Hey,

I'm fairly experienced with creating basic Occp/Invd -missions and so on, and recently I've become tempted of Asymmetric. I had no idea how much in-depth aspects it was holding with it all along. I have used it previosly in Stratis which is a fairly easy map for Alive due to having only a few objectives and them being apart from each other unlike some other maps. I thought Lithium (The FFAA map, what a masterpiece) was unindexed for civilians so Asymm wouldn't work but the situation has apparently changed now (?) so I tried;

I'm creating a mission, with Blufor units controlling the north of the map, then I created "objectives only" TAOR in to the middle, and TAOR for the insurgents down south. Problem for me is that although I do spawn insurgents in to the civilian placements, the OPCOM orders them to move into the civilian placements they're already controlling as they spawned inside them on the south side of the map. I figured, they might be placing installations (although there's already some). But this is kind of annoying, since the only thing that seems to matter to the OPCOM is the southern area of its TAOR. The other troops are not being waypointed anywhere, they just stand still. And oddly enough I noticed plenty of the insurgents being profiles of 1 soldier guarding places, I have never seen that before.

I have waited, with x4 speed, but the OPCOM just keeps the troops stationary at the big city of the southern area and elsewhere, maybe roaming the objectives in the big city a bit since the city has various of objectives inside it. I also tried to spawn insurgents to Mil Placements only, Civ Placements being "objective only", and they did the same thing. Focus being _only_ in the southern area of its TAOR. Doing as I described worked fantasticly in Stratis. I've tried for hours and tweaked this over and over again.

The mission I'm trying to create is ISAF (NATO peacekeeping troops in Afganistan) being in the north, then a 'no-mans-land' where the enemy could proceed to as I'm contesting to keep the area safe, and then the Taliban stronghold in the south. Although my idea of stronghold might not be the best idea whilst working with Asymm OPCOM, the Taliban tend to behave in an Asymm OPCOM manner in real life so that's kind of a must-have for me right now. I'm just telling the scenario if you guys could come up with any alternative solution. Cheers!

I have to add: As being new to the forum I have to give a big shout out to the community and especially devs behind ALIVE. Greatest mission making tool ever, and it enables me to create the large dynamic battlefields I always wanted from Arma. Plus it's super easy to learn once you learn the concept behind it.

FANTASTIC WORK GUYS!

Just posted a new thread re: Lythium/JBAD buildings. M1lkm8n the JDAB dev says they use a different naming system which could be what's causing issues with ALiVE and any JBAD map.

Would make sense considering when Diyala swapped to using CUP (which is named correctly) all of a sudden that map worked great.

Hopefully that's the case and a workaround can be found because a working Lythium map would actually make me start making modded missions again.

Oh well, if the map itself has issues and such, then I think I should stop trying. Really hoping for Lithium to turn to CUP, as Diyala did because it’s a stunning map. Although my experience is that the civs and pre-setup installations seemed to work fine, the problem was behaviour/movement of the asymmetric units.

The behaviour I had and wanted in Stratis was that the asymmetric enemy would start at military placements through out the island (On realism stand point I wouldn’t have placed them in mil objectives initially but I just wanted to spawn them dynamically, sometimes I manually place them but it’s a killer because I know where the technicals are etc..) except for Kavala/Airport where I had Blufor present. Then they’d move into civ objectives marked as ’objectives only’ and spread the rebellion. This worked great, I observed an insurgent squad moving into a town, staying there for a little time, and proceeding away once they had reqruitment HQ established there. This kind of active movement into uncontrolled objectives didn’t happen in Lithium.

I’ll check Sangin. Takistan is just boring, I’ve spent too much time there and the map doesn’t make me have that Afghan feel Lithium does. Reshmaan had kind of annoying ’fogginess’ like Arma 2 did, but the size of the map was great. I’ll check FATA, thanks for the tips!

Kunduz would be AWESOME but it’s just so damn small..

@HeroesandvillainsOS Kunduz is great but has major issues. IMO avoid with ALiVE. Beautiful map, but needs an update badly.

Seems to be the law of Alive and maps, the best ones don't work correctly!

I tried FATA and Sangin. Compared, I'd prefer Takistan. Sangin especially had weird cartoonish feeling, hard to describe but they weren't fit for me. Could be that they're just imports from Arma II with Arma II graphics, and that's not working for me.

Any more good tips/tricks for a middle eastern peacekeeping (asymmetric) scenario, especially for the map?

Thank you for you help so far. I'm trying to get to Lebanon as an UN-peacekeeper myself, so naturally I'm enthusiastic about these kind of scenarios :D

Well I downloaded bunch of maps that are Alive compatible, came across Clafghan and Aliabad. Clafghan was a bit too deserty with very low amount of rural villages and too much forest. Aliabad is actually looking neat, although it's small I'm doing a scenario for it right now. This is the best time to stop me from what I'm about to spend time on in case Aliabad isn't working neither etc.. :D

Btw, little unrelated but is it possible to make a custom objective without a composition? I once tried placing a custom objective and leaving the composition field blank but the debug gave me no object to be seen in-game. I'm building an FOB on my own and I'd like that to be an objective.

Yeah I got the custom objective right, thank you. Although I did exactly as I did before, only difference being that now I succeeded. Perhaps I F'd up something last time.

Okay, Aliabad seems nice and does work fine with Asymmetric so thanks for your help and I suggest you to try Aliabad, it's actually a neat map!

But but but, as I'm still quite a newbie about Asymmetric OPCOM, I'm wondering: About 45 minutes into the game, insurgents are way overpowered and have established plenty of Weapons depots and Recruitment HQs. Their profile count hasn't raised not even by one (Shouldn't it?). Plenty of civilians with ...get_weapons according to debug and as I ghost/teleported near them to do some debugging of my own most of them are wearing suicide vests. So when do/should they turn into opfor units, or should they get weapons somehow? The faction I'm using is LOP_AM_OPF = Project OPFOR's Middle Eastern Militia. Inside the weapon depots there are two supply boxes with explosives and detonators etc.

I got the basic understanding that Asymmetric OPCOM uses civilians to gain manpower etc, not the traditional Military Logistics module, but the deeper mechanism of that was a question mark for me.

Right now I have civilians set at "high", simultaneous objectives set at default value 10 and insurgents start with 30 profiles, setting up HQ's and depots quickly and proceeding freely without engagement. So things are running normally if no OPFOR profiles are being made within an hour? I was totally unaware that it takes that 'long' to actually finish the recruiting process. So if they do manage to recruit civilians, they'll spawn eventually as a new OPFOR group/profile?

And thanks for describing the "civilian hostility". I think that's what explains why 10 mins into my Lythium scenario in a non-insurgent area a civilian shot me from behind with a gun from vanilla ARMA :D

And also, I got the IED module synced to the Asymmetric OPCOM. So is it IED module making civilians wear those suicide vests?

I do use the Alive-menu function to reveal OPCOM installations and the profile counter aswell, they're quite essential for proper debugging. Aliabad mission is working great now, although I'm going to work on Takistan because it's much larger, Aliabad's downside is how tiny it is, sadly.. I also tried Spyder's modules for the first time only to find out it's absolutely stunning. The ability to talk to civilians makes depth into these scenarios.

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer, you've been a great help at understanding Alive a bit better!

Although there's one thing I'm wondering. I haven't had any persistent scenarios, ever. I've played with couple of friends and as we have quit the game we've just started the scenario again. I'm thinking having a save game might make things a bit more interesting, but I've got no idea how to do so and I actually just came across to this ability not too long ago..

I know I should change some of the modules to persistent, is that correct? And how to actually save the game and then open the saved game? We're playing on a local server hosted by me via Hamachi (It does work well actually)

I'll do that. Thanks for all of your replies so far!

Now my Takistan scenario is almost ready to rock n' roll (spend three hours building a base, spend 10 minutes setting up the Alive modules, haha) but I'm having a hard time fine-adjusting things. I've got the same kind of Afghan insurgency going on with ANA/ANP being the Blufor and me being a Swedish ISAF force in the area.

Everything else looks alright, but the Blufor is the question mark for me. I decided that Blufor should be kind of passive, more likely to just to hold on for the area they already have, so I set their readiness to 50% for mils and 25% for civs. I once read somewhere that a good idea is to let Blufor only know about the larger/bigger/more important civ objectives. This is to maintain that you're the first to patrol an area and not to be 1km behind of aggressive Blufor forces all the time. Bad thing though is that the presets for object filters kind of won't let me do that. I mean it would, but I'd have to include tiny objectives which makes so many little objectives. And that doesn't bother me anyway else than I figured that having five objectives in a 500 meter long road might reduce the progression of Opfor dramatically and maybe over-build installations? Or are the quantity of installations even objective related, don't know?

But I look upon you as kind of a professional here, don't know whether you're part of the Alive-team itself or not, but I'd like to hear your advice on this. You probably get the idea of what kind of scenario I'm dreaming in my head right now. What do you do like to do with the Blufor in an Asymm mission?

Some questions which would also get me through my problem here: If I'd set two civilian objectives in one TAOR, one having "ignore tiny" and the other having "ignore small + medium", then there'd be duplicates of objectives larger than medium. Is this OK, do they actually make duplicate objectives, can I use them even though the same objective is registered twice, does it lower performance? Btw. The filtering is kind of silly, since I figure "medium + small_er_" would mean medium, small and tiny. So "Ignore small (no -er here) + medium" means tiny objectives are still registered? Although I suspect it's a gramattical error and it should read "smaller" thus tiny objectives would not be registered.

Thanks for all the support and advices, they're indeed very helpful :) I'll definetly check your scenarios asap!

I hate that at least in Takistan keeping civ objectives at "ignore tiny" some of the rural villages that I'd like to get recognized are not recognized but if I don't filter they don't advance as fast as I'd like them to.. Of course that could be set according my wishes with custom objectives though.

Just one more: I have 57 Opfor and 33 Blufor units at start. Is that even a near an okay amount, or should the Blufor exceed Opfor? Secondly, do you sync Blufor to LOGCOM or not for reinforcements?