Scenario for testing: Desert Storm

[Kennetho]

Hi guys,

I only recently purchased Command. I used to love Harpoon and especially the Desert Storm scenario.
Since I could not find one in the scenarion pack - I quickly set about building my own. [:D]

I build the scenario on top of the "Shamal" scenario. [:)]

I've spend a couple of weeks researching and have placed all Coalition air units as they were historically i 1991.
As I understood from my research, there were 4 USN carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and 2 in the Red Sea?
I added the Clemenceau group to the Red Sea as I understand it started out here and then moved into and then moved into the Arabian Sea.

I’ve focused on placing the aircraft in the correct airbases. The USAF, RAF, Italian and French planes are definitely in the right places. I haven’t been able to find the USMC order of battle.
The Arab aircraft contributions I’m not quite sure whether is correct.

There are also ground units, but they should serve only as support - They have Ground Attack helicopters and Special Forces as well as forward observers which can be transported into Iraq in the SCUD hunt.

[&o] Since I am brand new to Command/scenario building here are the problems I would the professionel developers help for:

- A more fluent gameplay.

- Several of my events doesn't fire as intended.
I'd like the Iraqis posture towards Coalition to start as "Unfriendly" and then change to "Hostile" when the first bombs land. However I can't get this to work.
The scrambles I've included seem only to work for Western part of Iraq.

- The IOCs/SOCs are the air traffic controllers for Iraq.
Could it be made so that, when these are knocked out the Iraqis lose their comms?

- The scoring is totally unbalanced for some reason
The idea is:
100 Points scored for ground and air units destroyed.
150 Points scored for destroying Republican Guard units.
200 Points for destroying IOC’s and SOC’s.
250 Points for killing mobile SCUDs.
400 Points lost for every friendly aircraft destroyed.

- Maybe the biggest problem og the game so far is the SCUDs I've placed all over Iraq:
They to know exactly where coalition forces are located and fire their deadly SCUDs continously and accurately.
How can this be mended?
I tried giving the posture "blind" and played for three hours before I realized that Iraq didn't fire a single weapon at me... [:(]


So, I know that many people would like to play this scenario. So to all devs - help me build a cool scenario.

I am looking forward to hearing from you all.

Best regards
Kenneth from DK

[magi]

I cannot help you… But there certainly are guys here who can… I am going to download it and look at it…

[temkc5]

Welcome to the forum Commander Kennetho

If you bought CMANO on Steam you should check out the great scenarios in the workshop and add the community pack I think you would particularly like:

Task Force Normandy by Apache85

When that is done please try this tool
Command scenario viewer

[Schr75]

Velkommen Kenneth

Altid rart med en Dansker mere[:)]

Søren

[Gunner98]

Wow! Nothing like starting off with something simple [:D]

Briefing and OOB are impressive, well done.

I'll PM you with some minor stuff but a quick response to your concerns:

-Fluid game play: I've just run it for a couple seconds to see where the bad guys are - 13,400 AU is the issue here. The Game is much better than it used to be for handling large scenarios but 5-8,000 would be considered a very large scenario. The first thing I noticed was that all allied air bases are the full, multi-unit versions vice the single unit. Generally, unless you expect that base to be attacked you should use the single unit version to minimize the AU count.

-Iraqi posture – they will go hostile automatically once they identify who is dropping bombs on them. No event needed, and any delay will be because they cannot figure out what is happening – fog of war. Should only last a few minutes as units will automatically defend themselves.

-The IOC/SOC question. I’ll need to get into the scenario a bit but there are a couple ways of doing this. I have not done it since the Coms disruption module was added, so I’m not really sure.

-Balance will come with testing, you’re using big numbers so the score will be huge I think but just looking at the Orbat – getting a score of 4800 for a Triumph doesn’t look that hard. In a one-sided scenario such as this, you may want to consider other conditions for scoring. Such as:
-Allied player loses points if he doesn’t have X in position Y etc
-Perhaps keeping a CAP up to protect Israel from the Scuds and put some scuds on a mission to strike Israel with major point loss for any Scud hitting Israel.
-Point for moving units around in accordance with what actually happened.
-Might want to use angster’s script for Search & Rescue of downed pilots, giving lots of negative points for any that are not rescued.

-Are the SCUDs in a mission? Did a quick check and couldn’t find one. Also for locating targets which you want to hit (as opposed to applying the hope factor) you can pop in an invisible Special Forces unit to simulate a sympathizer on a motor bike with a phone etc. Target locating for the bad guys is always tricky, another option is adding another side which is allied to the bad guy but neutral to the player. You can get pretty tricky with this method.

I’m pretty sure I saw a Marine OOB a while back. Will look.

Cannot promise a full game play as my time is tight but will kick it around a bit.

You may also want to consider putting this one on the back burner and experimenting with something a little more manageable. This is big.[8D]

B

[Gunner98]

OK here is some USMC stuff:

http://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publi ... 164211-400

2nd half of that ref:

http://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publi ... 7200_2.pdf

A bit more:

http://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publi ... 6000_1.pdf

Some articles in the USMC Library:

https://grc-usmcu.libguides.com/ews/bat ... ert-shield

B

[fatgreta1066]

I'm very keen to give this a try, although it is so massive I'm not sure how much progress I'll make. I'll echo one thing Gunner pointed out, the number of units is just overwhelming. Finding a way to reduce that would seem like a big plus to me.

[fatgreta1066]

Is it your intention that the ground units attack in this scenario, such as the armored units that are part of the VII Corps, and the Marines already in Kuwait?

[Kennetho]

Hi Fatgreta,

I’ve focused on historical accuracy - to a certain extent.

Just a as in 1991, there are 8 marine force recon op’s on the border to Kuwait.

The Iraqis have a ground mission which will commence on Jan 29th. Battle of Khafji, with the original 3 division driving south into Saudi.
You can use the Arab coalition ground forces to counter these along with the marine cobras.

Initially the coalition ground forces were just FOBs to harbor attack helicopters and Broncos. Later I wanted to be able to use their artillery and mlrs capabilities.
There is also a special forces camp the rangers, delta and sas which can help hunt the scuds down.

Any suggestions are very welcome.
Maybe taking out coalition ground troops and only keeping the helo ports for Apache, Cobra, Broncos and Harriers?

[fatgreta1066]

I like the idea of using the ground troops on the offensive and being able to move them around, although it certainly would lighten the unit load to take them out. One suggestion I have is not grouping your mobile units with their associated airfields. Having to ungroup and manually select the units I'd want to move around is pretty time consuming. I'll probably end up detaching the stationary units and regrouping them myself, but if you're modifying the scenario that's something to consider.

I like the idea of playing out a long game (i.e. a month) and seeing how that works, but the prospect of managing so many units over time is daunting. I think it will be a fun learning experience if I can get my mind around it. I've always been surprised that there weren't more scenarios about this - Shamal is the only other first gulf war scenario as far as I can tell. So thanks for doing this one.

[butch4343]

- The scoring is totally unbalanced for some reason
The idea is:
100 Points scored for ground and air units destroyed.
150 Points scored for destroying Republican Guard units.
200 Points for destroying IOC’s and SOC’s.
250 Points for killing mobile SCUDs.
400 Points lost for every friendly aircraft destroyed.

Kennetho,


You have surely chosen a beast of an air campaign to start with mate, not sure if others will have a slicker way of scoring but heres my method.

You have 100 points for killing an Iraqi unit and 250 Points for a scud kill, therefore if the player kills a scud they score 350 Points.

My method is to create more than 1 event for scoring, Ie;

I have an event that says 100 Points awarded for killing an Iraqi Ground Unit.

I then have another event that says 150 Points awarded for killing a Scud.

The net effect is that the player will score 250 in total.

Im not a fan of scoring but understand why others like it, but consider this, does every kill need to be scored? You have the player execute a strike on an airfield, does killing a radar vehicle on the way in need a reward, does it draw the player away from the main objectives of the scenario? Should the player be rewarded for sending his F16 strike chasing down Migs?

These are all questions the designer has to answer.

As for the republican guard units, the way I would do this is create a side called republican guard, make then freindly to Iraq and Hostile to the coalition. Then create an event that scores a kill of any republican guard unit 150 points.

This will also let you set the profficency level of republican guard units higher than regular Iraqi units, thats if you want to.


Hope this helps

Butch

[Schr75]

Hi Kenneth

Regarding the SCUDs.
I don´t know how many SCUDs were fired during Desert Storm, but IIRC the TELs operated singly and used shoot and scoot tactics, firing a single missile and leaving the scene.
The way I would model that is to destroy five of the TELs in each unit and then place them on a ground attack mission with a set number of targets. This way, each unit will only fire one missile, and then reload for 20min. If you also activate the individual fire missions at different times, you would get a random launch once in a while.
Perhaps adding them to a separate side so that you can set their awareness level as you want.

I´m sure some of the resident LUA gurus on this forum could do this a lot more elegantly than my suggestion, but this should work.

As a side note to Butch advise regarding proficiency levels. Just so you know. You don´t have to set the proficiency level for the entire side only. In the OOB menu (press O), you can set the proficiency level for each unit.
This way you can simulate a single ACE pilot in a squadron, or a republican guard unit.

Hope this helped, and looking forward to the final result.

Søren

[Gunner98]

One other follow up to the SCUDs. The JSTAR's GMTI was picking them up quite well, no positive ID but it wasn't hard to figure out what they were. Might be worth having a bunch of vehicles on a neutral side acting with the same behaviour, with negative points for hitting one. This would force an up-close and personal SCUD hunt to sort the wheat from the chaff.

B

[Kennetho]

ORIGINAL: Gunner98

One other follow up to the SCUDs. The JSTAR's GMTI was picking them up quite well, no positive ID but it wasn't hard to figure out what they were. Might be worth having a bunch of vehicles on a neutral side acting with the same behaviour, with negative points for hitting one. This would force an up-close and personal SCUD hunt to sort the wheat from the chaff.

B

Hi Gunner98,

Thanks for the feed back. Much appreciated.

A neutral side in the middle of Iraq 1991?
Or are you thinking of adding civilian targets to force the up close identification?
There is a special forces camp with rangers, sas and the likes to actually send and do the id’s.

[Kennetho]

Hi Butch,

Thanks for the inputs.
I think I’ll modify the scoring and take several of your ideas in the new scoring module.
Also deleting the last zero. [:)]

[Gunner98]

Or are you thinking of adding civilian targets to force the up close identification?

yeah that's exactly it. Even in 91 the USAF was getting flack for hitting civilian targets and this would just represent everyday vehicles and trucks on the roads. Just to make the SCUD hunt trickier. The SOF etc are good for hunting so are low flying AC but they are also good for hidden Zsu-23s and SA-7s.

B