Occupation vs Occupation mission making advice

  1. 7 years ago
    Edited 7 years ago by HeroesandvillainsOS

    I'm just wondering how you guys go about fine-tuning this kind of conventional battle. I've spent a ton of time making Asymmetric Insurgency stuff but I'm relatively new to full map commander vs commander battles and having a hard time balancing them.

    The last few nights I've been trying to finish up one on Diyala. It's basically full-map warfare, aside from not allowing the enemy side to spawn around my bases, and my side not spawning in one large enemy held city. But otherwise, the entire map is allowed to be fought over. What I'm finding is, about 50% of the time, both sides are replenishing BCR's! I've tested this over 3 one-hour sessions, and around 30 minutes each time are spent with a relatively empty map, with BRC's being replenished and then waiting for the next OPCOM cycle.

    The mission is roughly 60 OPFOR vs 50 BLUFOR (I'd go higher which does help but Diyala is a little FPS hungry when I push it further). Both are set to Occupation. OPFOR gets tiny objects and above, while BLUFOR gets small objectives and above to keep the human players more active and not constantly interfered with by friendly AI killing all the enemies (I prefer to ask for their help when I need it).

    The virtual battles just seem to happen so fast that I don't think it would be possible to scout or recon or employ any strategy at all. Within minutes after mission start, both sides lose around a dozen profiles. Within 30 minutes the entire picture of the war has totally changed and most areas are completely empty because all the soldiers have killed each other. I use the slowest possible virtual AI speed (25%) so I know there's not really anything I can do there. Tonight I'll be messing around with the objective readiness (I have it at 100%) to see how that goes and see if it helps.

    I think this would feel a lot less painful to me if I could somehow increase the rate of the OPCOM refresh cycle, but before making a Github request, I'd love to see how some of you mission makers go about making fun and strategic full map missions.

  2. Edited 7 years ago by HeroesandvillainsOS

    Ok so I've made some progress but I still have to wonder if Military Logistics and new profiles getting reassigned to objectives is working as intended.

    Diyala is an odd map for one, just to be fair. If you place a civ placement module, and do not filter, you get about 160 objectives (way too much). If you filter out just the tiny ones, you get well under 80, and the map feels barren and empty.

    I've gone in and edited it a ton, keeping it at filtering out tiny and adding a crap ton of custom objectives to get the really small houses and villages recognized as objectives again.

    However, I'm still getting the same results when BCR's occur.

    It's taking over 40 minutes for IND to reassign their BCR's to new objectives. And even then, the majority of the new profiles are all clustered over and around the mil obj's. They don't spread out like they do on mission start. A couple things:

    1. I've removed the HQ and field HQ options in the mil obj module and they still seem to just hang out at their BCR location. Why don't they get reassigned to the smaller objectives around the map? Clearly they are important enough to spawn there on mission start.

    2. I have reinforcement set to constant and still, with around 70-80 starting profiles, BCR's don't take place until the force is almost entirely wiped out. I counted over 50 profiles replenishing simultaneously at two BCR spots. Isn't constant supposed to be a "constant" trickle of BCR's at approximately 90% of initial strength? Imagine what that BCR point looks like with over half of their initial force size spawning all at once! It's a mess.

    I'm thinking what's happening here is, profiles are being killed too quickly before the OPCOM cycle has a chance to cycle again and a mil obj is sufficiently held. So rather than dropping in 5 BCR groups here, and 6 BCR groups there, both sides are annihilating each other and OPCOM then has to calculate how to deal with over 50 profiles all at once.

    That said, I'm using auto-tasking so I don't think a player would really notice this much if they were just going from objective to objective, because the tasks do a great job of sending you to dangerous areas (minus the one time I had a clear the town task in an active BCR location with over 30 profiles being dropped in and just sitting there for 40 minutes! Imagine stumbling upon that).

    Though if I were just playing this without tasks and just trying to conquer the map, almost all of it would be uninhabited most of the time.

    This makes me wonder if something is borked with OPCOM receiving and reassigning profiles to objectives right now.