Campaign Manifesto
Posted: 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.
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.