Campaign builder questions

[Ripcord]

Have read this section of the manual several times, so let's get that out of the way.

 

1. Do these campaigns have damage tracking? For stationary units? For ships?

 

2. I see the value in the stages/ladders concept of this campaign builder, this is very very cool. However, is there a way to insert 'intro missions' into the beginning of the campaign, so that these are one-off missions which are never played again?

 

3. I understand that the score of the mission determines if we drop down a stage or move up a stage or remain in the same stage. How does the mission score then determine which missions we get within that stage? Say our player scores a 55, and he moves to the next stage. Which mission will be campaign assign him them? Will it look then for only those missions with a range that includes 55? So if I have a mission with a range of 60-100, our player would not be assigned that mission.... correct?

 

Had a couple other questions, but can't remember right now. Let's start with these.

 

Ripcord

[Exorcet]

Bumping this thread. I too found the manual a little confusing.

[zdXu]

Have read this section of the manual several times, so let's get that out of the way.

 

1. Do these campaigns have damage tracking? For stationary units? For ships?

 

2. I see the value in the stages/ladders concept of this campaign builder, this is very very cool. However, is there a way to insert 'intro missions' into the beginning of the campaign, so that these are one-off missions which are never played again?

 

3. I understand that the score of the mission determines if we drop down a stage or move up a stage or remain in the same stage. How does the mission score then determine which missions we get within that stage? Say our player scores a 55, and he moves to the next stage. Which mission will be campaign assign him them? Will it look then for only those missions with a range that includes 55? So if I have a mission with a range of 60-100, our player would not be assigned that mission.... correct?

 

Had a couple other questions, but can't remember right now. Let's start with these.

 

Ripcord

1) theoretical yes (with the help of tacview or lua-scripting), practical no. Every mission stands for itsself and cannot transfer results to another mission. However the creator can put results (damaged structures, veh., planes, etc) of the mission before in the next mission manually.

2.) yes. Create a singleplayer-mission "introduction-to-campaign_xyz.miz" and dont bind that into your campaign_xyz.cmp file.

3.)the logic of campaign-progress is stored in the *.cmp file of your campaign.

Edited September 3, 2010 by zdXu

[nomdeplume]

2. I see the value in the stages/ladders concept of this campaign builder, this is very very cool. However, is there a way to insert 'intro missions' into the beginning of the campaign, so that these are one-off missions which are never played again?

 

To add to zdXu's response, the only way to move to an earlier stage in a campaign is if the mission in the next stage ends with a score lower than 50%. So if you have a single mission in stage 1 which is immediately won (score set to > 50%), and none of the missions in stage 2 ever set a score < 50%, then the player will never find themselves back at stage 1. Downside of this approach is that you can't make them fail the campaign. Often that's not wanted anyway, so it might be irrelevant.

 

3. I understand that the score of the mission determines if we drop down a stage or move up a stage or remain in the same stage. How does the mission score then determine which missions we get within that stage?

When you set up the campaign in the campaign builder, you can assign a range of scores to each mission in the stage (in the range column, default is 0 .. 100 which covers the entire range). The game won't let you leave gaps in the ranges, but anything else is fine.

 

So, if let's say you have three missions set up for stage 3:

 

• MissionA, range 0 .. 49
  
• MissionB, range 50 .. 99
  
• MissionC, range 100 .. 100
  

The player completes a mission in stage 2 and gets a score of 100. They go on to stage 3, and the campaign looks for any mission which is valid for a score of 100. It only finds 1, so the player plays through MissionC and wins. They go to the next stage, and the process repeats.

 

In stage 4, the player fails the mission with a score of 40, so the game drops them back to stage 3, and looks for a mission valid for a score of 40. Again, only one choice, so the player plays MissionA.

 

They don't win that mission, but they don't do so badly that you send them back a stage. Instead, they end the mission with a score of 50. Since that's neither above nor below 50, they remain on the same stage, and the game looks for a mission which is valid for a score of 50, and they get assigned MissionB.

 

Say our player scores a 55, and he moves to the next stage. Which mission will be campaign assign him them? Will it look then for only those missions with a range that includes 55? So if I have a mission with a range of 60-100, our player would not be assigned that mission.... correct?

Yep, that's right. So by now you probably thoroughly understand it.

 

The main limitations you have one planning/building your campaign are:

 

• Scores only track to the next stage, and not beyond. This makes it quite difficult to do branching campaigns, but it can be done by being careful with the scores.
  
• The score is the ONLY way to pass any kind of state information between stages. But, you do have 49 ways of saying "the player won" and 49 ways of saying "the player lost".
  
• 50 points is a magical number: the only way to prevent the player moving forward a stage without moving backwards. However, it's also annoying: you completely lose the one piece of state information you previously had if the player ends a mission with 50 points.
  

To clarify that last one, let's say in one mission your task is to defend a friendly airbase. If the player succeeds, you want them to receive additional support in subsequent missions. If the player fails, you'll give them similar missions but with those supporting aircraft missing.

 

You can do this easily for one stage, by giving say 100 points if they succeed in defending the airbase, and 80 points if they fail but otherwise do okay. In the next stage, you assign the appropriate version of the next mission. You can even carry that through subsequent stages: the stream of missions where the player didn't defend the airbase always end with a score of 80 if successful (for example), and the one where they did end with a score of 100 if successful. That lets you create a branch in the campaign where the outcome of one mission affects all the subsequent ones. But God help you if you want to have 3 or 4 simultaneous branches. :)

 

One problem comes if you assign a score of 50 at mission start to avoid the player going back to the previous stage (which can break immersion/be annoying) if they're unsuccessful: which branch of the campaign do you pick for a score of 50? The only way to maintain that 'state' information without sending the player forward is to send them backward a stage.

 

Hopefully the campaign system will be a bit more flexible in the next title.

[Oscar]

So, what you're saying is we need BOTH a campaign state and a mission state? If thats the case, wouldn't we also need negative values [ie: -25] for missions that could affect changes to both mission and campaign states in addition to just positive values? I mean, there are plenty of real world examples of a mission accomplished, but the overall objective is not always satisfied. Wouldn't negative point values and both a campaign and missionstate provided the options needed?

[Ripcord]

Thanks guys, this is really good gouge here.

 

This here is very good:

 

The main limitations you have one planning/building your campaign are:

 

• Scores only track to the next stage, and not beyond. This makes it quite difficult to do branching campaigns, but it can be done by being careful with the scores.
  
• The score is the ONLY way to pass any kind of state information between stages. But, you do have 49 ways of saying "the player won" and 49 ways of saying "the player lost".
  
• 50 points is a magical number: the only way to prevent the player moving forward a stage without moving backwards. However, it's also annoying: you completely lose the one piece of state information you previously had if the player ends a mission with 50 points.

I get it now, the little light came on for me.

 

The score is the ONLY way to pass any kind of state info between stages or missions -- that's what I needed.

 

I think just had a bit of a revelation in terms of coming up with a workaround to compensate for not having damage tracking.

 

Say that in a mission one of several (permanent) things happens:

 

(a) a major surface combatant is sunk -- we would then not want that same ship out sailing around in future missions, regardless of the stage.

(b) a major SAM site is taken out.

© a runway is blown up.

 

OK, maybe a ship can be replaced after some number of missions with a new ship, maybe a major SAM site can be restored or rebuilt, and certainly a runway will be repaired/rebuilt after some time.

 

So what we can do here is add increments or decrements of 1 or 2 or 3 for these events. So when I tally up my score, I am getting scores that end in 5 or 10, provided none of these events happen. If the big SA10 site, which is central to the story line, is taken out, then the mission ends in a 2. So what would have been a score of 60 is now a 62. Then I just have to take care to include at least a couple missions in the next stage that will have that SA-10 out of commission.

 

Alright, thanks Mate. I got the old grey matter workin now.

 

Ripcord

[nomdeplume]

So, what you're saying is we need BOTH a campaign state and a mission state? If thats the case, wouldn't we also need negative values [ie: -25] for missions that could affect changes to both mission and campaign states in addition to just positive values? I mean, there are plenty of real world examples of a mission accomplished, but the overall objective is not always satisfied. Wouldn't negative point values and both a campaign and missionstate provided the options needed?

 

I don't follow. Just having the ability to return a negative score doesn't seem all that useful to me. I mean, you can kind of treat 50 as the "0" score, so a score of 0 is effectively -50. But just increasing the range of return values isn't all that useful.

 

What would be utterly awesome would be if you could have 'campaign flags', which work just like the flags in the mission, except their values are retained throughout a campaign. Then the triggers within a mission can have conditions "if campaign flag X is true" and "if campaign flag X is false", and actions "set campaign flag X" and "clear campaign flag X". That way if the important ship is sunk, you set a campaign flag to indicate it, and in all your other missions you just a mission start trigger to disable/enable the group with that ship in it depending on the flag.

[zdXu]

This arragement of points gives you unique sum-results.

 

Campaign-stage 1, Mission_1

Event A=1 point

Event B=2 points

Event C=4 points

Event D=8 points

Event E=16 points

Event F=32 points

 

Player X have played the mission and got a endscore/sum of ...

Score = 0 => In mission_1 nothing happened.

Score = 1 => In mission_1 Event A happened.

Score = 2 => In mission_1 Event B happened.

Score = 3 => In mission_1 Event A,B happened.b

...

Score = 24 => In mission_1 Event D,E happened.

...

Score = 43 => In mission_1 Event A,B,D,F happened.

...

Score = 63 => In mission_1 Event A,B,C,D,E,F happened.

 

 

At campaign-stage 2 you must create 63 different successor-missions

At campaign-stage 3 you must create 4095 different successor-missions.

At campaign-stage 4 your must create 262143 different successor-missions (;

[Ripcord]

What would be utterly awesome would be if you could have 'campaign flags', which work just like the flags in the mission, except their values are retained throughout a campaign.

 

I agree. Would be better if we just had damage tracking for ships, runways and stationary objects/buildings -- like other sims have.

 

Instead we have come up with work-around solutions.

 

Ripcord

[Ripcord]

This arragement of points gives you unique sum-results.

 

Campaign-stage 1, Mission_1

Event A=1 point

Event B=2 points

Event C=4 points

Event D=8 points

Event E=16 points

Event F=32 points

 

Player X have played the mission and got a endscore/sum of ...

Score = 0 => In mission_1 nothing happened.

Score = 1 => In mission_1 Event A happened.

Score = 2 => In mission_1 Event B happened.

Score = 3 => In mission_1 Event A,B happened.b

...

Score = 24 => In mission_1 Event D,E happened.

...

Score = 43 => In mission_1 Event A,B,D,F happened.

...

Score = 63 => In mission_1 Event A,B,C,D,E,F happened.

 

 

At campaign-stage 2 you must create 63 different successor-missions

At campaign-stage 3 you must create 4095 different successor-missions.

At campaign-stage 4 your must create 262143 different successor-missions (;

 

I see your point, but you wouldn't have to be tracking that many events, and some events you would not necessarily have to track at all, after you reach a certain stage or level.

 

For instance, you have a 12 stage campaign, and you have two massive SA-10 sites, fixed/permanent, that you really need to take out fairly early on in the campaign in order to proceed. Say by the time you hit Stage 8 or Stage 9, it is quite safe to assume that it was destroyed... if not by a player or AI flight, then by some other flight. So from Stage 9 on, it's gone. And conversely, we can be fairly certain those sites are up and running in the later stages as we are pushed to the brink of defeat, in Stages 1-4.

 

So you only really need to make an allowance for the possbility of the site being operational or not operational (eg, tracking its status) in stages 5, 6, 7 and 8.

 

And further, the regular everyday mission results -- such as 'enemy unit killed' or 'friendly units protected' or whatever chunk of real estate is gained or lost -- can be tracked in 5 or 10 point increments. So that whatever the point score, it is going to be a number ending in 5 or zero. That is unless our 'special event' trigger is tripped, such as the SA-10 site going down, then that adds 1 more point to the final tally. So here we are looking for scores of 6, 11, 16, 21, 26.... and so on, and even then, we need to track this only in our 'mid stages' of our campaign.

 

You are correct, however -- I will admit there are only a couple major events you can track that way, beyond that it just gets to be too many variables.

 

Ripcord