Nice mission ideas, Polish.
Here's how I would set up the game:
The player would be a SEAL Lt. sending his platoon to the 7 Mountains region for the month of January, 1967 to take down a VC warlord who's terrorizing the locals. (or, some other uber-objective that could be completed by doing a single action, such as taking out a base or killing/capturing a single person). The player would plan and execute a month's worth of missions, moving his platoon to different bases in the region and taking on lots of VC. While the ultimate goal would be to track down and neutralize the warlord, the player could also play the campaign for a full 30 days (up until the tet offensive), or have it ended early due to a poor score.
We'd cycle the game between a 'base' mission and the actual game missions. During the base missions, the player can move around the base and interact with the people and objects there. Each building would have a special function, such as planning & starting missions at the TOC, 'resting' for 6+ hours at your quarters, checking on the status of seals at the barracks, testing weapons and equipment at the general stores and shooting range, reoutfitting choppers at the chopper pad, talk to characters at the bar, etc. The player could also choose to move his platoon to a new base if the opportunitypresents itself (IE, move to a small SF base closer to the action, etc).
When planning a mission at the TOC, the player selects a piece of intel on the map and chooses insertion & extraction method and locations. All of the enemy base locations, caches, bunkers, etc as well as mission locations and insert/extract points would have to be preplaced by the campaign designers beforehand.
The enemies and objectives would be dependent on the state of the 'war', and set according to the bases and enemy strength in each region. We don't need to model the actual movement of enemies and friendlies from spot to spot, just plop down invisible objects and move them around in the background to keep track of what is where. In a heavily trafficked region near the cambodian border, for example, there would be a heck of a lot of VC and NVA, while some areas of the swamp might just have local VC militia and squads of VC moving through.
When the mission moves from the base mission to the actual missions, we could use the campaign branching trick outlined by snakeman. Dividing the map into five sectors with preplaced villagers, enemy bases, etc, and then into seven main 'objectives'. The extra two Example: Player sets up a mission to do a patrol in the mountain region. The game loads an invisible cutscene for the mountain region, then picks the patrol objective. We can have a patrol mission briefing with some basic objectives listed. The briefings could be fairly simple, as seal briefings usually were, and we can limit them to just the first page. We would need to set up a lot of mission locations (various forests, rice paddies, swamp bits, islands, villages) each with some options for inserting and extracting and support.
-The outro to the base mission would show the SEALs leaving the base in their insertion vehicle.
-The intro to each mission would show the players en route to the mission location in their vehicle.
-The briefing would show objectives.
-Each mission would start with the SEALs in their vehicle, inserting into the mission.
-Once the seals make it to their extraction vehicle, an outro cutscene would be played showing the SEALs leaving.
-The debrief would show the mission score, objectives.
-The intro to the base mission would show the seals arriving after their mission in their vehicle.
-Each of these cutscenes would be 3-5 seconds long.
We could limit the game to seven main objectives, while still having a lot of freedom in individual missions:
Patrol - Look for signs of enemy, engage enemies in area, gather intel
Destroy - Take out a specific item, such as an enemy weapons cache, factory, .50 cal gun or bunker
Snatch - Capture a specific enemy (tax collector, vc cadre, etc)
Ambush - Go to a location and wait for enemies, then neutralize as many as possible
Assault - Attack an enemy held location and inflict maximum damage and casualties
Defend - VC in the wire! Hold out for as long as possible...
Recover (POW's, downed crews, documents)
For support, the seals would have a Mobile Support Team with LSSC's, PBR's, landing craft, etc, and a detachment of huey Seawolf gunships.
Each day, the score of all missions and events would be totaled up. Each event in the game would rate a different score, such as capturing or killing enemy (positive!), or having team members wounded or killed (negative
). New weapons or equipment, money for bribes and intel, and extra support options and the like can be requested by asking command, but requests will be granted if the player doesn't ask for too much, too often and if their score is high. This would basically be a simple, hidden economy. Positive scores would result in medals, citations and the like, while too many negative scores could result in the player being transferred and the game ending.
Intel would be gathered by spending a budget on the Naval Intelligence Liason Officer (NILO) to bribe contacts, gathering intel in the field, or capturing and interrogating enemies. Intel would show up as markers on the map.
I caa make a test mission of how this all would work and upload it for you guys to check out.
