Operation Matchball

[wuschel 10]

The Story so far

It is the year 1992. The cold war has become hot, and soviet tanks roll through Europe. Berlin is in ruins, and the forces of communism roam the Schwarzwald forest and knock at the gates of Hamburg.

Meanwhile, in the North African theater, the red army has increased their presence in Ghaddafis Libya, strenghtening its foothold on the African continent and threatening U.S. operations throughout the region. In this dire moment of the war, the USEUCOM has decided to send the U.S.S. Nimitz Battle Group with a hastely assembled quick reaction task force into meditareanian ocean to deal with that pesky situation in the land of camels and oil and push the soviets back to Egypt.

Can the cowboys wrestle the libyan soil from commie hands? YOU find out!

General Information

The scenario features a Battalion scale battle near the shores of Libya. The order of battle includes one company of marines, one mechanized infantry company, base support assets, CAS, Artillery, recon operatives and arial reconnaicance.

The Scenario is in late Alpha stage and has been released for public testing.

Download Links

The download package contains the mission file and manual, including a link list with all necessary addons at this updated link. Thanks to Zulu for archiving.

After Action Reports and Reviews

I would be happy to see mission reports! Cheers! :)

Well hidden, of course ;-)

Edited October 27, 2011 by wuschel

[rellikki 7]

The mission looks pretty interesting and I'd be looking forward to it. Is it a single mission or a campaign? What addons were you planning to use?

Edited October 12, 2011 by Rellikki

[wuschel 10]

Hello Relikki, I accepted Your offer and have restructured my post. Although I was not inclined to reveal many details before the release of the mission, I will do so now.

As for Your questions, it is not clear whether this crystalizes into a campaign, into a set of missions, or if it will be a single mission only.It will certainly depend on my time, will, and if specific assets become availible for WGL. Note that I may want to ask so people for co-authorship - of course, if some is interested in participate in making such kind of missions.

Well, here they come, the juicy screenshots. Note that a lot of blood is dripping from them, as the photographer was in mortal danger when making the shots. The total playing time was about 2 hours, with only secondary objectives beeing completed and 50% of manpower in the battalion lost.

"Shit happens"

A mechanized infantry platoon had a bad day: Its BFVs are destroyed, and the

survivors of the BFV sections are trying to save their lives. The disembarked

infantry attachments are fighting behind the hills.

"A blast for Ivan"

The night knocks on the door, and Special Forces Team X-Ray is on a supporting mission

on the front line. In the background there are the remains of a Tomahawk blast.

"More meat!"

The battle is going bad, and more reinforcements from Able company are beeing

scrambled near main base.

"Damn those russkie AA!"

The only remaing transport helicopter, codename "Romeo", is landing at base

to bring more infantry reinforcements to the front.

"Xray, Go! Go! Go!"

SF Team X-ray - alive by sheer miracle - is still operating near the front lines.

In behind You see wrecks of destroyed friendly Bradleys with a fresh Platoon of Abrams

moving through the wrecks to attack enemy positions. The coin will flip on the bad side

and some of X-Ray Team members will be killed in a mashinegun ambush.

That is it, folks! See You on the beach!

Edited April 11, 2010 by wuschel

[RKDmitriyev 0]

Looks great, wuschel, looking forward to it. :icon_hug:

[BronzeEagle 2]

what units were used for the western forces? doesn't look familiar.

[sanctuary 19]

These are some of the WGL soldiers.

[zulu1 145]

These are some of the WGL soldiers.

Yeah, wuschel is a real nut for WGL. I can't say that this will be very popular except for a select few who still play WGL. Like those of us who play on the CIA or Cossaks/Union WGL servers. I wouldn't mind seeing some new SP missions or Campaigns for WGL rather than all the conversions that were done.

[wuschel 10]

Yeah, wuschel is a real nut for WGL. I can't say that this will be very popular except for a select few who still play WGL. Like those of us who play on the CIA or Cossaks/Union WGL servers. I wouldn't mind seeing some new SP missions or Campaigns for WGL rather than all the conversions that were done.

A real nut? I like that. :-) Of course I understand that many players set their priorities for the visual gameplay experience, and that choosing this mod as a basis for missions might reduce the number of players greatly. I just happen to believe in ballistics as one of the most important factors of modern warfare - WGL and UA are one of the few free tools that let one strive to experience an abstracted combat situation including tactical choices, strategic mission goals, realistic assets, logistics and support, and see every projectile having a beginning, an end, and the more or less right way to get from one to the other. Oh, I love explosions too, by the way, I just like them beeing portrayed with the right amount of kinetic energy.

That said, I must say that even with this 10 year old engine one can do marvels one had never imagined with those super bulky computers in the 80s .. while playing Pacman 3D on my fathers university mainframe in my childhood. And to consider Starcraft even a wargame is a joke. Enough blathering.. Operation Matchball is still on the horizon.

Edited April 14, 2010 by wuschel

[Drongo69 117]

It's a great mission concept wuschel, and looks to be quite replayable. If people give it a miss because they don't have WGL, they will be doing themselves a great disservice. I would have thought every OFP fan would have a permanent place on their HDD for WGL anyway.

[wuschel 10]

Unfortunatly, my time schedule did not allow me to work much on mission editing. A pity, for I have ideas a plenty, and even two more missions in the oven.

Release! Yay?

However, I decided to make a first public release to have hear some Yays or Nays. Check out the first post in the thread for the download link. Have fun and good luck!

Cheers!

November Tanks are on the prawl..

Pilots waiting for evac..

Chinooks unloading 1st Platoon Able Company on the front line.

Edited April 25, 2010 by wuschel

[zwobot 22]

I quickly tried your mission wuschel and it looks promising. The background information in the briefing is well laid out.

In contrast to the reports in the CiA forum I did not encounter any noticeable lags during my short playtime (about 20 minutes).

There is a big showstopper in this mission and it is the savegame bug :(

Can you try to reduce the golabal variables you use in the mission to get rid of it? I know you use DAC, UA, and CE2 which all come with quite an amount of global variables built in but maybe you can find a way to reduce the amount of global variables in your own scripts and triggers?

I'd like to have a clarification on the CE2 teams you setup for the mission: Are only the platoon HQs in the company teams or also all the individual squads of each company? I'm not sure but I think I noticed that only the platoon HQs are in the teams and follow the team leader group when ordered in formation.

Also I can't remember how many teams the CE2 supports but is it possible to define 2 or 3 dummy teams which the player could assign units to during the mission on the fly?

Btw, I was surprised to see my name in the credits ;)

[RKDmitriyev 0]

In contrast to the reports in the CiA forum I did not encounter any noticeable lags during my short playtime (about 20 minutes).

There is a big showstopper in this mission and it is the savegame bug :(

I had exactly the opposite experience as it lags something pitiful on my system, but seemed to be free of the saveGame bug.:confused:

But yeah, I'm not shocked that Zwobot is reporting the saveGame bug as any kind of gigantic mission is liable to run into it. In case you didn't already know, the use of too many variables (such as names for units, user-defined variables, variables used in scripts) corrupts OFP's saveGame file and causes it to CTD upon reloading.

THobson knows a lot about this because he had to strain to avoid it while making Abandoned Armies. You might track down him (or his old forum posts) for more info.

[zulu1 145]

Besides the lag I reported, I encounted many script errors. During gameplay when moving groups at the top of the screen I got [_x object......] kind of message and when leaving the game a popup in the center of the sreen would say missing xxxxx script. This has reported several different scripts at different times.

[wuschel 10]

Thank You for Your feedback!

Sorry for the late reply, but my time schedule is killing me as of lately.

I agree to all posters - clearly, neither the OPF engine was really made for such missions, nor the scripts I used were designed to be compatible to each other. It is really strange that different players report different behaviour of the mission. It might be because of variating hardware configurations, but maybe there is more than one mouse in the cheese.

I quickly tried your mission wuschel and it looks promising. The background information in the briefing is well laid out.

In contrast to the reports in the CiA forum I did not encounter any noticeable lags during my short playtime (about 20 minutes).

There is a big showstopper in this mission and it is the savegame bug :(

Can you try to reduce the golabal variables you use in the mission to get rid of it? I know you use DAC, UA, and CE2 which all come with quite an amount of global variables built in but maybe you can find a way to reduce the amount of global variables in your own scripts and triggers?

I'd like to have a clarification on the CE2 teams you setup for the mission: Are only the platoon HQs in the company teams or also all the individual squads of each company? I'm not sure but I think I noticed that only the platoon HQs are in the teams and follow the team leader group when ordered in formation.

Also I can't remember how many teams the CE2 supports but is it possible to define 2 or 3 dummy teams which the player could assign units to during the mission on the fly?

Btw, I was surprised to see my name in the credits ;)

Thank You for the positive feedback. Yes, some time went into the layout of the map. I think this is something every new mission author really underestimates.

Judging from Your playtime, You had at least some initial significant encounters with enemy forces. Have there been any key moments in particular You remember? Have You experienced enemy artillery strikes on Your position?

As for Your question regarding the CE command structure: The battalion has been structured into company sized teams, namely the Battalion HQ/support team, Able Company (Inf) and Charlie Company (Mech-Inf). While this are the setting of rPlatoonCommandStructure, I left rTeamFormations untouched believing it just holds parameters that can be changed by the player in the formation menu of the CE during the game anyway. If this is wrong, please tell me, and I will make according adjustments to rTeamFormations.

About the dummy teams: I do not really know if that is possible, but certainly I could give each SF team an rPlatoonCommandStructure team slot. The player could then fool around with it in the team organization menu.

Now You have mentioned this topic, do You think it might be better to use platoon sized team formations i.e. each mechanized infantry platoons containing two sections and four squads in a team? Certainly, it might help the player out in giving an additional layer of unit managment. As for me, I always used the marker managment option, mostly without waypoints, sometimes even micromanaging specific individual troops or vehicles, but I see that commanding entire major units might be handy a handy one. In a much earlier version of the mission, I was able to use formations with helicopters in a rPlatoonCommandStructure team, so maybe the size got something wrong here.

As for the savegame bug - I will comment it below. Did You have any savegame problems with Operation Azul or Your other CE missions?

I hope the unit names are not too misleading. I tried to keep it simple: a1C means Alpha squad, 1st Platoon, Charlie Company. Of course, this bring problems when dealing with single units of platoon size, in which I simply kept the first letter of the callsign in the unit designation (i.e. n3C, November, 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company).

I had exactly the opposite experience as it lags something pitiful on my system, but seemed to be free of the saveGame bug.:confused:

But yeah, I'm not shocked that Zwobot is reporting the saveGame bug as any kind of gigantic mission is liable to run into it. In case you didn't already know, the use of too many variables (such as names for units, user-defined variables, variables used in scripts) corrupts OFP's saveGame file and causes it to CTD upon reloading.

THobson knows a lot about this because he had to strain to avoid it while making Abandoned Armies. You might track down him (or his old forum posts) for more info.

I will look into how he solved that problem. However, I do not think that there is much hope in saving the save game. Instead, one might try to save the mission and take the cheap way out and state that there are no save games in real life anyway ;-) I realize, though, that playing a mission for 2 hours is a hit on the time schedule, and a missing savegame option is a problem.

Besides the lag I reported, I encounted many script errors. During gameplay when moving groups at the top of the screen I got [_x object......] kind of message and when leaving the game a popup in the center of the sreen would say missing xxxxx script. This has reported several different scripts at different times.

Yes, I can see at least one of those errors. It seems that it comes from combining DAC script with the CE script. One appears when I abort the mission and return to the main menu of OPF.

The error You mention might also come from GeneralBarrons artillery script, which is called from multiple units in the game. As mentioned before, it is most likely that the engine is completely overloaded with scripts that are not designed to be compatible with each other. For instance, I have not seen a single artillery call on my units when DAC was implemented into the mission. Can anyone reproduce this?

I do not even want to tell You what I experienced when adding Drongos Air Support script into the soup. While it worked partially, it sometimes produced very bad results with the CE.

I will try to cut down the number of global variables. The first will most likely be the removal of the enemy artillery script, which holds a big fat array variable. Also, I might cut down opposing forces a little.

However, I am very reluctuant to make a cut when it comes to DAC or CoC-UA, since these two elements really define the way and feel how the mission is played. To understand that, You need to have put Your troops into a major engagment at the first line of defense of the soviet forces. Certainly, I might have a look into some alternatives some of You guys pointed out to me at an earlier occasion, but I am not really sure if they can replace DAC in its entire functionality: After all, one of the fun parts is beeing flanked by more than one unit formation and seeing Your troops bite the dust. Enemystack has a quite advanced spawn system, while lacking the unit coordination, while grouplink might give heavy performance problems when working with an opposing force on the scale of Operation Matchball, and needs to be adopted to unified artillery to support enemy artillery. I have no experience in AI-on-demand, so maybe one could comment on its usability and features.

As for UA, nothing can give You such a cool experience of artillery pounding.. I still remember the cool moment when I bailed out my SF squad in the hot combat zone with the call of artillery strikes and air support, and seeing an tomahawk explosion in the distance, with bodies of russian soldiers flying all over the place. Priceless.

It is a pity that there is no combined, optimized framework with the capabilities of DAC, CE, UA, DAS. DAC, I found out the hard way, for instance does only support 256 friendly units, which is barely enough for battalion sized formations - a pity. Also, CE does not really go beyond battalion sized unit control.

Are there any of these scripts in later incarnations of the OPF engine? IMHO, the optimized CPU handling in ARMA2 could really improve the performance of such kind of missions.

I will look into these problems and see if I can improve them :) It is weird, though, that we have different bug reports from different players. As if the performance or addon loading could influence these errors?

Cheers,

wuschel

p.s.: For You entertainment, as there were no other reports from the 24 downloads so far, I place an after action report I wrote when playtesting an earlier revision of the mission:

After Action Report: Operation Matchball, revision 14

Note: that the OPFOR layout was different than in revision 15

Additional screenshots for this post can be seen in the third post of this thread.

Mission goals

(beginning of mission)

Assault and take control of junction point, Al-Khums, Port, Military base East and South.

Preparations and initial assault

(1700 to 1710)

I decided to make my first push against the enemy presence near Alis Crossing first and seek to dominate the other strongpoint from using elevated positions northeast and southeast from it as staging ground for further assaults.

The 1st and 2nd mechanized infantry platoons from Charlie Company would act as spearhead units. With its four infantry squads mounted on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV) sections they would roll east, dismount at enemy contact, flank and destroy its enemies. As backup I choose the 3rd Platoon (November), which consisted of four heavily armoured Abrams tanks. In case this would not be enough, the entire 2nd platoon from Able Company had mounted the two Chinooks (Sierra and Tango) at main base, with flight waypoints for insertion already layed out. Also, the fourth platoon, Charlie Company, consisting of four more Abrams, were stationed behind the front line and could arrive at the scene within 3 minutes.

The bloody road towards Alis Crossing

(1710 to 1730)

It took a while before we drew first contact. One and a half BFV platoons with mounted infantry advanced on a broad front of 1 km, with the middle units taking the lead. At first, it seemed that it was just a straggling squad that engaged a bradley section and its infantry squads. However, hell broke loose very quickly after the first minutes passed, and all mechanized infantry units were engaged into heavy fighting on the entire line of advance. With some casualities in infantry, the appearance of BMPs and the loss of two Bradleys, I brought the November tanks and called for artillery strike on two enemy infantry positions.

Initially, it seemed that I won the upper hand and I chose to push forward on the southeastern route, while spamming the northestern front with artillery. However, the enemy also reinforced its lines - the result beeing half a remaining Abrams platoon that had to fight dearly for its remaining armor plates. Eventually, the remaining damaged units got blown to pieces. With the infantry also taking heavy sucker punches from T-72 and BMP-1s, I chose to throw everything at them I could spare in short time - Cobra air support, artillery, Tomahawks roared through the sky, followed by the two troop - filled Chinooks. The artillery had good effect on the enemy infantry, and with the Tomahawks delivering their package with utmost precision, I had good hope to continue my offensive to the east.

Murphys Laws

(1730 to 1830)

Of course, one of the Chinooks passed an enemy infantry squad that had sneaked through my defense line and was blown out of the sky. Fortunatly, the troops bailed, saving one of two squads on board. Of course, they all had broken legs due to their low parachute height, were crawling behind enemy lines and crying for first aid..

While I tried to initiate a rescue operation, the second Chinook apperantly malfunctioned while landing at main base to get another pair of squads from Able company.. blast! I was down to one air transport, which was the Special Forces Black Hawk Romeo. After delivering two of three SF teams to conduct some special operations in other areas of Libya BH Romeo was used to extract the entire squad of wounded soldiers that survived the Chinook crash and bring it to sick bay at the southern base. In the following fifteen minutes, it would bring 4 squads to the frontlines before beeing heavily damaged by AA fire. It was then decided to use truck transportation for further front line supplies.

Unfortunatly, Charlie Company headquarters with the mobile Ambulance drove into an ambush while trying to provide first aid to one of its badly hit infantry squads. The Company Captain in his Scout BFV and all his subordinates died in the ensuing quick firefight.

One unit cleary make outstanding deeds on the western front: Special Forces Team XRay (Sniper Strike Team). With sporadic support from Armor and Artillery, it held of multiple enemy assault northwest of Alis Crossing. Only a after a marksman had a lucky shot on the teams sniper, and a motorized infantry assault killed another team member and wounded a second, Team XRay had to be taken into the illusionary safety of the rear lines. Its wounded commanding officer will be recommended for the Medal of Honor.

During this time, the remaing Armor Platoon (Mike) was a life line of the Battalion. Whereever terrible situations would arise, the Abrams would roll in to clear them with some steam and lead. With two tanks in damaged state and two fully operational, it prevented the remaining units to fall apart.

Taking of Alis Crossing

(1830 to 1910)

The troops switched to nightvision. The battalion managed to take Alis Crossing and push further east, but at a terrible cost of one and a half infantry squads. Were it not for the Abrams platoon, the attack had been a failure, for a smaller counterattack of multiple enemy infantry squads brought my platoon sized offensive formation in deep trouble. I managed to scratch together two new replacement squads by joining multiple units together, and I moved all remaining command squads and sections to the front line. However, I was out of artillery ammunition and Tomahawks, and only one Cobra was left in operative state. Before the start of the operation, the battalion had a strenght of 240+ men when starting the operation. All in all, in only two hours and ten minutes, the troop count was down to 96 soldiers, leaving me at a operational fighting strenght below 40%. One tough hell of a ride. With such horrific losses in important troop formations I decided it would be better to abort the assault ( well, another reason would be that the mission is not finished yet, and I had to make some food in order to avoid starvation ).

Enemy troops destroyed

(End of Mission)

If my memory does not fail me, approximatly 15 infantry squads, and 5 platoons of armoured vehicles were obliterated. This is, however, just a rough estimation. Most of the opposition seemed to be eliminated, but some enemy activity was still reported near camps in the east.

Territorial gains / fullfilled objectives:

Alis Crossing and eastern perimenter taken and "secured".

Retrospective

- Prepare Your troops and make use of the terrain appriopriatly

- Dont waste Your choppers and arti

- Dont waste Your troops

- Really, dont waste Your troops

- plan Your moves carefully, and have reinforcements at hand when necessary

- excellent mission!

- not beeing able to repair is a feature..

- After one hour of fighting, the BFVs and infantry were low on Ammo. Ammo supply may be needed.

- dont wait until fuel is in the red, for the choppers have trouble when landing at the helipads!

- spawn camps are mean.. also, downgrade enemy force a bit. They are "the horror".

[zwobot 22]

Judging from Your playtime, You had at least some initial significant encounters with enemy forces. Have there been any key moments in particular You remember? Have You experienced enemy artillery strikes on Your position?

Yes I had enemy contact when I sent weakened platoon sized recon elements east. But they were wiped out (I should micro manage and take command personally a bit more on vital assets maybe) and no enemy artillery came down on me.

Unfortunately I do have a tight time schedule as well and cannot commit very much time to playing Ofp.

While this are the setting of rPlatoonCommandStructure, I left rTeamFormations untouched believing it just holds parameters that can be changed by the player in the formation menu of the CE during the game anyway. If this is wrong, please tell me, and I will make according adjustments to rTeamFormations.

I would have to look into the CE2 documentation again to make a statement on this because it's been a while since I last used the CE2 from a mission designer perspective.

But I think you got it right and ordering the team elements into formation should make the whole company follow the company HQ unit. Maybe I was too impatient or did something wrong. I'm going pay close attention to this the next time I play.

It would be nice to have company as well as platoon formations you could order around but CE2 does not support this if I remember correctly and I am not sure if there are enough teams available to group the whole batallion into platoon sized teams (would have to check in the manual again). Consequently the current solution is the best way probably.

As for CoC AI on demand: I think it might solve lag problems and get rid of quite some global variables at the same time if used instead of DAC. On the other hand DAC should be optimised pretty good too and I think it potentially could simulate an enemy force which exceeds 256 units when you use group reduction (which you already do I think but the hint only showed about 11 vehicles cached for me).

In any case you would need to use a lot of editor placed enemy groups with guard waypoints which wouldn't be a bad thing either. Walker created some impressive big scale missions for CEX which solely rely on guard waypoints for your foes and according to him guard waypoints work particularly well in large scale missions like Operation Matchball. Read up on it here: http://forums.bistudio.com/showpost.php?p=1096323&postcount=22 and here: http://forums.bistudio.com/showpost.php?p=1277808&postcount=31 for example

One thing came into my mind while I was writing the above paragraph: I think CoC AI on demand is not savegame friendly at all, but please don't take it for a fact. Better read it up in the readme or make a quick test.

At the end of the day it is your decision if you use DAC, AI on demand or whatever. I don't have any at all on my hardware but I can Arma2 alright too, so...

[RKDmitriyev 0]

I will look into how he solved that problem. However, I do not think that there is much hope in saving the save game. Instead, one might try to save the mission and take the cheap way out and state that there are no save games in real life anyway ;-) I realize, though, that playing a mission for 2 hours is a hit on the time schedule, and a missing savegame option is a problem.

I should mention that it can depend on when you save, too, as that determines how many variables are in play that have to be recorded. I've had saveGame CTD's with just a few units and CoC Cruise Missiles. That probably explains why Zwobot got the bug and I didn't.

[wuschel 10]

Due to a request of a player I updated the link of the mission. Thanks to Zulu for storing the file :)

Note that Drongo's Toolkit makes this kind of script combinations - UA, DAC and CE - like I used in this mission obsolete now.. I still wonder how many players and units DT can take. Battalion scale with 15 players? (:

Edited October 27, 2011 by wuschel

[AlexeiGuba 12]

I am sorry for asking in this old thread but: has someone a working link to this mission or has the file and can give it to me?

Thanks! :)

[zulu1 145]

I am sorry for asking in this old thread but: has someone a working link to this mission or has the file and can give it to me?

Thanks! :)

With the comments not sure why you want this. Nothing wrong with the concept really, just over eagar with use of scripting pacakages. DAC, CCE etc.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/tptlass4g3y6gf9/sp_cedacua_matchball_rev15.Libya_256.rar

[AlexeiGuba 12]

Thanks! Once again you saved another guy looking for stuff to play with.

Now, there are not too many missions for the Libya terrain so one must get what he can. Maybe I can fix some of the problem by myself and having a good time. :)