Largest known scenario in Command history?

[SunlitZelkova]

I am planning to edit the first four CoW scenarios to have the commerical traffic that clogs the Pacific in the skies and on the seas.

Salvo in particular is already a huge scenario, I was wondering what a good limit would be in terms of active unit count.

In terms of active unit count, what is the largest known scenario in CMANO?

[Excroat3]

Red Dragon Descends on the Steam Workshop is a good place to start. Full OOBs for basically every nation in the Pacific.

[Rory Noonan]

Not sure on which scenario has the highest AU count but I try to cap my scenarios at around 2,500. Beyond that a lot of systems will struggle.

If you're adding a lot of merchant traffic make sure the Civilian side is set to 'blind'; that will save a lot of sensor calcs and spare the CPU [:)]

[Hongjian]

ORIGINAL: Excroat3

Red Dragon Descends on the Steam Workshop is a good place to start. Full OOBs for basically every nation in the Pacific.

This basically.

Smokes my PC every time I just try to load it.

[SunlitZelkova]

ORIGINAL: Excroat3

Red Dragon Descends on the Steam Workshop is a good place to start. Full OOBs for basically every nation in the Pacific.

Could you attach the file to a reply to this message? I don't have steam.

ORIGINAL: apache85

Not sure on which scenario has the highest AU count but I try to cap my scenarios at around 2,500. Beyond that a lot of systems will struggle.

If you're adding a lot of merchant traffic make sure the Civilian side is set to 'blind'; that will save a lot of sensor calcs and spare the CPU [:)]

One interesting aspect is to have certain ships be on their own side and share information with China, sort of like spy trawlers, but spread out to include other types of ships, specifically ones operating around places like Okinawa, Seoul, and Yokohama.

But yeah, for the majority of civilian units as well as the nature side, they will all be set to blind.

[Dimitris]

Isn't there a new Desert Storm scenario with 12.5K units?

[tjhkkr]

ORIGINAL: Dimitris
Isn't there a new Desert Storm scenario with 12.5K units?

Sweet Savannah! That is unreal.

Here I try to go out of my way to limit the number of units for speed reasons...
That is cool though: whoever did that generates a lot of work!

[Excroat3]

ORIGINAL: FlyForLenin

ORIGINAL: Excroat3

Red Dragon Descends on the Steam Workshop is a good place to start. Full OOBs for basically every nation in the Pacific.

Could you attach the file to a reply to this message? I don't have steam.

Here it is.

[SunlitZelkova]

ORIGINAL: Dimitris

Isn't there a new Desert Storm scenario with 12.5K units?

Yes, but the general consensus seems to be that that amount is far to big. Depending on the size of the Pacific scenario mentioned before, I will try to find a compromise.

ORIGINAL: Excroat3

ORIGINAL: FlyForLenin

ORIGINAL: Excroat3

Red Dragon Descends on the Steam Workshop is a good place to start. Full OOBs for basically every nation in the Pacific.

Could you attach the file to a reply to this message? I don't have steam.

Here it is.

Thanks!

[Gunner98]

Northern Fury #34 - The Longest Battle

Trans Atlantic convoy ops, runs about 3-3500 units. Used to be the largest but has been surpassed by several mentioned.

B

[BDukes]

Yes. Nobody play if too slow.

Perhaps someone finds limit where there lots of unit and run ok?

[SunlitZelkova]

ORIGINAL: BDukes

Yes. Nobody play if too slow.

Perhaps someone finds limit where there lots of unit and run ok?

Alright, based on what has been said here, the average maximum (runnable) AU count in scenarios seems to be around 2500-3000. This does not take into account the complexity of the scenario (sides, sensors, etc.).

12000 in the new Desert Storm scenario seems to be far to big for most people, 4000ish is also too much in the Red Dragon Descends scenario.

This a problem as Salvo, for example, already has around 2700 AUs.

Therefore, I have decided to ignore AU count and build to my liking.

Thanks for the replies!

[VFA41_Lion]

I'm making a scenario that starts off (currently) at 3000 AU and jumps to 4300, which is taxing my i5-6600k at 3.5ghz a decent bit.

[SunlitZelkova]

ORIGINAL: VFA41_Lion

I'm making a scenario that starts off (currently) at 3000 AU and jumps to 4300, which is taxing my i5-6600k at 3.5ghz a decent bit.

I apologize but I know practically nothing detailed about how computers work. Could you translate that into the real time it takes to play one second of the game? Or something along those lines.

I heard it takes around 1 minute or so for one in game second to pass in the new Iraq War scenario. Things like this are my primary concern at this moment in time.

[SeaQueen]

I worry sometimes that people make scenarios too big and end up compromising their realism because after a certain point, you effectively end up having to wear too many hats, and someone in charge of a force that big wouldn't be making the same kinds of decisions as you make in Command. If it gets too big, the commander is essentially writing the victory conditions for many Command scenarios at once, and setting timelines dictating the order in which they need to be accomplished, as well as working with political leaders to translate their political goals into military goals which support them, and working with diplomats to shore up alliances. That's a whole separate game. It's probably a whole separate KIND of game as well, which would be interesting, but I'm not sure it lends itself to the kind of highly detailed simulation that Command is. It'd almost be like a role playing game or a card game, or maybe something like Diplomacy. I don't know...

[Cik]

ah, one can wear many hats at once. in the same way that nudging a tanker to a new orbit requires being a mission planning man, a tanker man, a radio control tower man or what have you, you could play the diplomat and the commander at the same time.

when you are playing this sort of game, you are wearing many hats already considering you can nudge the planes around (pilot) nudge the missions around (planning) or nudge the objectives around (political guy) there is no reason to struggle for absolute realism in this way imo.

[Schr75]

Hi FlyForLenin

I heard it takes around 1 minute or so for one in game second to pass in the new Iraq War scenario. Things like this are my primary concern at this moment in time.

Unfortunately it´s not that simple.
Performance depends on a lot of variables, and AU count is only one of these (but a pretty important one).

I run command on an AMD FX-8350 octo core CPU @ 4GHz, and this is a three years old computer, and I can usually run a 3-4000 AU count scen pretty smooth at 15:1 time compression and at 5:1 with no problems.
Disabling range rings and other things can help alot.
You can tweek your setup quite a bit in the games menu, to be able to run quite big scens on slower computers, and the devs are continually improving the game, so performance should improve with each new build.

I haven´t run the 12500 AU monster yet, but this scen will max out most computers.

Depending on your computers specs, you shouldn´t be afraid to try scens running at 2500+ AU count.
If your computer is too slow to run it, you will know in the first few seconds, but I doubt that it will take a real world minute to run one game second.

Hope this helped.

Søren

[SeaQueen]

It is true, one can wear many hats at once, but there are limits.

Unless you're President Johnson (which I don't encourage), the job of a diplomat, politician and military officer of sufficiently high rank is sufficiently different from the kinds of things portrayed in Command that they're really beyond the scope of the game. There's many levels of warfare, and they interact with one another. On the highest level, you might not really be concerned with striking targets at all. You're creating facts which shape the underlying conditions in which one might potentially strike targets if it comes to that, or reacting to the unanticipated consequences of the conflict.

Do you really think Command has an accurate portrayal of electoral politics or the kinds of behind the scenes negotiations that effect things like overflight rights, basing options? In Command, that's all an assumption. In Command you wouldn't care how Madeleine Albright convinced the Bulgarians, Romanians and Hungarians to close their airspace to Russian overflight, you'd just assume that she did, and draw a big red blob over them. Once you get to a high enough level, essentially you're not playing a Command scenario anymore so much as you're helping to create the facts around which one might write a Command scenario, only it's in an adversarial environment, your opponent gets to create facts too. In that sense, Command is just the game within a larger game.

Command also doesn't do stuff like answer questions about things like how does striking targets and moving things around (e.g. things Command portrays) interact with Dept. of Treasury officials freezing the financial assets of the opposing nation's leadership? Command does not, for example, have any way to represent what happens when Slobidan Milosevic's wife can't go shopping in Paris anymore. If the Israelis enter into a conflict will it fragment the alliance? What kinds of facts can one create in order to minimize that possibility? If I move an amphib over the horizon so the people in Monrovia can see it, do the rebels pull back because they don't want to fight or do they attack the embassy? In Command you might be clever and script a course of action, or even a few different ones, but you wouldn't really be able to make an argument why it'd go one way or the other. That has to come from somewhere else.

There's other kinds of wargaming that deals with that kind of stuff. Effectively the end state of those kinds of wargames would be a set of facts which might shape a Command type scenario. Depending on what your interests are, there might be reasons to struggle for realism. For me, the entertainment value of the game lies in the way I can use it to think through real problems and gain some insight into some of the things which shape international security, either historically or in the near future. Because of that, realism is important to me.

ORIGINAL: Cik

ah, one can wear many hats at once. in the same way that nudging a tanker to a new orbit requires being a mission planning man, a tanker man, a radio control tower man or what have you, you could play the diplomat and the commander at the same time.

when you are playing this sort of game, you are wearing many hats already considering you can nudge the planes around (pilot) nudge the missions around (planning) or nudge the objectives around (political guy) there is no reason to struggle for absolute realism in this way imo.

[Dysta]

As far as I know in this game, you are the commander who abide objectives to do damages in scenarios, not the way around. The end of scenario will write "let the politicians do the clean up.", which isn't you.

Anything above this part is an excessity to complicate the whole game, not all players are willing to study politics to decide what to do militarily, especially the side he is playing is not in his country. This is what I understand to separate multiple small scenarios and pack them in one campaign. Not only to avoid explosive reactions on multiple sides in a big scenario, but also trimming down the unit size for processing performance.

Make no mistake, I really love grand campaign style of real-time modern strategy games to be real at someday -- I would love to see every single assets and units to be shown all around planet earth, with economical and political buildups like in Total War Series. But this will be a whole different discussion point. And like I said, not every players want to involve with politics in a middle of battle.

[SunlitZelkova]

ORIGINAL: Schr75

Hi FlyForLenin

I heard it takes around 1 minute or so for one in game second to pass in the new Iraq War scenario. Things like this are my primary concern at this moment in time.

Unfortunately it´s not that simple.
Performance depends on a lot of variables, and AU count is only one of these (but a pretty important one).

I run command on an AMD FX-8350 octo core CPU @ 4GHz, and this is a three years old computer, and I can usually run a 3-4000 AU count scen pretty smooth at 15:1 time compression and at 5:1 with no problems.
Disabling range rings and other things can help alot.
You can tweek your setup quite a bit in the games menu, to be able to run quite big scens on slower computers, and the devs are continually improving the game, so performance should improve with each new build.

I haven´t run the 12500 AU monster yet, but this scen will max out most computers.

Depending on your computers specs, you shouldn´t be afraid to try scens running at 2500+ AU count.
If your computer is too slow to run it, you will know in the first few seconds, but I doubt that it will take a real world minute to run one game second.

Hope this helped.

Søren

Thanks!

@SeaQueen , @Dysta , I currently don't have any plans on making a scenario that large for public consumption, or for myself- I have done something like that with small fictional nations before and it is pretty boring in my opinion.

I will say one thing though- logic wise, if we are already playing as high ranking officers on the one hand, and soldiers (pilots, captains) on the other hand, within one scenario, I don't see how expanding the scope is bad.

Fun wise though, I don't think it is a good idea, at least not for one player alone.

Having a multiplayer version, with say, 12 people on each team, with 1 person as the "leader", and the other eleven controlling theaters/fronts/divisions/whatever, could be pretty interesting. Definitely not possible with current technology, but it could be interesting in the future, for those willing to do it.