Oперация Тернопіль

This is the first playable mission that I am releasing for Iron Front: Liberation 1944. The scenario is a fictitious engagement between a German Panzer Company (ten Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. B King Tiger tanks) and a platoon of Soviet anti-tank forces that consist of four AT teams, three 76mm ZiS-3 guns and a small anti-aircraft platform.

Oперация Тернопіль is Russian for Operation Ternopil, which is a city in the western Ukraine where the village of Ivachev is near and what the scenario map Ukraine Ivachev 1944 is loosely based upon. The scenario begins on Sunday August 5, 1944 at 5:35 AM. The Soviets have a small tactical advantage in that the sun is rising behind them.

Operation Futile

The following screen shots are from a couple of testing sessions of a short mission I am working on where three squads of American infantry are to move into a town to neutralize an ad hoc artillery battery and remove any hostile forces. The setting is early morning and the weather conditions are miserable.

I have a love hate relationship with the ArmA 2 engine (and all iterations of it). A seemingly colossal mission of utmost elegance can be utterly abandoned due to some bug or behavior with the AI that cannot be scripted away. Hours, if not weeks of work can be lost if sequential saves during mission creation and/or tedious unwinding is not done to find the offending elements.

D-Day DLC

I picked up the Iron Front: D-Day DLC on sale for about $4 and started messing around with it today when I got home from work. Some oddities right off the bat, such as the DLC in game being named simply “DLC_1”, and perhaps most perplexing the default mission parameters in the editor has the Allies friendly to Germany. WTF Chuck Norris…

The DLC comes with one map, Omaha Beach 1944 which is a very nicely laid out map that I am already planning on using the backside of for a “Hedgerow Hop” type mission where a Ranger platoon is tasked with clearing out three of the thickety bastards in order to allow a supply column to move through the area without interference.

Red Hammer

This is a work-in-progress mission in Iron Front: Liberation 1944 which features a Soviet infantry platoon attacking three checkpoints held by German Wehrmacht. The framework is complete, meaning that there is a working briefing with clickable objectives that tick properly upon completion and the scenario ends as expected (once all three tasks are achieved).

Red Hammer is the working title and is taken from an Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis expansion pack several years ago (before Resistance hit the shelves, back when there were shelves for PC games). There are some armor units in the mission, namely the Sd.Kfz. 251 half-track armored fighting vehicle. This unfortunately demonstrated that for all that Iron Front does right, there is a lot that it does bad.