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Parameters - Idiot's Guide


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Gents - I'm starting to get into scenario design and I've cracked the maps and AI and all that stuff but I'm having real difficulties with understanding parameters for the victory screen. The simple reason for this is that me and mathematics have never been best mates. Basically then I'm looking for some simple tips here - I don't particularly want to open scenarios up and reverse engineer because I know what I want to achieve and I'd rather set me own conditions rather than modify.

My problem is ... I just don't get the parameters bit. I've designed a few scenarios and know what I want to achieve victory condition-wise - I just can't seem to put the right numbers in and in particular I've not really got a handle on the opposites in parameters. My sample question is:

If I put in 'Enemy Condition 30%' should I put in 'Friendly Condition 70%'

What/how does this translate? Anybody who can give me a full break down of how all of this works will assume heroic status!

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If I put in 'Enemy Condition 30%' should I put in 'Friendly Condition 70%'

No, the numbers don't have to add up to 100 so don't worry about that.

Let's use an example to illustrate the effect...

The US player has 100 crack soldiers, the Red player 200 poor soldiers. Not a fair match up perhaps so we want to make things harder for Blue to win.

We set Friendly Casualties as 5% and give the player 100 points for fulfilling this condition. That means he can lose up to 4 soldiers and earn this bonus. 5 or more and he gets nothing.

Or we can set Friendly Condition at 25% and give the player 100 points. I never use these two conditions together, just one but there's nothing to stop you from doing so.

For Enemy casualties, we set Blue's parameter as 90% and give him 100 points for fulfilling that condition. That means he must kill ... (yes you know) ... 181 enemy troops to earn this bonus.

Or we could do the same for Enemy Condition, probably slightly better. Again I don't mix these up.

Okay, so that means Blue can earn 100 points for ending the mission with less than 5% casualties or 4 casualties and he gets another 100 points if he kills 181 enemy troops.

Fine, so that's Blue. Now lets look at Red. Same scenario. Obviously, it's going to be a tough ride for those Syrian boyos so the conditions will be different.

We set Friendly casualties (or Condition) at 50% and give him 150 points if he can finish the mission with more than 100 troops.

And we set Enemy casualties at 8% and give him 150 points if he kills 9 or more Blue soldiers.

Therefore, Red earns 150 points if he kills 9 US soldiers and another 150 if he loses less than 100 troops when the mission ends.

Note that we don't HAVE to set Red's Enemy casualties at 5% because of Blue's parameters. We can set that value any way we want but obviously it's better if Blue's Friendly casualties parameter is lower than Red's Enemy Casualties parameter and vise versa

Hopefully that will help you understand some of the basics. Or perhaps I've just confused you further?

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Paper Tiger ... I think you might be a legend here. From what I've gleaned from your post - if I don't want to I don't have to assign any values to parameters if I don't want to (I'm thinking condition here if I have already set the casualty threshold for Blue and Red).

Am I right with that?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Does anyone know if it is possible to have more than a 2 hr and 15min battle? The parameters only seem to allow for 2 hours as max game time and then a variable length of time of 15 minutes max. Is there a way to change this? I tried altering it manually using .NET but it seems that the file types are a proprietary type only used in ICQ. Any help anyone could give would be greatly appreciated.

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Or we can set Friendly Condition at 25% and give the player 100 points. I never use these two conditions together, just one but there's nothing to stop you from doing so.

I seem to recall testing this and finding that the Condition and Ammo % thresholds work the opposite way around to the Casualty % threshold. This is vaguely hinted at in the manual as well. In other words, to make it hard for Blue to achieve victory points you should give them high Condition and Ammo % thresholds and a low Casualty % threshold.

In Paper Tiger's example, Blue would receive 100 points if at least 25% of the survivors of the battle were fit for duty (health status "green", fatigue status "rested" or "ready"). This would not be at all difficult to achieve, so I guess Paper Tiger meant to say 75%.

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Does anyone know if it is possible to have more than a 2 hr and 15min battle? The parameters only seem to allow for 2 hours as max game time and then a variable length of time of 15 minutes max. Is there a way to change this? I tried altering it manually using .NET but it seems that the file types are a proprietary type only used in ICQ. Any help anyone could give would be greatly appreciated.

As far as I'm aware that's your limit.

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