You'll notice the most valuable area on the map is Pont du Hoc. That's right - you are better off capturing Pont du Hoc than Caen or Carentan or any other area on the map.
Thats same thought process we use to elect our politicians.
Good job so far Krieg. Man I can't believe Carentan is like 14th, that was my whole objecive in this GC, considering I didn't think I had a chance in hades of getting a good footing at Caen. I am so bummed out now...[X(]
If I knew Sword was so high on the list I would have never let you get there....[:-]
Jess, the goldmine of the entire GC at Pointe Du Hoc ive totally ignored (that should qualify me for a promotion!)![&o]
Stacking does work, but I'm not sure if you can stack beyond the 16 VL limit. I'm experimenting with a few things though, so we'll see what I can figure out.
Upper portion used with permission of www.subart.net, copyright John Meeks
Okay, so I've been messing with this all week as time allowed. I played through probably 40-50 different combinations of flags and BTD values to really try to understand how this thing works. Figured out some interesting things, which maybe the devs already know, but I don't think anyone has told me. I'll put this up here just to help with the body of knowledge on how the game works with scoring.
The 'points' recorded in the BTD files are not how the flags are scored in game. The game actually used the numerical values in the BTD to determine what points the flags are worth BUT THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. So while at first glance it appears that flags are worth 50, 100 and 200 points - that is not the case.
A flag that has a value of 50 assigned to it in the BTD will be worth 1 point. A flag that has 100 will be worth 2 points and a flag that is assigned 200 will be worth 3 points. So based on the BTD numbers, three 100pt flags are equal to two 200pt flags. Again, at first glance that seems wrong because 300 <> 400, but the BTD values do not correspond on a 1 to 1 basis. You actually are ending up with 3*2 does equal 2*3. Hope this makes sense.
But my testing didn't stop there. As mentioned before, you can indeed stack flags. This is good if you want to push up value of map without adding new flag locations.
Probably the biggest find, at least for my purposes, is that there is actually a fourth flag scoring value. That value is zero. If you set your BTD value for a flag to any value other than 50, 100 or 200, the flag will still function fine in game, but it will have a scoring value of zero. This is great for maps that need to be a low value, but still have flags to fight over and capture.
Unfortunately, exit flags have to be set at 50 or they don't work right. They will only be worth 1 pt, but sure would be nice if they could be worth zero as it would allow for more variability in map values. But at least non-exit maps can be made to equal zero and still be kept on map. For my mod this will allow me to leave all stock flags in place and still reduce the value of many maps.
Another neat thing I noticed is the way the BTD values affect the AI. One would expect that stacked flags would attract greater AI attention. However, things are better and easier than that. The value set in the BTD file seems to directly influence the value the AI assigns to that flag. For example - if you set a flag to be worth 3000 pts in the BTD, then play that map, you will find the AI stacks nearly all their units right on top of that flag.
While I'm not doing any AI modding, the nice thing about this is, you could set a flag to be worth 1 point more or less than 50, 100 or 200 (ie 199, 201, 101 etc), thus keeping the AI drivers intact, but making the flag worth zero points to help lower map values if that is your goal. Also - if the AI should be treating certain areas as more important than others, setting values of 250, 300, 350 etc will modify AI behavior noticably. I tried this on the Gold beach map. I was able to get the German AI to deploy into the 4 big bunker by cranking up the value of those VLs in the BTD. Combine this with stacking, and you could stack a 'zero pt, high AI value flag under a stock flag and retain stock scoring, while adjusting AI behavior on that specific map. Neat stuff.
To summarize:
1) BTD values are only triggers: 50 = 1pt, 100 =2pts, 200 = 3pts. Any other value = 0pts
2) Stacking flags works
3) Setting flag value to 99 or 199 in order to make a flag 'score' 0 pts, does not adversely affect AI desire for that flag
4) Making a flag score 0 pts as above does not impact the way the game uses flags to determine deployment, area held, etc.
5) AI desire for flag is determined by value assigned to flag in BTD file.
6) Exit flags must be set to 50 in BTD (thus scoring 1 pt) or they do not work.
So as far as the mod goes, the recent VL limits I encountered set me back a bit while I sorted this stuff out. However, with the ability to set 0 pts for a flag, I can still make it work. I need to rescale my scores on a 0-48 basis, since the theoretical max pts for a map is 16 VLs @ 3 pts each, although that would be a map with no exits. But once I have done that we will be ready to begin recoding maps.
Along the way we have decided to make some slight adjustments to some of the entry points on maps to allow for more deployment area or slightly better deployment areas. I think panzerlehr62 is going to do more work on that than me, but any changes we make will be documented in a read me.
Hope this is useful for others - cheers!
Upper portion used with permission of www.subart.net, copyright John Meeks
For anyone following this - we found another constraint.
Seems if you put more than eight of the 1 pt (50 in the BTD) flags, the map will play fine, but ops and campaigns that include the map will crash. Not a huge problem, but something to be aware of if anyone is out there tinkering with the scoring model.
Upper portion used with permission of www.subart.net, copyright John Meeks
WaR and tLD have maps with more than 8 exit VL's now... can you expand on this info please?
EDIT: No, I'm not sure of that... I'll check. Is it the number of Vl's or is it that deployment would overlap on small maps... try it on causeway with good spacing between each Exit VL.
No, it isn't the deployment because I'm not talking strictly exit VLs.
If you set a flag to 50 in the BTD, it will return a value of 1pt in scoring. If the exit is set to -1 then it doesn't exit anywhere, it is just another flag.
What happened is this - on the Bayeux map, I was shooting for 14 pts. There are 6 exits so those are worth 6 pts total. There were seven more flags, so I made all of them worth 1 pt (50 in the BTD) except for Bayeux which I made worth 2pts (100 in the BTD). Thus, ended up with twelve 1pt flags (6 exits, and 6 normal flags) and one 2pt flag.
Tried to run that and it crashed. So I went back to stock, and adjusted flags down to 1pt one at a time, after each change trying to run the GC. Seven 1pointers worked fine, eight worked fine, but as soon as I went to nine, it crashed.
It was easy enough to work around, I just made two flags worth zero and three worth 2 pts (100 in BTD) or something like that. In any case - it works now, and I'm nearly 100% sure that the ninth 1pt flag is what causes the crashes as that is the ONLY thing that I changed between working and crashing.
Upper portion used with permission of www.subart.net, copyright John Meeks
Oh, and don't know about WAR, but the max exits on any TLD map is 7 IIRC. I can check when I get home as I checked them all for my scoring spreadsheet.
Upper portion used with permission of www.subart.net, copyright John Meeks
Mod is about ready for beta. I'm wrapping up a little readme, and I need to package the files (think I saw a mod swap program on the CC website).
My partner in crime might be generous enough to make a map image with the scores included, and if so than I'll put that in the package as well.
Here's how the scores ended up when all was said and done. I'm sure these will change after playing through and getting feedback from anyone that tries the mod.
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Hope to have this available by the end of the week! Cheers -
Upper portion used with permission of www.subart.net, copyright John Meeks
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