Case Blue

[Grymme]

I started work on convertíng parts of the boardgame "Case Blue" to Advanced Tactics.

Case Blue is one of the biggest boardgames out there with 10 maps, 3 rulebooks and 14! Countersheets.

Link to the boardgame here

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/29285

Might, with his permission, use a an altered version of Captain Crufts SFT list from his ostfront scenario but with my new NATO counters instead than the generic SFTsymbols (actually my new natocounters are from the Case Blue Boardgame anyway.

Link to use of NATO counters here

tm.asp?m=2199822


So far i have started work on the map (30 % done). Its 125*105 big. And also started on altering Crufts SFT list (40 % done). Unfortunatly there isnt any naval units in his list, so there might be some work recreating the ships again.

For graphics i will use a combination of boardgamemod rails, major river & background colour, realist urban, and generic forest, swamp etc. There will be railroad, road and makeshift roads.

This will probably be one of my larger scenarios so far. (apart from the Afghanistan scenario). The afghanistan scenario took 3 months. I estimate this will take 1 month 2 weeks (if i dont give up)

Here is a screenshot of the mapwork so far. Sprites for roads (red) might possibly be replaced with realist roads. I use them in the process for visibility

[Grymme]

Making a map with 120*105 hexes is 12 600 hexes to fill in. Its a lot of work but i do feel symphaty for Captain Cruft in his atempt to make a 300*300 hexes. Thats 90 000! hexes.

I guess his map will cover my map at the same scale. My scenario will be mainly on battalion-division level. With Armycorps & Army HQs.

Here is a screenshot of the map im going after.

[british exil]

Ahhhh!

A new russian campaign. You'll probably have Germany as human and Soviets as AI?

And you're kidding us with your reckoning of 1 month 2 weeks, right?[:D]

Will be keeping an eye open for further developments.

[Grymme]

Here is an updated map with the Caucasus mountains mostly added.

You can see where work is mostly to be done. Ive done crimea, caucasus mountains and the northern and western edge. So what remains is mostly the middle and the east.

After ive done with the map im going to upload it to the scenariobank/my website so that people can take the map (if they want to) and make their own scenarios on it.

[Grymme]

British:

There are a lot of design desicions to be made. So i dont know how i will make it. Hopefully it will be AI capable (its mostly land fighting). But i will see.

Actually the work ive shown it 1,5 half days work and Cruft made the SFT and the graphics are done so its the placement of units, events and production that will take the time. So 1 month 2 weeks isnt that hard. But when i think about it i will be gone for 3-4 weeks on courses and trips to Riga and Rome, so it might take a little longer.

Feel free to make suggestions on anything. I am really tired of these huge reinforcement lists, so any suggestions for a nice simple way to simulate production is very welcome.

[Captain Cruft]

Looks good. Is it 10km per hex?

[Grymme]

Captain: To be honest i am not sure of the scale. The map i used doesnt have any markings. If you look at the rulebook for "the operational combat series" of MPP it states that their maps are either 2,5 miles or 5 miles /hex.

Sorry not being able to give any better answers.

Map is starting to be finished. I have a couple of second thoughts about the road hexes.

Here is a screenshot of the "more or less"-finished map.

[Alan Sharif]

Looks.....................FABULOUS!

[Widell]

I think Vic should get Grymme involved as an official scenario maker for AT and/or the next release! I am sooo impressed by the output he (Grymme) is able to maintain! My "real" computer has a toasted motherboard, so I'm stuck with my Eee = No gaming right now but every time I look at the new ideas and projects from Grymme (and other too btw) I feel like designing on my own humble projects again.....

[Grymme]

Widell. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I am not sure it would be a good solution. There is a difference between doing what you feel lika and start & quit as you feel like it and seriously working on a scenario that you have to start and finish and dont have the option to choose yourself. But to be honest i have thought about it. We will see.

As for the scenario. I am working on a small introductary scenario that only uses a part of the map. Kharkov (its six rounds long in the boardgame).

I am sure there will be hundreds of small errors in the map (i am already starting to see difference between the boardgame map and my map (my map seem to be a little smaller. Really irritating).

Here is a small screenshot of the german setup.

The 42 strength inf units are inf divisions broken down into regiments. The 166 units are whole infantry divisions. The megastack depicted is an panzer division with 2 pz bat, 2 mot inf reg, 1 recon bat, 1 art reg and 1 antitank bat. Also shown is various Security units.

Basicly

Divisions will have ca 80 inf.
Regiments ca 26 inf
Battalions ca 10 inf.

[Captain Cruft]

Hey, those are real tanks!

[gre81]

Looks great! Sure would like to use those Nato symbols.

[Grymme]

Captain Crufts SFT set is really great. It does mean a little bit extra work so use someone elses masterfile though. Yesterday i switched of a 120+ events, changed regimecolours to peoplecolours etc. Also sometimes its a little bit dificult to know the strenghts of different SFTs when you havent been involved in making them.

Gre81: The pack of NATOsymbols are downloadable directly from my website under the section "other bits & pieces for the game", so feel free to use them.

http://web.comhem.se/olvmyr/At%20mod%20page.html

Have a lot of work at my genuine work, so modding & gaming is temporarily haulted for a couple of days.

[Widell]

ORIGINAL: Grymme
Widell. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I am not sure it would be a good solution. There is a difference between doing what you feel lika and start & quit as you feel like it and seriously working on a scenario that you have to start and finish and dont have the option to choose yourself. But to be honest i have thought about it. We will see.

One solution would be to simply incorporate the scenarios that have been released and approved through the Scenario Bank and include them in the vanilla game. That's the strategy TOAW has used since it "came to Matrix" (maybe before that too?) and it's a huge + for TOAW since it has a huge amount of scenarios ready to go from the start of the game = No need to d/l and deal with installs etc..... OK, I'm hijacking your scenario thread here, so I'll rest my case for now. Still hope you can contribute to future releases [:)].

[Captain Cruft]

I never really understood the regimecolour versus peoplecolour thing, so once I got the units displaying how I wanted I left it alone.

As to the SFT strengths, they are inevitably experimental, but everything is in the right order. A King Tiger is much better than a Pz-II etc. What I basically did was start with a copy of Light Tank for everything I considered a light tank, then I incremented or decremented the parameters. Ditto Medium and Heavy.

To be honest I did struggle with this a bit since the game engine allows a gnat (e.g. a machine gun) to kill an elephant (e.g. any and all tanks). The chances of this happening are small, but the lack of hard/soft factors does make it a bit tricky. Feel free to play around with it all, it is nothing like what I would consider tested.

[gre81]

Where do I unzip the nato markers to?

[Barthheart]

ORIGINAL: Captain Cruft

....
To be honest I did struggle with this a bit since the game engine allows a gnat (e.g. a machine gun) to kill an elephant (e.g. any and all tanks). The chances of this happening are small, but the lack of hard/soft factors does make it a bit tricky. Feel free to play around with it all, it is nothing like what I would consider tested.

Really? Can't you just set the attack points of the MG vs Armour to zero? If you want different effects against different armour you'd need to create a different class for each type of armour then set the MG attack points vs each to get the results you want.... I think....[;)]

[Captain Cruft]

I seem to remember that if you set the attack points versus any class to be zero then the SFT will not attack anything at all. Something like that.

[Grymme]

Widell: No problem. I sometimes hijack threads myself.

Captain Cruft. No problem. Your mod is just great. But there will always be implementingproblems. But instead of doing 200hs work finding all the SFTs and descriptions i can do 20hs work adapting it to my scenario.

Gre81. Its a little tricky. Open the folder somewhere in the AT folder. Create a new scenario in the editor then go into the editor and then in the SFT screen you go to each SFT and assign each counter individually. After you are done asigning it you save the scenario as a Masterfile. Then when you start a random game you just switch the file.

[Grymme]

On another note. I am thinking about a way to crudely simulate the use of oil and artillery supply in the game.

The way i am thinking of simulating oil is like this. The map will be divided into areas, roughly following the ones in Case Blue boardgame (12 or so). Then each round each player recieves a number of oil (something like 4-5 of them). Then each player gets an actioncard that places a oil SFT in their supply place. These oil SFTs can be strategicly transfered into different places on the map. Then when the oil is placed in the right direction the player plays an actioncard that checks if there is an oil SFT in that map part. If there is then all motorized units movement type is set to wheeled. Playing the actioncard also removes the oil SFT from that map section. If the actioncard is not played or there is no oil in that map section that SFT type will instead have the movement type "out of oil" (very crappy). The same for airplanes.

Also, owning Maikop and Grozny oilfields yield an extra oil.


Any thoughts or suggestions? All is welcome.