Scenario endings

[dutch990]

played a few scenarios now,where i have to capture tactical points or buildings.point is,when ive done so and severely mauled the defenders,i find im hanging about for the next 20 mins with nothing happening.when the scenario ends i find a small force of enemy are still on the field of play-doing nothing and making no attempt to retake anything.is this a bug or should i have gone gone looking for them.just seems daft.i have the marines with 1.11 patch installed.

just spoils which otherwise is a great game.

[Skinnedpuppy]

That's a limit of the new AI unfortunatley...

It only follows the plan otherise it sits there, limited to It's TacAI.

[BlackMoria]

You do have the option to use the 'Cease Fire' function if you think you have met all your mission objectives and you don't want to sit twiddling your thumbs waiting for the clock to run out.

Of course, that has to be balanced by waiting to see if 'something' does happen during the remaining time. My experience is there is rarely any last minute push by the AI unless the designer puts that in and I have yet to see happen. Personally, if I think I have met my mission parameters and nothing is happening, I go for the Cease Fire option.

[MikeyD]

Besides, if you were part of that small remaining do-nothing force and all of your comrades had been totally wiped out would you jump up and attack the victors?

[dutch990]

yeah thats a fair point but in the old CMs the ai would throw the towel in.so why not here

[missinginreality]

I've had the AI throw in the proverbial time a number of times, most recently on Around the Bend, Blues for Allah and the fiorst few scenarios of sandstorm too. Took me by surprise the first time and then just kept on a-happening. So yes they do sometimes.

[stoex]

The AI surrenders a lot for me. I would say better than half of my victories are AI surrenders, for whatever that means. It doesn't seem to have any make-or-break condition to it, instead there appears to be a lot of fuzziness involved regarding experience of AI units, damage taken by individual units and the OPFOR as a whole, CO casualties, remaining capabilities vs. enemy assets, objectives held/lost etc. etc. etc.

I have had several instances where the AI surrendered with literally twice as many soldiers OK as I had, but no ground to work with. Other times there are only few enemy soldiers left but they are unspotted and have useful assets at their disposal (often craploads of ATGMs that just never deployed/fired, hunkering down on a ridge or on a roof with LOS to my armor). I often don't get why the AI surrenders as easily as it sometimes does. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that the AI has trouble deploying heavy weapons if it doesn't have an AI plan to do so.

EDIT: One thing I think makes a difference and brings me a lot of surrenders is that I always attempt to pound everything I spot as hard as possible. There are a lot of battles where the briefing says to not worry all too much about the OPFOR, but to push for the terrain objective(s). Recce battles mostly, but there are plenty others. I tend to ignore this and try to beat the shyte out of everything that comes into LOS. I overdo it too, when I don't need to conserve ammo, and keep area targetting buildings and other positions even when the initial question mark has gone away, just to be sure there aren't any survivors (respecting RoE, of course...there has to be a '?' before I flatten it ). Getting infantry to panic en masse is IMO very conducive to the AI surrendering somewhere down the road. This may even be one of the key conditions for the AI 'commander' to eventually throw in the towel. If he loses C2 to a great deal of his men for an extended period of time, he has to assume that things are going very badly, doesn't he? Even if it doesn't necessarily mean all his men are dead, or permanently out of the battle.

Once low experience troops have panicked once, they become extremely combat ineffective .

[dan/california]

The other issue to keep in mind is that the AI takes into account reinforcements that haven't arrived yet. So if there is a big batch of reinforcements coming you can't force a surrender regardless. Someone mentioned in another thread recently that you could even set the reinforcements to arrive after the scenario times out, it guarantees the AI will not surrender.

I do agree with stoex that absolutely blitzing every contact seems to take the starch out of the red side. However, now that the AI can retreat a bit it is necessary to have LOF on his line of retreat first. You don't want to blow the front of the building off until you can ensure the guys running out the back have an appropriate reception.

[stoex]

dan, I concur with the reinforcements making a big difference. LARGE reinforcements set to arrive at or after the end of the battle are a good way to prevent AI surrender. However, I would like to add two observations to this issue:

1) I don't know how the AI regards the reinforcements yet to come, exactly. I am certain, however, that force composition makes a big difference here as well. If the reinforcements are too small, or if they are unsuited to the task of effectively fighting the player's remaining forces (e.g. no AT assets vs. a player with a fully functional tank platoon in good positions, heaping hurt on the units on map before the reinforcements arrive, it won't make a difference. The AI will surrender before the reinforcements show up, or immediately after if they appear before time is up. Which brings me to

2) Only strong reinforcements set to show up after time is up are a real guarantee. If moderate to strong reinforcements appear for the AI shortly before the end of the battle, the AI will hold out until they appear. At this point, however (it seems to me), some part of the AI does a check to see whether it can gain anything worthwhile using the new units, and if this check fails, the AI surrenders immediately. In fact one of the favourite times for the AI to give up appears to me to be right at the time when it receives its final reinforcements. I have seen this regularly, looking at the map after an AI surrender, where I find a sizeable but not too heavily armed AI reinforcement group obviously at their deployment point. This may be due to bad or no orders given to the reinforcement group by the scenario author, but I doubt it. I have never actually checked this in the editor (been playing mostly campaigns lately, where I can't look at the orders in the editor post-mission), but I strongly doubt that the laudable authors of the campaign scenarios have simply forgotten to give orders to these units. It just seems that once the AI has everything its ever going to get on map, it assesses the situation and makes a decision.

My $0.02.

[Meach]

I find it odd sometimes when Marines surrender. In history has any Marine unit surrendered to the enemy. As you can tell I mostly play RED.

I won a battle with conscript Syrian infantry. US Abrams rolled right into my village and my ambush. Several RPG's fired later from no doubt, very frightened conscripts the tanks were combat disabled. Was fun.