Anyone missing CMx1-style campaigns?

[Cogust]

But I think there is the possibility for a beautiful solution for campaign designers, IF they want to re-balance campaign - to avoid early frustration for one side: by making reinforcements and/or weather conditions dependent how well a player is doing.

That is entirely possible right now in CMx2, it is not even hard to do, there are even campaigns that scales the difficulty in later missions after how good the player is perceived to be.

Without endless hours of game testing, which is necessary now, with a few mouse clicks, the designer could opt i.e. for a rebalance of the tank forces after a certain time - without players noticing anything. Or maybe the designer wants to rebalance infantry after 50% of the campaign? Could be done by manipulation of the reinforcement possibilities. Or what about the option to give the attacker a continously worse weather for his attack, if his advantage is above a certain threshold?

Short: Triggers for reinforcements. They should work best in the CMx1 static campaign model.

That's also possible right now in CMx2, both weather, reinforcements, replacements and supply can be altered depending on how successful the player is.

Triggers for reinforcements exists both in CMx1 operations and CMx2 campaigns, i can't see what you're aiming for here.

In CMx2 each scenario is it's own battle. Therefore it doesn't make any sense for a designer to create a recon scenario in a campaign, because there is no way to work with the info gathered by the player.

With static campaigns all info a player gathers from the previous phase, would be kept and transferred over. If the player identifies a lot, he will know more for the next battle. If he recons nothing, he will know nothing. Tactically a completely different league.

The first scenario in the German CM:BN campaign is implemented exactly this way. You get a scouting force in the middle of the night to find enemy locations/units, the next scenario you conduct the actual assault and the enemy units are where you know them to be.

In CMx1 only the units that happened to be in 'no-mans land' in the setup phase were in a possibly known spot, all other units were free to set up anywhere. Therefore scouting didn't help as much, in CMx2 the campaign author can ensure consistency between scouting scenario and attack scenario by giving the AI only one possible setup.

One drawback with CMx1 is that if you faced a Tiger tank in the first battle you know that you will keep facing it until it is destroyed while it can be withdrawn between battles in CMx2.

Drawback? That's highly realistic.

No, it is not realistic at all to be 100% sure that all the units you fought yesterday are still in front of you today. The enemy might have withdrawn the unit facing you and replaced it with something completely different, or just withdrawn all but a skirmish line.

I would say that CMx2 offers almost everyting that operations in CMx1 did and due to the increased flexibility it opens up a vast amount of different possible campaigns.

If there was a will by the developers, there would be lots of possibilities to give designers tools, that could remove even all predicatability during a campaign. For example: make certain units only available for a certain timespan and then they must be "returned" by the player, otherwise he would face a severe penalty.

The static CMx1 system would offer incredible possibilities.

But those tools are already there, you can actually give the player a choice of giving back that Tiger company or not and alter the victory conditions depending on the choice made by the player.

Btw, the CMx1 campaign-system would even allow players to decide to build a bridge somewhere on the map on their own, without any campaign designer giving them the task to do so in a briefing. All the designer would have to do, was to offer units of that capability as part of available reinforcements - they could appear the next day. They could be used, or not.

It's not possible to model this tactical freedom with the predetermined CMx2 system.

It is not possible to build bridges during a CMx1 operation, though it is possible to blow them up with lots of HE, what are you referring to here?

It is important, because the CMx1 model would allow modelling the different phases of a battle and carrying over ALL previous tactical decisions. Therefore also a realistic timespan, when reinforcements could arrive, could be modelled with the CMx1 system.
With the CMx2 campaign system, there are no tactical decisions from the player going beyond 2 hours, and nothing is affecting the following phase of the battle, because it doesn't exist. Only a new, completely different battle exists, that is connected with a story and a core force. Therefore all reinforcements in CMx2 appear independently from previous player decisions, mostly in unrealistic and predetermined time windows - predetermined by the designer, independently from tactical developments - everything is crammed into the portrayed 2 hours.

In CMx1 reinforcements could take days until they finally become available. Another tactical aspect: players need to anticipate and foresee what could happen.

Reinforcements in CMx1 operations alway enter between battles and are either tied to a specific time, a specific part of the map (not possible for static operations) or handled as reserves that are released based on friendly casualty levels. Units are never withdrawn.

Reinforcements in CMx2 can enter during a battle (with a possible random arrival time which mean that they might not show up this battle at all) and are most often tied to a specific battle, but can become available sooner, later or not at all depending on earlier missions and decisions by the player. Units can also be withdrawn and you can be forced to fight with your force in two different places at once and so on.

CMx2 inorporates almost everyting that CMx1 contains regardin reinforcements and ands much much more.

Fact is there are not many campaigns now. Fact is further, that they take a huge amount of time to make.
I can talk about myself: I will never ever make a campaign for the CMx2 system. But making a campaign with a CMx1-system, with some of the tools I described, would be easy for me to make in an acceptable amount of time.

You would still have to make all AI plans, setups and so on. The things that takes much of the designer time as they have to be tested a few times. A H2H campaign is easier to make as you don't have to provide the brains for one side to make it fun and it doesn't have to be very balanced either as players will be having fun regardless.

The one thing lacking in CMx2 campaigns is dedicated H2H campaigns that are shipped with the game, that would be frickin' awesome. I also want the ability of several possible scenarios branching out from each battle to give more flexibility to the campaign authors, as it is now you can only have two different branches.

I envisage a campaign where both players are fighting battles along a frontline, divided into 2-3 sectors, where success in one sector will open up the possibility to drive deeper there and perhaps force the other player to fall back in other sectors to avoid being cut off.

Even that could be achieved by CMx1 style campaigns in a better way: if they would use a master map internally, while they only show a portion of it as battlefield. And according to the development on the battlefield, the size of the map could adapt. If players spread out, it could expand the size of the map for the next battle.

Driving into unknown territory? Driving deeper? Would become possible with master maps + CMx1 system.

The tactical possibilities of that system could be endless while the predetermined CMx2 storytelling seems like a caricature of it.

Players could then decide if they wanted to deepen their penetration or if they wanted to widen the breach first. This is doable with the current campaign system, but all the choices are pretty clunky if both sides are making decisions between battles.

The current system doesn't even store the tactical situation when it comes to the next phase of the battle. So I see this idea as two steps ahead. It would be nice, but as long as the tactical situation from the previous battle is ignored and not transferred over to the next battle, we are bound to a system that can not even model different phases of very simple and small battles.

I think your example is an argument in support of a CMx1 campaign system, not the CMx2 system.
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I think that you are focusing too much on that the units have to be exactly where you left them, when in reality there would be a pause of at least a few hours between fights where both sides would be redeploying and resupplying in real life. CMx2 already gives you the ability to fight a focused campaign with good narrative while giving lots of weight to earlier battles that CMx1 imo never came near.

Can it be better? Definitely, with more branching and a few other improvements, but it is really powerful already. I'm a little disappointed that designers aren't making more of it, but maybe I should do as H1nd and do it myself to show that it can be done.

/Conny