Matrix Games Forums

Good afternoon,

Just wanted to get some input on whether a victory condition is working as intended. Playing on the "A Tough Nut to Crack" scenario with a PBEM partner.

Sudden death was triggered at 3 hours 41 minutes of 6 hours due to NATO (my opponent) losses exceeding the threshold.

At the time I only held one of the two objectives on the map (the other is contested).

Victory Status was rated a tactical loss for the Soviets (played by me)

My partner said he spoke to the developer and everything is working as intended. Guess I fail to see how if NATO is withdrawing from the field and I have 2 plus hours to take the remaining objective and still field some 54% of my force that the situation is a tactical loss.

It seems to me that it creates an incentive for NATO (or the side defending the objectives) to trigger a sudden death as soon as possible if they see they may lose a majority of VPs. On the attacker side it imposes the burden of making sure you don't kill to many of the defenders before you have seized the majority or all the VPs. Hard to imagine the Soviets saying "Don't kill to many of the NATO fellows on your way to seize that town before you get there; if you do we will have to demote you!"

Anyway, I might be misunderstanding the process and wanted to get some input from other players!

I have tried to attach the relevant screenshots.

Do you have the saved game files. I would like to look at the last saved game (the one in which sudden death would be triggered.

Sudden death was triggered on my opponents turn. I can ask him for his save files if necessary. Here are my last two save files.


I had to upload them in a zipped file as it was telling me "invalid file extension" when I tried to upload the individual files.


Let me know if you need anything else!

my save files.

Whew! Lots to unpack here.

1. What is Victory?
2. What are the implications to victory regarding the overall narrative of the game?

First, let me say I am neither defending nor attacking scenario design. I don't work that stuff, but I will talk to a few elements of that.

WP perspective: Given a WP division, doctrinally there would be three sets of objectives: immediate, subsequent, and objectives of the day. Immediate are battalion level, deeper are subsequent, which are Regimental, and the last are Division objectives.

Now, if you look at things, you'll see that the scenarios are involving units in Germany at the outbreak of hostilities. So these units need to have credible combat power at the end of every scenario in order for the wr plan to work. The Campaigns are our attempt to model this.

Let me note US Army combat power status and implications:
1. Green: 75% or more - no problem accomplishing mission
2. Amber: 50% to 74% - some difficulty
3. Red: 25% to 49% - unlikely
4. Black: <25% - can't accomplish mission

Looking at force levels with the latest game save and wearing my Adjudicator Hat, I'd rule both players lost. We don't do that, as the win/loss is an outgrowth of human vs AI. Perhaps this needs to be changed.

Re: Combat Power. This is kind of important, since VP awards depends on that. In my professional work (mid-grade officers), I delved into this. It turns out this is a thorny issue with no consensus as to definition. What we've tried to do is provide a sliding scale of success vs resources. That doesn't consider the context of a scenario in the larger narrative. And I understand that does not address the desires of Players who want "skirmish" scenarios.

For what it's worth, in my time working in a Division Tactical Command Post, combat power was expressed as Tanks/Brads/Inf Squads. Notably absent were Arty/Mortars, Cav/Scouts, Attack Helos, and Engineers.

I have never seen this playing the AI. But if it did happen, the human player can make the choice to play on. I'm assuming head-to-head competition allows a similar choice. Human players would have to come to a prior agreement on how to handle a situation like this if it arose.