Comrades in Arms Discussion Board

I've been toying with making a coop campaign and I have glimpses of what I want to do, but no start, end or a thread to tie them together and can't decide on the addons.

I have several editor missions which are everything I know put together and can't pull anything out of that.

I tried picking an island or a faction and make a coop pack for them, but I'm starting to hate doing missions in quantity instead of quality because I think there's only so many times you can do a "go there, kill this" kind of missions before it gets repetitive.
On the other hand, every time I try something new, it's either complicated or seems to break (like my latest ACR mission, hooray for that trigger not going off on dedi when it does on local  ???).

I'm basically out of ideas what to do. Anyone?

Stealth missions and sabotage? Yeah, I can say going sander style missions are based more on cranking out high quantities. How about some mission where you sneak into a town and steal some nuclear bomb files in a brief case with possibilities random brief case spawn location against some man in black kind of guys. They won't have their NVs on except a few maybe, but if you get detection they put their NV ons because they're alerted (a1 addWeapon "NVGoggles") on BLUFOR detected by OPFOR or something. Hmm, I kind of want to make something like that but I'm busy trying to think of how to make it more of a fair fight against those NACs on my Namalsk mission.

Lingor, escort some truck full of drugs to the drug dealing place.

Random vengeance mission. Interrogate people around some city for location of crazy murderers who blew up an entire city and wipe out everyone. Some people don't know anything, some collaborates with murderers and will pull guns at you, some don't know what you're talking about.

I start to get tire doing high quantity after a while as well Outlaw . Maybe I should try something crazy again. Well, there's always trial and error and as you try something new, you'll eventually learn to master it. Some of the first few missions actually took me longer than necessary that I try something new since, I was in the middle of school and it was something new (Drug Confiscation with the interrogate civilian stuff), (Flash of the blade with random hostage spawn location and bomb).

Hmm, I just had an idea of making some taking over some base in a volcano's crater, but that's in Taviana.

Play as a bunch of tourists, massacres that happening. (Either help the locals fight off massacre or try to find an airport or dock to get a ship or plane to escape)

Bandits vs survivors. Play as suvivors and go to a town to get some food and supplies, sneak pass the bandits or fight your way through (they have already finish up wiping out some other survivors who came)

EDIT: Oops, I thought you meant random single missions.

What kind of coop campaign are you planning to make?

Outlawz, here are some guidelines of what I consider to make great campaigns. They aren't ideas per se, but rather some directions that hopefully lead you to some ideas of your own.

1. Play as an underdog OPFOR
2. Lack of resources (not only weapons, think of fuel, manpower, ammo)
3. Immersion and Elements of anxiety - that goes for the briefing in-game dialogue, enemy ambience (patrolling choppers, searchlights) the mission objectives ("run for your life!" kind of objectives), music and weather.
4. Missions that go bad - for example, start as a support for a main force, the main force is slaughtered, and you have to run away and keep the unit intact.
5. Sense of continuity between the missions - steal a chopper in one mission, you can use it in the next one.
6. Use of real life events and factions. Fuck those Takibans and shit. You want the mission feel immersive and real? Use stuff that happened for real. You don't have to recreate actual events, no one forces you to do that. Base the campaign on real events, but invent the missions.


I hope that helps.

lol Phantom, massacres again? :p

Ah yes, I did want to do something with stealth, but I'd like to create a proper "system" for stealth, so you can actually sneak around without being spotted randomly or some AI setting or mod turning all enemies into Predators.

Variable, you more or less described what I had in mind, but again, can't seem to put it together somehow.
Thanks for the replies.

Actually, I've been having similar thoughts recently: What can I do to make missions more interesting and go beyond the bland "go there and kill" type mission.

A few points I came up with:

• The setting is important. The island you use, the time of day, screen effects (like filters) and particle effects (like dust storms and ground fog). I made one mission for Iron Front that was commented on by the devs of IF themselves, saying that it was "the most beautiful setting they could think about", just because of the use of fog, location, and time of day (They gave me the D-Day DLC as reward ^^)
  
• Adding twists. Most missions we play are straight from start to end. There is no surprise, no ambush, no variety. All goals are always attainable. Remember OFP's "Ambush" mission ? You had to sack Houdan, but it turned out that enemy armor was rolling in on the town, and you had to flee
  
• Bonus goals. My ACE mission on Utes we played recently has about 4 hidden bonus objectives, basically targets of opportunity. You can either hint about those at the start of the mission, at the end ("We killed the enemy tanks, but I get the nagging feeling that we missed something"), or not at all.
  
• A lot of missions are missing the feeling of war. Most missions are spec ops type missions, no allied troops, no support from armor, air or other assets (mea culpa, of course). Granted, all out war missions are hard to balance, but they work. I made a mission for I44 that has a German Battalion (!) attack an Allied held town, complete with tanks, half tracks, and about 50 soldiers n each side. Problem is, it can go south very quickly, for both sides, but the feeling is IMHO great. (too bad we don't play I44 anymore)
  

(06-23-2013, 09:15 AM)Variable link Wrote: [ -> ]3. Immersion and Elements of anxiety - that goes for the briefing in-game dialogue, enemy ambience (patrolling choppers, searchlights) the mission objectives ("run for your life!" kind of objectives), music and weather.

Hehe, yeah, everybody liked the enemy planes overhead in Black Trinity, even though they are piloted by civilian pilots and have no weapons ^^

(06-23-2013, 09:15 AM)Variable link Wrote: [ -> ]1. Play as an underdog OPFOR

I don't know how many of you played Spec Ops The Line, but I just loved how the game makes BLUFOR (and you ARE an American in the game) morally ambiguous to the point of committing atrocities. Something like that is hard, very hard actually, to pull off, but if you get it, it's fucking awesome.