Lots of scenario design questions

[Jim D Burns]

So what are the upper limits to map sizes and OOB's you can create in the scenario editor? Can there be more than two nationalities in a scenario? (i.e. Germans and Italians vs. Brits etc.)

Is the AI painstakingly scripted for each and every unit by the designer or does the game's AI take over automatically with no player input needed? If it is automatic, can designers script individual units if they want to for special tasks?

Can some units be fixed in place by a designer so the AI won’t move them unintentionally? If so can they be set to release on a certain turn?

Can reinforcements appear during the course of a battle? If so is it map edge only or anywhere on map (i.e. Russians infantry popping up out of sewers in Stalingrad)? Can their turn of entry be varied?

Can scenarios be linked so surviving units carry over from one scenario to the next? Some of my favorite old ASL games were the campaigns that allowed players to purchase reinforcements to add to their surviving force between battles, this system appears perfect for that kind of linked campaign.

Jim

[k9mike]

Wow...you werent kidding....lol. Think will wait to see what Eric says about this....[;)]

[wodin]

I don't think there is a campaign system otherwise it would have been shouted from the rooftops.

Also I doubt we will be able to make our own OOB's as they want to make expansions. It said it was being released with Operation Barbarossa OOB's so thats what first year? If they are following the boardgame then Kursk will be next followed by Poland. I very much doubt we will be able to make new OOB's.

[DBeves]

ORIGINAL: wodin

I don't think there is a campaign system otherwise it would have been shouted from the rooftops.

Also I doubt we will be able to make our own OOB's as they want to make expansions. It said it was being released with Operation Barbarossa OOB's so thats what first year? If they are following the boardgame then Kursk will be next followed by Poland. I very much doubt we will be able to make new OOB's.

Well - I think we will be able to amke our Own oob's otherwise the scenario editors going to be a bit crap. Fair enough the unit types will be limited to 41 but OOB within that period should be fine. I think the jist of the OPs question was to see how big a scenario you can make with the engine.

[ericbabe]

ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns
So what are the upper limits to map sizes and OOB's you can create in the scenario editor? Can there be more than two nationalities in a scenario? (i.e. Germans and Italians vs. Brits etc.)

Is the AI painstakingly scripted for each and every unit by the designer or does the game's AI take over automatically with no player input needed? If it is automatic, can designers script individual units if they want to for special tasks?

Can some units be fixed in place by a designer so the AI won’t move them unintentionally? If so can they be set to release on a certain turn?

Can reinforcements appear during the course of a battle? If so is it map edge only or anywhere on map (i.e. Russians infantry popping up out of sewers in Stalingrad)? Can their turn of entry be varied?

Can scenarios be linked so surviving units carry over from one scenario to the next? Some of my favorite old ASL games were the campaigns that allowed players to purchase reinforcements to add to their surviving force between battles, this system appears perfect for that kind of linked campaign.

Thanks for the interest!

I don't have the maximum map size in hexes handy, but the biggest map is roughly about 4 or 5 COH board game boards tall and about 3 boards wide. So roughly one could fit the Mzensk Pocket firefight on such a map maybe four or five times over.

We only have two nationalities for COH:ATB, German and Russian. If there are additional nationalities introduced in sequels, they can exist side-by-side in a scenario. For COH:ATB, TCP multiplayer only allows for two human players, but we may look at increasing the number of players allowed for sequels.

The AI scripting system has a default script it assigns to units if the firefight designer does not assign one. Designers can design scripts for particular units and leave other units to use the default behavior. The scripting system is based on an article I read in "AI Wisdom III" for a game by a AAA studio, and is designed with extension as one of the primary design goals. There are about 50 "script bits" right now (based loosely on the ideas in the aforementioned article), which designers use to make lists of behaviors. It's fairly easy for me to add new script bits to the system, and as we get feedback from a wider circle of firefight designers I hope to increase the number and power of the script bits as we go forward.

Reinforcements can appear during a battle. The designer has a great deal of flexibility in controlling where they enter. The entry turns cannot vary in COH:ATB, but this is something we might be able to add down the road.

There is no campaign system at the moment, but this is something that Uwe Eickert has asked us to look at developing for sequel type products. I agree it would be a great thing to add.

[wodin]

What I men't was you want be able to add to the OOB i.e add later years other nations. The OP wanted to know if we could add other Nations, so I presumed he wanted to be able to make any OOB etc etc. If this was going to be the case then the expansions will be pointless as people could just make them themselves.

Actually re reading he OP the wording has been changed from when I read it.

[Gil R.]

Wodin,
You're right that we're not going to undercut ourselves by making anything and everything possible. But what we do plan should make modders quite happy with the range of possibilities.