Hi and nice to have an experienced ALiVE mission maker on the thread so fast!
Well, to rule out any problems related to the new saving, I have chosen to set up the mission for standard WarRoom saving instead of the new SP/local saving.
Good point you made with the ORBAT tool though; that shed some light onto the problem. All the different russian and german partial factions appear as ALiVE compatible there - BUT: not all factions have actual units or groups defined for all the different service branches. That means that since I wanted to have both sides spawn infantry, tanks and airplanes, I had to set the Military Placement Modules to spawn three factions per side - and THAT doesn't work and produces our beloved "Bug Helmet Friends", as it seems.
When, on the other hand, I did set the Modules in such fashion that there was only ONE of the respective side's factions set to spawn, it worked.
So basically there's two options to go for from this point:
1) Make a new ORBAT faction for each Russians and Germans out of the three or four different partial factions there are now existing per side so the Modules can spawn all kinds of units since they will then have just ONE complete faction with groups defined for ALL kind of assets.
2) Manually place & then virtualize Tank, Artillery and airplane assets, and set the MIL Placement Modules to spawn just the existing IFA3 infantry factions for each side. Set the MIL Commander Module to command all factions of it's side.
I tried method 2) already and it works so far - also can be done rather quickly if you have a mission like mine with relatively few playable slots that allows to take the option "virtualize all Editor placed units except synched" and then just synch that lil' band of brothers to the module, leaving you to happily pour a shitload of tanks and airplanes onto the map "place-and-forget" like.
Disadvantage is ofc as always that I have a fixed and, after a few re-plays, well-known amount of non-infantry assets for the enemy. AFAIK the enemy OPCOM will command those profiles which are non-infantry and pre-placed, on it's side and defined as faction in the MIL Commander Module. But I'm not so sure if it can and will order reinforcements/battle casualty replacements for these non-infantry factions out of it's force pool.
Will have to test this a bit more to see if the OPCOM can actually use it's force pool to request as reinforcements units & groups from ALL the factions that the MIL Commander supports, even if there was just ONE original faction defined in the placement module.
Nevertheless I had an intense gameplay experience yesterday when testing Option 2) and saw at least the hand placed units ordered around by their OPCOMs to engage in a fierce combined arms battle over the two bridges crossing the river on the Baranow map. This really was some "Hell on the Eastern Front"!!!
With 64bit ARMA and almost all of the units virtualized, the performance was stellar as well!
So all that remains is a word from one of the devs about the MIL Placement modules and the definition of more than one faction per MIL Placement Module - possible or not? Just impossible for IFA3?
Best regards,
tourist
