Roads and Train convoys

[Chris79]

How do I add them?

[bustr]

This is going to get real easy or real sticky depending on where you want to go with it. I just finished country wide road networks for my new project.

Easy.

Click on the paths tab and click on the create all paths. You will have choices for creating the active convoy roads then do it again for the active train resupply tracks. Then go look at every airfield, vbase, port and strat. You will have an east running straight line 10 miles long of road at feilds and tracks at strat. Now you get to move them around a bit to conform to the terrain. The tool tips will tell you how to manipulate the segments. Just make sure after you manipulate the road or track that it is 10 miles long. It is OK to stretch, add or delete segments to achieve 10 miles. Just make sure at the end that stops next to the destination that it is 1\2 of a 660ft square away from touching the square object boarder edge. You can see this if you push your view down onto the ground and go to wire frame view. Don't change anything in the properties menu for any of those roads and tracks.

When you have all these manipulated into place, run the error check and you will see it say you need to run the mask. That option is above build. Run the mask and go get some coffee or do your laundry. It removes trees and bushes and clutter from the roads and tracks. And from rivers if you put any in. When it's done run error check again, if all is OK, run build. Then go offline, wait 10 minutes, and you should see convoys and trains running. Then a new one will spawn every 10 minutes and run after that.


Sticky,

You want to add in a dummy road network and run roads over bridges. It will drive you nuts.......


This small snap shot of the three country road network with bridges over rivers took a month and was a pain in the paducka. I won't know until after the terrain is in rotation if it was even worth doing. I think Hitech has some things he still has to tinker with on the river paths before this terrain can be considered for rotation. Waffle didn't paint a road bed up the berms on each end of the bridges so you have to run a dummy road up at an angle and adjust heights with several nodes to get just the surface to show or the road shoulder can tip over tanks climbing up to the bridge road bed. If it is an active convoy road you have to run a segment over the bridge bed and set it to not be visible. Sticky and irritating fussy work.

[Chris79]

Thank you. Is it at all kosher to add extra 17lbrs akin to shore batteries. I was thinking about adding anti-tank traps on the approach to some bases?

[bustr]

No the only extra guns are the shore battery. Not sure what an anti-tank trap is.

[Chris79]

Pre arranged firing positions blocking likely GV advance routes.

[bustr]

In the MA only the guns on each field object and the shore battery. One of the reasons I incorporated believable water sheds with river valleys near about half the feilds on my new project. I use bridges across rivers as choke points where you have to reveal yourself long enough to get sniped or bombed. You know how writers for comics say they don't need to make anything up and just look at people day to day? Real world terrain features have no end to possibilities without having to premeditated stick it to GVers. Be careful you have not trapped yourself into only your perspective as a player as your guide to creating the area around feilds.

You have to balance your offering in the MA to help all of Hitech's customers have fun. About half way through setting up the spawns and terrain around feilds on my first terrain BowlMA. I caught myself doing everything I could to screw tanks becasue I hated what they did to my home field behind my back when I was out in a plane attacking their feilds. I went back and started driving my terrain and realized I had just screwed half of Hitech's paying customers out of having any fun. Took me about a week to come up with a balanced alternative. The strats were the way they are setup becasue we had just gone through that period of the HQ down almost all night every night. I figured the majority of Hitech's customers would appreciate having their country radar 99% of the time to enjoy other activities besides being forced to resupply the HQ by the tyranny of a tiny minority. Creating the ability for that to happen just punishes everyone needlessly. I catch myself on BowlMA sometimes getting PO'd becasue setting up the ground game equitably was equitably screwing my pooch at that moment.

Balance to help "all" of Hitech's customers have fun is the essence of terrains in the MA. So building my terrains I had to stop being a POTW member or a fighter pilot type customer and become as much as possible a fair and balanced content provider. Why I put so much time into my new terrain over roads\rivers and making the micro terrain around spawns and feilds just as fun to drive a tank as the terrain is fun and beautiful to fly over. You can see with Oceania this concept was evolving.