Slitherine

I was just playing (and thoroughly enjoying) Campaign '40 and I got to a scenario where I have to attack forward to a French HQ, capture a general and escort him back to a hex near where I started. I got 20 turns to do it. O.K.
There was a warning in th ebriefing that once I captured him, the French would counter-attack aggressively.

Well, things were going along well and I had captured most of the map and destroyed most of the French units...so my plan evloved to continue attacking the French troops near the edge of the map so that there would be fewer of them to counter-attack. I also set up a nice perimeter defense along a riverline with artillery behind my infantry which were guarding the cities/ crossing points.

So I proceed to capture the general and all hell breaks loose. Not only do many new French units attack from the edge of the board, but many new units show up all over the map and start attacking me from BEHIND!

I lost many great core units, especially artillery.

Now, I surely appreciate the design team trying to mix up the scenario types with some original offerings, but c'mon! How the heck did these units get there? Did they fly?

This is pretty annoying, not only was it COMPLETELY unrealistic, but now I just wasted an hour and a half and have to start the scenario over.
Really poor decision and/ or shows that the team never play tested the scenario.

Now I have to re-play the same scenario... not what I consider fun.

Actually, I had no problem with the scenario the first time.

When they said there was going to be a counter attack I expected what happened.

It was brutal, but I won.

I have to agree with the OP. I wouldn't expect enemy units to pop up all over the map. I could see units appearing along the edge, or even paratroopers dropping in within their valid range. It seems a little cheap that units magically appear. Now I am just going by the OP's comments because I haven't played that scenario. I was planning on buying the DLC due to all the positive comments, but this makes me wonder. This type of stuff does not sound appealing to me.

I think it was Doom 3 where creatures would just pop up behind you right after you cleared an area. From a 'reality' standpoint it seems acceptable. Not too far a stretch that some demon could do that, but it was still annoying and I didn;t enjoy the game. Please tell me that this is the only scenario where cheap stuff like the OP described above happens.

gdrover wrote:Really???

No not REALLY!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... gQwI#t=20s

gdrover wrote:Really poor decision and/ or shows that the team never play tested the scenario.

Sorry you had trouble with a difficult scenario, and while it may seem a poor decision in your opinion, I can assure you it was quite well tested by both dev and BETA teams.

viewtopic.php?t=28338

viewtopic.php?t=29076

And actually, if you are having so much trouble with it, I highly recommend not capturing the city of Wassigny and just getting the minor victory for the scenario.

Really, it was a very fun scenario. I do appreciate that you allow people to still get a marginal victory by just holding four scenarios, that is very gentlemanly of you. I give this one a thumbs up. It might not be a bad idea to tone down the counterattack a tiny bit but it didn't seem excessively unreasonable, given the scenario parameters.

This 'backdoor' option was left in the scenario just in case players, such as yourself, were frustrated too much with the scenario. A way of completing the scenario and continuing the campaign and skipping this particular special (and possibly very brutal) event.

I'm with you, gdrover. Don't know how razz was able to know how units would pop out of the ground when it doesn't happen in any other scenario but it completely floored me. Playing it a second time I had no troubles - I knew what was coming - but the first time any realistic approach (as per the OP's actions) could not anticipate the whack-a-mole that would occur next.

I just assumed they were guerilla or partisan units. I mean, it is their home turf that is being attacked after all. The key to the scenario is taking and holding key bridges and roads along the escape corridor so that when it is time to race back to the German HQ with the French general, there is a minimum of fighting (and losses).

I dare to say that most of us lost a couple of units here on our first tries, especially to the (somewhat hard to explain) units popping up fairly far from the edge of the map.

Personally I lost 2 IIRC mainly while running around fairly headless while trying to consolidate my position and trying to establish a real frontline again.

But I think this is the only scenario where I saw something like this. Personally I played that one again and even managed to crush the counterattack in the end which was a lot of fun actually.

Zhivago wrote:I just assumed they were guerilla or partisan units. I mean, it is their home turf that is being attacked after all.

If they had been infantry (without trucks) popping out of the ground, I would have been fine with that - but being able to hide columns of French tanks and ACs from my Luftwaffe was a bit too much - for me, anyway.

While not playing the scenario yet (went through British path), I would give my vote against such scenarios where units magically appears from nowhere right in the middle of the map. I am bothered enough with the fact that you or the opponent can purchased units in every city no matter they are completely isolated. I understand that it's not easy thing to create difficulties for experienced players due to cipple AI, but such methods of artificially increasing difficulty without much logic are not my thing. The other scenarios are excellent thought. I hope in the future DLCs designers will make less use of such cheats.

Maybe a new French partisan unit should be created for that scenario, and maybe some of the others. Partisans could blow bridges, put mines in the road (a PZ core feature I have been crowing for) and make the journey back across the map somewhat harrowing. But I definitely acknowledge that it is way out of the norm for units to materialize out of nowhere like they do in that scenario.

I think people are exaggerating the part with the units popping up in the middle of the map. As I remember they do end up there in a turn or two, but they start towards the edges of the map and move towards the line that you use to evacuate Giraud. I had some units in their way so I have a pretty good idea of the approximate area where they spawned. You don`t know what the overall front looks like apart from your small section. For all you know you could have just made a pocket with enemy units on the sides of it(outside the missions`s map). It`s not really illogical for the units to be able to appear where they do coming from the sides of your surge. I.e. dropping what they were doing in other sections of the front and rushing to close down your breakthrough.

That said, I had to replay this map too. My expectation was that the counterattack will be frontal and I was protecting the far left edge of the map. I had only understrength units to the back and those got lost so I panicked and played it again. Still, the scout car that represents the general moves very fast and you can actually get him to safety quickly(about 3 turns I think). Plus, iirc the fact that I had lost some victory cities and was unable to get them back before the end did not affect the decisive victory. So basically it`s just a rush to get the general to a designated hex.

No tanks pop up on the map at all. The tanks start on the corners in the NE, NW, and SW. There are some infantry units that pop up but I think only one is full strength right away. I didn't lose any guys the first time I played it but I did have to run away (and took a good amount of damage in the process). It was an interesting scenario and a nice change from the same old same old. If you didn't like your results just play through the scenario again.

My dad had told me about this scenario and how hard it was...

So i finally get around to it and end up capturing every city/town and destroying every enemy unit on the map before I get the general... "Pfttt dad just dosnt know what hes talking about" i think... capture the general after putting some units to block where a counterattack might come from (I assume edges of the map?)

... and BAM! french in cities, french in hills, french everywhere.

Got through it with the loss of 2 SE infantry and found it quite amusing. It was fun and now i know it wont be a problem next time but i think placing units in the middle kind of goes against accepted rules for the rest of the game. It isnt civ with barbarians spawning in dark hexes.

=)

I had to play it again, like most of you I was expecting a massive counter attack from one side, maybe two. I was quite surprised to have a counter-attack from all sides, except the path to the evacuation zone.

After that I planned my movements and positions accordingly, and everything went well. Apart the first surprise for a big quantity of units deploying rather unreallisticly, if found this scenario quite funny and original.

I liked the scenario a lot. It is one of my favorites.

There was a clear warning about a massive counterattack and the "backyard" spawning troops were afair only 5str infantry. Nothing that can kill a full arty unit.
I took the warning seriously and brought all my units to full strength during the scenario, before I captured the general and established a defendable lines to the capture points. It was lots of fun.

@Kerensky:
You could use the 2 paths within each campaign (french/british, leningrad/kiev), to let the player select what kind of scenario he wants to play.
Eg when the player has the choice, you can state, that one path might contain nasty surprises, while the other is more ordinary. Then you pack 3 scenarios full with surprises and tough challenges, for us who like that, and the other 3 are more straight forward.
Everyone wins.

Locarnus wrote:I liked the scenario a lot. It is one of my favorites.

There was a clear warning about a massive counterattack and the "backyard" spawning troops were afair only 5str infantry. Nothing that can kill a full arty unit.
I took the warning seriously and brought all my units to full strength during the scenario, before I captured the general and established a defendable lines to the capture points. It was lots of fun.

@Kerensky:
You could use the 2 paths within each campaign (french/british, leningrad/kiev), to let the player select what kind of scenario he wants to play.
Eg when the player has the choice, you can state, that one path might contain nasty surprises, while the other is more ordinary. Then you pack 3 scenarios full with surprises and tough challenges, for us who like that, and the other 3 are more straight forward.
Everyone wins.

Based largely on feedback like we've seen in this thread DLC 1942 has branches similar to this. Can't talk about it in detail yet though, you'll have to wait for release to see for yourselves!

Bottom line though, not everyone is aware of which is the hard mode and which is the easy path(not everyone reads forums or even mission briefings), so even if we do have hard modes, they can't be THAT hard and they must have a sort of back door/escape hatch similar to the mechanic you see in Wassigny, where it's possible to avoid the ambush phase of the scenario all together and still complete the scenario.

I was going to be tricky and load the general into an air transport... considered train but too much rail line to defend... in the end he was in a armored car =P