GCM new carry-over campaign mode

For those of you who haven't experimented with it, the mod now allows the host to set lots of parameters for a given battle, including the number of divisions involved (1 to 5 per side) and many other things, including number of objectives (minimum = 1).

We would like to avoid objectives revealing the enemy's presence to the other side by lighting up when occupied. I therefore asked Garnier, on the GCM forum,* whether he could alter the mod to allow 0 objectives as an option when setting up a game, or whether that would muck other things up.

Garnier has replied with a lateral-thinking work-round. Set the objective radius at 10 yards and the number of troops required at 1000. Thus, impossible to take objective. Bob's your uncle.

*http://forums.sowmp.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=197

I want to experiment more, when people have time, with the GCM mod as it does a lot of what we want.

Clever guy, Garnier. It would be nice to convert him to HITS & couriers

Martin

What I would like to propose, and this is really aimed at our own modding wizard, Little Billy, is that he take a look inside the actual GCM mod itself and resets all the gameplay changes to default and we then work away at it to make our own version with variables we think make a better game for our purposes. This would include removing Garniers unmarked mini-maps and putting in Kevin's. We end up with the best of all 3 worlds - Garniers campaign system and his nice random maps; our "KS" SoW gameplay mod; HITS and couriers.

It may be a tall order depending what he's changed but worth a try I think?

Just played a SP game & chose to command one of three US divisions, against 3 CS divisions. (Had a brilliant game, btw, routing the enemy when I came out of a wooded ridge on their flank)

You can now choose to play with one to seven (I think) divisions on each side. This gives us a way of setting up a battle with the correct number of divisions for the number of players we have at any given time on the TS server (if we all take div. commands) in less than a minute. If we want to play with mixing up divisions and brigades, requires a little more flexibility (aka leaving some gaps for the AI too fill).

@Digby
I have no understanding of the amount of work involved in what you are proposing for Kevin, so am not sure of the implications. I can't say that in game I notice the gameplay variations in Garnier's mod and I'm quite happy to play with it. I can't see us all suddenly becoming gung-ho column chargers...

Looking forward to the next game.

I'll download the GCM mod and have a look at it. Since it is just a mod, we should be able to remove the parts we object to and add others that we want.

I took a look at the GCM mod yesterday. It's quite detailed. Garnier put quite a bit of effort into it. It looks as if removing the mods that emasculate the artillery, increase the firepower of the muskets, allowing every formation to charge, etc can easily be removed. We can then substitute whatever we want. There is one problem that can only be corrected manually each time a battle is to be fought. Garnier decided to further hamstring the artillery by making the gun crews very small so that they fire less often and will route after only one or two casualties. This is in the oob. So the umpire will have to take the oob and manually restore the 15 men/gun. As hated as artillery is among the GCM'ers, I don't know why they didn't just remove them from the game entirely.

Thanks for this, Kevin. It sounds very promising (apart from the strength of the batteries, which sounds a pain).

For campaigns (such as Digby's) and planned battles with full scenarios (such as Leffe's) could the GCM mod (or a future KS version) be part of the system? Or does the need to place units in position mean each battle needs to be built from the ground up?

For the moment I can see that the GCM mod (as is) should be very useful for setting up context-free ad-hoc battles very quickly. eg, there are six players on TS wanting to have a battle - the host sets up a 3 div vs 3 div battle. We'd need to check it works in MP as promised and we'd have to be happy to live (for the time being) with the differences from vanilla that you mention.

The way I envision this mod will be used is as follows: each player has a modified version of GCM. By that I mean, the mod contains the essential GCM files and the KS mod files. The host or umpire downloads the scenario and oob from the GCM server. He then mods the oob to restore the artillery. The battle is fought. The only problem may be that when the umpire connects with the server, it will restore all the original files to his GCM mod automatically. He'll then have to make the needed changes to get back to KS approved files. I don't know if that will happen or not, it's just a possibility.

Uncle Billy wrote:The way I envision this mod will be used is as follows: each player has a modified version of GCM. By that I mean, the mod contains the essential GCM files and the KS mod files. The host or umpire downloads the scenario and oob from the GCM server. He then mods the oob to restore the artillery. The battle is fought. The only problem may be that when the umpire connects with the server, it will restore all the original files to his GCM mod automatically. He'll then have to make the needed changes to get back to KS approved files. I don't know if that will happen or not, it's just a possibility.

Thanks again. I'd have to do it to really 'get it' but I understand more now. The above process works for context-free games I assume. What about something like Leffe's planned scenario? Is that something totally different, or could it be a bolt-on to the process you describe?

Blaugrana wrote:

What about something like Leffe's planned scenario? Is that something totally different, or could it be a bolt-on to the process you describe?

That does not require the use of GCM. The GCM/KS mod can be active. It shouldn't negatively interfere with anything. It just saves the step of getting the scenario off the GCM server and then modding the GCM oob.