Going with Syria in early design stages.

[Sequoia]

Now I know Battlefront considered going with a fictional country as the Red force at one time but finally decided a real country would be more interesting. Can someone confirm that Syrian was chosen because they had a fairy decent size army with relatively modern equipment, the later would of which would make them a better choice than Iran?

I'm curious though if Egypt or Pakistan were ever considered? This has got to be well past any NDA. Were these two countries rejected because they would have too much US equipment (I'm quite ignorant on what they actually had in 2008) and/or their overthrow by a Revolutionary goverment was even less likely than the case would be in Syria; in Pakistan's case at least that's how it looked in 2006 when the Red country was chosen.

[Damian90]

Egypt has modern, vell trained army and I highly doubt that soldiers overthorwn their goverment, besides this Egypt goverment is protected by an entire elite Republican guard Armored Division, they got best training, best equipment etc.

So Egypt is very unlikely to go war with US, besides this, several months after US cut's spare parts, ammo, etc. to Egypt and their entire armored force and especially US made equipment is sitting preatty in the middle of the desert doeing nothing.

Pakistan is more probabale but still, it seems that goverment controll situation.

And Syria have enough descent armed forces to try fighting against US.Army and U.S.M.C. supported by NATO.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Well, it pretty much had to be a middle eastern country, being the baddies du jour at the time of design. And no doubt it helped that Syria was quite like Iraq without actually being Iraq.

[Sgt Joch]

From what I remember from forum discussions at the time, the main reasons why Syria was chosen were:

1) Syria has fairly decent armed forces by ME standards, certainly better than Iraq '03 or Iran in terms of capability and equipment.

2) In 2003-04, when the design decision was made, Syria actually was a potential US target and a US-Syria war did not seem as "fictional" as it does now.

I also presume that with the Iraq '03 invasion being so recent, there was a desire to use a similar setting. Again, Syria seemed the most obvious choice.

[Battlefront.com]

Sgt Joch has it pretty much spot on. We didn't want something generic, but we also didn't want to get tied up by the baggage surrounding Iraq. I'm not just talking about all of the political issues, but rather the reality that there were very few major CM style conventional engagements to simulate. We didn't want people's imaginations to be constrained by what didn't happen.

Some were quite shocked we didn't pick Iran as the target for the game. The reasons were many, but one of them was that Iran is not a viable country to invade. If the West gets into a shooting war with Iran it will likely be more akin to Kosovo than Iraq in our opinion. Blockades, massive air attacks, perhaps even artillery shelling... but little chance of a ground invasion.

Going into "allied" countries was considered. Saudi Arabia was, and still is, the most likely place that intervention would be necessary. However, the armed forces of Saudi Arabia would be an ally, not the primary opposition force. The same could be said for Egypt and likely Pakistan even. So those didn't provide good backdrops for a conventional war.

Steve

[Alan8325]

So will CM:SF2 be China or Russia? Or perhaps some kind of fictional melding of the two?

[Sequoia]

So will CM:SF2 be China or Russia? Or perhaps some kind of fictional melding of the two?

The North Koreans would be easy since all of the vehicles are already done.

But yeah the Russians will have to be in it as a Red force.