluded that the mission was just too difficult for Blue to win AND keep a significant portion of his force intact for the next mission. There were two ways I could solve this problem; more force for Blue or less force for Red. Since I remembered that there was a problem with frame rates in this situation when there were more forces, I decided to go for the second option.

First, I reduced the quality of the Red force. I noticed that the force quality was Veteran so I dialled that back to regular but with a few exceptions. The quality of the leadership was also reduced. I figured that this change alone would make the firefights less lethal and reduce AT weapons accuracy. I also changed the composition of some of the AI groups. Then, I removed the ATGM teams from the Red OB because they were the real tank killers in this mission. Finally, I gave the Blue force back the minefields that they originally had.

I fired up the new version and gave it a go and had a great time with it. I didn't have time to finish it this morning so I saved the game so I expect to finish it tomorrow morning. So far, the playtest is everything I'd hoped for. I'm approximately 50 minutes into the situation and the assault on the ridge is well under way and casualties are very light. I still lost one tank but that's fine. I don't want to turn a tiger into a pussy cat.

The reorganization of the AI groups has made a difference to the overall balance of the battle too. Before, when Blue had successfully recaptured the ridge line, the rest of the mission consisted simply of driving across the rest of the map to Blue's own objective zones without much of the way of force left to deal with. Now, it's easier to clear the ridge but you'll have to be careful approaching your own objectives now.

Hopefully, if this mission is balanced, I won't have to make any real changes to the other RG missions so I'll be able to start a proper playtest of the compliled RG missions tomorrow.

[Paper Tiger]

Well, it's looking like it's getting there. I finished the new, more forgiving, version of 'The Guards Counterattack' on Tuesday and I'm very happy with it. I also finished playtesting 'The Barrier' again yesterday and managed to get a draw which is a good result in this situation so it looks like all the phase 1 battles are now finished.

So, I was able to get back to concentrating fully on the four phase 2 battles again. I started work again on'Breakout' yesterday. One result of all that playtesting last weekend was that I know I'll still have about 60-70% of my core force intact for this mission so I'm playtesting it with only one full strength Special Forces company. I figure that if I can just about get a win with one company then this situation will be balanced.

So I fired it up and tried it out. Before I had to go to work yesterday, there was still about 20 minutes of the situation to go and I had already broken the AI attack and recaptured the most important AI objective without taking many casualties. But I still had to advance across the board and capture my own objectives. I still had two mobile T-55(1972) tanks so it might just be doable but I don't think there's enough time to do it.

Then, this morning I finished the mission and got a total victory. I was a bit surprised to find that I was only using two of the full strength Special Forces platoons from the company. I left one back on the base line and forgot about them until I checked the board before making my assault on the last objective.

I guess that means that the mission is almost balanced. If anything, it might be too easy for Blue to win without taking significant casualties, i.e. appx 50%. So I'll make a couple of minor changes to it and playtest it again tomorrow. I really DO mean minor too. Most of the increased challenge will be as a result of the new adjusted victory conditions, and not by adding or subtracting units. After all, 'The Farm' and 'Strong Stand' are pretty tough on your core forces. Some people might be bringing less than 50% of their force to this one but if that's the case, they'll still have a fighting chance.

If the new version works out fine then it means that I just have to finish 'Saudara' and 'Hasrabit'. I'm pretty sure that all that need to be done to 'Saudara' is to increase the size of the Red force and that won't take long. But I think it will take a bit more work to get 'Hasrabit' finished.

Since I'm not planning on releasing the campaign before I've playtested it all again with the 1.08 patch I think I might have time to enhance 'Heavy Metal'. It's actually fine as it stands at the moment but my personal feeling is that it's the 'lame duck' of the RG missions. I have an idea how I could make it into something special but I'd have to redraw the map and that would take a few days. But I know that the two forces are already balanced so it probably wouldn't take too long to do this. I'll see though as I'm anxious to get this finished as soon as I can and I don't want to make any sweeping changes to anything at this stage.

[Webwing]

Paper Tiger,

The angles you chose for your screenshots are fantastic!!

Also reading your posts/designers notes has been very inspiring.

Seems like you are getting very close to the end now.

Good luck.

--

[Paper Tiger]

Webwing

In real life, one of my other hobbies is photography and I tend to 'build' the picture before I take the screenshot. I've got a real beauty for the mission picture when you highlight this campaign in the Campaigns folder.

I feel like it's nearly finished too. And I'm glad becuase I'm starting to develop some ideas for a US MOUT mini campaign and I'm quite excited about doing that. Once 1.08 arrives, I think I can get this campaign finished very quickly so I'm hoping for the patch to come sometime early next week. (I'm a Gamersgate customer so I'll probably have to wait 2-3 days more for my patch)

Hopefully I'll have everything finished this weekend except 'Hasrabit'. Before I can finish that one I'll have to play all the SF missions in one campaign a couple of times at least to see how much of my force I can get through. If it works out that I'm getting 50-60% of the core forces through to the finale I'll have to up the difficulty of "Breakout'. I don't want to change any of the SF Phase 1 battles now unless I feel it's REALLY important to do so after playtesting the compiled missions.

Fortunately, I don't have to include 'Ambush' in the compiled game as I can win it regularly with almost 0 casualties. Since it's the first mission, I'm happy about that. So I just have to play 'Strong Stand', 'The Farm' and 'Breakout' a few times more to get 'Hasrabit' finished. It'll take around 5 hours to complete all three but it's the weekend so I'll probably be able to do that at least once.

As for the RG missions, I'll wait until I've got 1.08 before doing the final playtesting as there are a couple of MOUT missions in there and I think I'll have to make some adjustments if the building cover model is improved significantly. I really LOVE playtesting 'Hill 142' so I'll look forward to doing that again. I've redesigned the victory conditions for that one to make the Blue side fight to control the whole map and not just the hill. Actually, I'll probably load it up first thing tomorrow morning before doing the SF missions since I enjoy playing it so much.

[Paper Tiger]

I compiled the three main SF missions and played them all the way through and got the result that I was hoping for. As I mentioned earlier, I am not compiling the first mission as it's very easy and I get no/very few casualties so it saves me about 45 minutes.

So I started with 'Strong Stand' and for the first 30 minutes I was groaning because I though it was too easy and I was going to have to redo the AI again. But then, I got overconfident and things went horribly wrong and I spent so much time saving my ass that there wasn't enough time to capture any of Blue's objectives. Result: Blue Total defeat.

I can definitely put this defeat down to overconfidence and careless handling of the Reserves which meant that I lost control of them. I don't need to make any changes as it was my own fault. So 'Strong Stand' is definitely finished.

Then I moved onto 'Buying the farm'. It's hard for me to playtest this one 100% objectively as there's only one AI plan and so I know what it's going to do and when it's going to do it. Nevetheless, I managed to get a Total Victory by the time time ran out and had a great time doing it. I didn't make any significant errors playing this one so I can confidently say that this mission is finished too. Here's one more screenshot of the action from this afternoon's session.

That took me onto 'Breakout' and I was a bit nervous that this was going to be too tough. My core forces were pretty beaten up from the previous missions so I took it very slowly. I was worried that I was going to run out of time but I stayed cool, broke the AI attack, and recaptured red's victory point locations and found myself with 15 minutes of regular game time left. With 0-10 minutes of extra time on top of that I organised my forces and made an attack on my own victory locations. As time was running out, I had captured one of the three huge work sheds and was very close to controlling the second. I got a minor defeat when extra time expired but it was REALLY close. So close that I knew all I had to do to make this one winnable was to increase the mission time by 10 minutes and reduce Red's Friendly Casualty threshold to... ah, I'm not going to tell. Needless to say it was too high but now it's perfect.

The end result was that I had 148 men left, which works out at 54% of the starting force. That was absolutely the result I wanted. Now I have a pretty good idea what is needed to finish the final SF mission, 'Hasrabit'. That will be my job for tomorrow.

[handihoc]

The fact that you're a photographer shows. These shots are full of atmosphere and detail and a real sense of 'being there'. Great stuff.

Looking forward immensely to playing this. Red on Red will make a great change, and I suspect make it much harder. I'm currently close to completing bardosy's TF Narwick (highly recommended, but may be worth waiting for the update he plans soon, with a few tweaks following player fback). Then I plan to restart Webwing's Ghost, which I had to abandon due to probs with v1.06. After that it'll be Hasrabit - by which time I imagine you will have it completed.

Rock on!

[Paper Tiger]

Thanks for that. I actually wanted to post this picture that I'd set up yesterday afternoon. But afterwards, I opened it up and found that I'd forgotten to move the cursor off the screen and so the green arrow was bang in the centre of the picture. bummer... still, here it is

Naturally, I'm a bit concerned that I've really been building up people's expectations with all the screenshots. But I've been working really hard to make sure that the action lives up to the beauty of the maps.

It's taken much longer than I expected to get to this point. When I started this thread back in January, I thought it was 4-6 weeks from completion. And I could have finished it in February if I'd wanted to. But I kept having ideas how to improve the experience and some battles, especially the RG missions have undergone massive overhauls. The original 'Murder in the night' was rubbish compared to the final version of 'The Guards Counterattack', as was 'Passed Off' which became 'The Barrier'. My experiences creating the AI attack plan in 'The Barrier' changed the way I designed all my attack plans. Both 'Guards Counterattack' and 'Breakout' benefited tremendously from the ideas I'd evolved from creating 'The Barrier'.

I've also had a change of heart about the difficulty level of this campaign. It's one thing to playtest individual missions in a campaign with the full OB but it's quite another to test them when they're compiled. What was challenging before becomes impossible when compiled. It also takes ages to play through the compiled missions and I don't really want to invest regularly nearly 2 hours of my life playing a particular mission only to have to repeat the whole thing again and again because it was too tough. But don't worry, I think it's still challenging enough for most of us. I guess I'm going more for an enjoyable AND challenging experience rather than merely very challenging.

I've also been very careful to keep CPU performance in mind. The original "Guards Counterattack' was a monster and it crawled, man. I think I've managed to reduce it to manageable levels without losing the flavour of the original. In a couple of missions, you''ll see a performance hit when reinforcements arrive but it's a very temporary situation, usually about 1 minute until the new units have performed all their new LOS checks.

[Paper Tiger]

Well, it looks like I've almost found my final version of 'Hasrabit'. I figure nobody's going to be brining more than the equivalent of two companies to this one so I've been trying to balance it with slightly less than two and, so far, I've been having great success with it.

I had to make some changes to it to keep the frame rates up. Red has lost most of his tanks. There was originally a full company but now we're down to a much smaller number. Here they are, basking in the warm evening sun.

I gave the Red side a bit more infantry to keep up the challenge. I will continue to playtest this version as it feels about right. Blue also lost the IED's but I've given Blue something that will be much more useful in an urban environment: a couple of platoons of engineers. I haven't used them yet so I'll see how things work out with them as playtesting continues.

I also made a few changes to the map and setting to make it look better. For starters, I changed the weather from Heavy haze to Clear and that improved the look of the map both before and after sundown.

Everything is much sharper with clear skies. I also extended the time limit to the full 2 hours as you're going to need all that time. The mission is a tough one but should be doable within 2 hours + extra time. The mission starts later so there will be less daylight and that will confuse the action somewhat. However, there is a full moon so there will be plenty of light. A small detail I noticed while playtesting, it looks like Mars is red in the late evening skies. Very nice touch there BFC.

I don't want to go overboard with flavour objects in an urban environment as I want to keep frames up in double figures. At the moment, the games runs at around 10-12fps after the artillery barrage finishes. It dips slightly when you're reinforcements arrive but returns to normality quite quickly. But that's doable for me.