Comrades in Arms Discussion Board

I thought about trying out a new type of mission in the (Ofp) coop nights. A mission type I already talked about in the BIS forum thread, but it appears that the suggestion was ignored or overlooked there.

So, I have started to play around with tacrod's/DMA CoIn2 (<- link, click me).
It is a so called "dynamic mission", dynamic means that the majority of enemy troops are created randomly with DAC (within the constraints set by the mission designer).

Excerpt from the readme:

Quote:OVERVIEW
========

The aim is to give the player(s) a freeform mission focused on squad-level combat. The overall theme is a highly abstract version of counter-insurgency operations. CoIn2 can be played either SP or Coop.

There is a strategic angle to the mission, but CoIn2 is not an RTS-style experience. The strategic element is deciding on goals (eg. kill all HVTs first, clear out the enemy camps next, etc). Also, choosing upgrades is part of the strategy. To put it another way, the player makes strategic decisions, but most of his game is played tactically.

PLAYING AND WINNING
===================

To win the mission, the player must kill every enemy unit in the area of operations. This may sound like a daunting task, but over time the player will be able to buy upgrades such as lethal airstrikes and satellite sweeps. There is also a slowly-decreasing "commitment" rating that measures political and public support for the war. If the mission is not won before this rating hits zero, the players will lose.

At the heart of CoIn2 is Silola's excellent DAC (Dynamic AI Creator). Enemy troops move about the AO. When they are killed, they will respawn at DAC bases. To prevent the endless respawn of enemy troops, the enemy DAC bases (and their guardian squads) must be totally eliminated. Finding and destroying these bases should be the main goal of the players.

The enemy also has a number of HVTs (High Value Targets) that generate resources each minute. These resources are used to buy upgrades such as mortars, snipers and elite terrorist squads. The timely elimination of these HVTs will prevent these new threats from appearing.

The enemy also has roaming BMPs and stationary Shilkas.

It is up to the players to decide the best upgrade path, their tactical objectives and how best to acheive them.

The strategic part of the mission, like buying the Intel and Airstrike upgrades, can be toned down by the mission designer to suit the players' needs (for example: in the beginning of the mission there are no supporting vehicles in the base and the players have to buy vehicles, instead the mission designer can place some empty vehicles in the base to be used by the players right away and so on).

The mission/template is higly customizable (by the mission designer) and converting it to different islands and addons is child's play.

If you are interested I suggest you download the CoIn2 from the BIS forum and try it out in singleplayer to get a basic feeling of what the mission is about and if it appeals to you.

Thread in the BI forum:
http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard311/ikonboard.cgi

Zwobot I'll try the SP version. I got a few questions first-
Can you make a MP mission for us to try sometimes?
How many players are needed to play such a mission?
How long approximately such a mission lasts?

I appreciate your interest Variable.

(05-25-2008, 11:02 AM)Variable link Wrote:Can you make a MP mission for us to try sometimes?

The mission is MP compatible out of the box, in theory you could upload tacrod's template right away to the server and play it as MP mission.
I thought about converting it to Tonal with BAS Rangers as playable units, but I would make any other island/addon combination out of the addons on the server to your (the players) tastes.

(05-25-2008, 11:02 AM)Variable link Wrote:How many players are needed to play such a mission?

Depends 
The mission designer can choose the size of the AO and adjust the player slots accordingly. A decent squad with 5 to 10 players and maybe 1 or 2 designated pilots/crews would work best for us I think.

(05-25-2008, 11:02 AM)Variable link Wrote:How long approximately such a mission lasts?

That again, depends. The size of the AO, the number of players, configuration of the DAC zones, special objectives the designer might have added are factors that influence the duration of a mission.
Generally I would say a mission lasts not less than 2 hours.
You can even save the status of the mission in MP and load it again for another session, but I have not tried this yet and don't know how well it works and if there are any major limitations.

By the way, respawn is activated by default but can be switched off of course. Depending on the size of the mission it might be useful to have at least a limited respawn for each player.

Another nice feature in my opinion: there is a small time acceleration going on in the mission, that means every 30 seconds or so, the game time advances a few minutes, thus there is a day/night cycle in the mission which is - surprise, surprise - customizable by the mission designer.

I did a hasty conversion of that for fdfmod a long while back. It's an interesting concept but the actual template is rather badly designed and buggy for MP play. For instance, one guy clicks "buy" and the buy dialog opens for all players and the same kind of locality mishaps are found in just about any part of the mission's scripts, like it wasn't tested once. At one point I realised I should've just took the idea and built a new mission from scratch around it rather than redoing most parts of the template one after another, but I never got around doing it.

I changed it to group respawn, but it was possible to reinforce the squad back at base with more AI (from 10 reserves) for some more respawns than the max squad size of 12 allows. I think it would be best and more "realistic" if you lost all your reserves and the squad was down to say <8 units the mission would just end there, rather than having the last few survivors dragging on forever.

(06-08-2008, 09:21 AM)Pulverizer link Wrote:I did a hasty conversion of that for fdfmod a long while back. It's an interesting concept but the actual template is rather badly designed and buggy for MP play.

Yes, I noticed this too. I haven't planned to use the buy dialog much anyway. I did a quick conversion of it to use with the CE2 in singleplayer but it becomes laggy very soon with about a platoon of infantry and some vehicles you can command with the CE. Seems like DAC and CE scripts cannot cope with each other on a weak machine like mine.

Would you fancy to rebuild the mission 'from scratch' these days Pulverizer? I'd be interested in this, however my time will become a bit limited in the next few weeks...

I don't know if I can arse myself to commit on such project, because it would take a fuck-ton of work to get it working the way I would want. Like, not just random patrols wandering around the outback in the middle of nowhere... have the enemies work towards some believable goals (recruit men, terrorise civilians, kill infidels etc).