Campaign Manifesto

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toonces
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Campaign Manifesto

Post by toonces » 2009-05-11 12:29:08

Hi all.
I had a long talk with Hustler last night, who had a long talk with Dr. Fred last night, about campaign creation. We talked for over 2 hours and he shared alot of passdown from Fred about how the campaigns work. Unfortunately, we were both a bit spun up, and I didn't write everything down; therefore, some of this might not be entirely correct. Sort of a friend of a friend said...type thing. So bear with me. With luck, Dr. Fred will chime in with clarification.
So, up front, anything that is wrong in this post is my fault and responsibility- not Hustler's or Fred's.

I'm going to put this in the first person, as if I came up with these thoughts, but most of it should say, "Hustler told me Fred told him..." Now that we got that out of the way...

1. We already talked a bit about roads. When the programmers work doing Falcon, they originally meant for there to be specific paths (roads) between objs. For whatever reason, they put the parts in there for this to work, but then never implemented it. The roads are colors on a map; they don't influence movement like we think they do. LINKS are what influence the path of ground movement. A LINK is essentially a ROAD for our thought purposes.

2. In order for ground units to move properly (one thing), they MUST BE ABLE TO TRACE A LINK FROM THEIR CURRENT POSITION TO THE POLITICAL OBJECTIVE FOR THE CAMPAIGN.
Toonces, "What is a "Political Objective?"
Hustler, "I don't know."
Toonces thoughts: In Tacedit, there is a button on the left entitled "POL". I've often wondered about that. Clicking it brings up a blank screen in the PMC campaigns I've checked. I haven't been able to check old Korea campaigns yet. But, I wonder if there is a value in there for stock campaigns that establishes the political objectives for a campaign. As in Pyongyang and Seoul. We've been concentrating on PRI values as associating the primary goal objective for a campaign; it could be that there is another value we are neglecting that establishes the ultimate goal- the political goal.
Huster's comments again: Fred said that the links should look like spokes coming out of this political objective. When a unit calculates its path, it looks for a link to the political objective, evaluates movement costs (Toonces: and probably other things like supply...) and then moves. If it can't follow a path all the way to the pol obj, it gets "lost".

3. The TYPE of terrain impacts ground movement, as does relief. For example, armored units cannot move through water or swamp tiles. Some tiles associate a "ground cover" with them (I was a bit unclear on this part). When a terrain is built, the grade associated with a hill/mountain is given a value...we think that armor can't move over terrain with >15% grade (number is probably off, but serves for illustrative purposes just fine).
Toonces thoughts: The point I got is that if you run a link over a hill/mountain, even if the link "works", if the terrain is too steep the units won't use the link and become broken. Or, if the link moves through a terrain tile that the unit is prevented from using by a rule- like armor through a swamp- the unit won't move. This probably counts FROM THE UNIT ALL THE WAY TO THE POL OBJ. If we use different tiles than the stock Korea tiles- I have no idea what values could prevent movement for a ground unit. In other words, if a certain ODS Sand tile has some value that the campaign engine "interprets" as a Swamp tile, and an alternative link doesn't exist, then the unit will become "stuck" and that's that. On the surface that sand tile looks like sand, not swamp- it's how the engine interprets the tile.

4. Rivers: A bridge must exist for units to be able to cross a river. Units don't actually "use" the bridge, they travel next to it (Toonces: I've seen this in Nevada). If the bridge is destroyed, the "link" is broken and the problem cascades as described above. This is why bridge busting is so bad.

Toonces thoughts: I don't know how much of this we (you all) already knew, but this all makes perfect sense to me. Approaching this from a wargame perspective, wargame-101 tells you that all units have terrain restrictions, movement allowances and so on. It's typical in a board wargame that armor can't cross swamp or mountainous terrain, that there are "impassible" hexes, and so on. In the Falcon world, something I've been dwelling on is the division-brigade-battalion relationship. For example, you can drop in an "armor" brigade, but then make all of the attendent battalions mechanized infantry. What is the unit the for TASKING? Is it "armor" or is it "mech". Or the brigade value just a cosmetic assignment for how it appears on the campaign map? This is important because you can build an infantry brigade, stuff it with T-80 battalions, and it will show up with the NATO infantry icon on the map. Tasking "seems" like it comes down from the campaign engine at the brigade level. So, can an infantry brigade's T-80s move through a swamp? Or, will an armor brigade made up of nothing by infantry battalions be prevented from moving over a swamp? How about a battalion that has infantry mixed with a couple of BMPs...is that treated as infantry or armor and how is its movement affected. Lot's of questions here. When one battalion moves happily along while 4 other battalions of a brigade are "stuck" or stay in reserve, is this because of the mixture of units in the battalion, is one battalion different from the other 4?

[This is Toonces' thoughts from here on out]:

Compounding the ground unit movement problem is the use of 3rd party terrain. We have new terrain tiles in alot of the PMC theaters. Given everything I've just put forth about how tile attributes affect ground movement, it is conceivable that the non-Korea terrain will need a substantial going-over to determine what attributes are associated with each tile. I have no idea how the engine is looking at this terrain. At the very least, it's a wildcard variable that could be confounding ground movement when we are doing everything else right, and everything looks right...but the .thr is messing us up and we can't see it.

I know I'm forgetting alot, but I hope this sparks some thoughts and conversation. This doesn't even touch all of the other variables under the hood. For example, when you open an objective in tacedit, have you really studied all of the attributes an objective can have? How many of those attributes have been implemented in the sim, and how many are like "roads"...sitting in there but then never actually coded to do anything? How does the supply of an objective influence anything? How does being a "beach" or a "border" or a "second line" influence anything?

I have ALOT of ideas. But I think, if we want to get to the bottom of getting a "working" campaign going, the simplest thing to do is this:
We should build a relatively small campaign, 16x16 segments seems reasonable, with stock Korea tiles, and use this terrain to test campaign ideas. I think if you go too small, 8x8, the campaign engine might barf in the other direction- it get's goldfish bowled and can't spread out enough to form a strategic plan for the AI units. So, we build a 16x16 mini-Korea or Europe or whatever. When we build the terrain, we DO NOT include rivers. If we're grabbing the info off of the NOAA website, we don't have to download the river attributes in the .conf or .tdf file. I say this because rivers are a big deal and if we can just eliminate them as a choking point, it will make troubleshooting all of the other stuff I brought up that much easier.
This mini terrain should have minimal, but sufficient, objectives. I'd envision about 30-50. Enough to let the AI plan, but small enough that we can monitor and tweak them without being overwhelmed.
The OOB for both sides will be built on a div-bde-bn level, carefully, with units placed via tacedit onto objectives in accordance with an overarching campaign plan. What I mean is that we will think about a logical deployment of forces (I have tens of boardgames to help with this) and place them in accordance with this, and the parents will be set in the attributes. We can start with setting all to reserve, and then experiment with setting some brigades to "support" other brigades, bns to support other bns and so on and so on.
We will link all of the objectives together.
We will set one political obj for each side and spiderweb out from there.
Every obj on the map will be garrisoned.
The PAK map should have 6 PAKs, although I don't know that this will matter.
Air units should probably be only gun and AIM9 equipped to keep air attrition low. How does the air war influence the ground war?

My Ogaden war, with Korea tiles, would probably be a nice little "historical" campaign that would work, so that if the campaign does eventually work, we have something based on reality- however, we should not be restricted to historical anything; the whole point is to do a study of the campaign engine.

If we get the campaign "working", we can rebuild the terrain with 3rd party tiles and see what happens. Move from there.

I have to go give a brief- I will write more later.

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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by Snake Man » 2009-05-11 13:26:58

toonces wrote:We talked for over 2 hours and he shared alot of passdown from Fred about how the campaigns work. Unfortunately, we were both a bit spun up, and I didn't write everything down;
How is that possible, why didn't you copy paste the stuff into text file?

Lets assume you use IRC, when I'm having important discussion or someone is explaining to me something I need to fully understand and save, I usually copy paste each time a screen gets full from the last copy paste (is that like 50 or so lines).

Never underestimate the power of saving such important discussions for later reference.
Toonces thoughts: In Tacedit, there is a button on the left entitled "POL". I've often wondered about that. Clicking it brings up a blank screen in the PMC campaigns I've checked.
Check Nevada\campaign\redflag1\save0.cam :)

You can create the Pol objectives by going to the Pol window, the choosing Objectives -> Create Pol.
We have new terrain tiles in alot of the PMC theaters.
Perhaps I could rework all their texture.bin files and add all terrain types to plains and so on. Yeah bit cheating, but atleast we would know there isn't any terrain types which tanks cannot pass etc, so if tanks aren't moving... the problem ain't .bin at least (if the theory is correct).

Will have to fire up pathmaker and see how big task this would be, seeing your interest, I could start with Nevada, its sand anyway so.
We should build a relatively small campaign, 16x16 segments seems reasonable, with stock Korea tiles
Was thinking of manually making such theater, but I think manual work which is reasonable work, is too little, then if we do some real theater it starts to get complicated real fast.

But, 16 segments is really small... so dunno, perhaps we would find some barren area which we could use as background.

I'll do some trials on Dem2terrain to see how it would come out.
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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by toonces » 2009-05-11 13:31:11

@SM: I talked to him on the phone, no screeshots possible!

Some more thoughts:

Fundamentally, what sets Falcon 4 apart from other flight sims is the dynamic campaign engine. We've always appreciated that Falcon is utlimately a big wargame with an F-16 sim set inside of it. Most folks on the other forums focus on the F-16 aspect- the avionics, or flight model, or weapons, or whatever. But that really overlooks the bigger picture, which is the campaign engine and what is going on under the hood of the sim.

And, if we take that thought further, if we appreciate that the campaign engine is easily 50% of the sim, then it shouldn't surprise us to realize that the campaigns are constructed in a complex manner. Reproducing a campaign, without a manual or anything to tell us HOW shouldn't be easy.

I have no idea if I'm right. My gut feeling, though, is that the guys who programmed the campaign engine approached it as a computer wargame. And, it seems that they built it in a modular manner, meaning that new campaigns could be built using the same set of "rules". So, it isn't enough to build a terrain, put cities and factories on it, place alot of units and planes in there, and then expect this complex engine to "build" a war around the units without far more direction on the campaign attributes. They are there; we can see them in Tacedit and terrainview and such. So, none of this should surprise us.

I feel like we are making real progress to creating a "working" campaign. What is slowing us down currently is we have so many variables in the campaigns on which we are working that clear solutions are hard to pin down. Having said that, though, I think over the last few months we have made progress in figuring out how the campaign engine works.

If we really want to make a working campaign, we simply must figure out what parameters the campaign engine uses to figure out how to task units, and what gives them the incentive to move offensively. Then we have to know how they move there.

I think we can make a working campaign, but I don't think it will be easy, and I think it will be very labor intensive. But that's ok, that makes sense. It's not supposed to be easy. We have this hugely complex program running a dynamic war- it shouldn't be simple to get a user-made war to work.

So, we have the tools to do this and once we figure out the secret, new campaigns will follow. I don't think starting with something like Europe or ODS is necessarily the way to go. Even Nevada is probably too big. We need to start small and work our way up.

I can think of any number of small-wargame scenarios we can game. I can do this stuff all day. We can build a small Europe campaign with Korea tiles focusing on the Fulda Gap region. We can do Ogaden. We can do a small section of Kuriles. Taiwan...I think all those mountains are problematic, but maybe that could work because it has less land area. I don't know how mainland China objectives will influence things...like I said, alot of variables that aren't present in Korea.

Well, I think that's it for now. I look forward to your thoughts.

I have to go brief a 3-star now 8-) ...more later.

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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by Snake Man » 2009-05-11 15:41:57

toonces wrote:I feel like we are making real progress to creating a "working" campaign. What is slowing us down currently is we have so many variables in the campaigns on which we are working that clear solutions are hard to pin down. Having said that, though, I think over the last few months we have made progress in figuring out how the campaign engine works.
Please register into the wiki and I'll validate your account, then you can start to summarize up all this knowledge into some campaign pages so its easily readable format.

I start to feel like these various campaign topics across the forum areas are such a haystack that nobody can make heads or tails out of them without spending 6 hours straight reading constantly making notes...
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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by derStef » 2009-05-12 11:10:10

wonderful read, cleared up many things.

i also think that the brigade/division type is just a cosmetical thing, i don't think it will affect to the gameplay whatever you set.

as i said, my idea is to grab one theater as you said, remove every units and then build them up from scratch, in that Falcon version i which you want to fly then. in our case FF5.

i'll post more later.

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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by molnibalage » 2009-05-12 12:23:30

Guys, this is quite good talking!
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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by toonces » 2009-05-12 20:56:22

SM,
How do I get an objective into the POL spreadsheet?

When I open the empty POL page, go to objectives-add POL, I get an error that there are no
"primary objectives".

I can't figure out how to get LV into the page.

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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by Snake Man » 2009-05-12 21:40:07

Dunno, works fine on my Tacedit on Nevada redflag1\save0.cam file.
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Re: Campaign Manifesto-POL and PRI issue.

Post by Closter » 2009-05-13 12:31:58

AFAIK reading the Tacedit help POL stands for Primary Objective Listing, but PRI seems to be short of Priorities.
Primary Objectives are those cities with Priority equal or greater than 81. PAK means something like "Primary Areas of (K)onflict" (or (K)ombat).

It's funny you don't see anything listed, I've myself seen some PAK cities listed there in an ODS install. Review where the tacedit file/properties are pointing (incidentally, what a POS is that menu item in tacedit. It's a shame... :evil: )
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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by toonces » 2009-05-14 17:24:46

A couple of additional thoughts:

1. I DO think that the division-brigade-battalion structure is important. I don't have any hard, fast, solid information to back up this statement. However, after watching my modded Nevada for a while, I feel like tasking from the campaign engine is sent down at the brigade level. That's not to say that we don't get psycho battalions doing their own thing, and I've seen independent battalions not attached to a brigade move very offensively. But, from a campaign-design perspective, it makes sense for the programmers to put some sort of chain of command rules in there. Otherwise, you'll have battalions moving randomly all over the map with no regard to coherence. I haven't determined what divisions do yet- they seem to be of no use other than cosmetic, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have some sort of requirement for supply or reinforcements or some other criteria. So, if you have some compelling reason to add a battalion independent of a brigade, I'd recommend grouping it in a division anyway. If you can follow the div-bde-bn structure, you should. It can't hurt anything, that's for sure.

2. I still see some references to roads in a few posts. We tested SMs modded Nevada terrain and I had units moving quite happily without roads. LINKS are the important thing. And bridges. And I haven't figured out why some bridges work and others don't- but we'll get to that later.

3. If possible, we should consider making campaigns where one side has a clear numerical advantage over the other. Under these circumstances (based on my limited experience), it seems that one side will clearly go offensive and the other defensive. I've gotten independent positive offensive movement in both Nevada and Vietnam like this. [Air superiority may have an impact on this; if a side lacks air superiority, it might negate the ground numerical advantage.]

3b. Offensiveness can probably be scripted in the .tri file. Without a working .tri (and there would need to be a certain amount of robustness to it to maintain offensive momentum) a clear numerical advantage can inspire offensive momentum.

4. I don't know how "close" a unit needs to be to a linked objective, but I have found that placing multiple units ON TOP of the objective works very well. When I put in a brigade, I usually drop 3-5 component battalions on the same spot right on top of each other. I've checked this in recon after the start of the campaign, and it appears that the units will spawn on top of each other, but then sort themselves out pretty quickly. It doesn't appear that there is any collision detection among ground units, so they just drive through each other until they get lined up and start motoring along their link. The major inhibition to movement in PMC stock campaigns is that the ground units aren't co-located with an objective, meaning they aren't near enough to a link, so they can't move because they have no link to give them a path. ccc has noticed that units tasked with "reserve (blank)" do not move. If you drop a unit on top of an objective in tacedit, it will go reserve (objective), and can then be tasked by the campaign engine. It makes sense if you think about it. The campaign engine is probably looking for units to task. It needs units (as per Fred) that have a clear line of links (with reasonable movement costs) from the unit to the political objective, in order for the unit to move. If a unit is sitting in the middle of the desert and isn't "associated" with an objective, then the campaign engine can't see it, or it is ineligible for movement the same as if it has a broken link, or whatever. So, that unit is static. If most of your units in the campaign are static, then there aren't enough units to generate an offensive.

This would be fairly easy to test.

ccc, said he tweaked the Kurile campaign to fix alot of the broken links. Take his tweaked files. Rebuild the campaign, using SM's TCL, but alter the TCL code to drop all brigades (and component Bns) right on top of an objective. All of them, throughout the theater. If I understand the code, that shouldn't be hard to do, just edit out the +1 part of the x or y coordinates, and change each x/y coord to match up with the x/y of an objective with a working link.

Rebuild the theater, and then run it and I'll bet you a beer your units will start trucking along those links capturing objectives. In fact, I'll bet you a case of beer. Just get them on an objective and give them a working path and they'll fight.

You guys up for the challenge?

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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by Snake Man » 2009-05-14 17:44:06

toonces wrote:I haven't determined what divisions do yet- they seem to be of no use other than cosmetic,
As you might already know, divisions are virtual entities, meaning they aren't placed in Tacedit like brigades, campaign engine creates them on the fly at campaign start. So dunno, if that means anything regarding their functionality...
I don't know how "close" a unit needs to be to a linked objective, but I have found that placing multiple units ON TOP of the objective works very well.
How about if I setup some campaign TCL's so that brigades and battalions attached to it are all placed on top of each other and usually ON OBJECTIVE of some sort (with some on ROAD to see how they move from road starting point)?

If that would be worth to try, then we need to pick a campaign to test this on and I'll do the modifications and release "experimental campaign package" for testing.
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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by toonces » 2009-05-14 18:26:12

I think between doing that, and fixing links (meaning forgetting about roads and looking at movement costs for terrain, avoiding swamps or "thick" terrain, bridging or avoiding rivers altogether) you will find that all of the PMC campaigns can be repaired to show much more aggressive ground movement.

Like I said above, ccc indicated in another thread, a while ago, that either Georgia or Kuriles had the best link network. I'd test one of those.

However, any of the smaller ones would work- probably. If you rebuild a campaign, just totally spamming the map with units placed on objectives, me and ccc could go in and re-work the links and see if the units start moving.

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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by ccc » 2009-05-15 01:38:47

Like I said above, ccc indicated in another thread, a while ago, that either Georgia or Kuriles had the best link network. I'd test one of those.
I suggest you pick Kurile for test. i can send you my tweaked files..or SM can pack them into a new installer for further dev?

Georgia is much more complex.. terrain check not complete yet.

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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by toonces » 2009-05-15 01:54:11

Let SM take care of it. He's got the TCL stuff, and besides, I have my hands full with Vietnam right now.

However, I'm happy to work on links with you when he's done.

To be honest, I'm kinda excited to see how this works out!

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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by toonces » 2009-05-20 12:11:13

ccc wrote:a bit late to reply, I've difficulties testing my choking point fix in *.cam. so, once i figured out the trick [ rename tac_new.tac into tac_new.cam for editing], i resumed the tweak in past few days.


====================================

and more serious thoughts...for SM, toonces, and those want to take it seriously..

1. Terrain is the base work, comes first. Tile sets, current ones is incomplete and could make further dev a big headache. two options..

option A - if some tile artist(s) can do a [ compete tile sets] package for vnam mod.. we may choose this way. ( imo chance is minimal)

option B - use CATE to re-tile vnam, use default Korea tiles. simple and easier. the boring korea terrain-looking could be improved by [ painting vnam feature/rice paddies gfx on existing korea tiles]. Extra new feature tiles can be added later, and won't hurt the dev process.

2. once tile stuff is set, fixiing choking points - as i mentioned above.

3. campaign, once you enter [campaign-making stage]..it may not work as you expected. my impression from previous test..
- NVA, most with infantry units, may dare not to launch any offensive. my campaign obsevation shows most offensive is led by armour units. in vnam, NV counts on infantry and VC.. dare they(with much more quantity advanatage) advance to challenge SV/US armour units?
- the strong air power/striking power from US, make NVA infantry retreating, not advancing. even with an oriented TRI file, Red side refuse to advance south.
- it's a bit hard to balance the power of war.. look at default korea..
US/ROK - fewer ground power, stronger and superior air power.
DPRK/CHN/CIS - more and stronger ground power(with many mechanize units), weaker air power.

now historical Vnam..
NV/CHN - massive ground power( but few mechanized unit), minimal air power.
SV/US - much less ground power( more mechanized), much strong air power.

as you can see, to balance the quation is..power of will.. blood is stronger than iron. To reproduce it in falcon campaigns, you probably have to do some compromise, or tricks like..
- give NVA more and more armour units, just like DPRK has. then it got the momentum ot advance regardless of US air power.
- edit NVA infantry/VC unit with f4browse, make them more resistant to air strike, move fast, tougher as commando, or has similar feature as mechanized unit... and hope them could vulunteer as spearheads in campaign.

4. database, adding new 3d stuff is always the last thing to do.
I'm quoting all of this from the Vietnam thread because I think it's relevant to the discussion we're having here, and I don't want my thoughts scattered all over the forum :)

There are alot of great points for discussion here. Two, in particular are very important to address up front:

1. Tiles. This is the second post in which ccc has referenced incomplete or non-working tiles/terrain. The first was in Nevada. I don't exactly understand why tiles wouldn't work, but I'm willing to take it on faith that if ccc says they don't work or are hampering development, then that's how it is.

Guys, this is fundamental to campaign development. If the terrain isn't going to work, we can't get anywhere. Derstef has been saying something to this effect for a while now, but I've always taken Stef's criticisms as more cosmetic than practical. I think we all want to see some new terrain to fly over. I mean, you can throw Korea over top of anything and it's still going to look like Korea. But, if that's what we have to use to get beyond this step and get to a "working" campaign, then let's stop screwing around and just do it already! (ok, I know it's been done- I'm just making a point).

2. This point is something I alluded to before, and one that I've been dwelling on as I work on Vietnam. It has to do with forces and offensiveness. ccc says that it might be hard to get historical offensive movement when we have to work with the Falcon database to create a campaign. He's absolutely right. For example, I've been putting in infantry battalions like crazy into Vietnam, but they simply impale themselves on US armor. Furthermore, if I build an "historical" air OOB, it may be nearly impossible to get the NVA to go on offense. This may be a limitation of the campaign engine. I don't know how generic the original programmers made the campaign engine, so I don't know all the parameters that have to be met in order to get offense/defense. We do know, from experimentation, that air superiority has some influence.

All of this is a long way to say that part of campaign creation has to take into account the ability to model the conflict within the Falcon engine. I mentioned above that the best campaign to model initially may be one where one side is heavily outnumbered by the other, creating an offense/defense scenario. I'm not talking about modeling an entire war; I'm talking about modeling a one to two-week conflict.

For example, I chose the Easter Offensive to model in Vietnam because it sort of fits this criteria. The campaign would start with the SVA heavily outnumbered by the NVA. Maybe by giving the NVA a 10:1 advantage of infantry (or something to that effect) might be enough to convince the campaign engine to go offensive without an air advantage...or maybe not. As I get into it, I'm starting to think I might be wasting my time for all the reasons mentioned above.

So, that leaves us with, maybe, breaking focus with historical campaigns and working with hypothetical ones that give us more opportunity to work within the game's constraints. For example, I read last night that in 1967 there were serious plans in front of Johnson encouraging him to invade North Vietnam with US troops. The fear was that this would bring China and the Soviet Union into the war. Historically we did not invade....but what if we did? Why can't we model that? Now we can use Vietnam, but we can beef up the North in order to create a working war.

************

I know I'm rambling, so I'll start wrapping this up. I want to create a "working" campaign, and I'm fairly flexible. I think the tools exist to do this, but we have simply got to focus on a campaign that has the terrain and scenario enough in place that we can actually make the war work.

I'm not sure how to wrap this up into a conclusion, so I'm just going to stop here. I have alot of additional things to say, but I'm going to start losing you if I keep going.

We need to:
1. Pick a theater/campaign on which to focus.
1a. The campaign should be balanced or deliberately offensive/defensive in nature.
1b. The theater (probably) should use Korea tiles for now, if for no other reason than to eliminate a possible source of problems.
1c. Minimal rivers or no river definitions.

2. Get a team together.

3. Use the principles mentioned above to start building a campaign.

4. Start with a small theater. Get it working. Prove the concept. Then move up. ODS- too big. Europe- too big.

ccc
Chief of Staff
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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by ccc » 2009-05-20 12:57:36

ah ha.. you are too serious about this hobby :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

tiles - i don't mean current tiles are not usable. they are ok. But for further, better, serious dev, those tiles are few and incomplete..

campaign in Vnam - just don't limit your imagination, give NVA more armour units and the job done.

toonces
Brig. General
Posts: 484
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Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by toonces » 2009-07-04 13:34:57

I was going to start a new thread, but this still seems appropriate. Man, there's alot of good info in this thread.

I think we are moving into a period where we can no longer expect campaigns to work generically with all versions of Falcon. I know that Hustler is big on the problems with DB deconfliction. Having re-worked Nevada, Kuriles, and Vietnam lately, I can say that it is becoming very difficult to make one version that works properly with all versions of Falcon. Not to mention that restricting ourselves to units common to all three Falcon versions fails to capitalize on the strengths of each version.

I'm throwing this out there because as we move forward in development, I think we are going to need to either pick a version of Falcon for which we are developing, or whatever member is working on the campaign will need to work on "their" version and coordinate with other leads in different versions of Falcon.

My Vnam campaign is FF5 only. It won't work in any other version, not even FF4. I had to make that design decision in order to capitalize on the awesome F-4's available in the FF5 DB.

Another aspect to keep in mind as we continue development.

derStef
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Gaming Interests: Falcon 4.0
Editing Interests: Terrains
Location: Austria

Re: Campaign Manifesto

Post by derStef » 2009-07-07 15:02:02

totally agree. it is not possible to create campaings that will work for all Falcon4 versions.. you must built them new for every version. the DB are way too different.

I'm also working on the FF5 side.

IMO the only things in a theater that can be shared is the Terrain mesh and the Terrain tiles. Even the ground objects (buildings) can be sometimes critical...

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