Any "prolonged" scenarios?

[difool2]

Have had this for a week, slowly (re)learning how to drive a modern sub. I bought it knowing full well how the scenario/campaign system worked, but after playing several custom scenarios I've downloaded I'll make an observation.

Invariably I'll be dropped into the gameworld fairly close to my objective, and it won't take a huge amount of time to find my target(s) (with the exception of Kara Sea, but even then I found my target within 10 hours of starting the scenario). Reviewing the replay with truth on, every scenario has a bunch of ships within 100 miles of your starting point, and nothing farther away.

I'd just like to be dropped into a scenario where there's traffic spread out pretty much everywhere, and I have to go find it (with help of other linked AI units and radio intel of course) over a period of several days. 16x compression isn't bad in the relatively small square each scenario encompasses (at least compared to the ocean-wide Silent Hunt campaigns). Is there a technical reason why few/no scenarios like this exist, or is every designer merely following some sort of community standard where such things simply "aren't done"? Does the AI go haywire or something after 24 hours or so?

[Dr.Sid]

There is no limit I know of, but more platforms means slower simulation. Even the last campaign missions are quite slow and time compression does not reach indicated values.
But that for sure depends on hardware you use. So simply try it.

[Frame57]

This is my bane as well. You can have someone else make up the missions you are desiring. or make them up yourself. I like to hunt things, so I will make up a few missions and use random box for them, so I do not know precisely where they are at, then hunt them down. You can develope some good ones as you get more tuned into the mission editor. But i agree, that all the missions and campaigns pretty much put you right into it. I like not knowing what is there, like int he good old days when we would be on patrol. We would just snoop around in a specified area and if we found a contact, we would radio it in, and usually we would get orders to track it and if possible make SPA's on it. It is all about the thrill of the hunt.

[Blacklight]

Have you tried the Red Storm Rising campaign or Sicilian Wedding ? Those missions have some far reaching goals.

Sicilian Wedding is huge !

[difool2]

Thanks-will do.

[Kapitan]

Some of the mission i make have random start points i realsed none so far, but they vary depending on what i want to do, most of them even at compression have to be played over a period of days to get to a goal or track a submarine.

made on where i had to transit to kings bay and wait for a boomer (longest mission id ever done) spread over about 12 missions for transit and pick up then home (used same mission map home) that took nearly a month to do in real time you would be looking 3 maybe touching 4 months so in all it went well, second time i did it i rammed the boat i was ment to be trailing so that one wasnt so good.

[Bill Nichols]

Originally Posted by Blacklight

Have you tried the Red Storm Rising campaign or Sicilian Wedding ? Those missions have some far reaching goals.

Sicilian Wedding is huge !

My goal in Sicilian Wedding was to do the equivalent of an entire campaign in a single mission. That way, weapon conservation becomes very important! Also, many of the situations in Sicilian Wedding are based on my real-life experiences while serving on a nuclear sub in the Med.

Red Storm Rising is, as the name suggests, based on the novel. The scenarios are my interpretation of the storyline. I hope you enjoy the campaign as much as I did creating it!

[difool2]

I'm about 1/2 way (?) thru Sicilian Wedding, about to sneak into the harbor, and enjoying it immensely. Even got some deep water CZ contacts (merchants tho).

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by difool2

Invariably I'll be dropped into the gameworld fairly close to my objective, and it won't take a huge amount of time to find my target(s) (with the exception of Kara Sea, but even then I found my target within 10 hours of starting the scenario).
...
Is there a technical reason why few/no scenarios like this exist, or is every designer merely following some sort of community standard where such things simply "aren't done"? Does the AI go haywire or something after 24 hours or so?

I think it's so interesting to listen to how long people take to find the SSBN in Kara Sea. It's usually pretty close to where statistics would predict it. That makes me happy.

There's not really a technical problem behind it, though. It's more a problem with the scenario designers. I think the problem you're describing is a symptom of several things. First, in order to hold most people's attention, a scenario must be exciting. That means they want to quickly be in a situation where they can start shooting and evading torpedoes. People want their scenarios to be fun, and sailing around an empty box looking for an elusive submarine can be boring. Unfortunately, in a real ASW battle, you're going to spend a lot of time sailing around an empty box, which brings me to the next problem.

Most people designing scenarios don't have a very good idea of what an ASW battle looks like, and the distance and time scales involved. There's actually formulas that one can use to take quantities like search speed, sonar range, and search area size, to predict statistically about how well a given platform will do. Using those will allow people to better allocate platforms to appropriate sized areas given their estimate of how long they want the scenario to run. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of people here who know how to do that.

When you look at the numbers, then for the sonar performances that say, a 688i has in the game, and make some assumptions about search speed, then you can easily search a 50mile box in 10-12 hours, often less, but people don't want to play for that long. The truth is, a lot of ASW is sailing around looking at nothing. Too often victory is defined as "nothing happens." That makes for very poor video gaming, unfortunately.

Huuum... I've never made a realistically sized barrier patrol...

[Kapitan]

Nor have i to be honest yes some of the missions i make do take a long time akula your search box of 50 miles can take about 16 to 20 hours if you did it properly, bear in mind the mission box is about 1000 square miles makes it so much harder.

i fancy another trip down to kings bay now dam it !

[difool2]

Originally Posted by SeaQueen

There's not really a technical problem behind it, though. It's more a problem with the scenario designers. I think the problem you're describing is a symptom of several things. First, in order to hold most people's attention, a scenario must be exciting. That means they want to quickly be in a situation where they can start shooting and evading torpedoes. People want their scenarios to be fun, and sailing around an empty box looking for an elusive submarine can be boring. Unfortunately, in a real ASW battle, you're going to spend a lot of time sailing around an empty box, which brings me to the next problem.

When you look at the numbers, then for the sonar performances that say, a 688i has in the game, and make some assumptions about search speed, then you can easily search a 50mile box in 10-12 hours, often less, but people don't want to play for that long. The truth is, a lot of ASW is sailing around looking at nothing. Too often victory is defined as "nothing happens." That makes for very poor video gaming, unfortunately.

Well, I come from the Silent Hunter community, where you can literally search for weeks of game time (hour upon hour of real time) and not find anything, but me I'm cool with that-finally locating a target makes that encounter all the more special. I don't see very many posters who come both here and over there (not trying to start a flame war understand ), so I guess its just community standards at work. I like starting farther away from the enemy in a blue water scenario because then the convergence zones come into play-what's the point of placing the enemy inside the last CZ like I see in so many scenarios?

[Blacklight]

The catch is that in Silent Hunter III, the time compression will drop back down to realtime when a contact is picked up where as in Dangerous Waters, you'll just keep going and then be blown out of the water by something that whizzed by and shot a time compressed torpedo at you. The time compression in Silent Hunter III makes it bearable to hunt mad long distances. Dangerous Waters just doesn't have that feature (Although it would be nice).

I also don't think I'd mind an ultra-realistic naval target hunt/tracking in DW. I'm used to playing realtime campaigns in SHIII all the time.

[SeaQueen]

I don't see very many posters who come both here and over there (not trying to start a flame war understand ), so I guess its just community standards at work.

Honestly, the appeal of the two games is different. I enjoy both, but nuclear power puts a very different spin on the nature of how the game is played.

I like starting farther away from the enemy in a blue water scenario because then the convergence zones come into play-what's the point of placing the enemy inside the last CZ like I see in so many scenarios?

In environments where you lack significant depth excess, you might not see any convergence zones.

Ignoring that possiblity, I think the point is that putting the enemy in close tends to have the effect of shortening the amount of time you have for decision making, and ultimately the amount of time from detection to shooting. I think in certain other cases, the scenario designer is trying to surprise the player. For those who want to play "ASW Doom" that's great. Although I think it's sort of a cheap trick, ultimately, because once you realize there's a submarine placed in close, you don't get fooled a second time so the scenario gets old fast.

Having to surprise the player by artificially putting an enemy in close is a sign of having insufficient randomness in the scenario. When designing scenarios I think it's really important to randomize the enemy submarine's location and depth. It doesn't hurt to randomize the number of submarines as well. It's also important to choose an appropriate distance scale for the scenario to occur over. If you do all of those things, then there's enough uncertainty in the game for the enemy to surprise you without resorting to cheap tricks which wear off once you've discovered them. It makes for more replayable scenarios and it makes for much more fun ones in my mind, because it makes the player the decision-maker. Isn't that why we fantasize about driving submarines in the first place, to be in the captain's chair? Too often scenario designers try to make people jump through too many hoops and if you don't solve a problem in a very specific way, then you lose. That's lame. Scenarios should be open ended enough that people can try different tactics, approaches and methodologies and still win. It should be up to the player what the best way to tackle a problem is.

The other thing I see going on sometimes is just people not knowing. Sometimes people honestly try to add enough randomess and they just don't know enough about ASW tactics and search theory to make decisions about things like how to position and size random position boxes or dynamic locations so that the randomness they add actually matters and doesn't just suck up CPU cycles.

[Molon Labe]

Originally Posted by SeaQueen

Ignoring that possiblity, I think the point is that putting the enemy in close tends to have the effect of shortening the amount of time you have for decision making, and ultimately the amount of time from detection to shooting. I think in certain other cases, the scenario designer is trying to surprise the player. For those who want to play "ASW Doom" that's great. Although I think it's sort of a cheap trick, ultimately, because once you realize there's a submarine placed in close, you don't get fooled a second time so the scenario gets old fast.

Having to surprise the player by artificially putting an enemy in close is a sign of having insufficient randomness in the scenario. ... It's also important to choose an appropriate distance scale for the scenario to occur over. If you do all of those things, then there's enough uncertainty in the game for the enemy to surprise you without resorting to cheap tricks which wear off once you've discovered them. It makes for more replayable scenarios and it makes for much more fun ones in my mind, because it makes the player the decision-maker. ... Scenarios should be open ended enough that people can try different tactics, approaches and methodologies and still win. It should be up to the player what the best way to tackle a problem is.

I definitely agree in principle. If there's anything I hate, it's single-path, single method missions. I've been trying to make things a bit more open ended lately thanks to people like SuBB who have shown a willingness for MP sessions that last longer than the usual 2-3 hours. Still they're in the minority. Just as an example of my frustrations, in one session I played about two months ago, the scenario was set up with forces far enough apart that the location of intercept, if it occured at all, was highly variable, but that also meant that the time was highly variable as well--no sooner than 1 hr. in if everyone was aggressive. Well, the closest Blue side platform dropped, and the closest red side player and the next closest Blue side player played conservatively. It's perfectly legitimate to play conservatively of course, but that will delay the time contact occurs. As the 2 hr mark approached the complaints about "nothing happening" started to build, and shortly thereafter a Blue player voluntarily dropped--and he was probably only 10 minutes from being engaged, too. The AI failed to take over his platform and the whole match was screwed.

Even though the delayed contact was due to someone dropping and the choices the players made, I still found it necessary to make some changes in the scenario to accelerate the conflict. Fortunately, in this specific case, those changes probably improved dynamics rather than harmed them, but that of course is not the usual result.

I'm not going to stop trying to make longer missions just yet, but I can't shake the feeling that they won't see much use.

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by Molon Labe

Just as an example of my frustrations, in one session I played about two months ago, the scenario was set up with forces far enough apart that the location of intercept, if it occured at all, was highly variable, but that also meant that the time was highly variable as well--no sooner than 1 hr. in if everyone was aggressive. Well, the closest Blue side platform dropped, and the closest red side player and the next closest Blue side player played conservatively. It's perfectly legitimate to play conservatively of course, but that will delay the time contact occurs. As the 2 hr mark approached the complaints about "nothing happening" started to build, and shortly thereafter a Blue player voluntarily dropped--and he was probably only 10 minutes from being engaged, too. The AI failed to take over his platform and the whole match was screwed.

Yeah... that happens. Multiplayer scenarios are a special case, however, I'd argue that you can still pull it off by chosing appropriately sized areas. For example, in the Kara Sea scenario, I'm always fascinated by the game time it takes for people to play it because I designed it around a simple search model

Pd = 1 - exp(-wvt/A)

That's Koopman's random search equation. It gives the probability of detecting a target at a uniformly distributed random point in an area of size 'A.' If you guys want to get really geeky we can talk about what it really means because when you start thinking about it, it's actually quite pessimistic. By inverting that equation I can come up with the median time to detection, and other numbers too. It's not a bad idea to plan a scenario around that. By using only slightly more elaborate methods you can make some calculations for planning a search area so that you can play a scenario in a reasonable amount of time with say a P-3 and an SSN in two assigned areas for MP. I haven't done it yet, but lately I haven't been doing as much gaming as I've been doing. It's sun shiney out and my balcony called me.

There's another equation, called the Klingbeil magnet that's good for barrier searches. Although you can't get a time to detect from that, you can figure that out by the kinematics of the scenario.