Beginners Tutorial on Scenario Design for the Combat Mission Series

Scenario or Level design is the process of using an editor to produce a game level or scenario. In CRPGs or shooters this could include creating a dungeon in 3 dimensions and populating it with monsters or in a wargame creating a 3d map of the battlefield and allocating the troops and positions for both sides.

The Combat Mission series of games comes with an editor that allows players not only to set up points based Quick Battles (QB) with randomly generated terrain but designed scenarios with the player acting as the level designer and creating new scenarios. The editor allows control of what the battlefield will be like and the troops on each side and is the same one used to create the scenarios on the game CD. This game series is a good choice to make for beginners, who want to make their first scenario as it does not have a scripting language to control the enemy side. (Some wargames such as Steep Panthers: World at War do have scripting options.) The game AI is state of the art although it does "cheat" and pick on certain high priority targets to shell for instance. So what do I know about it? Well my second attempt at a CM battle, the operation Polar Bears has been given one of the highest ratings by CM players on the Scenario Depot.

 

Deciding on a Scenario

The game allows you to label your scenario or operation to be either Historical, Semi-Historical or Fictional, which roughly corresponds to how you should think about what the scenario is going to be about. If you think some factor could make an interesting scenario such as fighting in a snow storm or having one side start off the battle weaker in numbers but compensate him halfway through with extra reinforcements then these are Fictional scenarios. Semi-fictional is basically creating a typical battle from a period of time that you know roughly what the troops were on both sides and what the terrain was like, such as recreating the feel of combat in the bocage hedge row country of June 1944, without going into any specific detail of an action that actually happened in this period. Historical battles are about creating an actual historical battle or action in a scenario and trying to recreate the troops, terrain, and conditions that were faced in that battle. For me this category holds the most interest because the player using the QB editor can create for himself with little effort typical battles for a certain period of time and to a certain extent create special conditions such as battles in specific and unusual weather conditions or terrain. The idea is to create an actual battle that occurred with the exact same type of troops, on the actual terrain and with the same weather conditions. The result should be almost an historical simulation of that battle which should teach the player something about the problems the commanders and troops faced. Another possibility if you are just starting to create scenarios is to recreate an old Squad Leader scenario or other board game battle into Combat Mission. This approach will give you a map and an idea of troop types but remember that you will recreate any mistakes from the original designer and that the system may be very different leading to game imbalances.

Most players want their wargame to be historically accurate so that tanks of a certain type such as a German Panther have the historically correct chance of knocking out an enemy Sherman tank for example. This can go down to modelling the ballistic performance of the attacking tanks gun and the actual armour thickness and slope of the defending tank. So recreating an actual battle has considerable interest with many players. However, many scenario designers including professional ones that label their wargame scenarios as historical, but when I play them I discover that the actual factors of the battle are ignored. The designer has created his own contrived problems, rather than thought about the battle it purports to be about and this has left me feeling slightly cheated. Such scenarios are of course fictional.

The game is also played for fun so your scenarios even if hardcore historical should be fun. By fun, I mean that if the game is to be played in single player mode then the player should be able to win the scenario. This does not mean you should not make the player struggle and have to use his brain. Even the player can win every time with little effort it will be an empty experience for him but the level designers job is to create an experience for the player in which he can achieve victory. For two player games the level designer must create conditions for both sides which give interesting problems but are ultimately fair so both players have an equal chance of winning. Brian Martuzas, an ex-Avalon Hill Squad Leader designer believes it is fun for the player to have many different tank types to play with in the scenario. They player in Quick Battles (QB) has his choice limited by rarity costs, and the scenario designer can include some little used or exotic types in his scenarios.

For operations and large scenarios you must also bear in mind the limitations of the typical players computer and the time it takes a player to complete a move. Many players would be interested in refighting the whole of Kursk man to man scale in Combat Mission but when their computer grinds to a halt and the first turn takes them over three hours to do, they will no longer be thanking the designer.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to create a scenario, which is fair in two-player mode against a human opponent but gives the same level of difficulty for player going up against the game opponent which uses programmed Artificial Intelligence (AI), rather than grey matter. A point to bare in mind is that the AI is much better at defence than attack. You can in the brief give some guidance as to the scenarios use such as only suitable for single-player mode from a certain side. Some designers issue slightly different scenarios for different forms of play but in my view this is confusing and unpopular for most players.

 

Historical Research

If you are going to create an historical scenario or operation you are going to have to do some research. The main inspiration for such re-enactments are historical books that cover such specific actions in detail or personal accounts of combat experiences rather than general historical overviews of a theatre wide campaign.

When you do your notes, the things you want to look for and extract are:-

The problems that you are going to have with the sources are numerous, they will tend to be from just one side and will be very vague, and sometimes inaccurate as to what troops the enemy exactly were. Tanks will tend just be referred to as a type such as Shermans not Shermans IIIs with diesel engines for instance. Extra research may be needed to find out what types were available at that battle or were in that theatre at that time. (The game cannot always be trusted to get this right!) Even very detailed personal battle accounts from one person will be limited to a very narrow view of what took place and should be backed up with more general information about the battle. Available maps tend to be large scale and only hint at the general terrain, although they can be useful for getting the road network. Sketch maps sometimes included in personal accounts of the battle are affected by one person's limited view and can omit important details.

At some point you need to write three briefings, one introducing the scenario and give background information on the battle and detailed briefings for each side. The tendency is to do the briefings last after the scenario has been finished but I have found it is best to write the main briefing first from your research notes and describe the battle, why it was fought, the troops involved, the outcome and the result on the main theatre campaign. I find this will help you understand the battle better and what went on. I also find that when you talk about the troop types in the battle and the events it makes it easier to make the scenario and write the other two briefings in a way that reflects the historical events of the battle. In one operation, I found that Focke-Wulf 190s appeared at a certain point in the operation and tried to bomb some bridges. The game has no scripting system so I could not exactly make Focke-Wulfs attack the bridges, but I could place a reinforcement flag on the bridges so that when the player reached them, the Focke-Wulfs with the historical bomb load would appear. You will find in battle accounts other references to types of enemy troops that were encountered at critical points, and the designer can seek to place them in his scenario.

 

Example Scenario - Steamroller Farm

This is a step by step guide to how I created Steamroller Farm for Combat Mission Africa Korps, which in its construction is typical of all CM scenarios. However, I tried to do something original and had a good first hand account of the battle from the point of view of a British tank driver in the battle and decided to set the scenario up to follow as closely as possible his account and see if the game would follow the actual events of the battle. I used the troop and tank types and their positions mentioned in the account. I used unverifiable factors such as troop quality and losses already inflicted to give the game as much chance of possible of being true to the events in the account. Such factors can also be used to tweak game-balance in other scenarios.

My sources were the chapter "What it was really like!" in Tank Battles in Miniature 4 A Wargamers' guide to the Mediterranean Campaigns 1943-1945 by Donald Featherstone (1977). Featherstone was in the 51st Royal Tank Regiment in the Italian Campaign and so knew everybody who took part in the battle. The account included a sketch map of the area with not only the British positions but the encountered Germans positions as well. I also found an obituary from a newspaper article on the internet of an officer in the Coldstream Guards, who won a medal at the battle and gave information on the action from the British infantries point of view.

 

Starting Up

Press the Scenario Editor button and the following screen will be shown. You now need to start a New Battle.

 

 

Warning - if you start a scenario or operation, you cannot change your mind and convert it to the other type and the editor will not load a scenario map into an operation.

You come back to this screen every time you go into an individual control screen and exit. You can Save the Game from this screen at any time. The name you save it, as will be the name of the scenario, as the name box in the scenario shows only so many letters it is best to keep it short. Exit takes you back to the main Combat Mission dialogue screen.

Warning - Tournament Save stops the scenario from being editable and it is used to make scenarios for tournaments to stop cheating.

 

Parameters

The first step is to put in basic information about the scenario and the Parameters dialogue will open automatically once a new battle or operation has been chosen. Your research into the battle will now hold you in good stead as you complete these choices.

 

 

The choices on this screen are:

Date - Select the month and year. Steamroller farm took place in February 1943. This sets what troops will be available when you open the Unit Editor as the Combat Mission troop lists reflect actual introduction and availability of different tank types by month for the period and theatre of the game.

Region - the battle for Steamroller Farm took place in Tunisia, North Africa. This sets the location of the scenario in the small dialogue map in the game interface.

Ground Condition - very dry, dry, damp, wet, mud, deep mud, light snow, snow, heavy snow. These choices have various effects from how much dust is kicked up when vehicles move in very dry conditions to the chances of vehicles bogging down and becoming immobilised in conditions of deep mud. In winter, Tunisia does have a short rainy season in which vehicles historically became bogged down and this temporarily stopped the allied advance. However, by February this has passed so I went with dry. Players, do not like having their tanks immobilised by wet ground conditions without good reason. I would avoid such setting unless you have good historical reasons for it. My Scenario - Hero of the Soviet Union was set in the period when the Russian mud halted the German tanks and so was a real feature of the battle. During testing I toned the effect down twice as I believed the game settings for the weather - mud and frost were not giving a realistic result.

Temperature - ranges from Hot to Extreme Cold. Temperature affects troop fatigue and weapons reliability. I choose hot to reflect Tunisia even during a winter's day.

Ground Type - choices are Dirt, Arid Rocks or Sand. This controls the set of tiles that will appear in the Map Editor. I went for Arid Rocks as Tunisia is a mountainous barren land rather than the sand dunes of the Sahara.

Defender is - with choices of not dug in, dug in, dug in with fallbacks, or dug in with vehicles. Steamroller Farm is a defence game and the Germans had dug in guns and men.

Map Contours - can be 1.25m, 2.5m, 5m or 8m per elevation change. Since there are up to 20 height levels in CMAK, this allows for height differences of up to 160m. I went for Steep (5m), this is not the default. I used this setting as I was trying to model steep wadis or dried up river beds, which were impassable to the tanks in the battle and very steep hill sides. However, even on the steep setting they can be traversed by tanks in the game.

Fanaticism - same choices available for Axis and/or Allies. This determines the percentage chance that a squad/unit of the selected type of troops (regular or better, or all troops) will be fanatic, i.e. never panic (except when attacked by flamethrowers) and rarely surrender. Neither player knows beforehand which of their troops will be fanatic. This setting should only be used for troop types, which are fanatic such as the SS or situations where troops fought to the bitter end. This theatre does not have the extreme brutal conflict of the Russian front, and is marked by gentlemanly behaviour such as the DAK allowing British Ambulances to cross their lines. So this setting should be used sparingly in CMAK. Examples of fanatic troops in the North African campaign would be the 1st Free French Brigade, which held the Gazala line in the 1942 campaign and included Jews and French foreign legionnaires. (Rommel ignored Hitler's order to have the Jews instantly shot and they were treated with great respect by the DAK, they only surrendered after running out of ammunition. Rommel turned them over to the Italians who treated them the same as any other prisoners of war. The moral and fighting quality of these troops was very different from the former Vichy French forces who first fought and then joined the US in Tunisia.)

Brief Description - the format followed by Battlefront is US date; month - day - year; battle location; engagement type; historical/fictional. You can of course do your own thing.

When you have finished this screen, the game will take you to the Battle Parameters dialogue screen for parameters specific to a battle.

 

Battle Parameters

 

 

Time - Mid-Day, Dusk, Dawn, Night. Light levels will affect distance units can be seen at and aircraft will not fly at night. Steamroller Farm took place during the day so I picked mid-day.

Weather - Clear, Overcast, Rain, Fog, Rain & Fog, Thick Fog, Snow, Blizzard. These again affect the distance at which units will be first seen. I picked clear to match the very good weather that Tunisia typically has. Only clear weather will allow airstrikes.

Wind sets the wind strength and direction. This will effect duration of smoke rounds. I stuck with the default breeze.

Game Length - can be from 2-120 turns. The variable amount is an extra number of turns and is apparently dependent on how much combat action has taken place but is usually from 0-5 turns.

Attack/Defender games need to last longer than encounters, as the attacking player needs to move his troops across the map. Units have a limited amount of ammunition and this can run out in long games. The more realistic combat system of CMBB and CMAK also means that games take longer to play. However, players no not like very long games as it they have to invest more time in playing your scenario and prefer to complete it inside a evening. Steamroller Farm is a fairly small game so I went for 30 turns variable. Around 45 might be better for a medium sized game and even the very largest game should not go over 70 turns.

Type - can be Assault, Attack, Probe or Meeting Engagement. This option is important as it affects the end game victory points calculations for each player. I chose Allied Probe as that matched what the British troops were tasked with doing.

Map Edges Friendly To - All four directions can be toggled to Axis, Allied, or Neutral. At least one map edge has to be friendly to a side.

Warning, if you change these after you have bought some troops and then buy some more the AI could regard them as being on different sides and they may fire upon each other!

Map Edge for Exit Points - If the goal for one side is to fight through and exit the map, the map edge eligible for exit is set here.

Flag Type - can be static or dynamic. Dynamic flags have a number of false and real flags to represent the defender not knowing what the attackers real objective is at the time he has to set his defences. These can be selected by the attacker at game start or set randomly be the computer. Dynamic flags are rarely used.

Axis Bonus - Can be positive or negative. Used mainly for unbalanced historical battles where one side is superior to the other. The idea is that a weak defender can be allowed to win by the bonus in the system allowing him to outperform expectations of his force. This is one of the options to consider tweaking after play-testing the scenario.