Air war only campaign creation

[toonces]

Hey all.
I've been toying with this idea for quite a while, and it came up again in the Afghanistan folder (I think). I'm talking about creating campaigns that focus solely on the air war.

There are a few reasons why one could focus on an air war campaign, but the primary reason is that it bypasses the whole "ground movement" issue completely.

What I want to do is exchange ideas of how we could develop a campaign or two that focus on other aspects of "winning" without ground forces driving onto, and capturing, objectives.

I sort of explored this idea with Vietnam, somewhat. I can certainly create a campaign with victory conditions reliant upon ground forces capturing objective cities. But a Vietnam campaign could just as easily focus on the air war, with no real stretch of imagination. For example, in a Linebacker II campaign the ground war would be virutally irrelevant historically. The campaign would focus on taking airstrikes downtown to destroy factories and infrastructure targets. But how could we write a trigger file to decide victory?

I was sort of daydreaming some ideas this afternoon, sort of mulling over that amphibious landings thread a while back. My initial idea was to write a campaign that focused upon an amphibious landing of troops onto a hostile coast, after which the troops fought their way to some ground objective. However, is it really necessary to have the troops actually land and then drive somewhere? What if we did it this way: a carrier striking group escorting an amphibious group is still motoring along to do a landing somewhere. We could place the CSG far enough out that it has to motor for a day or so doing an opposed transit to the area of operations. Then when the CSG arrives onstation (scripted using a junction objective placed in the middle of the ocean as a waypoint?), let another day of steaming occur between two waypoints. On the third day, have the amphib group spawn a couple hundred miles away, with its destination on objective waypoint placed upon the beach somewhere. If the amphib group reaches the beach, it's a bluefor victory. If the amphib group is sunk, it's a redfor victory. Victory conditions could be tied to naval force levels maybe...I know force level triggers work, but I don't know if they work for naval forces- I've only tried with air forces. But you could write the .tri based on some attrition level of naval forces. If Day X passes, say 1 day beyond however longs it takes the amphib group to reach the beach, then it's a bluefor victory, simulating the successful ferry of supplies/troops/whatever. Think Red Storm Rising, and the supplies ferrying to Europe after which the war decisively switches to NATO initiative.

Anyway, let's just exchange some ideas here and see if there is anything we can do along this path.

[Snake Man]

What I recall the guys here, I think Sherlock has the most knowledge on the SUPPLY system (I hope so) and what I recall is that while we can do such trigger files that you bomb enemy and their supply/factories drop below certain point and you win... it really doesn't work. I really hope I'm wrong with this, but I think we cant make pure bombing campaign and I believe there is no way to count how many squadrons/airframes each side has left.

So we are outta luck?

I personally would be very very interested of pure bombing campaign, even without much enemy airforce to oppose you, sort of like Desert Storm or Operation Iraqi Freedom. I find it very difficult to fight off enemy fighters and enjoy bombing of targets at the same time and I do love bombing stuff.

You're talking about the amphibious stuff which I think we cant do and is beyond my head anyways and then the Vietnam war stuff which historically was pure bombing. So I think we are on the same track here?

[Snake Man]

Here is the post by Sherlock which was the only thing I could find, the key words I tried to search was "iran bomb stone age" because I recall the discussion was a campaign to bomb iran in stone age... but anyways this is the only reference I could find quickly.

Sherlock's trigger file help post here.

[toonces]

We're tracking on the same page I think.

I'm intrigued by the "bombing into the stone age" idea, but as we've explored, it's hard to implement this. Frankly, I don't think we know nearly enough about how the supply system in Falcon works. Also, Hustler intimated that the re-supply is hardcoded into the Falcon code so that bombing supply to zero isn't a simple matter of blowing up factories. I know they're looking at this part of the code, but without the instruction manual on how the designers built the Falcon campaign engine, we're just shooting in the dark.

My idea is more about making a campaign with what we know how to do. There's force level triggers we can exploit. I'm just wondering what else we could do.

All of this would be a lot easier if I could get some decent feedback from the community. But, nobody seems to want to talk about what they want from a campaign. They'd rather just bitch about them.

I'm fine with flying a campaign with no cool victory movie, provided I know whether or not I achieved the designer's victory conditions. It has to be something quantifiable though- something I can pull up, look at, and say "yeah I won" or "bummer, I lost". However, I don't know if anyone else is cool with that. Like I said, nobody says squat when I ask. I would say it's fine because folks are playing a lot of the PMC campaigns in their various "working" conditions. So, can we script a victory condition for Vietnam that doesn't rely on some supply trigger that we don't know how to get working?

I'm just thinking out loud here.

[Snake Man]

Earlier in some topic you spoke of some sort of role playing type of campaign where player has to use bit of his own imagination. Could we use this somehow, like just write a readme that states the victory conditions on each campaign, even though ingame they wont trigger campaign end?

I know this would be very dirty workaround and many if not most people wouldn't "get it", but still, some people might find it enjoyable.

Also when I spoke about the supply thing, I recall some mentioning in other forums that no matter if the player bombed all the enemy factories, the supply would still stay high.

Hmm what about the force levels or that stuff, can we use any of them from triggers, do they drop if you cause enough damage to the enemy?

[ccc]

my .2c..

- supply ratio does not work in FF. i don't think we can use supply ratio to end a campaign.

- air or ground unit ratio is ok. i favor use ground force ratio as victory condition.. you can keep bombing for days to win. using ac number ratio is not that reliable.. once enemy AFBs are disabled, their ac number still going up.

- if you don't want to bomb ground units to win, the only solution is [ end the war at given days, as friendly still hold some obj deep in friendly land ]. it's a timeout setting plus holding some obj.

- navy ratio to win, i have not tried it yet.. imo it should work - but you can not specify sinking a carrier or amphibious ships to win, just a ratio. This one is good for Atlantic sealine or Falkland/Kurile type scenerio..combined naval ratio and capturing some obj for vicotry condition, should make island type campaigns more challenging.

[toonces]

For the amphibious scenario, it was the naval ratio trigger I was sort of thinking of. You can't choose between ships though....maybe design the scenario so that the capital ships are held back and the amphibs aren't amphibs but a resupply convoy. The red side has to sink X number of ships, but in order to do so he has to break through the blue CAP from the blue CVNs. Yes, like Falklands I suppose.

Darn. It's a bummer we don't have more flexibility on triggers. It wouldn't even have to be supply. An infrastructure trigger would be perfect for Vietnam. Like, some percentage of the infrastructure would have to be destroyed, forcing the player to hit all those bridges, factories, depots, etc.

[Hustler]

There is a difference between something not working due to bad code and something not working due to bad data presented to the code.

Three things have to happen. First we have to fully understand how the code works and what data it is looking for. Second, we have to ensure the data we have is what the code expects. Third, we have to use our knowledge from the first two to create a campaign and achieve our desired action and end result.

[toonces]

Knowing that the FF5 devs are looking at the resupply code makes me hopeful that there will be a solution to the supply issue, and we can exploit some sort of supply/infrastructure trigger.

I keep coming back to a couple of recurrent ideas. The first is a Vietnam campaign. I'd love to slice up a short 30 day segment of the Vietnam war, perhaps late Rolling Thunder when the US authorized the bombing of POL and infrastructure targets in N. Vietnam, and create a non-ground war campaign where the victory conditions are tied to the destruction of a certain percentage of the North's infrastructure targets. The player would still be opposed by all those pesky SAMs and MiGs, but would have to think "big picture" about how to create a proper SEAD and OCA campaign to thin out the opposition and then take his strikers downtown to hit factories, railyards, etc.

Hmmmm....

I might be able to work up a "role playing" type readme for something like this. I had used the "Downtown" boardgame before to calculate victory conditions, but I think the complexity of the rules I provided would turn off everyone but...well, me I suppose. However, maybe we can make something easier.

Ideas:
1. re-work the N. Vietnam object list. Keep only vital targets, airfields, and cities. This would focus the ATO on "proper" targets and not waste time attacking non-vital campaign-related targets. In fact, we could try altering those "at war" settings so that airfields are "off limits" and make only the infrastructure targets "hostile".
2. Create a simple to understand/hard to achieve set of victory conditions (but without the gucci movie at the end). I was sort of a fan of the "100 Missions North" idea, where the player's objective could be as simple as surviving 100 campaign missions. But, since the amount of hostile activity in Falcon campaigns is far higher than "real life", perhaps 25 missions north is more realistic.
2a. Victory condition 1: Player must survive (no restarts) X missions; let's say 30 missions. That's 4 missions a day for about 7 days. A dawn patrol, two afternoon missions, and a night strike. You could encourage the player to fly a dawn SEAD strike in an A-7, two BARCAPs in Phantoms in the afternoon, and a night strike in the A-6 in each given campaign day (although the player could do whatever they want).
2b. Victory condition 2: Player must destroy X number of infrastructure targets. He doesn't have to destroy them himself; the target has to be destroyed by a member of his flight/package. So if you have a 12 aircraft strike like I had last night, as long as the target has "destroyed" in debrief, it counts even if its a second or third flight in the mission.
3. Perhaps create a "Debrief Tally" word document, like a kneeboard checklist type card, and the player can just fill in a few details to help keep track of his current victory level. At the end of day X, play a movie, then let the player calculate his victory level.

One of the ideas I proposed in a few places is an exercise or deployment work-up scenario. I'm pretty sure that a carrier air wing working up for deployment isn't going to worry too much about a ground war. So, we take a theater/campaign, tweak it up like above so that the player's task is focused, and then turn him loose to strike targets for his workup. You could still tie things into ratios if that's the direction we want to go...it depends on how resupply ends up working.

Idea:
Take the Panama theater idea I had. The scenario is a deployment workup for one or two carrier air wings. We gut the theater and fix it up such that the whole of Panama is hostile, except airfields. Fill the area up with the time-appropriate SAMs, adversary aircraft, and infrastructure targets.
1. Victory condition 1: a force level trigger. The player must achieve a certain air level superiority and air defense level superiority; this forces the player to fight for air superiority and also fly SEAD missions to reduce the air defenses.
2. Victory condition 2: a role-play trigger. Flown like the Vietnam idea where the player has to destroy X targets, filled out on a debrief sheet.
3. Victory condition 3: Harder to implement, but perhaps best, we could script (yes, script) a flight, call it an airborne flight, that will ferry airborne troops to some deep objective, on day X. The player would need to ensure that the air defenses, enemy air, etc. are all thinned out so that the helicopters can make it in, insert the troops, and get out. You could call it the "graduation exercise"...So the player has some ultimate goal of securing airspace for this mission that is going to take place at a certain time. It keeps the player focused on a goal, and allows some gucci movie to be played indicating victory or defeat (if >day X and objective X is still enemy it is a defeat, else it is a victory...)

I guess the bottom line is that we have all this terrain sitting out there, sort of looking for a reason to fly in it. Rather than dwell on how to "fix" it, I'm curious if we can think about all this a different way. I don't know if it will be fun or not, but I think any sort of goal is better than no goal. I'm a wargamer, so I'm used to playing for some abstract victory condition goal; accumulating a certain level of "points" to determine victory. It's a different approach, but doable I think in Falcon.

[toonces]

http://i263.photobucket.com/albums/ii12 ... lyday4.jpg

I've been running an experiment in FF5.3 Panama. As you can see, it is possible to degrade supply through strategic strikes.

This particular campaign is hacked up to test this idea. I haven't figured out how to make it a playable campaign yet. But I think we're getting closer.

More later.

[Snake Man]

I've been running an experiment in FF5.3

Is there some code changes to make this possible?

This particular campaign is hacked up to test this idea. I haven't figured out how to make it a playable campaign yet.

What do you mean by "hacked"? Like, hex edited?

[toonces]

Sorry, I didn't mean to be cryptic.

I can't specifically comment on any code changes in FF5 that affect supply. I honestly don't know that there are any- I don't think there are, but I don't actually know that.

When I describe the campaign as "hacked", what I mean is that I edited the campaign in tacedit to test my idea. Specifically, I deleted 99% of the red air opposition to allow the blue side to fly unopposed strategic strikes. In starting the campaign, I set the strategic strike slider to max, as well as the plants and refineries target types. The results are in the screenshot above (I wish you would leave those shots up when there is only one).

My understanding of how supply works in Falcon is extremely limited. Hustler and Demer have made some progress in figuring it out, but I don't think any of us is truly sure of how it works. I was reading the RP5 manual and there is some very good information in there with respect to resupply- if the info is still accurate.

What I think happens, roughly, is this:

First, you have all sorts of objectives in the campaign. If you open the obj in tacedit, you can see that it has a supply parameter. When a ground unit "captures" an objective, it inherits the supply that the objective has. From a wargame perspective this makes sense because what you are doing is enabling continued offensive operations by resupplying a unit when it moves forward and captures something.

Second, you have the resupply system in the campaign. It appears that "airlift" type aircraft/helos provide "resupply" to objectives when the land at them. I'm not sure how exactly this works. But, when I was testing Vietnam a while back, I noticed by N. Vnam airforce units would become critical in supply very quickly. When I put a few squadrons of An-2s into the campaign, suddenly the units would be resupplied periodically. I think this happens in all campaigns. It is likely a code thing. I don't know if airlift units use a "hub" as a supply source to "ferry" supplies to airfields. A very interesting (read: time-consuming) project would be to run a campaign and track all airlift missions in the ATO- where they fly from and to, and see how the ATO Manager runs airlifts. The bottom line: removing the airlift capability from a campaign seems to enable supply attrition, but needs to be tested more.

Next, you have a resupply line in the .aii file. I haven't quite figured out how it works, but it seems to influence resupply rate. I'm at work so I can't open it up right now, but I think I edited it to a very long periodicity- have to double check that.

Finally, you have the factories, plants, depots, etc. I'm not sure how they work. In the RP5 manual, it is suggested that you can attrite supply and fuel by destroying these. It could be that the factories/etc "give" a certain amount of supply to their parent source- the periodicity of this may be hard-coded. If you destroy the factory (or damage it) it reduces the amount of supply the factory gives; if it is partially damaged it is 70%, heavy damage 30%, destroyed 0% and so on. Where the supply is "stored" I don't know. *** The supply ratio tracked in the "force levels" could be a "capacity" to produce supply rather than the "actual" supply stored somewhere. *** Just an idea.

I think on some level you have to think about how you would set up a supply system logically in a working wargame. But also, I think you have to think about how you might streamline the supply system code so that the game works without being unmanagable. What I mean is that while it would be great to have factories producing supply, vehicles and planes ferrying the supply to depots and airfields, and then from there to the warfighting units, it might just be a code that if a unit can trace an unobstructed line back to a supply source it is "automatically" resupplied by the code at some interval (that may be specified in the .aii file). This is fairly common in board wargames where a unit can only remain in supply if it can trace a line back to some source.

There is still a lot of experimenting to do with this, but I think it may be possible to bomb the enemy into the stone age if you write the campaign properly. ODS is begging for this type of treatment.

[Snake Man]

I found one old topic relating fuel and supply levels, check out Fuel and Supply levels in campaign.

[molnibalage]

It is good to see that for some theaters you can set the campaign values that your activity has effect on supply. In current FF5.3 campaign the suplly is literally unlimited.