Fantastic AAR and mission concept... thx for sharing that with us... and welcome to SimHQ.

Absolutely beautifully done.


Writing prose and superb screenshots make this AAR one of the top three I've ever had the pleasure to read. Great job!

Thanks Mag and enigma!

Much appreciated.

Cheers,

Intense, very well written and illustrated!

Thanks Heretic!

Cheers,

JC, great AAR, very inspiring. Wondering how you can "randomize" the aparition and location of the enemy??

Hi Stratos,

Thanks! Glad you liked it.

For this scenario, I just declared a random variable and added "spawn if" conditions for units placed in different places. Ssnake, back at the steelbeasts.com forum has rightly said to me that I'm better of with a "move to end" random condition. It's just way easier.

Cheers,

...the "jump, if..." condition, to be precise. If the condition depends exclusively on a random variable the jump (or a spawn condition) will be executed prior to the planning phase, so all units are at one of their starting locations. That way you can also randomize the starting location of the player's units, or, with the Spawn function, randomize the composition of the player's units.
This is being demonstrated in one of SB Pro's stock scenarios, Desert Ambush if I remember it correctly, which has a total of more than 50 ways how it can play out - one of three different types of enemy taking one of three different routes, with the player being equipped with one of six or so different types of task forces - 3 x 3 x 6 = 54 variations.

The Jump function serves the purpose of having the same force appear in random places, e.g. reinforcements that may take different routes, or an ambush team that could attack at different points of a patrol route. I used it once to simulate the effect of wind drift for a force of paratroopers that would appear in one of five places around a release point (not an animated air drop, they simply appear on the ground). With the Copy Route function you can then paste the same jump route to different waypoints so that all units will drift in the same direction and with the same amount so it's not an arbitrary scatter but a coordinated shift of the landing location.

In principle you can just as well have multiple units of the same composition to spawn in different locations. But then you need to create way more units of which only a fraction will actually be needed and it is more complicated to reference them in other conditionals (hence a bigger chance for making mistakes in the scripting). The Jump function simply helps a bit to declutter the map if you want to script multiple courses of action for either side's units under computer control.

Amazing AAR- Awesome mission!