Ive been playing around with alive for a while now and in the previous campaign i ran with my unit i came uo against someone who wanted more scripted missions such as convoy support, search and rescue etc.
How do you guys get around this?
Secondly do you find a role for zeus in Alive missions? I always find they just screw up what the AI commander has planned.
@AUTigerGrad for example, usually runs a long term persistent campaign on his server, but once a week or so, he puts up a smaller, mission/objective focused no-respawn operation to mix things up, then the long term persistent campaign gets put back up after. He may or may not Zeus during either (I usually don’t ask as to not kill the magic).
Pretty sure this is how he still does it, but it’s been awhile since I played on his server. It’s a good idea maybe you can try to keep things fresh (though it does require you or your team to make lots of missions).
I often will run a zeus mission over the top of an ALiVE mission, it works great.
Last time I just placed a helicopter wreck down, a couple of units scattered around set to unconscious and give them some injuries, then dropped down a couple of civilians and gave them the intel action using achilles and gave him a path up to and around the chopper. That intel told my guys that the civilian had seen taliban fighters take 3 hostages off to a nearby village.
Then I just cuffed 3 friendly units placed them in buildings around the town and gave my guys the mission.
I had to baby sit things in zeus to add a few more enemy forces and reinforcements but it worked well.
I also have a convoy supply side mission that I've been working on. I've got about 9-12 hidden markers placed in certain towns around the map. You head into one of the hangars and ace interact with a laptop and it spawns 3 crates of supplies and gives you the location to deliver them. Those crates will only fit in the HEMTT trucks (again using ace) so it forces the players to have to defend the truck while you deliver the supplies. Once they're unloaded at the target location the civilian hostility is reduced in the area.
That normally keeps us busy at least half the night if not all night depending on how much goes wrong.
Good ideas @JD_Wang makes me wish I could do simple scripts like this. I love it.
Oh trust me, someone who actually knows what they're doing could do a much better job than I did. My scripts are normally cobbled together from others and horribly inefficient.
So you guys have alive running in the background? and Zeus actually creating the narrative? I'd like everything to be fairly fluid and the commander actually making decisions based on sitreps which have been given during the evening.
I have Zeus enabled but I rarely (more like never) use it to spawn in Opfors, etc during an actual ALiVE campaign. It's more of an insurance policy if a vehicle needs replacing, things get "fubared" in game and need a god like fix, etc. I find that the combination of VCOM plus ALiVE more than provides enough dynamic situations for my group on our server. That being said, I've thought about doing a purely Zeus mission but it just doesn't appeal to me as much as it does to some folks. I've played a Zeus mission with some folks and did have fun..I just prefer not knowing where and what is gonna happen.
But I always have a Zeus enabled on my campaigns for the reasons i posted above...insurance against shenanigans and hijinks derailing a campaign. Too many helos hovering overhead that won't go away? Zeus removes them, etc.
AuTigerGrad, that exactly what I was thinking, I like the combination of VCOM and Alive. However trying to get the Zeus to not spawn loads of units in an insurgency campaign is proving to be difficult. EG. Last night was our first trip into Isla Duala and more importantly in the friendly and pretty safe area of Afrene. (I've taken inspiration from your Deadly Shadows campaign I hope you don't mind) on our way south we came into contact with a bunch of insurgents. Now obviously the way I have had it set up, its a slow burn, lots of patrolling, intel gathering and general COIN stuff.
Basically I'm trying to keep zeus entertained as well as keeping things dynamic and actually follow a narrative.