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Difficulty Guidelines

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Mike-MF edited this page Mar 14, 2024 · 38 revisions

This page is a general guideline as to how to balance difficulty in a mission. Mission makers should take care to create a challenging but not impossible mission, the idea is to make the players feel accomplished by finishing it and not to ensure you kill everybody.

Intelligence

The briefing intelligence section now has new fields required to be filled out. This section will explain this.

Breaching
This is an indicator of locked doors in missions, they don't have to be mission critical doors just an indicator that doors have in fact been locked.

  • No
  • Yes

Mission Example with locked doors:
Locked Doors: Yes

EOD
This is for us to understand if EOD is required and what kind of EOD, contracts with tripwires/mines indoors where the bot can't reach should require Defusal kits too.

  • Not Required
  • EOD Bot
  • Defusal Kit
  • EOD Bot + Defusal Kit

Mission Example with mines indoors and outdoors:
EOD Required: EOD Bot + Defusal Kit

Enemy Count
This is an estimation of AI numbers, not an exact amount.

  • Fire Team Sized Element (2-4)
  • Squad Sized Element (8 -16)
  • Platoon Sized Element (32 - 50)
  • Company Sized Element (100-150)
  • Battalion Sized Element (300+)

Mission Example with 70 Enemies:
Est. Enemy Force: 2x Platoon Sized Elements (32-50)

Mission Examples with 150 Enemies:
Est. Enemy Force: Company Sized Element (100-150)
or
Est. Enemy Force: Platoon Sized Element (32 - 50), Company Sized Element (100-150)

Enemy Vehicles
This is for us to know what to expect when fighting enemy vehicles.

  • No Armour Capabilities
    • Transports
    • Civilian Technicals
  • Improvised Armored Capabilities
    • Up-Armoured Offroads
  • Light Armored Support Capabilities
    • M-ATV
    • Fennek
    • Karatel
    • Otokar ARMA
  • Heavy Armored Support Capabilities
    • Pandur
    • Namer
    • Leopard 2SG

Mission Example with Offroads and Pandur APCs:
Enemy Vehicle Composition: Heavy Armoured Support Capabilities

You're only required to write the 'level' that you hit in your mission, anything below that is already covered.

This also covers whether AT is required and how much of it.

  • No Armour: Unneccesary
  • Improvised: Optional
  • Light: AT is required in smaller amounts.
  • Heavy: Heavy AT in large amounts.

Enemy Capability

  • Militia: No body armour, basic rifles and RPGs
  • Organised: Armour, Helmets & More advanced weapons
  • Near Peer: Heavy Armour & Theseus Equivalent armaments

Faction examples of the above:

  • Militia:
    • Somali Pirates
    • Revolutionaries
    • Taliban Militia
  • Organised:
    • Taliban Veterans
    • Northern Africa
    • Greek Cartel
  • Near Peer:
    • Eastern Europe
    • Northern Asia
    • Southern Africa
    • Seven Rings
    • Vanguard

Template Example:
Enemy Capabilities: Near Peer

Est. Time frame
This is literally the mission makers estimate of how long this mission will take to complete. Theseus does not require a mission to last 2 and a half hours. It's perfectly acceptable to make something aimed for 1 hour playtime, allowing us to run something afterwards for those interested.

Nobody should ever take this as an exact time, it does not count briefing/debriefing or organisation. It's entirely possible it could be over faster or take far longer depending on how events play out.

Example:
Est. Time frame: 1 hour

Theseus Vehicles

From this point forward, Theseus will ONLY utilise it's own vehicle set. If it's available under the "Theseus Services" faction, it is one of our vehicles available for use.

Theseus-Funded

If you wish to utilise some kind of APC for us, it needs to make sense lore-wise and it will be crowd funded as we've done in the past. If it doesn't reach the required funding, it will not get used. The mission should not be hard-dependent upon something outside of our vehicle pool.

Crowd-funding is not fully necessary anymore, Team leads, if desired can pitch an idea with arguments to staff for Theseus to cover the costs. Simply stating "We need this" will obviously result in a no. A well reasoned argument and a great thought out use-case for the asset are more likely to get a yes. This idea can be brought up inside the team-leads channel on Discord as all staff can see it.

If Staff reject the idea, crowd-funding is still allowed.

Guidelines for pricing of assets is as follows:

Vehicle Type Min. Price Max. Price
Armoured Cars (Unarmed) $5,000 $12,500
Armored Cars (Armed) $12,500 $20,000
APCs & Tanks $15,000 $25,000
Specialised Aircraft $15,000 $25,000
Turrets $2,500 $7,000
Equipment $2,500 $5,000

It should be noted that requiring us to rent these assets every week will obviously fail as people cannot afford it.

AI

AI are now significantly more aware than vanilla Arma 3, being able to see players and engage them at distances between 500m-1km. This also works by AI passing information onto other groups nearby who will join in on the engagement.

Keep this in mind along with the recommended active AI count of ~125-150. Going over this will likely result in a long and deadly contract. Additionally, having over the recommended amount of AI will impact performance.

To keep the AI count low, utilise reinforcements where it makes sense to do so. Not every mission requires them nor logically would it make sense.

Enemy Compositions

"Militia" styled enemies present a minimal challenge to players, yet near-peer enemies will. This should be kept in mind when making a mission and if it makes sense to the story of the mission, utilise both at once.

Positioning will always be more of a challenge than numbers. AI in good positions instead of simply standing out in the open waiting to be shot creates more tension and is actually far more challenging while requiring less AI in general.

Helicopters

If the mission has AA emplacements but the briefing has no prior warning for this, a helicopter with countermeasures must be placed. Check the Helicopters page for information on which ones to use.

Mines

Minefields are perfectly fine to be used to deny an area the mission maker does not want players to go. For this purpose it only has to be marked out somehow, it doesn't actually need to be placed. If this is the tactic used, EOD does not need to be stated as required in the briefing.

Utilising Mines to deny specific portions of the mission by adding an extra variable is also fine, the mission must state that EOD is required due to this factor in the briefing.

Obstacles

Utilisation of any kind of obstacles in missions designed to slow players down, force them onto an alternative approach or hinder them is acceptable in smaller doses. Constant obstacles designed to do nothing but take up time is frustrating and does nothing for enjoyment.

Using IEDs, UXOs, and Tripwires are fine as obstacles as long as the previous section is followed. However, for alternatives to these the game does offer the following:

  • Locked Doors
  • Razor Wire
  • Barricades

If you utilise locked doors at all, even non-mission critical ones the section in the briefing must be filled out.

RPGs

The AI have the ability to fire RPGs at infantry, they are significantly less likely to fire AT rounds at infantry, but AP rounds will be fired as we are now used to. With our in-house factions all groups are placed with AT units, not AP.

AP units CAN be placed down, but extremely sparingly. The chance of one shot being a mission-ending experience for large groups of players is already a pretty significant risk. Missions that over-utilise AP units will automatically fail the review.

Turrets

Turrets are a great enemy force multiplier, but overuse of them will result in an excessive death count.

Following the above section on RPGs the AI can fire SPG-9 rounds at infantry and this should be taken into account.

Pretty much all turrets should be utilised sparingly, while some fail to react or be effective, others can be overly so.

Vehicles

If vehicles are being used the "Enemy Vehicle Composition" section of the briefing must be filled out.

Tanks are the heaviest force multiplier Theseus will see. We are limited to fighting against the Leopard 2SG Tank. Tracked APCs are also considered in this category at a similar force multiplier.

APCS & IFVs are significant force multipliers which if used correctly can change the balance of the mission in seconds. Using these should be done with care and not "spammed" as realistically players can only deal with so many before rockets run out or everybody is killed.

MRAPS should follow the same limit as APCS & IFVs. They're armored with HMG/GMG variants with the gunner being extremely well protected.

Technicals can be used more liberally as both the HMG/GMG variants have a very vulnerable gunner which any rifleman can take out.

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