Wish list

[HobbesACW]

Air power is certainly available but it is woefully underpowered. It would be nice to see it do a little more damage although that may affect the
balance of existing scenarios. I also think heavy artillery should have far more effect on armour, at least with regards to disrupting armoured units -
but with the same caveat.
 
Chris
 
 
 
 

[british exil]

Yes the air power is woefully underpowered as u said. But in WW2 the germans were overwelmed so much that they could hardly move their tracks around during daylight hours. Forceing them to rethink their battle plans. Often time the panzers arrived too late to turn the tide of a battle or as piecemeal, if they reached their destination at all. But it would be nice if the Campaign Series could include a stronger airpower. Leaving a little over for the GI and co.

[HobbesACW]

ORIGINAL: hobbes

Another thought - the ability to change AI behaviour (mission type) during the game would help AI games no end.
First 10 turns could be Meeting engagement followed by delaying action for example.
Chris

I'm going to quote my own message here which is probably bad form.
I have two thoughts related to this.

1. For a wargame the Campaign Series was a very big budget game and (apart from Divided Ground) was very well made.
I assume the change of AI behaviour that I have listed above would have occured to the original developers so is there
a reason this was not made possible to scenario designers? (I don't really care about this as I usually make PBEM scenarios but I find it of interest nontheless)

2. I have never seen a post from an ex Talonsoft developer discussing the game. If I had taken part in the coding of this game I would be quite proud
of it and would pop up from time to time to discuss the finer points - at least after a few beers. Where are they all - what are they doing now? Something
that keeps them too busy to ever pop back to see how their baby is getting on? That's bizzare to me.

Chris

[Karl Berg]

I am an impassioned player of the games of Campaign Series and I am waiting anxiously for the exit of Matrix edition.
Emeliorations that I wait and I think more important are the followings.
Improving of A/I that, especially in phase of attack is absolutely inefficient.
Improving of the air support with possibility to choose, between those available, the type of airplane to be emploied in the ground attacks and the opportunity to employ airplanes to oppose possible hostile air attacks; the effectiveness of the aviation in world war two, expecially against unity in movement, was very important while in the game it results negligible and too much casual, therefore it needs to be increased.
Inproving and debugging of the opportunity fire assigned to unities, currently hard veilces, also with fire range toward soft veicles and other targets setted to S often shoot to these objectives an then could not answer to the fire of hostile hard veicles arriving lather.
Modification of artillery indirect fire; in practice it was not possible, in world war two, a so rapid answer of the artillery to request of support sent by a artillery unit, as was it for instance able a platoon of infantry or a square of gunners to get the immediate support of field heavy artillery depending from the command of division or from the corp?. To make believable the indirect fire of the superior artillery major than same caliber would be necessary to introduce unity of observatories that must spot the objective for some turns.
Moreover the effectiveness of the draught of the artillery depends on you corrections effected after first shots while in the game you can divide the fire of the same turn without penalizations there are no advantages to continue the draught on the same objective for more turns.
Now sometime hostile units appears only if friens units tray to enter ex were they are.
Morale recovery and supply of encirled units. Now it happens that if some unities are stacked in a fortificted hexagon a terrain with hight concealment together with a HQ it is practically impossible to destroy them because they recovery and resapply every turn even if they are surrounded. From where restocking arrive if they are encircled ?
Withdraw of units. Units entrenched in a good ground sometimes withdrawn in open terrain, even nearer the enemy.

[warhead2]

get the historical divisional OOBs from the blitz battlepck and have it so we cn begin DCG with them
 
for that matter get the blitz battlepack entirely incorporated

[jynx11]

Sorry but long day at work and not feeling like going through 5 pages of posts, but was wondering if there was an answer or timeframe on the possiblitly of changing map size.  I would be tickled pink to play a gigantic senario.
Thanks

[Chris Wilson]

ORIGINAL: hobbes

2. I have never seen a post from an ex Talonsoft developer discussing the game. If I had taken part in the coding of this game I would be quite proud
of it and would pop up from time to time to discuss the finer points - at least after a few beers. Where are they all - what are they doing now? Something
that keeps them too busy to ever pop back to see how their baby is getting on? That's bizzare to me.

That's because at it's most fundamental level there was only one TS developer working on this series of games - John Tiller. Steve looked after the graphics (with a bit of help from JAG and a Polish chap who's name escapes me for the moment provided crewe artillery graphics). Bob with the help primarily of Joe (but was willing to listen - although not always agree with us all) saw to the oobs and unit types. Charlie saw to the testing and the various admin type stuff, Mr Rose looked after the music. Glenn wrote the tutorials and there was a bunch of folks who did the scenario design and helped out with the testing. Apologies if I've missed anyone but the bottom line is that it all revolved around JT.

[TAIL GUNNER]

ORIGINAL: jynx11

Sorry but long day at work and not feeling like going through 5 pages of posts, but was wondering if there was an answer or timeframe on the possiblitly of changing map size.  I would be tickled pink to play a gigantic senario.
Thanks

Look up a scenario on the Wargamer archive for EFII called "Volga Inferno" by Gregg Allen....

If that scenario's not big enough for ya, you're a freakin' freaky freak![:D]

[HobbesACW]

I think units in good cover (woods, towns etc) that don't want to be detected should be a lot harder to spot. To compensate you should be able to
fire into positions where you think targets may be. Probably a big change though.
 
Cheers, Chris
 

[jynx11]

HOLY [:-] , Juggalo, that is a big freakin' freaky freak senario[:D]

[big dawg]

Chris Wilson,

What happened to Doug Bevard? He designed most of the scenarios. Many of the scenarios have passed the test of time & are the most popular ones played via PBEM.

Jack

[Geomitrak]

ORIGINAL: Juggalo

ORIGINAL: jynx11

Sorry but long day at work and not feeling like going through 5 pages of posts, but was wondering if there was an answer or timeframe on the possiblitly of changing map size.  I would be tickled pink to play a gigantic senario.
Thanks

Look up a scenario on the Wargamer archive for EFII called "Volga Inferno" by Gregg Allen....

If that scenario's not big enough for ya, you're a freakin' freaky freak![:D]

Or he could try this one, all 1250 turns of it. If that's still not enough, he's a fully automatic belt-fed freaky freak. [:D] [;)]

Overlord

[Krec]

i actually prefer the 50 plus scen,   gives one time to really set thigs up proper!![:D]

[Plodder]

This is a great game and I'm having a blast.[:)]I'm not sure if this has been mentioned but a pop-up reminder for any unresolved assaults when you end the turn would be nice. 

[Chris Wilson]

ORIGINAL: big dawg

Chris Wilson,

What happened to Doug Bevard? He designed most of the scenarios. Many of the scenarios have passed the test of time & are the most popular ones played via PBEM.

Jack

Sorry I don't know ... I bailed out at around the same time as the others. Last I heard he was co-ordinating the testers and designers for the RS Expansion disk. I think I probably exchanged no more than half a dozen emails with him ever.

[jynx11]

Geomitrak funny you mentioned Overlord, after downloading the other scenario I went digging and found that one. OOOOOOOOOO yes, it is a freakin, freaky freak one to.[:D]

[Zeitgeist]

I wonder if anyone has ever completed Volga Inferno, or OVERLORD.

Seems to me it would have to be done as a team game

[Geomitrak]

I completed about 180 of the 475 moves of 'Hells Highway' by H.J Baltjes ( same guy who created the Overlord scenario ). XXX Corps reached Arnhem, where the 6th Airborne was hanging on by its fingernails, and was in the process of securing the areas to the north and east of the town when my HD died and it was lost. [:@]

If you want to get your teeth into a large scale and really gripping scenario I thoroughly recommend this one. A 'project' for the long dark winter nights maybe. [:)]

[warhead2]

ORIGINAL: Juggalo

ORIGINAL: jynx11

Sorry but long day at work and not feeling like going through 5 pages of posts, but was wondering if there was an answer or timeframe on the possiblitly of changing map size.  I would be tickled pink to play a gigantic senario.
Thanks

Look up a scenario on the Wargamer archive for EFII called "Volga Inferno" by Gregg Allen....

If that scenario's not big enough for ya, you're a freakin' freaky freak![:D]

there's also a Jim Dunnigan designed monster scenario that came with the original east front. I can't recall the title offhand,but it's your basic east front slugging match between mostly infantry and involving fortified lines on both sides. as he commented at the time the scenario represents most of the eastern front action.
clash of titans stuff

[warhead2]

here it is "the real deal"
 
http://www.warfarehq.com/index.php?page=articles/cs_articles/real_deal_notes.shtml
 
 
"Designers Notes for "The Real Deal" scenario"
by Jim Dunnigan
 When Jim Rose asked me to do a scenario for this game, I agreed as long as I could do something a little different. My first idea, to do a 1939 battle between the Russians and Japanese in the Far East, proved impossible because of how the first release of East Front was being designed. My second idea was to do one of the first encounters with the Russian KV series heavy tank. This didn't work out because these encounters tended to go on for hours, or even days, until the Germans were able to bring these beasts down. Then I realized that what east front tactical games tend to ignore is what the troops there spent most of their time doing. Namely, defending and attacking fortifications. The attacks were breaking and entering on a very large scale. Note that the Russians did not give so much provenance to artillery because of mobile warfare, but in order to win at the more prosaic trench battles. Designers, and gamers, prefer the more glamorous, or at least less tedious, armored battles. But most of the action on the Russian front was in the trenches. Not very glamorous, and rather plodding, these set piece battles defined the fighting in the east more than anything else. It was the Russians who set the pace for developments in trench warfare. While the Germans became quite good at it, the Russians were always a little better. 
So I decided to do a scenario on trench warfare. Yeah, it's a downer, but most of the other scenarios will cover the dashing mobile warfare. I don't mind doing the less appetizing stuff. Besides, I think I may have broken the game along the way. But enough of that, The Real Deal scenario covers the opening hours of the Soviet 20th army's August, 1942 assault against three divisions of the German 9th army. These three divisions were at about half strength, as they had not yet recovered from the beating they had taken in the previous Spring and Winter. You have two hours (20 turns) to keep the Russians from crashing through your defenses. Historically, it was touch and go in the first two hours and by the end of the day the German lines were breached in many places, especially on the left flank. 
Why the Soviet 20th Army? Why August, 1942? Glad you asked. When I decided to go after the KV tank scenario, I promptly came up short on real information. So I went to a friend of mine, Allan Rehm, who, in addition to being a wargamer, has the largest collection of Soviet era Russian language unit histories and staff reports. He's also a lot faster at translating Russian than I am. He checked through his collection and came up with the fact that there were no really exciting encounters between the KVs and the Germans. In the process he began translating the staff report that follows. And then I realized that this was what the war out there was really about and asked Allan to translate all the good parts. He did and it is shown below. An accompanying Excel worksheet gives all the Russian (and most of the German) order of battle. The staff study translated is one of several dozen that were prepared after World War II and used by the Red Army as "case studies" for the training of their staff officers. 
After examining this material I decided the right thing to do was show the Soviets' 331st Rifle division's operations in that attack. The 331st had the 17th Tank Brigade attached (which was supposed to have KVs, but that's another story). But I had some trouble getting the map information sorted out and off to Talonsoft, so I ended up having them do the entire 20th Army sector. Came out quite nice. But now I had all this space. Well, might as well fill it up. Let's do the entire 20th Army. Hey, maybe we can break the code. Now working with beta scenario design tools is no fun under the best of conditions and it got worse with East Front. But I kept going. I made a few changes. Rather than putting the German 36th Panzergrenadier division on the right flank, I put them in the middle. Actually, the reason I did that was less in the cause of experimentation but more because at the time the early beta version of the scenario editor had a bug that prevented you from easily deleting units once you had put them down. I started putting down a German unit in the wrong place (actually did that twice, but only re-did all my map work once) and had to switch the two German divisions. No big deal, as the only practical difference is that the Panzergrenadiers have trucks. Anyway, it shows you what you can do with all this material. Using The Real Deal map and abundance of Order of Battle information, you can conjure up any number of scenarios. Change the names of the two supporting files (Pogorelo.map and Pogorelo.org) and start a new scenario.  
With The Real Deal scenario itself, keep in mind that you should always let the computer play the Russians. As the German player, you will spend most of your time moving your dwindling supply of  mobile reserves around to plug the gaps. The Russians will keep on coming. At this stage of the war, the Russians were losing up to five troops for every German casualty they inflicted. Of the 80,000 Russian troops involved in this campaign, a bit over half became casualties.  
To further simplify things, I have left out a lot of the Russian artillery operations. The Germans were well dug in (although you might want to add entrenchments for many of the rear area German units) and the game starts after the Russian preparatory bombardment has finished. I thought of adding a lot of craters, but realized, while realistic, it would have ruined a perfectly good map. Do it yourself. 
If you want a more manageable taste of The Real Deal, just do the sector of the Soviet 331st Rifle Division. Just highlight that outfit and do that frontage, back a few kilometers behind the Russian lines and out ten kilometers into German territory. Much more manageable, although not nearly as impressive to view. 
I hope you enjoy this scenario. If you don't, you'll at least know the real reason why Germans tried to avoid service on the Eastern Front. 
by Jim Dunnigan