Targetware: Scenario Development

Scenario Designer User's Guide

Designing a Campaign

This section presents some ideas on how to string together individual scenarios to make a dynamic campaign. The concepts introduced here are intended to be nothing more than suggestions, based on the experience of the Targetware staff in designing scenarios for Target Korea and Target Rabaul. Feel free to ignore them entirely if you wish.

Why Plan a Flow chart?

It doesn't matter what kind of scenarios you are developing, or what mod they will be used with. If they are going to be linked together into a campaign, a visual representation of those links will help you plan additions to the campaign, and better see possible problems with the campaign flow. The charts we present here were originally designed to prevent campaigns from getting stuck in loops (no scenarios ever jump back in time to previous scenarios). The basic ideas behind the campaign diamond are:

• One team always wins in the end, no matter how long the campaign is dragged out by back and forth fighting.
• Time always moves forward, it never jumps back (no loops).
• Time progression is not necessarily linear, it could move a day, a month, a year, between scenarios.
• Any point on the campaign can be expanded by another, embedded mini-diamond, to add greater depth to the campaign.

How to Read a Diamond

The diamond is a representation of time: time starts on the bottom, and moves upward as players progress through the scenarios. The yellow dot on the bottom is the starting point; it is also the point to which the campaign resets after a campaign victory. The Blue and Red dots represent campaign victories for Teams 1 and 2 (or 2 and 1, if you prefer). Each green dot is a scenario or an embedded mini-campaign. When the Blue team wins, the scenario up and to the right of the current scenario becomes the next scenario. When the red team wins, the scenario to the up and left is chosen. Here is a standard campaign diamond:

Notice that in this 25-scenario campaign, a minimum of five scenarios must be played before a campaign victory, but it could take as many as nine scenarios, if teams trade victories back and forth.

Adjusting Campaign Length and Complexity

If we wanted a miniature campaign, we could pare down the diamond to the bottom four scenarios. This would create a best two-out-of-three campaign. It could be a stand alone campaign, or we could use it to give greater depth to a particular battle, and embed it within a larger campaign diamond. That would also give our overall campaign greater depth and complexity. Perhaps each dot on our overall campaign chart would lead to a mini-campaign.

There are two other ways of adding complexity and length to a campaign diamond. We could grow the diamond sideways, so that instead of a minimum of five scenarios, maybe it took 20 scenario victories (in a row) to win in the minimum amount of time. That would mean that it could take as many as 39 scenarios, if the teams really slug it out. It would also mean you have to design 400 scenarios to fill out that chart!

The other method that can be used to prolong a campaign is to add extra scenarios in the middle, where it's fattest, and elongate the campaign chart from top to bottom without expanding the entire diamond. This lets you have longer campaigns without creating as many scenarios. Of course, if one side tears off an unbroken string of scenario victories, they could reach an early campaign victory along the side, so it is not a guarantee of a longer campaign, but the odds are that it will be. Here's one example of this type of campaign tree:

This 52-scenario campaign has the same minimum of five scenarios to win, but it could go as long as 15 scenarios.

Rewarding Lopsided Victories

Suppose your side is crushing the other side in every scenario... Shouldn't you be rewarded for not just defeating them, but for smashing them to bits? Shouldn't they be punished for losing that many planes and targets in defeat? Shouldn't the war end sooner because of your team's superior tactics and skill? The only answer is probably "it depends", but you, as the scenario engineer, can certainly set up the scenarios so that lopsided victories are rewarded by advancing the winning team further than they would with a closer, harder-fought victory. One way to accomplish this is to create 2 (or more!) victory paths for each team, and have minor victories follow the regular diamond pattern, but have major victories jump ahead one dot's worth. For example, if a campaign diamond required a minimum of 5 victories to win with a normal margin of victory, it might take as few as two major victories to win the campaign. This is diagrammed in the chart below. The thin black lines denote minor victories, the thick black lines denote major victories:

This is not, of course, the only way to take into account various degrees of victory. You might set up your campaign so that lopsided victories in one scenario result in the enemy side having older (or less) planes in the next scenario. There are many, many options available to you with the Targetware scenario system, play around with it and see what you come up with.