In search of original concepts

[Paul Hanson]

I`m currently working on Red Storm, a scenario about a Soviet invasion of Western Europe in the 1970`s. So far, work`s been progressing quite well (my units are all of a similar style, the graphics correspond to the unit they represent, etc.), but now I`m looking for some original ideas to set it apart from every other scenario in existence. So far, I`ve come up with these, semi-original ideas.

1. Most units cannot be built.
The vast majority of units in Red Storm cannot be built in the usual Civ2 sense. The only units that can be built in cities are basic infantry units and possibly missiles, which I`m toying with at the moment. Stronger units, like tanks and planes, are generated by events every few turns in certain cities. The idea is that you must protect your key production centres from being overrun by the Soviets.

2. Happiness affected by Riot Control
The normal Civ2 game allows you to build religious buildings to keep your citizens happy, and allows you to give them luxuries to keep them content. In Red Storm, your citizens are in a mad panic, especially in places likely to be overrun by Russia. What you must now do is employ Riot Police (Temple) to keep them in line. If this fails, you can build a Military Police Post (Stadium) or Garrison (Cathedral). Furthermore, luxuries are replaced by Riot Control, which channels some of your funds into improving the quality of policing in your cities.

3. Streamlining of your command structure
When you start the game, the Allies (the playable civ) are a Republic. Although this allows for relatively high production, it also causes problems when you need to support units on the battlefield. This is due to the large number of national commands that exist within the NATO alliance, which causes requires endless red tape and bureaucracy. By changing your government to a Military Alliance (Fundamentalism), you eliminate these problems by streamlining your many commands into a unified NATO Command.

4. Manpower replaces Resources
Manpower is the single most useful resource you have at your disposal in Red Storm. From your availiable manpower, you can recruit soldiers, construction workers and bureaucrats. The more men are available, the quicker you can find enough to from new regiments to send to battle. Once in battle, they require bureaucrats back home to keep filing paperwork, which wastes your manpower (eliminated once you become a Military Alliance). Construction workers can build defences, improvements and ammo.

Does anyone else have some good ideas that I could use? If so, do tell me, and I may credit you if I use your idea.

[Jimmywax]

Wow man, those are some pretty good ideas. I will have to think for a while to come up with soemthing.

BTW, how far are you from completing this. I realy look foward to it.

[Paul Hanson]

To be honest, it`ll probably be quite a while, because I work slowly on scenarios.

I`m glad you like my ideas. Many of them are nothing special, just a case of renaming certain aspects and passing them off as new concepts in gameplay.

[our_man]

If the player can switch to Fundamentalism, that sort of does away with the riot aspect of the scenario. I know there's still a point to building these improvements in order to get tithes, but from your description it sounds like you're after the effect that a large scale war has on a populace. If this is the case, I suggest you ignore Fundamentalism, unless NATO has the capability to develop overnight into a fascist regime... Maybe Communism would be more suitable. It also sounds that the scenario is meant to be played from the NATO side only, in which case I suggest giving the computer a Fundamentalist government renamed as Communism.

Great idea about manpower! With regards to improvements which increase resource production e.g. factories, what about having improvements which simulate 'freeing' manpower from non-essential work to contrbute to the war effort? For example, 'recruitment campaign' replacing factory.

[Paul Hanson]

Originally posted by our_man
If the player can switch to Fundamentalism, that sort of does away with the riot aspect of the scenario. I know there's still a point to building these improvements in order to get tithes, but from your description it sounds like you're after the effect that a large scale war has on a populace. If this is the case, I suggest you ignore Fundamentalism, unless NATO has the capability to develop overnight into a fascist regime... Maybe Communism would be more suitable. It also sounds that the scenario is meant to be played from the NATO side only, in which case I suggest giving the computer a Fundamentalist government renamed as Communism.

Great idea about manpower! With regards to improvements which increase resource production e.g. factories, what about having improvements which simulate 'freeing' manpower from non-essential work to contrbute to the war effort? For example, 'recruitment campaign' replacing factory.

The idea is that Fundamentalism isn`t a fascist government in this case, it`s a more efficient command structure. It`s just a limitation of the Civ2 engine, so you have to use your imagination a bit. Just suppose that when you switched to a miltary alliance, people become more aware of the need to maintain a large force and the unhappiness problems go away.

Also, the tithes would be necessary in this, because by downgrading from Republic, you would lose the +1 trade per square generated by this govt. The tithes would offset this somewhat.

As for the improvements idea, I had sort of had that kind of idea, but was unsure of how exactly to implement it. What sort of things would draw people into cities? Recruitment centres for Factories, OK, but what then? Advanced Recuitment Centre for Manufacturing Plants sounds a bit cheesy.

[our_man]

I don't have that many ideas myself for improvements, but I suppose having press gangs would be too drastic for a democracy. I'll see if I can think of anything else along these lines.

[master on high]

- Make a Neutral civ and create neutral refugees that clog up main roads when cities are taken. It will slow any counter attack to a slow crawl, especially if NATO is allied to the Neutrals, and the Soviets are not.

- Make events that simulate intelligence. Perhaps something like "our German intelligence has reported that the Soviets are massing for a great push on Cologne." and then the player can either believe it, or think that it's a bluff. Make the intelligence roughly 50% effective, so that people KNOW that it won't always be right. This could be helped by the random events files, so nothing is exactly the same twice.

- Definte lines of supply...duh...hope you know that when Bonn is taken then most of it's units will be reduced to a few rouge battalions.

- Food caravans. Make some cities large producers of them so that they can feed the larger cities. Would make some cities more important than others.

eh...just what I've thought of in a few minutes.

[Hobbes]

some ideas:

have a city improvement called "Martial Law" or "Riot Police" that takes the place of the cathedral, but make it's cost very low so it can be built in one turn, yet make it's maintenance cost very high. So when you have just captured a city and you don't want to built something expensive to make the people happy, build the Martial Law and then start to build some else, like a temple, with out having to pay for it. Then, once the temple is built, sell the Martial Law.

have random events in the form of newspaper headlines like:
American President caught with pants down or
Stock Market Crashes!

have lots of air and submarine warfare. have submarine destroying helecopters.

have the technology tree have options to be able to create something that was never created or something that was by never used (eg. stealth boats, anti-matter bombs)

help from the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc for NATO and help from China(maybe), Cuba, North Korea and Eastern Europe for the Soviets.

[WarVoid]

-Partisan Units
When a unit is destroyed use the events to trigger the creation of a few "partisans" from the destroyed unit. Such as the destruction of an APC or IFV might leave one or two soldiers alive which spring into action near the destroyed unit.

I've begun to use this idea with some success in my upcoming scenarios.


-Stalingrad
When one unit in Stalingrad is destroyed you could use a trigger event to replace it with a weaker civilian defense unit. THis will stall the German advance much like it was IRL while allowing the city to still be bombarded by an endless offensive of Deutschen weaponry.

[JMarks]

-Leave Factory as is or name it Manufacturing Plant. After all those help 'amplify' manpower

-Rename Manufacturing Plant - Recruitment Center

[Hobbes]

more ideas:

underground resistance:
once a city is occupied, instead of partisans, have units that look like the occupier's units that act like diplomats. It will be hard, as well as confusing, to get rid of all of them.

changing terrain:
after a city is capture, make some of the surrounding terrain rubble, which nothing can be built on, but an engineer can change it back to normal land, after a long time.

bombing raids:
make an unmovable "factory" unit, which is an air unit, and can only be attacked by air units and once the unit is destroyed, money is taken away from the defender. This way, your factories are very important and need to be protected.

[Juche]

Okay here are some ideas I'd like to implement in my scenario (set c. 1985, playable only as the Soviets).

1. Bridges. In GDR/Poland/Czech. bridges are a vital means of supply that will have to be gaurded to continue supply to the invasion force. To NATO bridges are something that must be destroyed before the Pact can get to them. Sadly there is no way (without using multiple bridge units) to have Soviets actually be able to secure a bridge, but that frankly wasn't likely to happen anyway on the big rivers (Rhine+Main+Neckar+Mosel, Danube, Loire, Elbe). Theoretically the destruction of these bridges can be handled by having them supported by cities that will have to be taken before you can get to the bridge. But the computer may end up disbanding them way before the connected city is taken...

2. River Crossing/Bridging units. The Soviets had tons of these, and you can see why. These units will be transports that are paradropped into a nearby river so that units can be transported accross, during which time they are very vulnerable. Since these units will be invaluable to the player, I'll have to be careful considering how many to give (They had 6 bridging and 6 river crossing regiments in the Group of Soviet Forces Germany, and the Pact countries also had a lot).

3. Supply. In order to replenish losses conquered cities will be able to create new units, but Soviet units will cost a whole lot to make, and that is why Supply units, created by events, will be valuable to the player. when disbanded in a city they will provide enough shields to "produce" a unit of mobile infantry (it will take more than one supply truck for other units -but they won't be rare).

4. Vulnerable supply lines. Air Strike (short-range missiles) units will be spawned along roads that the Supply units will be traveling down, and will be able to wreak havok on your means of supply! Air Strike units will also threaten your Bridges, further slowing down your supply route. It therefore becomes necessary for you to post units along your supply routes (the Air Strikes aren't very strong, but they can add up).

In case you're thinking "I'll just disband the Suppliers in the nearest city and have the unit with stronger defense go to the front," you're smart, but you should know Supply units will be twice as fast as a normal unit, so you have to balance the risks.


-Other than all that it's all pretty basic stuff. I'm wondering if I should go through the effort of making the Red Army civ seperate from the other Warsaw Pact countries, and if I should make their respective Air Forces seperate as well. If I did the latter, I could give the ground force's artillery carrier ability and give them some shell units to play with.

-I'm still working on the map (It's a Gigamap) for this one, so there's still time to change direction. If I wear myself out and am incapable of finishing at some point I can always just release the more simplistic (though broader in scope) version I am almost finished with.

Oh, can anybody guess who this is a DL of?

[Stefu]

Anyway, if you want a good timeline for events, may I suggest this timeline, from soc.history.what-if? It doesn't go all the way, but should provide some assistance. Of course, noting the author would be good manners.

[Chris 62]

When I was in the Army(80-86), we had fixed hardpoints in Germany and western Europe that had heavy equipment in storage, called Reforger sites. The concept was that trained personel could be rushed to Europe, and quickly mated with on site equipment to rapidly deploy heavy units in combat, without the needed to ship the heavy equipment across the Atlantic. So you could have map tiles, not just cities, to recieve reinforcements. Our whole doctrone was based on defending the reforger sites, and there location was kept secret, in the hopes of adding to their survivability. If you have reinforcements only in cities, the enemy will know where to strike to cut the flow, so you could add some of these sites in the events to prevent predictability.

[Jimmywax]

Originally posted by Juche

-Other than all that it's all pretty basic stuff. I'm wondering if I should go through the effort of making the Red Army civ seperate from the other Warsaw Pact countries, and if I should make their respective Air Forces seperate as well. If I did the latter, I could give the ground force's artillery carrier ability and give them some shell units to play with.

I don't think ground carriers will work. When they move they leave the units that are supposed to go with them behind. Kind of like ground transport units.

[PolarisGL]

I did it with Gettysburg and the leaving behind of artillery shells out of artillery guns represented how difficult it was to move artillery at the time.

[Panda]

Just to underline cpoulos' point about reforger sites, you'll find that if you have events creating units in a city, they will continue to be placed there after the city changes ownership. Non-city squares which are occupied by another player will not.