The Hasrabit Campaign

[Paper Tiger]

Finally, it's finished and it's available for download at CMMODS right now.

The Hasrabit Campaign is a ten mission, dynamic Red on Red campaign. It is set on the first day of a fictional coup staged by some dissatisfied army generals and the Syrian Ba'ath Governement. All ten missions take place within a twenty four hour period. The campaign starts at 10pm on the night of the 17th July 2008 and concludes at approximately 20.30pm on the evening of the 18th. The first few missions will take place at night illuminated by the light of a full moon. Then after the sun rises you will have to fight in the extreme heat of the day. Finally, the sun will set during the course of the final mission.

You play as Blue, and you control the forces loyal to the Government throughout the campaign. You have two sets of core units, a Republican Guard Battalion Group and a battalion of Special Forces. You will be doing battle with the forces of the rebel 7th Armour Division within the confines of the fictional Hasrabit Military district, located about 80km south east of Damascus. These two core groups will never appear together in the same mission as they are based in very different parts of the district. The Special Forces operate in the fertile Shuruk valley to the south east of Hasrabit, while the Republican Guard missions operate in the more rugged, arid hilly district to the south west of Hasrabit.

Although they do not appear together in any mission in the campaign, the results of one group's missions will strongly affect the direction of the campaign and so affect the other groups missions as well. The campaign is strongly story based, and it has two distinct phases. The first phase consists of all the night and the very early morning missions. This is where the campaign is at it's most dynamic and there are eight different variations of the final phase one mission. Then, depending on how you faired in phase one, you move into one of four phase two story lines. At this point, and to prevent the branching from producing an absurd number of variants, failure in a phase two mission will immediately eject you from the campaign.

Most of the missions last at least 90 minutes, quite a few last 2 hours with some extra time. Most of the maps are quite large, especially the maps for Republican Guards missions and you will sometimes have to control two or more companies during the mission. The Republican Guard missions are all combined arms missions where you will have to co-ordinate all four arms, infantry, armour, artillery and air support. While the Special Forces have no armour of their own in their OB, they will be acting in concert with a Reserve mechanised unit so most of their missions will be combined arms actions too. It is my understanding that this is how the Special Forces are intended to operate.

Although not nearly as modern or as sexy as current US equipment, the Republican Guards and the Special Forces field the very best equipment that the Syrians have. Your tanks are T-72 TURMS and the Guards battalion Group has a full company of them attached. Your forces, both RG and SF, are of a very high quality, mostly crack but there are some veterans in the force mix and even a small number of elite units. With the most to gain from the survival of the regime, the RG units are fanatically motivated while the SF units are extremely motivated. However, because the action takes place within such a short time span, all your units have a weakened fitness level. This is because they had to ride for 3-4 hours in their transports and then go straight into action and stay in action for 24 hours. It won't be so noticable at night but they will slow down during the heat of the day.

Further, with the exception of the first mission, most of your units will not be resupplied at the end of a mission. This means that you will have to manage your ammo throughout the course of the mission. This also seriously restricts the power of artillery in the campaign. You will have lots to throw around in the early missions but once that module has spent it's ammo, it's gone for the duration. It is also very unlikely that immobilised vehicles will return to action after a mission. Immobilisation is almost as good as a kill. Neither will vehicular damage be repaired so if the smoke launcher or the externally mounted ATGM weapon is lost, it is probably lost for good too. However, your tanks and a very few select units will receive a one time resupply at the end of the phase one battles. This is because the T-72 doesn't carry a huge amount of AT ammo. Trust me, they're going to need it all.

This is a very ambitious project as it attempts to be fully dynamic. It represents the end of literally HUNDREDS of hours of work. Although you will only play a total of ten missions in the campaign, there are a number of variants of those same battles that you will only find if you fail a mission. While most of them represent a slight, and usually temporary rise in the difficulty level of the subsequent missions, lose too many missions and you will find that the later missions become almost impossible to beat. Of course, you will only experience these variant missions if you fail a mission, accept the result and move on to the next mission. I hope that most of you will play the campaign in the spirit that the designer intends you to play it, ie, to accept the result of your missions and move on to the next one rather than reload and only advance after you have won a victory. You will have more fun if you do it that way. And of course, more kudos to you if you complete the campaign while following one of the more difficult branches to the finale.

Good luck and good hunting.

[ChrisND]

Excellent - can't wait to start it up!

[Darkmage]

OK well I gave the 1st mission a quick go, 1st lesson I've learnt... RPGs don't go through trees.. Set me my nicely placed ambush a bit too far in to the forest, will try again from a forward position

also is there anyway to get the ATGM to watch the approaches but only fire on tanks not APCs? I tried using a small target arc but I guess that means they are only looking at that small sector or is that not the case?

[Paper Tiger]

Hmm, and here was me thinking that 'Ambush' was a walkover. I gather from your post that you're playing WEGO? I have playtested everything in RT so micromanaging the ATGM teams was the way to go. While there is no specific order you can give to your ATGM Teams to make them fire ONLY on tanks, I have found that, since 1.08, the TACAI has been doing a really good job of prioritising it's targets to fire on armour first and vehicles second.

And don't panic if some of the tanks get over the river. You're going to find that the RPG-27 is a superb tank killer. Your teams are very well trained and usually have good leadership modifiers as well to enable them to operate independently. You can succesfully complete the mission without any ATGM teams. I know 'cos I've tried it, but it is a LOT tougher.

BTW, there are some places on that map that will make excellent positions for your ATGM teams. No more clues

[Paper Tiger]

After posting dozens of screenshots in the WIP thread it seems a bit daft of me not to include some screenshots for this thread. I hope some of you will post yours too...

The map sure looks pretty but the mission's got teeth.

I should really have posted this next one with the original post but never mind... here are your boys...

And another from The Guards Counterattack mission.

Finally, just after dawn on the farm.

happy hunting

[handihoc]

Great news! I'm looking forward to this one bigtime!

Going to finish Webwings Ghost campaign first, but after that . . . .

[Webwing]

Congratulations Paper Tiger!

And more great screenshots!

--

[Field Marshal Blücher]

Originally posted by Paper Tiger:

Hmm, and here was me thinking that 'Ambush' was a walkover.

I found it extremely difficult. I got my behind handed to me almost immediately. I took nearly 50% casualties and had to bug out after only being engaged a couple of minutes. I lost 3 of my four ATGM teams, a whole platoon except for its HQ section, and another platoon except for its HQ section and one surviving rifle squad of four men. 30 KIA, 17 WIA. Not an auspicious start. Those enemy tanks are beastly! I'm going to have another go at it.

I know you said to keep playing if I lose, but then I started Strong Stand and immediately had a whole platoon rendered combat ineffective (although not completely destroyed). I figured that after this, it would be pretty much impossible to beat any of the Special Forces missions that follow.

The maps are beautiful, though. This one deserves another go! I can tell you out a lot of effort into these, and I think part of the reason I'm sucking is that I'm unused to this kind of combat (defensive combat with infantry only against armour). Hopefully I'll improve!

-FMB

[Field Marshal Blücher]

Well, just gave it another go and I did beat Ambush, but it was really hard. I positioned my ATGM teams differently, and that helped a lot.

On to Strong Stand! Really enjoying this so far.

-FMB

[the Fighting Seabee]

Downloading now!!!!!!!

[Paper Tiger]

The map for 'Ambush' dates from the same time as 'In Harms Way'. In fact, it's very similar. It was originally a QB map but I liked it so much, I made it into a Red on Red meeting engagement. I have played this one over and over again. I often played this mission as a stand alone scenario and I ALWAYS enjoyed playing it. Short, quick and fun.

Anyway, my point is that I guess I have become extremely familiar with this map and know the best sites to place everything. I have even beaten it with ZERO casualties, but only once. Are you playing it WEGO? I'd imagine it's a bit tougher to beat in WEGO.

A word about casualties. Don't panic if you take quite heavy casualties, ie 20-30%. It's a Red on Red campaign so casualties will happen and they're planned for. The later missions were playtested with significantly reduced OBs so even if you lose a whole platoon in a mission, don't worry, you'll still be able to win the later missions.

In fact, replaying until you get the perfect result will result in making the later missions too easy and, with regards to frame rates, possibly unplayable too as you'll have too many units on the map. I'd imagine 'Breakout' would suck big time perfomance-wise with the nearly the full Special Forces OB. And the finale, 'Hasrabit' absolutely definitely will! Trust me, you'll get the best experience, both challenge and performance-wise with this campaign if you accept the result and move on.

But after saying all that, I agree with you, it's better to start again if you take lots of casualties in 'Ambush' though.

I guess if people are going to have lots of problems with these missions, I'll have to start an AAR so that you can see how I use these forces. Those AT-14s can get kills on M1s so, sited properly, they should have no problem killing the all armour in Ambush. And those RPG-27s are truly awesome too. Once you learn how to use them properly, you'll see just how powerful they really are. And there are so many of them. Each Special Forces platoon starts out with three of them. Their unbalancing effect in the campaign resulted in me introducing the 'no resupply' condition in the scripting.

I had so much fun playtesting these missions and learning how to use the equipment properly, I just hope you guys get some of the same pleasure that I did doing the same.

[Paper Tiger]

Okay, I've started working my way through my campaign and I must admit that I found 'Ambush' to be a bit tougher than I remember. Although I haven't changed anything about it, I found that my ATGM teams were finding it harder to get hits. I must confess that I didn't playtest this one again after 1.08 because it was so easy before and there are no conscripts in it. However, the new AI self-preservation routines sometimes make an ATGM team leave it's position and then they have to deploy the weapon again and sometimes it's in a place with poor LoS.

I still got a surrender result though and with acceptably low casualties. And my ATGM teams are almost intact too. But it was hard work to get this result and I did feel like it was going badly for a while. A vehicle crew got to the exit point and earned those 500 points. That shouldn't have happened. And unfortunately, most of those kills came from one squad, one of the good ones. But that result really won't hurt me later in the camapign. I occassionally got those numbers pre-1.08 too.

I would be really happy that 'Ambush' has turned out to be challenging but doable but it's followed by 'Strong Stand' and it's a really tough mission. And it is intended to be that way for a reason. However, some of you might get discouraged and think that, after two missions, this campaign is too difficult. Don't worry, the Republican Guards missions come after 'Strong Stand' and they're much easier and fun too, especially 'Hill 142'. And ALL the following Special Forces battles are epics, 'Buying the farm', 'Breakout' and 'Hasrabit'.

Okay, time to move onto 'Strong Stand'.

[Schmoly War]

Really enjoying this!

Typo: RPG27 is really RPG29.

[Paper Tiger]

Oops, RPG-29 it is, my mistake. Glad to hear you're enjoying it.

I'm about half way through 'Strong Stand' at the moment and will have to wait until tomorrow morning to finish it. Play time this afternoon was interuppted by my wife's discovery of a large dead rat at the back of the house. Since she's absolutely terrified of rats, even when they're dead, it was incumbent upon me as the 'man' of the house to get rid of the thing so I paid someone to come and take it away. What a hero.

Anyway, I got my absolute best result in the Special forces stand ever. I still took some casualties and lost a coule of RPG-29 teams but I've never done so well before. Usually, I lose about 30% of the force. However, I did play more carefully than I usually do. But it's not over yet. Now the rebel attack is beaten and it's time to rest my troops and assemble the rest of the reserves before launching my counterattack. And those reserves are a handful at night.

I don't know about you guys but I feel that playing a campaign is a completely different experience from playing a single mission. I'm spending much more time considering my set up positions than I normally do and I really FEEL those losses when they happen, even though they're unavoidable. It's making playing this thing a really intense experience. Yes, I know, I designed and set this whole thing up but playtesting the missions individually or even a short compliation really doesn't match up to the experience of playing the whole thing.

[ChrisND]

After playing the first scenario, I have decided that I love the AT-14.

Spoiler:

Ambush was fairly easy for me on Elite. I think the crucial element is correct placement of the Kornets. The ATGM teams decimated most tanks and a good deal of the BTRs, while only taking one casualty. Their kill zone was the patch of open ground at the top of the hill on the enemy side. RPG-29s killed anything that reached the woodline just before the bridges, and no enemy troops got further than 10 meters past the crossings. 4 dead, 5 wounded on my side.

[SgtMuhammed]

This sounds great. I'll definitely give it a shot.

[Field Marshal Blücher]

Originally posted by Normal Dude:

After playing the first scenario, I have decided that I love the AT-14.

Spoiler:

Ambush was fairly easy for me on Elite. I think the crucial element is correct placement of the Kornets. The ATGM teams decimated most tanks and a good deal of the BTRs, while only taking one casualty. Their kill zone was the patch of open ground at the top of the hill on the enemy side. RPG-29s killed anything that reached the woodline just before the bridges, and no enemy troops got further than 10 meters past the crossings. 4 dead, 5 wounded on my side.

Hmm, that's weird. That's exactly what I did (on Veteran, too) and I still took a fair number of casualties. Same end result (lots of destroyed enemy vehicles on the top of the hill, no enemy vehicles got very far beyond the crossing), but I lost a lot more guys (20-30 in total I think). I did realize too late that one of my RPG-29 teams was not positioned correctly, and that might have accounted for some of my difficulty.

[ChrisND]

Originally posted by Field Marshal Blücher:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Normal Dude:

After playing the first scenario, I have decided that I love the AT-14.

Spoiler:

Ambush was fairly easy for me on Elite. I think the crucial element is correct placement of the Kornets. The ATGM teams decimated most tanks and a good deal of the BTRs, while only taking one casualty. Their kill zone was the patch of open ground at the top of the hill on the enemy side. RPG-29s killed anything that reached the woodline just before the bridges, and no enemy troops got further than 10 meters past the crossings. 4 dead, 5 wounded on my side.

Hmm, that's weird. That's exactly what I did (on Veteran, too) and I still took a fair number of casualties. Same end result (lots of destroyed enemy vehicles on the top of the hill, no enemy vehicles got very far beyond the crossing), but I lost a lot more guys (20-30 in total I think). I did realize too late that one of my RPG-29 teams was not positioned correctly, and that might have accounted for some of my difficulty. </font>Did you have them split into half squads and spaced apart? I did this, and a few tank rounds that did get fired would have made double casualties if I had not.

[Field Marshal Blücher]

Ah, that could have been it.

[the Fighting Seabee]

I set up my atgm's in a way that made them very deadly. One all the way to the right, hiding behind a low wall. They were very effective and ran out of ammo. Then another atgm looking down the road to the left. Hey was also very effective and ran out of ammo. I only wish I would have had my other 2 positions doubled up. They were perfect and would have taken out ALL of the tanks and most of the apc's.

Instead, 2 tanks made it through. Luckily, they were quickly taken out by the close range rpg's. So, I made it out relatively unscathed, with only a few casualties.

Great mission! I'm looking forward to the rest of the campaign.

[Paper Tiger]

Sorry guys, I think I stuffed something up before I uploaded the campaign. I made a change to 'Strong Stand' to prevent the Red side from surrendering too early and I forgot to adjust the victory point conditions to account for it. The result is that you'll have to play an unbelievably flawless game to get a win and that's ridiculously hard to do (at least for me)

I finished my game this morning. Because I'd managed to defeat the initial AI attack with minimal casualties, I was feeling very proud of myself and as a result, I played the remainder of the mission quite timidly with my core forces. I wasn't so timid with my Reserves though and they took heavy casualties.

I managed to clear out the farmhouse and I'd very nearly cleared out the east yard and the peach orchard objectives when the game finished. I thought I'd done enough to get a victory so when I saw Total Syrian Defeat, I thought I'd won it. then I noticed that it was me who lost. I got 250vps for capturing the farmhouse but the AI had 1250 points, 1000 for keeping a small percentage of it's force intact and 250 for inflicting significant casualties on my force.

My reserve forces were in too bad shape for me to clear out the east yard and I'd lost one tank and two others were immobilised in crappy positions so their attack faltered. But I should really have wrested control of the peach orchard from them but I held back my Special Forces to keep my core force casualties low. But even had I cleared it out, I'd still have lost. So, as it stands, you can ONLY win if you control all three objectives AND do it without losing a lot of your force. OR, you concentrate on finding and destroying almost all the AI forces to deprive them of their Friendly casualty bonus.

That really wasn't my intention mto make this mission so difficult. Before I made this change, you had to work to get the win but you could get it with enough work and very satisfying it was too. However, just before compliling everything I added a little bit of extra force to the Red OB to prevent them from surrendering too quickly but I forgot to adjust the VP conditions when I did this. I actually did change it on my spreadsheet so it LOOKED like I'd done it. If I had changed the parameters, you'd get a win for controlling two VP locations and contesting the third but not a Total Victory from surrender unless you're bloody good.

So here's what I'm going to do. I want to decrease the bonus the AI earns from keeping his force intact (that's what I meant to do but forgot) or remove the extra forces from the Red OB. I'm going to check in here again later this evening and see if there's any feedback. If not, I'll recompile the campaign and upload a new version later tonight or early tomorrow morning. It really is a quick fix to make. Of course, if you guys think it's fine the way it stands then I'll leave it. After all, I did play the second half of the mission very badly. I deserved to lose.

[afreu]

Just played the "Hill 142" mission. The weird thing is that the enemy gets a 2000 point bonus. I didn't meet the artillery observer objective but occupied all zones. Alltogether 1250 points vs. 2250 points for the enemy - tactical defeat. O_o

[Paper Tiger]

That sounds right. That mission can only be successfully completed IF you kill the artillery spotter. Failure to do so results in a branch leading to a mission with more artillery support for the AI. The bonus was given to the AI to make sure that ONLY this condition (ie getting the artillery observer) was the deciding factor. Of course, you can't win it if you don't control the village either. To make a campaign dynamic with real consequences to success and failure, it's necessary to skew the VP conditions to ensure the player fulfills his objective.

Anyway I'll have another look at it this morning. Did you win in the earlier missions afreu?

[Paper Tiger]

I've just uploaded a new version of the campaign to CMMODS that takes care of a small number of issues listed below.

Strong Stand.

Just before releasing the campaign, I made a quick change to the Red OB to give them enough strength to keep them in the fight until time expired. However, I forgot to change the VP allocations in the game to account for this. I have deleted the 'new' units. This means that you'll now be playing the heavily playtested version which is MUCH easier to win.

Hill 142

Three changes to this one.

a) after reading afreu's post I realised that one of the Red VP conditions was Touch and not Occupy. I changed that.

I also removed the tank that begins on the map at the start. Instead, it will arrive as a reinforcement with the other tanks later in the mission. Again, that was a last minute change to the campaign. The commanders tank was originally assigned to B Company's task force. I had my reasons for changing it but when I moved it I put it in Blue AI group 5, NOT reinforcement group 5.

c) I also noticed that the briefing for one of the branched missions was the wrong one.

Buying the farm

I deleted the tank from the Red OB. I figure this mission is difficult enough without having to fight off this monster too. Again, this was a (rather sadistic) last minute change which I regretted as soon as I read the first posts in this thread.

Core Units

I removed the 'Weakened' condition from the Special Forces as the valley is their home base. The RG units still have 'weakened' status.

I had originally planned to have two sets of core units, one for the night missions and one for the day. But the option to edit core units in some missions in a campaign doesn't seem to be working so I just made them all weak throughout the campaign.

Breakout

I added a TON of flavour objects to the map. I forgot to add any before I compiled the camapign. They're there now.

Artillery

I gave the Special Forces artillery modules a bit of extra ammo to make sure that you still have some for 'Breakout'. You NEED artillery to get through that one. It's not much extra however so still need to be economical with it.

I really must apologise to you guys who have already started playing this campaign. I admit that I was in such a hurry to get it released in time for the weekend that I put it up without thoroughly checking the changes I made to it first. I should really have playtested the new version of 'Strong Stand'. Instead, I playtested 'Saudara' and 'The Barrier' exclusively during the final stages of development.

I am hoping that these changes will make the campaign a bit easier to complete. I think 'The Farm' mission is one of the best in the campaign and sticking in that tank was a very bad idea. Instead, you'll really haver to fight to get your win without having to deal with a tank in open terrain as well.

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