Tides of War first impressions

[HalfLifeExpert]

I've completed the first Tides of War scenario (campaign mode), and I felt that the way things went were pretty unfair to achieve a "winning" score, and there's some issues that need to be resolved in an update:

1) The Designer Notes state that the starting player score is 250, but it's actually negative 500.

2) At a certain point, the player will receive a notice of a real-world SAR situation, and directs the player to pick up survivors. It also states that the restriction on vessels leaving the exercise zone has been lifted. HOWEVER, the player still receives the repeated score penalty for leaving the exercise area AFTER this event triggers.

3) The mechanics of warning the PAFMM work well at first, but there are issues that need to be corrected.

First, there's no clearly laid out ROE for what to do when the PAFMM ships stop responding to warning messages. The two apparent actions available are ramming & boarding. There's no defined parameters for going weapons hot for damaging shots.

Second, I did both ramming & boarding, repeatedly, but there was no scoring effect for either event when attempted/successful.

Third, after a certain point, the PAFMM ships just kept coming to the point where I was overwhelmed and buried in point loss, since the player loses two points for every 5 minutes that a PAFMM ship is inside the exercise area. Either the numbers of ships incoming need to be toned down, or there needs to be points given back when a PAFMM ship either obeys and turns back, or is captured/rammed.

I personally find this scenario not exactly functional at this stage, given it's stated purpose.

[Arcuse]

Good morning,

I'll add a voice for the post above :

1) The Designer Notes state that the starting player score is 250, but it's actually negative 500.

--> Same on my side. I suspect the briefing is ok as I ended up with a score of 480+ and only got an "average" ranking.

2) At a certain point, the player will receive a notice of a real-world SAR situation, and directs the player to pick up survivors. It also states that the restriction on vessels leaving the exercise zone has been lifted. HOWEVER, the player still receives the repeated score penalty for leaving the exercise area AFTER this event triggers.

--> I did not check regularly if the points were removed but I also got the event ("You are not allowed to leave the area...") fire when my ship left the exercise area.

3) The mechanics of warning the PAFMM work well at first, but there are issues that need to be corrected.

--> a. I assumed that when they stopped responding I should ram them. I was expecting at least a warning message (or actually anything as a reaction) either from China or from ASEAN.
--> b. I also rammed and seized most of the PAFMM. And sunk a few of them (by ramming. No shot were fired). No point gain / loss seemed weird even though loosing points in these conditions would be quite unfair as ramming damages are quite unpredictable and often lead to heavy fire / flood.
--> c. On my side, splitting the fleet was enough to cover all the area. However, after a few ingame hours, and besides the main objectives, the repeated "Move at flank to predicted entry point" / "Zoom-in to select both the ASEAN and PAFMM ship" / "Try to board" / "Try to ram" / "Try to board" / ... grew old quite quickly.

In summary : I liked the setup, I found the units at our disposal to be adapted (I don't know if the "passengers x15" twin otters are useful or not) and the gameplay was ok for the first few hours. But the bugs above were a bit frustrating and the gameplay loop after the first 6 hours was tedious.
I think the mission duration could be brought down to 12 hours (maybe with the SAREX, ASWEX and "live SAR" mission firing a few hours earlier).

I am looking forward to test the Scenario 2 even if the description seems to imply that they will be additional boarding & ramming (which I am not looking forward too if it looks like Scanario 1).

Version : Steam, updated to the latest stable version

Thank you.

EDIT : typo

[blu3s]

1) The Designer Notes state that the starting player score is 250, but it's actually negative 500.

That's true, that one was tweaked internally. Since campaign mode allow you to pass to the next campaign achieving just 500 points, we needed to tweak that starting player score since if you complete two of the exercises the scenario will end automatically within completing anything else. You should receive those 500 points at the end of the scenario if everything else went well.

Logging everything else to be sent to scenario designer.

Logged 003

[maverick3320]

I had exactly the same issues as the first two posters with the first mission.


For the second mission, the PLAN fires on me first, I fire back (which is in line with the scenario ROE), and the scenario concludes, regardless of whether I destroy any PLAN ships or not. I always end with a score of 0, which isn't enough to advance to the next scenario.

The scenario briefing says the player can earn points by forcing PAMFF vessels to retreat, but none of them attempted to come into the exercise zone. Further, they always fire on the Vietnamese patrol ship when it gets close enough.

How do I win the second scenario?

[SchDerGrosse]

Based on these posts i assume one should wait till the bugs get fixed...

A pity, i was looking forward to playing this campaign.

[Stellen]

That's true, that one was tweaked internally. Since campaign mode allow you to pass to the next campaign achieving just 500 points, we needed to tweak that starting player score since if you complete two of the exercises the scenario will end automatically within completing anything else. You should receive those 500 points at the end of the scenario if everything else went well.

Can you explain this? We start at -500 points and score 250 points for each of the three objectives. That put us at 250 points. We also earn 10 points for each of the SAR actions, giving us an extra 40 points and a maximum possible score of 290 at the end of the game although we need 500 to pass. (Unless there is the opportunity to earn a lot more points at the very end of scenario.) I abandoned the scenario some time after the ASW objective and the bonus SAR tasks after I realised that I wasn't going to reach the 500 score, I really did not enjoy the scenario and didn't want to spend more time running out the clock. When the special action to warn the fishing boats away stops working it's not obvious whether it's by design or just a game bug. As someone else said above, this scenario was way too long and way too tedious.

If I try to just skip this scenario and the second scenario, which sounds like more of the same, and try to play later scenarios as individual missions then my little naval force loses all of its helicopters, which I assume is another bug. Does the continuous loss script mean that these scenarios aren't really playable as standalone scenarios?

[blu3s]

That's true, that one was tweaked internally. Since campaign mode allow you to pass to the next campaign achieving just 500 points, we needed to tweak that starting player score since if you complete two of the exercises the scenario will end automatically within completing anything else. You should receive those 500 points at the end of the scenario if everything else went well.

Can you explain this? We start at -500 points and score 250 points for each of the three objectives. That put us at 250 points. We also earn 10 points for each of the SAR actions, giving us an extra 40 points and a maximum possible score of 290 at the end of the game although we need 500 to pass. (Unless there is the opportunity to earn a lot more points at the very end of scenario.) I abandoned the scenario some time after the ASW objective and the bonus SAR tasks after I realised that I wasn't going to reach the 500 score, I really did not enjoy the scenario and didn't want to spend more time running out the clock. When the special action to warn the fishing boats away stops working it's not obvious whether it's by design or just a game bug. As someone else said above, this scenario was way too long and way too tedious.

Yes, in campaign mode, with the 250 at start plus the 250 from the sinkex, the scenario ends triggers since you've achieved 500 points to pass the scenario. That's why we put a -500 and then a +500

I guess the warnings stops working is a scenario design, so you need to be more aggressive.

[Stellen]

Yes, in campaign mode, with the 250 at start plus the 250 from the sinkex, the scenario ends triggers since you've achieved 500 points to pass the scenario. That's why we put a -500 and then a +500

So, we start with -500. We sink the target, that puts us at -250 points. We rescue the dummy, that puts us at 10 points. We sink the submarine target, that puts us at 260 points. We rescue the life rafts, that puts us at 290 points, assuming we've lost no points and have pre-positioned ships around the borders of the engagement zone with the foreknowledge that we'd have to ram and board civilian fishing boats. (Which seems like a very extreme escalation.) Where do the other points come from?

[blu3s]

There's an event that fires one minute before the end of the scenario that gives you the 500 points that were subtracted at the beginning

[Stellen]

I see, thank you.

[SchDerGrosse]

Can anyone confirm whether the new campaign is playable (i.e no game braking bugs, or collapsing scripts etc.); see other threads regarding said issues.

Thank you!