Making the Quick Battle Generator Work (well)

[Echo]

I dont like designing misions, I like playing the game. Also, there arent alot of custom missions being made by community.

That leaves QB generator, which I to play most of the time, and it has lots of problems. Battlefront isn't doing anymore work on this part of the game, so how do you make this rusty nail spit out a halfway decent battle?

[Canada Guy]

I know that it is almost impossible to create the old CMx1 QB generator in CMx2 because of all the added complexity. It would be nice though to have some help with creating your maps though. With all the different levels, angles and now 8m squares, the computer never gets it qute right. I remember the roads from hell in QB CMx1.

What I would like to see is a button to create a map with heights, brush and trees only, based upon certain user defined values. (e.g. hilly/flat and desert/brush/trees). No buildings, roads, or walls - though roads might be easier if you have only minimal options (1 road, 2 roads, no roads). Everythng else would be left up to the designer but would allow variation in terrain.

I know that once you get to do something well, every map tends to look like that when you design your own scenarios. My train station in CMBB is usually always in as it looks good and is fairly realistic. I think this is why I loved the idea of a meta-tile so much. I could design train stations and other designers could do what they do best and I could pick and choose (and then alter) to suit my situation. A good map could be finished in half the time.

[VonWebb]

I think the QB section of the game is presently being worked on... or maybe i'm wrong?

But i think since most things have been fixed they've been able to shift priorities to QB. That's what i read, somewhere. Especially going forward to new releases..

[rich12545]

Going forward to Normandy, yes. For Shock Force, no. What we have is what we get.

But with Marines and cmmods there are about 150 battles. Plus several campaigns. Plus the British are coming. Each battle has diverse ai plans so can be replayed. Plus most can be modified a bit in the editor to further increase replayability. You could play one battle a week and never play the same one for more than three years.

[Bigduke6]

True, but if a substantial portion of those scenarios are of the variety "awesome US military trashes all opposition/hapless Syrians die like flies and try and take the scenario on points", then you have a sameness problem. The outcome is pre-determined, in RL terms the US will win by application of a massive firepower advantage. Maneuver and tactics are a distant second to the US ability to hose anything it sees, and often well before even an ambushing Syrian manages to fire back.

These factors tend to reduce the fun level in blue vs. red scenarios even if the scenario is well-built, and frankly the scenario designers are just learning the engine. A proportion of the scenarios that have already been built are clunky, simplistic, or just stacked towards the Americans because the designer thought "fun" is the same thing as US forces blasting everything that moves.

Probably even worse, since CM2 is most often replicating a 1st rate army vs. a 5th rate army, and the designers are taking blue on the defensive as not worth simulating, almost any red vs. blue scenario will come down to red sitting in ambush and waiting for the Americans to drive into a fire sack. We should not forget the game allows no US wire, mines, sanbagged positions, or engineering obstacles; all of which would be standard in any kind of US prepared defence. This substantially reduces the variety of scenarios available to the gamer; most of the time the US - as is reasonable given the CMSF scenario - is always advancing.

Think of a CMBB where a designer really can only game 1941 Germans advancing, or at best Germans in a meeting engagement, and has no chance of gaming Germans in a deliberate defense, or fighting Soviets any more competent than June 1941.

I think we can all agree that would reduce the replayability of CMBB. Yet, if the definition of replayability is a simple available scenario count, then CMBB and CMSF are the same: technically there are more scenarios out there than an average gamer could manage to play.

To my mind, the two games are not comparable in terms of replayability, not even close. This is, obviously, a result of two conscious decisions by BFI, specifically (1) not to pour all their effort an resources into a single huge, all-encompassing game; but rather to release increasingly sophisticated portions of it as modules and (2) choosing a modern framework pitting a 1st rate army against a 5th rate army.

But less obviously there is a third reason: with the rougly 5-fold increase in detail in the game (i.e., before a plot of ground was 40 meters square, now it is 8-meters square) designing a scenario has become at minimum five times more time consuming. But actually that task is even more than that: a scenario designer in CM2 must choose from about three times as many terrain types, judge game balance not between symetrical forces (easy) but asymetrical ones (hard), and tweak not a primitive "who killed more, and captured more flags, wins" VP system, but in addition relatively complicated and fuzzy things like mimimum/maximum friendly casualties and damage to civilian structures.

Finally, and again this is a function of the theater choice by BFI, maps frequently must be much larger in CM2 than in CM1, because of the longer rangers of modern weapons, and because Syrian open field battles in general would take place in a arid, semi-desert or desert environment.

My personal estimate, and roughly speaking, it is somewhere between 5 and 10 times more time-consuming to create a proper CM2 scenario, as it is to do the same thing in CM1.

The scenario designers, I think it is worth remembering at this point, are for practical purposes all unpaid volunteers. Without their voluntary contribution there is no replayability.

So what's one of those designers to do? Well, we have already seen the result: a few put in the effort and do the job right, while most crank out scenarios where short cuts are taken. The engine allows all sort of A/I behavior, but the designer doesn't build it in. The theater argues for huge maps with engagement ranges in mulitiple kilometers and maneuver possibilities beyond that; but the designer just starts all forces off in effective range with one another, so goodbye maneuver. The scenario engine allows all sorts of complicated ways to determine win or loss, but the scenario designer defaults to the much simpler and easier-to-handle "who killed more?" yardstick.

Another problem in getting good scenarios made for this game is, the US vs. Syria just isn't as compelling as (say) US vs. Nazi Germany. There is no question which military is superior, in pretty much all imaginable engagements, in Syria; and further US vs. Syria is imaginary.

Compare that to the level of grog (i.e., amateur military historian) interest in fighting between the US and Germany in Normany 1944. That conflict really happened, and the armies in that conflict weren't asymetrical; they were generally speaking fairly close, which made the outcome of most engagements much less predictable than anything one might see if the Americans went at the Syrians.

BFI clearly recognized all this at the outset, and the company strategy clearly has been to deal with limited replayability by pumping out a new module every 6 - 12 months, and so making customers pay for access to a batch of scenarios more or less different from what went before. After all, to a certain point the Brit force module will give any one interested in the game a degree of freshness; yes blue will still be overwhelmingly powerful and yes most scenarios will be blue attacking against red in some kind of built-up terrain, but for a while anyway it will be new because it will be British kit and some additional equipment variety on the Syrian side.

But long term CM2 replayability will still be in my opinion quite poor, because the real problems - modern war framework and how time-consuming it is for an unpaid scenario designer to make a scenario - will not have been addressed. Yes there will be more battles to play, but they will suffer from sameness.

CM2 Normandy logically will improve things somewhat as the gamer world is far more interested in WW2 than modern war, and so logically there will be more volunteers willing to put in the time and effort to build a scenario, and since the forces will be less asymetrical the scenarios themselves will, logically, suffer less from sameness.

But the massive treasure trove that is the CM1 user-created scenario base, I think that is gone forever, we will never see that again. Creation of a scenario in CM2 is so time-consuming it will put off all but the most dedicated gamers, and even the dedicated ones will be producing scenarios not (say) once a week, but once a month or even less frequently. Since practice makes perfect, I think that less really fun scenarios is the only logical outcome.

Think about one of the great CM1 scenarios of all time, you know Tiger Valley, Moltke Bridge, Into Normandy by Tank. Think about the really skilled CM1 designers, you know, Wild Bill, JasonC, Richie, Mad Russian, Enigma, Kingfish; and that's just off the top of my head.

Now think about CM2. Divide the overall size of user-created content by at least five, probably ten, and quite possibly twenty. Reduce the quality of that content by some additional inderterminate number, as skillful scenario designers get to be that way by practice, and quality scenario design in CM2 will be taking five to twenty times longer than in CM1.

You want to be realistic, that is the replayability future. There will be less scenarios and their overall quality will go down. The CM2 scenario design engine is an order of magnitude more complicated than in C1, and volunteer scenario designers have only the same amount of energy and free time as before.

[c3k]

Bigduke6,

That was very cogent and well written. I agree with your concerns.

Regards,

Ken

[Thomm]

I think the QB section of the game is presently being worked on... or maybe i'm wrong?

I am not a big QB player myself, but from the traffic on the beta board I deduce that QBs are definitely worked on, at least in the sense of bugs being fixed.

Best regards,

Thomm

[Thomm]

Bigduke,

What you say is correct, no doubt. I want to add that the current editor interface is at the lower bound of user friendliness, which becomes painfully obvious once one wants to move beyond fooling around towards making a real scenario. That is not really a problem of the setting or the forces involved. I expect that to change in the WW2 engine (hopefully).

Nevertheless, for all the hundreds of CMx1 scenarios made, I probably played/downloaded already more CMx2 scenarios than I actually played in all of the three CMx1 games combined. That does not mean that CMx1 was not a great game system; it was. But for me the current engine just offers much more fun in a shorter time frame. Heck, I play CMx2 almost daily for 1.5 years and there is still stuff to discover, be it obscure Red equipment or subtleties of the engine. But I better stop going all fanboi over you now!

Best regards,

Thomm

[c3k]

Thomm, your comment about user friendliness, or the lack thereof, in the editor is spot on. Although, game editor interfaces are often substandard, being a developer tool given to the community as a goodwill gesture; in CMSF it is THE key to the game.

I find that various UI issues are the remaining hurdle to this game (as evidenced by my various threads on UI tweaks). Well, that and a healthy scenario library!

Regards,

Ken

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I'd have to disagree with BD6 that quality is going down. IMHO compared to CMx1, quality CMSF of scenarios is soaring!

Getting the AI to do something halfway decent in CMx1 takes, for all it's simplicity, twice the expertise then cobbling something together in CMSF. I've not done much at all with the CMSF editor but already I've gotten it to do things that were beyond my wildest dreams when toying around with CMx1 battles.

[c3k]

Elmar Bijlsma,

I think that the best CMSF scenarios are far better than the best CMBB scenarios. In that regard, I agree with you; CMSF quality CAN be fantastic.

However, the longevity of this game is its scenarios; the complexity required to build a GOOD CMSF scenario is greater than that needed for CMBB. That is what I took away from Bigduke6's post. And I agree with HIM that the very complexity has given rise to a paucity of GOOD scenarios.

The on-disk scenarios in CMx1 were vastly outnumbered by the user-created scenarios. A lot of those scenarios were quite good.

I do not get the same sense of good user-created scenarios being available.

I've used CMMOD's to get some; the repository for a couple others. There doesn't seem to be as many available as there were under CMx1. (Given an allowance for sepia tinted memories distorting what CMx1 was like a year plus after release, I do not think the perceived lack of CMx2 scenarios is only imagined.)

As Bigduke6 stated, the complexity of scenario design has driven away some talent. The sameness of the tactical situation (Blue advancing into Red kill-sack), drives away some downloads.

So, the possibilities are immense for great scenarios. I applaud the folks whose work has given me greater gameplay; THANK YOU! However, there does seem to be fewer scenarios out there.

Thoughts?

Ken

[Echo]

Thats good news for sure if they are working on the QB code. I played more CM1 QBs over the years (single play and head to head)than pre-made scenarios in any other game I own, CM included. Anyone have any tips at getting the QB working decent? I'm gonna try Mark Ezras QB maps, and see how those pan out.

[MarkEzra]

I'm gonna try Mark Ezras QB maps, and see how those pan out.

All QBG maps have been removed from CMMODs and will not be placed on the BFC server. I have been revamping them. The new work will be presented hopefully as an early Christmas gift. I recommend you wait for the new stuff.

[CogNative]

The QBG Santa! Thanks for this holiday gift. Maybe BFC will toss a V1.11 in the sock as well?

Ken said it well, "I think that the best CMSF scenarios are far better than the best CMBB scenarios. In that regard, I agree with you; CMSF quality CAN be fantastic." It takes work to do this in CMSF. Example, Paper Tiger! His dedication to doing campaigns is admirable and appreciated. There many good CMSF scenarios and mods. CMBB has been around since 2003? and is easier to ... well as Bigduke6 stated, the complexity of scenario design has driven away some talent.

Patience and / or practice. I tried making some platoon sized scenarios / maps and it takes time. Fun = Yes but CMSF takes time because it is that much better than CM1.

[Wengart]

I would like to point out that the introduction of British forces will allow scenario designers to make Blue vs. Blue games with armies of roughly the same quality however with different equipment.