The Original Gunship Missions

Counting all the campaigns, the Single Battles and the 'fly nows', there are a total of 74 missions straight out of the box.

When I first started to seriously look at mission files, I took a conscious decision to concentrate on the 'original' missions, as supplied by Microprose and ignore those written later by fans and developers. That's not in any way meant to denigrate the skill of these later authors; quite the reverse, it was their examples that inspired me to start all this in the first place. But what I wanted was a clean sample, written by the 'experts' who had access to all the goodies that we don't. The original missions looked like the mother lode.

The object was to sift through the missions looking for patterns and then paste chunks into a 'test map' to monitor the result. Analysis of the results would allow conclusions to be drawn about the rules by which the missions were originally created. That was the theory; unfortunately it wasn't quite that simple. Being a huge fan of Gunship, I am very reluctant to criticise Microprose, but the standard of mission writing varies dramatically. There are some glaring errors that should never have survived proof reading. In some cases, entire groups of units are rendered virtually inactive through spelling mistakes (noticeable in the 20th Guards campaign). In other cases, bad punctuation causes units to completely ignore complex orders.

This doesn't mean that the missions don't work; they do, in fact there is evidence that some were edited at a later date, where units are added out of sequence. It seems that rather than correct mistakes, some of the missions were 'tweaked' to restore the required balance. Unfortunately, instead of being able to refer to the original missions as shining examples of good practice, many have to be approached with a certain amount of caution.

Test Map

If you want to experiment with platoons and commands, apart from a lot of patience, you'll need some sort of sandpit to play in. Use BB to find a map with fairly open terrain, as hills, woods and cities will just get in the way and force units to 'adjust' to the terrain. Belarus is probably a good place to start. Set the side to Blue, the weather to clear day and make sure you include one non threatening Red unit (Trucks will do), placed far away and out of sight. You then need to find a clear area and you can select this from the on-screen map, or launch the mission and fly around to look for one. Save it with a suitable name ('A Test Map' will put it near the top of the list) and then open it in Notepad. Place a couple of UAVs in convenient spots (100 to 200m away) overlooking the clear area.  Write them into the file immediately below your flyable helo. Now hide your flyable helo unit behind a wood or a hill with a simple set of commands and make sure they have an LZ order, to keep them on the ground. If your helos detect an enemy unit, they will respond and join in. The object is to produce a fixed environment with no external influences. You can now write a single platoon into the mission file, give it some commands and watch the results. When the mission is launched, press F9 to go to chase mode and F12 to cycle through to your UAV. Pan with the joystick and zoom with the Z and X keys.

Any of the platoons (Blue or Red) can be added and the action watched from above, but remember that if Red units get close enough, they will treat your UAV as hostile and shoot at it (although they can't actually shoot it down). You can experiment with changing WP orders or create fairly dynamic scenarios using opposing platoons and Logic commands. Almost anything that Gunship can do, you can re-produce and watch on your test map.

Much of the material on this site was gathered using the methods described above. The results speak for themselves, although the conclusions drawn from them are all mine.

Campaign Missions

Gunship contains five separate campaigns, each comprising 12 or 13 missions.  It seems that most players (myself included) attempt one, maybe two and then give up. That's a shame, as most of us have missed the bulk of the missions. We may be familiar with the first 2 or 3 missions from a campaign, but if we didn't progress any further, then we've never even seen the later ones. Getting at them all, is quite easy.

Using Explorer (or other), open the campaigns folder and select a campaign. Double click a mission and Explorer will tell you that it's an unsupported file type and bring the 'open with box' onto the screen. Select Notepad and click open. The mission then opens as a text file. Click File, Select All and Copy. Open a blank page in notepad and Paste. Now save it (wherever) and give it a name. Strip out the 'map', 'sound' and 'movie' references in the briefing (as they will no longer work) and you now have a text file that can be edited and modified and copied to your 'player battles' folder. From there you can run the mission as a single battle. It really is that simple.

Just playing all 74 missions should keep you busy enough, but the potential for editing and re-building is huge.

The tables below list all the missions from the five Gunship campaigns, showing the Engagement and Objective combinations used, together with a platoon count. The last four rows show the number of WP and Logic platoons deployed for each side in the mission, together with a total for each side and an overall platoon total. This total includes the support platoons and the player's flyable helo. The Engagement combinations vary with the campaign. The Russian campaign starts with a variety of Engagement types, but then settles down to a catch all 'Air Assault'. The 1st Cavalry campaign, although fairly well written, uses paired 'Air Assault'  lines throughout.

Note the Red Engagement line for ger2. The usual zeros are replaced by X Y co-ordinates, presumably to fix the focus for the Deliberate Attack. This is the only instance I could find of an Engagement being tied to map co-ordinates.

5th Panzer Divn Campaign

1st UK Armoured Divn Campaign

1st US Armored Divn Campaign

1st US Cavalry Divn Campaign

Microprose Platoon Mix

I was hoping that a platoon count would be enlightening, but the only conclusion I drew was that Microprose didn't make much use of Logic commands. Perhaps this was quite deliberate and the structured progression of the campaigns didn't lend themselves to the 'free for all' that multiple Logic commands can produce. But I'm not entirely convinced. Unless you deliberately leave a fixed opening for exploitation by the player, Logic commands, used carefully can be very effective in plugging gaps and allowing troops to respond to unexpected moves. I doubt that increased Logic use would have been detrimental to the mission outcomes.

In the 74 missions that are included in the game, the average platoon count per mission is 21.45, with the Logic platoon count being a mere 3.12.

The prize for the Microprose SLUGATHON must go to rus3, with a combined total of 44 platoons.  23 of these use Logic commands.

This is a colossal Russian tank and mechanised assault against a pitifully small UK armoured force, which unfortunately contained 'errors'. The original author transposed the X and Y co-ordinates of one of the 3 Blue tank platoons, causing it to head south and disappear into the sea. A whole third of the defending forces' tanks goes off paddling and no one notices.

The terrain is quite outstanding, with two huge woods (one of which has a road running through it), a piece of coastline that includes an island, a large city and plenty of hills and covered ground. I often use this map with the platoons and briefing stripped out as a test area. I've made changes to the existing mission and modified the briefing to remove campaign references. It's renamed 'Red Mist' and is available for download on the Missions page.

Coincidentally, UK4 uses exactly the same map, with the same Helo units and almost identical briefings. All the ground forces used are from rus3 and most of them use exactly the same Waypoints and orders. I'm not certain which came first, but I think that UK4 is just a slimmed down copy of rus3, with the player side switched from Red to Blue. Proof positive that legitimate new missions can be created by making small changes to an existing campaign mission.