ORIGINAL: Chief Rudiger
Certainly, I've put a lot of work into one major scenario and multiple smaller ones but, like others here, have found difficulty with research and OOBs, but only really because i'm looking for too much perfection. Does anyone really care whether Vichy French Syrian Native Cav companys had any LMG's or grenade dischargers? Similarly, how important is an accurate map - as long is it plays okay.
IMO, the detail is what makes it fun/interesting, even if no one else knows what's going on under the hood. In this regard, there are aspects of what I do that border on the occult. Of course, you can take this sort of thing too far. A friend of mine is a modeler and built a PBY with a scratch-made interior that's only visible through two tiny windows in the fuselage. If I hadn't seen him add the items before he sealed the two halves together, I'd have no idea of how much work went into it.
This i think is another major problem. Once you've built your own estabs, like PoE, how do you know they really "work" properly, given the abstraction of the engine (especially when your new units are in the hands of the AI). Getting the AI to do what you want using the objectives is also (something i certainly find) dificult
Whenever possible, I take items from the stock estabs and simply rename them. If necessary, I modify the stock values to get me where I want to go. I'm also constantly "cloning" items, so that I reduce the possibility of transcription/transposition errors to a bare minimum. That way, so long as my base estab items are sound, all the clones will be as well. All I have to worry about is getting the various strengths, names and counter labels correct. The spreadsheet modding tools utility helps a lot with that last part. When all is said and done, I test the new forces in a scenario like the one that I constructed for my commandos.
Also, if you're like me and like to try weird things out, this side-tracks you and you end up never finishing anything fully. Maybe the sheer possibilities the editors gives you means people are working on too big projects. See the number of "dead" mods for other games like the Total War series. At least nobody has released a "big heads" mod or something daft, Star Wars related.
At one time, I was working on four different scenarios at once, spanning three different maps. I think that I almost drove myself mad in the process. The problem arose because I kept coming across "cool stuff" during my ongoing research, items that I want to include in one work or another. Since then, I've gotten organized and created "folders" to store this/that little tidbit until I return to its associated operation.
Anyway, i digress, nobody's probably read this far, but I know releasing a WIP scenario and having other play test it would probably be the answer but an hestitant to do so until the editor improvements are made, so that i can easily go through everything i've done.
Let her rip, Rudiger. I must have played your "Goose Green" scenario a dozen times. Feedback can only help you improve your work.
To end of a negative; What i don't think helps is the amount of "pointless" info in the estabs, which is only there for future use - like vehicle personnel carrying capacity, which you sometimes don't know whether to ignore or spend an hour researching the answer too...
YES, PANTHER GAMES, please let us know what's disabled so that we can cease researching arcane matters that are of no more use to your game or our scenarios than the interior detail of my buddy's PBY!
Government is the opiate of the masses.
