Ways to Spruce Up a Scenario

[SeaQueen]

I've built a scenario for myself which is quite involved. In it, I must establish air superiority so that I can eventually roll in with some amphibious assault ships and seize a peninsula. The problem is that after knocking down the IADS and the fighters, the scenario devolves into a long, but un-challenging slog where the inevitable defeat of the enemy land forces by overwhelming air power is held up only by my own sortie rate. Landing the Marines is almost a technicality at that point.

I'm trying to think of ways to make it more challenging. What are some ways to make ground forces in Command more survivable against air power?

[Amnectrus]

Just going off the cuff, you could have some random timers that would create (or warp in from across the map) ground units as the scenario goes on, to simulate units that were hidden by camouflage or inside buildings or were otherwise inactive and not possible to find when the initial battle takes place. Or you could limit friendly forces in some way to make the initial battle take longer, or happen in more stages. Maybe long initial ready times, or limited munitions, or maybe make munitions replenish over time, simulating cargo flights in to friendly bases. In one of the community pack scenarios that models Operation Allied Force in Serbia, there's a SAM belt of SA-10s that you don't have exact locations for, and with the units you have, and the weather, it's not very easy to get an exact location, and then you don't have enough SEAD planes to knock out more than one or two sites at a time.

The problem of the long ending is something I've seen in other scenarios too and I'd be interested in seeing what people come up with.

[Whicker]

- clouds/fog
- veteran/ace status?
- limit amount of a2g ordnance

if it is cloudy enough to force the AC to lower altitude the manpads might be pretty effective.

[Gunner98]

This is a bit of a problem - if the player does everything right, the mid & end game can turn into a slog.

Land unit survivability:
-Use bunkers (need PGMs and penetrators to take out)
-Use lots of AAA which keep the player at a med and higher altitude (linking this with low clouds as mentioned above)
-Use mobile reserves, easy to hit and find but may catch the player napping and probably causes some diversion
-Use invisible or low visibility SOF to keep an eye on the amphib force and provide targeting solutions
-Beyond the area of the objective, have some depth targets which are hard and well defended. Player will either limit the depth of the attack, and therefore enemy SSMs and aviation can hide in the protection which will cause problems later. Or player will expend resources and time to defeat in depth.
-Lua in aviation, at nape of the earth with a mission to strike the amphib forces. Defeatable but will cause a rush of blood to the head.

-Mines in the amphib area, you don't need many

-An SSK is always good
.

[SeaQueen]

I like the bunkers idea. I'm not sure about AAA because I'll need to rationalize it to myself in terms of the order of battle, but I do think there's not enough MANPADS. Something I have thought about, though, is that massed smallarms fire would be a thing in real life, but Command doesn't really do that, although it could with minor database changes. That's important because when I roll in with my drones to start picking out targets for follow on strikes, they have free rein. That's not realistic.

I already have SSKs. Those usually get hit by SSNs earlier, though. Sometimes I lose one.

Originally, I had the idea of some kind building some sort of quick reaction force, but when I looked at the order of battle, it wasn't clear that I had enough to do a static defense at the beach, defend the airport, and maintain a QRF, given the assumption that they'd do simultaneous air and surface assaults.

Mines... can't do that. Water's too deep.

SOF... meh... doesn't matter.

[Amnectrus]

Another possibility that just occurred to me: make the radars and SAMs regenerate with a LUA script after some amount of time, maybe 12 to 24 hours, to simulate the sites being repaired and brought back into service, or backup units being deployed. Possibly also with a random location some distance away from the original site. That would make it so that a SEAD mission would be enough to cover one or two strikes, but then radars would start popping up again and you'd have to do another SEAD to cover them through the next day's missions.