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ANW vs Commanders Edition????

 
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ANW vs Commanders Edition???? - 7/3/2010 4:48:47 PM   
Yogi706

 

Posts: 5
Joined: 7/3/2010
Status: offline 		Back around 1990 I bought and loved the original Harpoon. Of course you figure things will improve with time so I recently purchased Hapoon 3 ANW. I enjoy making scenarios and frankly that is over half of the reason why I bought the game. After 3 days of learning and relearning the functions of the ANW scenario editor I'm afraid to say that I wasted my money. Why would they restrict air missions so you can't "program" missions to aircraft on the airfield or carrier? And what happened to assinging percent chances to units or groups being in a scenario and assigning percent chances to their starting positions? I have a feeling their is more but this was enough for me to discard the game.

So my question is this. Before I spend and potentially waste more $$ can somebody tell me if Larry Bond's Harpoon Commanders Edition scenario editor is the same as the original harpoon (with hopefully some upgrades and not ommissions). Does it include the 2 above listed functions?
Last question, I have read on some post that the scenario editor for Commanders Edition will not work with a Windows 64 bit system. Is that still the case or have their been patches to fix that issue that I couldn't find?

Quick thumbs up to those invoved with PlayersDB, I loved it!
Post #: 1
Harpoon - 7/3/2010 9:23:28 PM   
hermanhum


Posts: 2464
Joined: 9/21/2005
Status: offline 		It's great to hear that you enjoy making scenarios.  The community always needs more talent like yours.  I am saddened to hear your frustration with the ANW ScenEditor.  However, to be fair, the ANW and HCE games are quite different.  AFAIK, the H2/H3/ANW type of game has never had the exact same SE functions as the HC/HCG/HCE line of games.  I agree that some of the HCE SE functions like "Probability of inclusion" and "Probability of appearance at an alternate staring point" are very nice features of HCE, but they were never available in any H2/H3/ANW game.  There are some ways to work around this problem, but they are work-around solutions and not game features.  I am sorry to hear that you discarded the game for this reason.

My experience with HCE and previous versions is that the latest SE for HCE is pretty much identical to the one you might have tried in the original Harpoon Classic released in 1990.  The only change for things you can no longer do (that I can remember) has to do with setting Victory Conditions.  I think that in the original HC SE, you could be a bit more specific in setting your ViConds to specify units.  It seems as though this is no longer possible in HCE.  You can still set them, but you might have to be a bit more broad in the selection.

The last I heard, the HCE SE is still not functional in Windows7 64-bit processor.  However, the support group says that they are working to fix that ASAP.

I'm very happy to hear that you enjoyed using the PlayersDB.

Welcome (back) aboard, shipmate. 


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Harpoon - 7/3/2010 10:37:38 PM   
hermanhum


Posts: 2464
Joined: 9/21/2005
Status: offline 		I found the difference in setting up ViConds. As you can see by this image, you cannot select "ClassID" in the new HCE SE (it is greyed-out). However, I think this ability is covered by other HCE changes so that you can get the same result by setting ViConds in a different way. I think that this means that there are problems playing old scens in HCE because the old ViConds will not evaluate properly, but should not pose a problem for those writing new scens with HCE SE.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Yogi706

And what happened to assinging percent chances to units or groups being in a scenario and assigning percent chances to their starting positions?

I forgot to mention that both the functions you desire from the old HC Editor can be found in HCE SE.




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RE: Harpoon - 7/4/2010 4:06:56 AM   
Yogi706

 

Posts: 5
Joined: 7/3/2010
Status: offline 		Excellent info, thank you. Maybe got the first half of my shoe in my mouth as I was a bit aggravated with ANW.....without a valid reason. I thought ANW was a sequel to HCE but I get it now that they are from seperate "blood lines". Now that I understand I'll have to decide to wait for Harpoon Ultimate or get HCE. Again, appreciate the info and quick response.

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Post #: 4
Harpoon - 7/4/2010 4:12:09 AM   
hermanhum


Posts: 2464
Joined: 9/21/2005
Status: offline 		A demo of HCE is currently available:

HCE
http://tinyurl.com/2459rd8


< Message edited by hermanhum -- 7/4/2010 4:16:37 AM >

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RE: Harpoon - 7/4/2010 4:30:46 AM   
Yogi706

 

Posts: 5
Joined: 7/3/2010
Status: offline 		thanks, going now to check it out.

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Post #: 6
RE: ANW vs Commanders Edition >> Differences in t... - 7/4/2010 3:27:55 PM   
uncleharpoon


Posts: 112
Joined: 11/28/2004
Status: offline 		Howdy Yogi

The H3 ANW product supports alternate starting locations via Reference Points. It doesn't allow multiple starting paths or % force inclusion.

** I also edited my subject line to be a bit more specific - I hope Erik doesn't mind **

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AGSI
http://www.computerharpoon.com
http://www.h3milsim.com

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RE: ANW vs Commanders Edition >> Differences in t... - 7/5/2010 6:44:09 PM   
Yogi706

 

Posts: 5
Joined: 7/3/2010
Status: offline 		Thanks, the 'Reference Points' seem to have more usability than I initially thought so thanks to your posts I am exploring what their strenghths and weaknesses are. I'm having trouble with air missions doing what I want......the mission always split the strike group up up into small groups and I'm trying to see if I can have the strikes (primarily surface and ground at this point) come from certain directions. I realize that most of the scenario editing is associated directly to the gameplay rules but a scenario editing manual sure would help. Is their one out there that I have looked over?

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Post #: 8
Harpoon - 7/5/2010 7:11:39 PM   
hermanhum


Posts: 2464
Joined: 9/21/2005
Status: offline 		You can check a couple of places for manuals.

http://wiki.computerharpoon.com/index.php?title=Harpoon_3_manual
http://wiki.computerharpoon.com/index.php?title=H3_ANW_Advanced_Manual

They aren't very good, IMO, but they are better than nothing.

The simplest way to keep your strike together in One Big Group and not break into the standard "flight of four" is to enable the "Focused Strike" option under the Mission Editor for that particular mission. It might have other associated behaviour for your mission, but it will certainly keep the group together into one massive group. Just remember that the missions in H3/ANW group themselves according to the type of plane and loadout. That means that all the planes that are identical and with the same loadout will fly in the same group. Your A-6 Intruders and A-7 Corsairs will never be in the same group (even if they are assigned to the same mission).

The RefPoints can support alternate starting points even with multiple starting paths. If you look at the attached image, you can see that if the ship is given both of the Alt Ref Pts as alternative starting locations, the ship will appear in one of the three positions and sail to the first waypoint.

As for getting strikes to come in from different directions, I think that is best accomplished by the use of Navigation zones. To see some of the wonderous examples of this, load up Freek's "3rd Temple" scenario for the PlayersDB to see how he gets planes to attack from all different directions. It is even possible to get planes to come in from behind a target if the Nav Zones are set up properly.




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RE: Harpoon - 7/5/2010 9:10:38 PM   
FreekS


Posts: 436
Joined: 5/12/2006
Status: offline 		Right,

the Harpoon SE can be tweaked in many ways. In one of my 3.6 scens (Western Aproaches), I used three ref points as alternate starting points for a small convoy, then used three ref points for a Transit mission. As a shipgroup on Transit mission will choose one of the ref points at random as the first place to sail to, this effectively gave three different alternate destination harbours. To top that off I used Nav zones to ensure the ship group did not sail in a streight path to the destination. All done so that a player who has detected the group once (using a satellite path in this scen) cannot simply extrapolate the PIM to the destination.

Unfortunately the scen is not ANW playable as the special satellites PlayerDB used do not rise to orbit in ANW as they do in 3.6.

Look forward to your first scens - as a matter of principle, assume that anything you want can be done!

Freek

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RE: Harpoon - 7/5/2010 10:17:27 PM   
Yogi706

 

Posts: 5
Joined: 7/3/2010
Status: offline 		Downloaded the Harpoon 2 SE Manual and it looks like it will be a big help. The 'Focus" function in the Misssion Editor worked and my air groups stayed together. GREAT! Very interesting point about using the NAV Zones to direct air strikes......it will take some planning but better than having the air strikes blindly and dumbly taking a straight line approach. ZeekS use of reference points to establish alternate starting points and paths is exactly the type of flexibility I was looking for. Maybe they will implement a "Probability of inclusion" function in ANW with the Harpoon Ultimate release.....fingers crossed. As you can see I like the replayability approach.

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Post #: 11
Harpoon - 7/6/2010 12:51:24 AM   
hermanhum


Posts: 2464
Joined: 9/21/2005
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: Yogi706

Maybe they will implement a "Probability of inclusion" function in ANW with the Harpoon Ultimate release.....fingers crossed. As you can see I like the replayability approach.

Be really careful when you make wishes around here. I urge extreme caution when doing so. More often than not, some of them get implemented (along with a bunch of unintended consequences) i.e. all your planes might fail to appear in scenarios.

You can get some additional design hints here: Building a scenario help

I agree that re-playability is nice to have. I think that a good many designers (but certainly not all) have taken the one-time-only approach. There was a poll run years ago and I think that many folks stated that they generally play a scenario only once (or repeatedly until they "solved"/won it).

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ANW vs Commanders Edition???? - 7/6/2010 4:40:12 PM   
TonyE


Posts: 1486
Joined: 5/23/2006
From: MN, USA
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: hermanhum

I found the difference in setting up ViConds. As you can see by this image, you cannot select "ClassID" in the new HCE SE (it is greyed-out). However, I think this ability is covered by other HCE changes so that you can get the same result by setting ViConds in a different way. I think that this means that there are problems playing old scens in HCE because the old ViConds will not evaluate properly, but should not pose a problem for those writing new scens with HCE SE.



The VCs in old scens should evaluate correctly. The difficulty is that the transitory nature of the commondb databases made the specific ship VCs dangerous and crash-prone. In other words, they evaluate fine in battlesets before EC2003.



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Sincerely,
Tony Eischens
Harpoon (HC, HCE, HUCE, Classic) programmer
HarpGamer.com Co-Owner

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Post #: 13
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