Targetware: Scenario Development

Scenario Designer User's Guide

Assigning Victory Points

Victory Points determine who wins, and who loses... But how do you determine how many points a team should receive for shooting down an enemy fighter? What about a bomber? And ground targets, how much should they be worth? What is the actual process for assigning points to an airplane or ground targets? This section will attempt to answer those questions, and help you understand how the Scenario Designer can help you automatically assign Victory Points to the important targets and aircraft in your scenario.

First of all, the fundamentals: every air unit or ground/sea target in a scenario file can be given any number of victory points you want. If you give an air unit a point value of "0", then it won't matter how many of those airplanes your side loses, the enemy will not profit by their destruction. Now if you had assigned that air unit 1000 points, and the scenario was set to cut off once 1000 victory points had been reached by either side, the loss of only a single aircraft from that unit would cost your side the scenario victory. So you can see you have great flexibility here, targets and aircraft can be of critical importance, no importance at all, or they can be set up for a war of attrition... It's all in your hands.

You can manually assign points to an air unit or target by editing the "points = [some number]" line in the .scn file for the unit or target. In the Scenario Designer, you can assign points manually by typing in the desired point value in the "Points" field of the Unit or Target panel.

Using the Victory Calculator to Assign Points Automatically

If you don't want to assign points manually to every unit and target in your mission (and why would you?), you can use the Scenario Designer's victory point calculator to automatically assign points to targets and units based on a strategic importance that you set. The calculator works on a mission by mission basis within your scenario. This means that you can assign each mission within a multi-mission scenario to have varying relative values, vis a vis the other missions. So while one torpedo strike mission with 30 players might be worth a total of 1500 points, a fighter sweep with another 30 players might be only worth 500 points towards the overall scenario total.

The first step is to set a strategic value of None, Primary, Secondary, or Ancilliary for all targets in your mission. It defaults to none, so you actually only have to set it for targets with some strategic value. Air Units can be given a value of None, Primary, or Secondary. (See the illustration above).

The next step is to check that the calculator is enabled, then set the projected strat value of the mission via the "Point Base" field on the Mission Panel, as below:

Next, ask yourself what the goal of the mission is. Is it a bombing raid? Is it a fighter versus fighter sweep mission? What does each team want to accomplish? How much can each team afford to lose? These questions will help you assign points in a way that achieves your vision of the mission.

Ground/Sea Targets: If this mission will involve striking ground or sea targets, ask yourself how many of the primary targets must be destroyed before the mission is deemed a success. Plug this number into the slot for "destroy (0) of (?) Primaries." If there are secondary targets in this mission, assign a higher number for them. In general, a team should not be able to call the mission a success if they only destroy secondary or ancilliary targets, even if they get them all. So in most cases you'll want to assign successively higher destruction goals to secondary and ancilliary targets. What the Scenario Designer does with the numbers you plug in is very simple: it takes the point base, divides it by the number you put in for primary targets, and then assigns that number to every primary target as its point value. For example, in a 1000 point mission, if there are 8 primary targets, and half need to be destroyed for victory, each one will be assigned 250 points. It does the same math for the secondary and ancilliary targets.

Air-to-Air: If your mission is all air to air, all of the victory points will come from airplanes. However, even for bombing missions, you do not necessarily want to ignore aircraft victory points. The number of interceptors lost by the defenders may not be as important as the targets destroyed, but if the interceptors destroy enough of the bombers, the mission could end in a failure for the bombing side, no matter how successful they are in destroying their targets. That is, in fact, the question you want to ask yourself for air-to-air missions: how many planes can a side afford to lose before the mission is deemed a failure? In a bombing mission, bombers may have primary value, and escorts secondary value, or even no value. In any case, set up your air units with strat values, then plug in the acceptable losses into the calculator, it will calculate the points for you.

After play-testing the scenario, you may have to adjust the numbers for balance. Additional factors to consider are the length of the mission, whether or not lives are limited, and the relative side balance between the teams.