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Einar Fridgeirs -> Chosin Few campaign: evac cut short b/c of force morale broken? WTH? (7/28/2009 7:48:28 PM)
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Longtime SPWAW fan just getting back in the game after several years away. I finally feel like I´m getting the hang of this game(largely by lurking in this forum) and decided to play something I felt would be a real challenge, a campaign that I was too intimidated to try to play way back when - the Chosin Few campaign that comes with the vanilla download from Matrix Games. But in the first scenario (the one where you have to evacuate a convoy into a village that is under attack) I ran into a problem. Well, perhaps it isn't a problem but I felt it detracted from the fun.
Initially I really had my hands full, my perimeter was under heavy attack and seemed to be going to get crushed under the Chinese assault early, but with some clever maneuvering I managed to get the defense organized in such a way to maximize my firepower. Meanwhile the convoy was making good time to the evacuation zone.
Now the scenario was supposed to be 24 turns, so all my movement was based on that assumption - that I had 24 turns to get all my stuff to the exit hexes. But that turned out not to be the case. The game ended abruptly in a draw after round 14, not because all my guys had been swamped by the chinese horde, but because the rifle company holding the town, now backed up by the faster forward elements of the convoy had managed to repulse and totally wipe out the attackers! The Chinese force morale had broken and they had barely any units left on the map with half the game to go, but because of the early ending most of the convoy was nowhere near the exit hexes, and since I figured I had plenty of time I hadn't exited the units that had made it into town, but rather deployed them in an secondary inner defensive line for my now almost out of ammo defenders to fall back to while the rest of the convoy made it to safety.
I feel this is a bit of a flaw in the scenario design, but I guess it might be hard-coded into the game that the scenario ends when one side has been reduced enough regardless of what is going on, but I feel it would be rather silly if I tried to deliberately keep Chinese units alive to buy myself more time! Instead the player is punished for doing what the USMC does best, killing large numbers of the enemy while still accomplishing their mission [:D]
I know nothing about scenario design or editing, but I guess the best way to make the scenario run longer would be to add more reinforcements that arrive later in the game as opposed to fiddling with hitting and other such parameters, because the scenario is quite challenging up until the Chinese attack just runs out of steam way too early.
What app do I need if I want to modify the scenario to bring in several companies more worth of infantry to test my troops around the halfway point of the scenario?
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