[narwan]

Some ideas for adjusting difficulties:

While thinking about ways to go from pure airmobile to regular missions for diversity of missions, I thought of a couple of ways we can use this for scaling the difficulty in scenario's.

For the company and battallion sized parts of the campaign we can use the availability of helicopter assets themselves as a way to scale difficulty.

Due to losses and damage to choppers within the division (so outside the direct scope of the players missions) the player may begin a scenario with less than the needed amount of air transport. If he has a 3 company battallion for example, he may have just enough helicopters to transport 1 company at a time if he's been doing real good up until now or 2 companies if he has been losing sofar.

Now if the scenario requires air transport (for example because of dense terrain and a limited number of turns so troops can't reach objectives on foot) the player will need to shuttle troops back and forth and work hard to get the troops in place on time. This way the availability of transport becomes a way to scale difficulty.

But you can push this even further. If the availability of air transport is a scaling tool for the scenario, than so is the amount of AAA since that will be a factor in (possibly) reducing the amount of transport available during the course of a mission. By varying the amount of AAA in quantity and quality and by their specific location on the map you can further scale the difficulty.

Then there's the next scaling step, which is to provide the player with anti flak assets. A poor player may get for example some very precise (pre game) CAS strikes on the flak positions, a moderate player may have to do with some less accurate pre-game B52 strikes for example and a very good player will get some pre-game artillery strikes (with variations in calibre and ammo) on the flak positions.

And you can go a step further. You can use the pre-game briefing to further scale the difficulty of the mission. You can neglect to tell a player who has been doing very well anything at all about the presence of flak (in which case any anti flak strikes are just 'soften up the target' without mentioning the target being flak), a moderate player may be warned about the presence of flak and a poor player given precise info (and perhaps the suggestion to use further CAS strikes to take these out).

This also offers some new options for the secondary mission (which will precede this one). That mission may include the capturing of high ranking prisoners (destroying the enemy A0 unit) to get the information needed for the anti flak strikes. It may include finding and destroying an ammo dump which contains flak ammo (reducing the ammo available in the primairy mission and giving warning of the presence of flak in the pre-mission briefing). It may even be intercepting an enemy convoy transporting the flak guns (reducing the flak available in the primairy mission).

What do you think?

Edit: this does mean that either the helicopter assets are AUX and not part of the core force or that the player has at this point a force which is only partially equipped with helo's (for example because he just got promoted from company to battallion and only his original company starts out with core choppers (some AUX choppers may be made available though); the rest of the 'core choppers' he'll have to earn later on maybe?)