Battle of France 1944 ToT scenario released

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THIS SCENARIO HAS BEEN UPDATED TO V1.1 ON THE SCENARIO LEAGUE WEBSITE:

You can find all the latest game zip V1.1 files and screen shots at http://sleague.civfanatics.com/index.php/Battle_of_France_1944

Check out post #31 in this thread to review the latest changes.

GAME INTRODUCTION:
"
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS, (AP) -- Allied Expeditionary Force, June 6

Allied troops landed on the coast of France in tremendous strength by cloudy daylight today and stormed several miles inland with tanks and infantry in the grand assault which Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower called a crusade in which "we will accept nothing less than full victory."

As the Supreme Commander you are in charge of "Operation Overlord". Will you be able to liberate the continent or will your forces flounder before the formidable fortifications of the vaunted Atlantic Wall? The fate of the free world rests on your shoulders.
"

The scenario covers the liberation of Western Europe by the Allies from the beaches of France to the crossing of the Rhine river and capture of the German Rhineland. The game lasts from June 1944 to April 1945 with each turn representing one week.

There are only two protagonists, the Allies and the Germans. The game has been designed to play ONLY as the Allies.

There are a number of house rules and game concepts, all designed to enhance the scenario experience, that the player should familiarize themselves with before beginning to play. As such, please read the scenario's ReadMe PDF file first.

The scenario has been designed and tested on a 64-bit PC computer and should therefore work on both 32 and 64-bit platforms.

If you have a 64-bit computer you will need to run MastermindX's "Civ2XP64Patcher.exe" patch after starting the Test of Time program but before loading the scenario. I have included the patch and instructions on how to use it in the zip files. If you prefer, you can also download the patch from the CivFanatics forum http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=193215.

I hope you enjoy the game as much as I liked designing it.
 
Tootall,

I'm very impressed by the quality of this scenario. Is it your first for Civ2? Its not often a new designer comes out with a product that is so polished. This is a major factor in weather players take the time to play.

I have just started my first game. I must admit that upon first inspection I did not think it would be too difficult. I decided to follow the historical path with landings on the five beaches. Things were going all Ok until the Axis first turn when my landings on Juno and Sword beaches were repulsed. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to take Caen either. I'm hooked already, I really love a challenge! :goodjob:
 
Hi McMonkey,

Thank you for your comments, they are much appreciated. There are so many other great scenarios and designers out there that I wanted to take the time to get this one right and do the franchise justice.

This is my first "official" scenario. I have designed another fully functional ToT scenario called "Total War 1941- 1945" which covers the entire WWII but haven't released it. It is designed to be played as the American player.

With regards to my "Battle of France 1944" scenario I can't stress enough the importance of reading the ReadMe file first. It holds valuable information on the mechanics of the scenario.

Without giving too much strategy away, I want each player to come up with their own way of winning, here are a few important tips. The Recon unit plays an important role in the game as it allows the player to investigate enemy cities. With this unit the Allied player can determine whether a city is ripe for picking or a hornet's nest of enemy activity.

Some cities in the game are veritable fortresses, comprised of blockhaus' and other defensive units. Whenever a player comes across these cities, patience and preparation are a virtue. The British 5.5 inch artillery, Churchill AVRE and American POA-CWS units are the weapons of choice against blockaus' and 240mm Naval Battery. Allied air units are best used against German units out in the open. If you attack these heavily defended cities or units too early without the proper units you will quickly end up with a pile of dead units.

Protect your transports as they are the key to reinforcing your invasion.

In the meantime, enjoy the scenario!
 
Thanks for the tips. I don't think you are spoiling anything by giving us hints as by 1944 the Allied Armies had a lot of combat experience and invasion training and would have been aware of their units capabilities. I think I am guilty of underestimating the German defences and I'm planning to start again with a bit more planning and preparation!

I think I may pursue my own strategy this time which will vary from the historical plan. I like the idea of the beaches to help guide the scenario along historically feasible paths!
 
Oops! ;) There seems to be no PEDIA file in the download. Otherwise, BOF appears to be a very well designed and truly challenging scen. :goodjob:

I found the README very helpful in deciding where to launch the invasion in order to most quickly capture the critical objectives of the first phase. The Allies are ashore with most of their "funnies" and many of their best mechanized units. Unfortunately, all of the British and some of the American airborne units were unable to take part in the assault because of heavy fog over their airfields. Similarly, all the Poor Bloody Infantry are stuck in their camps in Britain.

I'll post in a couple of days about progress and some minor questions I have.
 
One suggestion: As cities are fairly small (many 2-4 in size) and the allies cannot build city walls (at least early on in the game) it is fairly likely that German counter-attacks will completely remove some cities from the map. If you don't want this to happen so easily you could give the Allies the Great Wall wonder and put city walls in each German city at the start. Just an idea.
 
Giving the Germans the Atlantic Wall Wonder and not giving the Allies the ability to build anti-tank defenses early in the game was an intentional choice.

For one reason, I gave the wonder to the Germans because its capture by the Allies would help accentuate the collapse of Germany once the Rhine river defenses where breached.

For another reason, after the breakout from the beaches the strategy of the Allied command was to aggressively pursue the German Army back to the Rhine. For generals like Patton the only good defense was a good offense. The Allied player should adopt a similar strategy, whenever possible, and only pause and prepare when getting ready to assault a heavily defended city or sector.

Also, it wasn't exactly uncommon during the war for a city to be almost utterly destroyed before the Allies 'liberated' it. During testing, I didn't often play a game where a city was destroyed prior to reaching those of Belgium, Holland and the outskirts of the Siegfried line. But once along this line, I quickly discovered that the AI could be quite aggressive and often attempt to recapture recently liberated Allied cities. Even though defensive works where never really part of the Allied arsenal in any significant degree during this whole campaign, I decided, nevertheless, to give the Allies the technology with the capture of Bruxelles, but I wanted there to be an associated cost.

Thereby players wishing to avoid a newly liberated city's destruction due to a German counter-attack can always 'rush buy' the anti-tank improvement. A good strategy to avoid this destruction while the improvement is being built is to place ground units ahead of the city in defensive positions along the possible avenues of German attack (it provides the player a little rush to see if the city will survive a counter attack while the improvement is being completed).

Other players may disagree with the concept but I hope my explanations, at least, help them understand why it was chosen.
 
Your reasoning makes sense, especially defending outside of the city. I wish the programmers of Civ2 had put an option in the cheat menu to toggle between a city's population decreasing when a unit is lost and it not decreasing. This way a designer could set it so cities wouldn't be so easily annihilated but the defensive advantages of having / not having city walls could also be exploited. I also wish I could win the lottery! :lol:

I'm up to turn 9 now and I'm in the western half of Paris and have half the Atlantic ports. So far I haven't encountered any gameplay problems and I'm having a thoroughly good game!
 
I'm giving this a go, and on my fourth attempt, I've secured a reasonable bridgehead, without unsustainable losses, and good prospects for future offensive action. It's an amazing first effort, very challenging and quite fun. Congratulations!

Now, here are my suggestions for improvement. [I'm never satisfied, even with my own work. :( ]

1. Lose the covered map. I assure you, the Allies have good maps of France. They used to control it.

2. The border terrain is unnecessary and ugly. Since the entire map is German controlled except Switzerland and Spain, impassable mountain terrain is all you need to keep ground units on the right side of the border.

3. You might consider adding German controlled cities in northern Italy, and adding allied units via events at the right historical turn.

4. The German missile attacks are a bit overdone, but managable. I just lost half my landing craft to torpedo boats and U-boats on the 4th turn, after a successful invasion. I suggest adding a bit more tactical advice in the Readme, so that a new player can get right into the scenario without having to make multiple starts.

5. B-26 and especially the Lancaster bombers should be stronger, relative to the other ground attack aircraft. You can increase the survivability of aircraft, without making them too powerful, just by increasing their hit factor. That way, they will usually kill even a strong defender, but take too much damage to attack again, without recovering for a few turns.

Great scenario, and welcome to Scenario League! :goodjob:
 
I'm still playing when I find the time and I have most of France west of and including Paris under Allied control and the Husky/Anvil landings have taken place.

My main suggestion to improve an already very good scenario would be to make more use of events to boost German counter attacks. You can be quite brutal with them as it will give the player a bit more of a challenge as they fight their way across France.
 
Hi McMonkey & Techumseh,

Thanks for the feedback. I wanted as much as possible for the players to play a complete scenario to get the full experience and hopefully get their comments on the positives and negatives on the scenario before I undertook making any possible changes.

With regards to your current suggestions here are the explanations behind my reasoning:

Techumseh:

1. Lose the covered map: I thought about making the map uncovered but in the end choose to make the map partially covered not because the Allies didn't have good maps of France but because they weren't always aware of the exact location of the Germans forces. Even though they had been preparing Overlord for almost two years they were unaware that the Germans had inserted an entire division in the Normandy zone prior to the invasion. Therefore I thought adding a 'Fog of War' concept added an element of uncertainty to the scenario. Not all players might agree but I remain comfortable with the concept.

2. The border terrain is unnecessary and ugly: Personally I like the concept of the borders. I believe it adds a little bit of flavor to the game, though I agree the graphic itself isn't the most appealing. I will try to design a graphic that is a little less 'offensive'.

3. You might consider adding German controlled cities in Northern Italy: I originally thought about including northern Italy as part of the scenario but in the end decided against it. In reality the Mediterranean and French theaters were two separately run affairs. Even after the invasion of Southern France, there was no significant operations by the Allied forces in Southern France against Northern Italy. As this was a scenario primarily designed to represent the French campaign, I decided to keep them separate.

4. The German missile attacks are a bit overdone, but manageable: Churchill actually put a lot of emphasis on eliminating the V-1 sites and considerable Allied forces were diverted to eliminate that threat. Unfortunately, the AI has a preference for attacking allied naval units instead of cities, but that is something I can't control. Anyhow, I wanted the V-1 bombs and V-2 rockets to have a measured impact in the game and just like their historical counterparts be subject to elimination when certain key installations (cities in terms of the game) were overrun by the Allies.

I agree, I should have given more warning in the ReadMe file about the predatory nature of the German U and torpedo boats, particularly in the opening turns, and I will revise the ReadMe accordingly. The Allied landing craft are irreplaceable and therefore the allied naval forces must constantly sweep the oceans to detect and eliminate the German naval units and protect their vital shipping lanes (TIP: There is a finite number of German U and Torpedo boats located in the French Atlantic and Mediterranean ports but a regular flow from Germany proper). Fortunately, provided they have alternate naval targets, the German air units and V weapons have a tendency NOT to attack the landing craft. So yes, protect your landing craft at all costs against U and torpedo boats, because even the loss of one craft can on the 4th turn, for example, mean up to 20 less units transported to France from England (as explained in the ReadMe ALL landing craft are recalled at the beginning of turn 14).

5. B-26 and especially the Lancaster bombers should be stronger: I spent a lot of time before starting the scenario on researching and devising an integrated ground and naval unit strength system. Unfortunately, I did not possess corresponding and equivalent data for air units and are less comfortable with their respective strengths, though after reflection I agree the bombers should probably be stronger.

At the same time, I didn't want to make the Allied air forces so powerful, both in terms of numbers and strengths, that they completely dominated the battlefield. At this point, I feel they are well balanced enough to get the allied player out of a tough jam, attack powerful but exposed German units, provide aerial support against lightly defended enemy cities, serve to reconnoiter territory and keep the small but potentially dangerous German Luftwaffe in check (since a few German cities are dedicated to producing fighter and bomber units, your Allied fighters must be agressive in hunting down German air units whenever possible, otherwise, you may end up confronting a large enemy airforce that is always agressive in attacking Allied ground and air units).

McMonkey:

With regards to the Germans aggressiveness, I tried to remain faithful to history whereby the Germans heavily contested the beachhead area but once the Allies broke out there was a mad dash for the border. As you approach the Siegfied line I hope you will find that the German defense once again becomes much more aggressive, just as happened historically. Let me know if you find this to be the case.

No other aspect of the designing process ended up being as frustrating and required as much testing and revisions as the events file. As it is, with all the events, delays, triggers and flags the events file is almost maxed out with regards to the memory size. I tried using multiple events files but because I'm using multiple flags for many events, replacing the file in mid-scenario cancelled some of the accumulated triggers thereby nullifying the events. As far as I know, maybe more experience designers can confirm whether this is true, there is no way to carry over accumulated triggers once you've used the deletevent.exe program to switch the events file.
 
tootall 2012: Fair enough, though you don't need to cover the map to prevent the allies from knowing the location of German units. Unless they are within 1 (or 2) squares of an allied unit, they don't appear.

Regarding the border squares, the problem is that you have a unique terrain type for the border with fixed specs, when the actual borders run through grassland, forest, hills and mountains. One possibility is to add pollution (graphic changed to border post) on the border squares and get someone (perhaps Agricola?) to hex edit pollution out of the scenario. Your border squares will have lower fertility, but retain their other stats, regardless of terrain type.
 
As far as I know, maybe more experience designers can confirm whether this is true, there is no way to carry over accumulated triggers once you've used the deletevent.exe program to switch the events file.


I would have expected that techumseh would have anwered your question but he seems to have forgotten what he does in Market Garden. Check out his use of whether or not the Allies have technologies 11, 25 and 27 as 3 flags that are passed on to successive events files and are not affected by delevent.
 
No other aspect of the designing process ended up being as frustrating and required as much testing and revisions as the events file. As it is, with all the events, delays, triggers and flags the events file is almost maxed out with regards to the memory size.
I checked your events memory. You've got 7155 bytes free space. You could save yourself another 3570 bytes by removing all but one of the secondary RandomTurn triggers in the 12 double trigger (@AND) events. Two of those triggers use a denominator of 1, which means they return true every turn and are thus redundant. I'll refer you to this thread, post #6 in particular.

Example:
Code:
@IF
CheckFlag
Who=Allies
Mask=0x3C   ; Atlantic Coast ports are liberated
Count=3
State=On
@AND
RANDOMTURN
denominator=5
@THEN
CREATEUNIT
unit=M12 GMC
owner=Allies
veteran=no
homecity=Portsmouth
locations
40,10
endlocations
@ENDIF

could be rewritten as:
Code:
@IF
CheckFlag
Who=Allies
Mask=0x3C   ; Atlantic Coast ports are liberated
Count=3
State=On
@THEN
CREATEUNIT
unit=M12 GMC
owner=Allies
veteran=no
homecity=Portsmouth
randomize
locations
40,10
109,107
109,107
109,107
109,107
endlocations
@ENDIF

where (109,107) is an ocean tile at the bottom of the map. Both events create a unit 20% of the time. The first event uses 636 bytes in memory, the second only 317. I've attached an edited events file. I left the V-2 Rocket event as it was because it contains multiple non-randomised spawn locations.

I tried using multiple events files but because I'm using multiple flags for many events, replacing the file in mid-scenario cancelled some of the accumulated triggers thereby nullifying the events. As far as I know, maybe more experience designers can confirm whether this is true, there is no way to carry over accumulated triggers once you've used the deletevent.exe program to switch the events file.
That's correct. The events flags are stored in the @INITFLAG event, the very first event listed in the SAV file. Delevent deletes the entire events block from the SAV file, including @INITFLAG. It's the only way to force the game to load a new events file.

I would have expected that techumseh would have anwered your question but he seems to have forgotten what he does in Market Garden. Check out his use of whether or not the Allies have technologies 11, 25 and 27 as 3 flags that are passed on to successive events files and are not affected by delevent.
Market-Garden doesn't swap events files during the course of the game. It randomly selects from 10 files when the scenario is launched. IIRC, there was not enough memory available for all of the Delayed events in that scenario.

I agree with Techumseh about the border terrain. It's a wasted terrain slot. If anything, I would've created some kind of alternative to grassland, for example farmland, just to break up the block that covers most of France. That can still be remedied with a combo of the Civ2 Map Editor and MapCopy.
 

Attachments

  • BoF_Events.zip
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Gentlemen thank you for your counsel.

Catfish:

During my testing I was finding that some of my events weren't triggering and couldn't understand why. It's only after searching through the forums that I finally understood that there even was a memory limit. I vaguely remember reading your comments about using the ocean tile to reduce bytes but obviously failed to properly grasp its significance.

I did look at Techumseh's OM-G event file, as suggested by Agricola, but noticed that he was using masks as well and was wondering how that could circumvent the delevent program. It seemed like a promising idea, until you confirmed that the scenario wasn't swapping the event file.

Thank you for the revised BOF event file, it is much appreciated. I will be sure to include it in any subsequent update.

I'm not certain what you mean by "If anything, I would've created some kind of alternative to grassland, for example farmland, just to break up the block that covers most of France. That can still be remedied with a combo of the Civ2 Map Editor and MapCopy". Perhaps you can explain further. In the meantime, it seems as though Techumseh's idea about using pollution is a good alternative to pursue.

One of the known bugs in the scenario is the AI's unfortunate habit of pillaging some of the stackable(fortress) tiles near the Siegfried line and the eastern side of the Rhine river. Is there a way to prevent the AI from doing this?

Techumseh:

There seems to be a growing consensus against the border hexes, at least as they are now. I very much like your idea about using pollution instead. As you mentioned, the border should normally run through all kinds of terrain types. I was stubborn in that I really wanted to add the borders but I couldn't figure out a better idea when I originally designed the scenario.

Since pollution has been turned off in this scenario, that there is no production except for a few cities and the current border tiles don't generate any production or trade anyhow, using pollution to represent the border hexes seems like a good solution.

My only qualm is that the border hex gives the defending blockhaus unit an extra 50% defense bonus and the Siegfried line runs exclusively along the German border. By replacing the border hex with pollution some parts of the line would lose that extra defensive bonus. I wanted to make it equally difficult for the Allied player no matter which section of the line they decide to attack (otherwise they might always choose the exact same path).

I guess I could make all the hexes along the line either hill or forest hexes even though that wouldn't be geographically accurate. I'm open to suggestions.

I do have a question, even though there are no settler/engineer type units in the game will the AI still try to clean up polluted hexes? If yes, that would render the concept less attractive.
 
Tootall 2012;

Catfish is correct, I don't use successive event files in Market-Garden. They're alternate files, 1 of which is chosen randomly at the start of the scenario. However, using technologies as triggers does overcome the Delevent problem you describe. And you can delete technologies using the ToT events language as well, so you can still turn events on and off.

Re: eliminating the border terrain, you might double up the blockhaus units on grassland terrain or use 240mm Battery units instead.

I don't think the AI cleans up pollution, except with settler or engineer units, though I've not verified this.
 
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