First Strike - unbalanced scenario or am I a dumbass ?

[dredpath]

Tried playing 'First Strike' twice now against my live opponent (once as Soviet and once as NATO) - and seems to us both that it is a daft set up for the NATO player, in fact almost impossible to win. The instructions seem to indicate that you 9NATO) have to attack and, after a quick look it seems that way but ... spoiler alert if you haven't played it and want to - do not read on...


1. The Soviet has all of the victory hexes at the start
2. The soviet is dug in or at least in readily defended positions with superior numbers and great LOS with minor shuffling
3. There is a chem hazard to reduce the possibility of any maneouvre by the Brits, in fact you will lose a lot of your recce to it if you probe forward.
4. British reinforcements- particularly attack helicopters - come on in the LOS of the already set up Soviet AD, so get shot down before they can even be given any orders
5. It is daylight with reasonable weather, so there is no chance of moving covertly into any positions or sneaking about

Are we missing something or was this just a poorly designed scenario ?

D

[CapnDarwin]

Sunray42,

You are not missing anything and it was a "balanced" scenario when it was made a tested over a year ago. All of the scenario work was done by Steve aka "Mad Russian" and he is a damn good scenario maker. Some of the scenarios have slid off the balance fulcrum do to the many bug fixes, tweaks, new code, etc. that Rob and I have done based on feedback from many players and our own continuous test and code work. So blame us 100% for the way things are in certain scenarios. Steve has been patiently waiting for us to stop tinkering around in the mechanics so he can go back through and make some adjustments to restore the yin and yang they once had. We just got the 2.09 update out the door last week to Matrix. We are now focusing on coding for 2.1 (Southern Storm) and Steve is on travel for 6-8 weeks and is planning one spending some time doing a rebalance run though the scenarios. Once he is done we will be posting those updates on our website.

That should make a number of folks happy. Including Steve. [:D]

[Jagger2002]

It would be nice to have a section in which people could put in recommendations for play balance vs AI or PBEM for particular scenarios. I am sure there is a lot of real life experience playing the scenarios by now. The feedback might be very helpful when it comes time to rebalancing the scenarios.

[CapnDarwin]

Jagger2002, we have a mods and scenarios sub-forum that you can start a thread on balance thoughts or even tag along on a few others that are doing similar. That being said, I will state that Steve will be revising the scenarios he made. He has done hundreds of scenarios for a number of war games and we fully trust his judgement. Balance is a very subjective term and means different things to different people with respect to scenario design. Play style, understanding of tactics and timing, and luck make everyone's approach to a scenario different. Tack on to that the way the game engine works. Level of victory is on a sliding scale. You can have a tank platoon fight a MRR and win even if the unit is lost. Granted, that may not be the most fun scenario for each side, but it is balanced in game outcome. On our end we will be looking at the VP values and ratio calculations to make sure we are happy with the numbers.

I will also point out that you can always use the scenario editor and make your own adjustments and try them out.

Thanks for posting!

[cbelva]

With what Capn D said, I don't think that the scenarios are "way out of balance". Some will need some tweaking from Steve. Steve and I have talked about some of them. If you have some comments or suggestion by all mean please provide them. First Strike has been a hard scenario from the beginning. I can see how it could need some tweaking based on some of the changes/adjustments to the code. We will make sure that Steve sees your comments.