RB3D TEMPO MANAGEMENT SYSTEM AND RANDOM CAMPAIGN GENERATION
RB3D TEMPO MANAGEMENT SYSTEM AND RANDOM CAMPAIGN GENERATION
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| When I started playing RB3D there were a few things I noticed about the campaign game. First, I almost always flew as a German. Second, I generally started as early as possible and since I generally did not survive all that long, I rarely flew Allied aircraft and just as rarely flew much in the late-war months. A third problem I had with the campaign game involved the tempo of action. I could control the number of sorties I flew using Von Tom's Campaign Manager 11. But the distribution of sorties was ahistorically and evenly distributed. In other words, if you set the game for 160 sorties and there were twenty months left in the war, you would fly about eight sorties each month. The problem was that was not how things went. The tempo of air operations changed with the seasons and with the level of activity along the front. For example, Manfred von Richthofen's career along the Western Front spanned twenty months (September 1916 to April 1918). But his eighty kills were not evenly distributed among each of those twenty months. He downed twenty-one of those enemy aircraft in a single month--Bloody April 1917. I tried to develop a system, using CM11, to control the tempo of air operations so that one would fly more when the weather was good and a ground offensive was in motion, and less during times of ground inactivity and bad weather. In the chart that appears below, you will find sections for each of the four regions of the RB3D Western Front--Flanders, the Marne, Verdun, and Alsace. The names in the "Campaign" represent offensives, Allied or German. If they are bolded that reflects the intensity of the operation, usually in its early stages (deemed "heavy" effort). If the name is not bolded, that reflects the on-going offensive petering out (deemed "moderate" effort). If a "1" appears under the setting column, that is the number that you have to stick in the "campaign.ini" box under the "Preferences" setting of Von Tom's CM11. If a number other than "1" appears under the month in question, indicating a higher level of activity along that section of the front, take that number, add to it the total number of sorties you have already flown (to use this system you must keep a scratch record of the number of sorties you fly) and apply the sum of those two numbers to the "campaign.ini" setting. For example, if you are flying British along the Flanders front, you have already flown sixteen sorties, and your campaign has just moved into March 1918, you would add 154 to 16 and insert the number 170 into the "campaign.ini" box. If you follow this procedure, you will fly four sorties per month during periods of inactivity, but as many as twenty sorties during more active months.
Download copy as an Excel spreadsheet. If you do not agree with my seasonal percentages, you can alter the seasonal percentages in the downloadable spreadsheet and the numbers on the chart will automatically recalculate to reflect your changes. |