Official Scenario & Campaign Editing Tips Thread

[Mustang]

Note about mission briefings

A kind of important note about writing mission/campaign briefings. Do not write "..." in the briefing, because the game considers this a "next line" command that moves the text after the "..." to the next line, taking out of some of it in the process. To show what I'm saying here is an example:

Say you type this into a mission briefing .TXT file.

"Sir," said your officer, "We're... We're having trouble on the south flank."

THIS is how it shows up in the game"

"Sir," said your officer, "We're
e having trouble on the south flank."

To get around this, put spaces in between the periods like this:

[quote]


"Sir," said your officer, "We're. . . We're having trouble on the south flank."

[Mustang]

Another note, this time about reinforcements. If you set a unit as a reinforcement in, say, hex (1,1), it will STILL appear during actual gameplay at hex (1,1) even if you move it to, say, hex (2,2) in the scenario editor. Whenever you make a mistake on placing reinforcements and want to move it to another hex, don't just move the unit to another hex. Move it to another hex and reset it as a reinforcement all over again.

[Mustang]

At the SZO forums, someone came up with a creative way to create aircraft revetments and destroy units at a certain turn. The destroy units idea would be helpful if, say, you are simulating a Special Forces raid to destroy terrorists that are trying to shoot down a civillian airliner with SAMs, and want the airliner to be killed on a specific turn if the mission is not yet complete (but still want the scenario to go on so the player will have a chance to extract his units).

From http://www.strategyzoneonline.com/fo...reply&p=530037 :

Originally Posted by MKSheppard

I came up with this idea while walking the dog:



Aircraft Revetments. Take a bunker and give it 10-20 cm of armor on the sides and rear, but no frontal or top armor. Zero carry capacity.

Only useable in scenarios, really, because to accurately depict the importance of the aircraft inside, you have to edit the scenario yourself and re-cost the units.

Once I came up with this gem, my mind began to wander....what if when I bought the CD version, I changed the icons of ground units to aircraft ones to represent aircraft on the ground? You could now represent a terrorist attack on a US Airbase, in much the same vein that a Puerto Rician Nationalist group actually attacked the PRANG's main field and destroyed like 20~ or so A-7s in the 1970s or 1980s...

As my mind wandered further, I realized you could create a building icon and then assign it to a bunker-like unit, to represent an absolutely crucial facility that needed to be destroyed; like for example, the communications shack of a Marxist Guerilla group in the South Americas? If you gave the unit a cost value of like 900~ in the scenario editor "unit editor" you'd be able to represent the special victory conditions from destroying that shack, rather than having to have a special house rule in the introductory briefing.

Yet another idea popped into my head. Why not use this costing to create a civilian aircraft? Give a large aircraft a very HIGH cost, then program it to "strafe" a location on the map at on a specific turn. The aircraft of course would have no weapons and would have no EW. So you could then use that to represent say, dropping a Special Forces team into the area to hunt down a terrorist group that's planning to shoot down a civilian airliner with a SAM.

You could get the same effect by using ammo dumps. Set them in the hex with the aircraft you want to blow up, and make them a reinforcement to arrive on whatever turn. Set the ammo dump's "men" rating to 0 (no WinSPMBT unit can survive with 0 men, and will destroy itself the instant it appears on the map). It will blow up on whatever turn it arrives, but may or may not destroy the aircraft (if you want to ensure its destruction, pile several ammo dumps on top of each other). Make sure that you set the ammo dump cost to "1" so that noone gets points for them blowing up.

Representing Cruise Missiles

To represent a cruise missile as a form of artillery, take an aircraft and, by selecting the unit and hitting "D" to go into its Data Edit screen, get rid of all its armament and give it only 1 PGM of your choice (probably a 2000 pound Paveway would be the most realistic choice). It will susceptible to long-range SAM fire, but will make a completely stand-off attack. You can't depend on it attacking the target you want it to, though- the airstrike might pick a different target.

[pdoktar]

In the SPWW2 Stalingrad campaign, the unit cost for Soviet equipment has been lowered to 1 point for each Soviet conscript squad and for 4 points for Rifle Squad, representing nicely Soviet force strenght and ignorance of losses. So you really have to take those v-hexes, and get only a little boost for destroying the enemy units.