Unknown victory hexes & Captured units

[Embis]

Just looking at designing a scenario or two and was wondering how others might have used "unknown victory hexes"

can anyone point me to a scenario, either stock or home made, where these have been used?

What kind of situations might they be useful for?

I would quite like to design a scenario that is rather more than a "storm the position" and the use of some of these often underused features might add the spice I am looking for.

I am particularly looking at SBWW1 and was thinking of a trench raid scenario.

[Jeff Conner]

Embis

I have used both of these features at some point in time. The hidden objectives are not always real popular and during playtesting, on at least one occasion, they were removed and replaced with regular objectives. Still, I think that they are underutilized and should be used more. I think I used them in Ambush in the Babur Valley from SAW. Just make sure that you include enough information in your scenario description that the player knows he needs to look for them.

As for the captured units, you need a situation where hostages (or POWs) are being held in a fixed location. You could probably do this with a hypothetical trench raid scenario. For example, a POW escapes and leads his comrades back to where the rest of his mates are being held. Might be fun. Anyway, if you want to take a look at a scenario that uses this, there is one in Falklands titled Rescue. It is a hypothetical scenario based on real life events and depicts a special operations raid to free the Kelpers being held in Goose Green. I found that it was kind of tough to balance, given all of the possible things going on.

Good luck with your scenario design work. Let me know if you have any questions and I will try and help out if possible.

Jeff

[Embis]

Embis

I have used both of these features at some point in time. .... snip snip.... Let me know if you have any questions and I will try and help out if possible.

Jeff

Thanks Jeff thats really helpful, I will check out the scenario you suggest

[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.

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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.

[TheBigRedOne]

I don't recall if it was Oz or Mike that used the hidden objectives in some SAW scenarios, calling them 'Weapon's Caches' in the instructions. The issue there was that the game became a hunt for buried treasure at times rather than focusing on the military objectives of the scenario. Almost became a distraction to the scenario, but I think if thoughtfully done, they can be utilized to make the scenarios more interesting.

I also think the Capture objectives don't get used enough. The one thing I used to hate in SB was once the battle had pushed forward, some lone squad that had been demoralized and hiding in the weeds coming back and getting an objective that had been moved on from. I think in many cases that once an objective has been secured and the battle moves forward away from those objectives, that they should not be allowed to be turned like in the above situation.

Just my pet peeve, however...

[Embis]

Thanks Guys, especially for your essay Volcano Man! That is just what I was asking for, and not at all confusing, you have given me some good ideas there.