Unknown victory hexes & Captured units

[Volcano Man]

Good idea. I had planned a trench raid scenario (hence the presence of the "spiked club" melee weapon in the game) but all the other scenarios prevented me from getting around to it.

What I would recommend is, take a map that has a large section of trench that you create. Then of course have it take place at night with low visibility with only sentry units which are all fixed but arrive in randomized locations. The objectives would be setup as unknown capture type, and in the briefing (and probably on the map labels) mention places of key importance that should be investigated in order to capture intel. Some of those hexes would have no value, and one could be the jackpot. The only trouble would be re-playability; once you find where the jackpot is the you always know it - but that is not a bad thing. You could make a trench raiding campaign for example, where several small scenarios are present making it difficult for someone to memorize OBJ locations.

Anyway, the best way to deal with re-playability would be to make the objective something like securing some POWs like Jeff said, or something creative like capturing an enemy officer which is, in the game, really a friendly "captured" officer that you must "free" and get to an extraction/exit hex. You can these have these "captured" units arrive by reinforcement at start at randomized locations which will keep the raiding side guessing.

Good luck, I would love to play a scenario like that myself. When I was brainstorming the idea one hurdle I brainstormed was how to represent a reactionary force.

Here is my personal suggestion on what I thought of on how to handle sentries and reactionary forces (some of it already mentioned above):

1) The defender has one or two man sentries across the front trench and in any forward located listening posts. These are one man units, and all of these are fixed with no release and all should arrive as reinforcements at randomized locations. These should be situated based on visibility level. Visibility should probably be 1 to 2 hexes (2 hexes being full moon situation) then you should probably have one fixed sentry unit for every 5 hexes of trench on the front line at 1 hex visibility, and one fixed sentry unit for every 8 or so hexes of trench on front line at 2 hex visibility otherwise there isn't much of a chance to actually sneak into the enemy's position.

2) This is the tricky part. The defender has one two man non-fixed sentry unit which acts as a roving patrol. Organizationally speaking, in the order of battle this roaming sentry unit should be in the same platoon as the units in the reactionary force (this is important for their release). The roving patrol unit then has AI orders to move up and down the trench (hopefully the AI will actually move along the trench, you can ensure that this happens with the presence of wired obstacles along both sides of the front trench). Just create different waypoints for each turn in one direction or back and forth however you see fit, and you can use the AI scripting options to setup different paths. Needless to say, if the map is very large then you can have several of these patrols; perhaps two or three in a large front trench and one in the rear second trench for example.

3) The reactionary force, as mentioned, starts in a dugout somewhere and they are fixed. They should arrive on the enemy's first turn in randomized locations. Their release is set at 0% but is triggered and the reason for that is so that they will only become active if a roving patrol is engaged by the raiders because they stumble onto them for example (or if this is a multiplayer scenario then it is because they sent those units to investigate missing sentries). Of course you would have to get the enemy to engage the roaming unit however, but I think you can do that by attacking them or assaulting the raiders with the roaming units. You can also put some of the fixed sentries into the reactionary force organization too, but I would be careful about that as it might make it too difficult -- you would have to experiment.

4) The next hurdle would be to make the AI controlled reactionary force do something intelligent, so I guess you should just have to give them AI orders to capture objective hex or just have them fan out and move to the front trench.

5) Give the defenders flare guns, but very little amount of flares so that they cannot use them willy nilly. You could also setup some artillery delivered flares to arrive as random support, but these should be very few and probably only one shot every few turns.

6) This one should be obvious: Given all of the defending units arriving randomly on the first turn (or at least most of them), you should place the raiding side at such a distance that they are at least two turns away from the enemy's trench, lest they get there before they actually arrive.

---------------------

Ugh, I typed far more than I planned to and probably only managed to confuse you. I just wanted to mention my thoughts when I brainstormed the idea in the past; maybe some good will come from it. In the end it will involve some experimenting, also I would be generous with the amount of turns you give the raiding side, since too few turns means that they can have no margin for error.