Sorry in advance for making two threads back to back, but I was just curious to get some feedback.
I've been developing an insurgency mission for a little while now, but I've been curious about how others set up their AO markers. Personally, I have one giant AO marker for the entire area where insurgents are active. Is this the best way to go about creating an AO, or should I create a bunch of smaller AOs, like per town?
Depends on what you are trying to do, but I usually just have insurgents without a taor, and I blacklist all the spots I don't want them to be such as bases and airports. I don't see the point in a bunch of small taors unless you are trying to do something specific. The commander will pick up the objectives just as fine if you set it to the complete map instead of small taors.
I'm the same, a blacklist TAOR around the players base, and that's pretty much it for the majority of our missions.
The main exception would be say the player base is in the south I might make a TAOR for the bottom of the map, one for the middle and one for the top, then use those to increase the amount of enemies around the further north the players go. The problem with that though is it's very easy to create too many objectives if you have overlap.
For an insurgency I blacklist a 500-1000 meter radious around the player base from IEDs, objectives etc. so the players have a "clean" area to gear up. That's pretty much it. I'll typically have the Blufor friendlies set to only patrol major areas..with players responsible for taming the smaller, more remote villages and towns. Finding the balance on friendlies between overpowering insurgents and getting annihilated by an overwhelming tide of insurgents is the challenge.
As of now, I have the players responsible for patrolling the entire AO. I have had some issues setting up BLUFOR patrols, how do you do it?
Well unless you enjoy that type of thing, I typically don’t want friendly AI constantly interfering with my operations too much, so I do what AuTigerGrad does and usually limit them to medium or larger objectives only. Or for another example, I’ll sometimes let them do whatever they want even at smaller military objectives and leave the civ objs to me. That kind of thing. But as he said, balancing takes time and experimentation.
In my Unsung Lam Dong campaign, , I just set up blacklisted areas for the insurgents and a "hotzone" TOAR in the rice paddies, and some small TOAR's around my bases for basic setup and blacklisting. In reality, the Blufor units seem to go on anti-insurgent patrols all on their own once their TOAR is secured. And insurgents do not confine themselves strictly to the TOAR if they know about Blufor's objectives. But, if you are not syncing modules, then TOAR might be more important.
@HeroesandvillainsOS Well unless you enjoy that type of thing, I typically don’t want friendly AI constantly interfering with my operations too much, so I do what AuTigerGrad does and usually limit them to medium or larger objectives only. Or for another example, I’ll sometimes let them do whatever they want even at smaller military objectives and leave the civ objs to me. That kind of thing. But as he said, balancing takes time and experimentation.
I discussed previously about duplicate objectives and this filter issue. How do you manage to make friendly AI aware of "medium or larger objectives only" without having duplicate objectives?
If the other side is aware of the same objectives, you don’t.