Campaign reinforcements

Reinforcements means that they are troops “hidden” until certain time period has passed when they become active and visible in the campaign engine.

How to add reinforcements unit with TacEdit.

Just add unit normally as you would in any other case, then when you double click the unit to bring up Battalion window, click Unit Properties tab and you'll find slot called “Reinf”, this digit means time in hours since the campaign start until this unit becomes active. Then click the Unit Flags window open and tick “Inactive” on.

Now your unit remains hidden from campaign engine / user view until this activation time.

In TacEdit TCL commands you have:

Reinf - reinforcement status

Which means when you issue “reinf x” command into a unit, the x value will be your reinf status hours.

Snake Man notes / TODO: if I add 0.5 does it mean 30 minutes, or does the hours digit only work in 1, 2, 3 etc numbers?

Also CCC wrote in PMC Tactical forum post the following: However, no promise the units can show up on time or later.. it seems up to campaign AI - if the AI decide you need Reinforcement, they will show up - if AI decide you don't need them - well.. no reinf.

So - it's quite tricky to balance the ground war powers - only some force level/ratio/situation can make campaign AI call for reinforcement.

IMHO if we can not set reinforcement units show up at a given time point, we can not make “simulated” amphibious landing. the alternative is placing marines at beachhead in the beginning of war.

There is chance that if you run your campaign time acceleration more than 8x speed, your reinforcement unit might appear in various times and not the specified in Reinf tab in TacEdit. This apparently is because the campaign engine has so much to process, that it loses focus on these reinf unit clocks (or something). So if you're debugging your reinf units, don't accelerate time faster than 8x.

Sherlock wrote PMC Tactical forum post the following:

For squadrons you have to make them a “Parent” (check the box in the Unit flags screen) AND check the “Inactive” box in the same screen. Then set the time in hours (this is approximate). Also I've found that if you move the start of the campaign from the normal 9am start time that his screws up any reinforcement times you might have already set on units

For ground troops just set the “Inactive” flag on the Units Flag screen and put in the time reinformement time. Note that running in 2D at 64X that your times will not be correct. You have to run at 8x or slower to achieve a reasonable idea of when the reinforcements will actually show up. They typically show up about 10 minutes after the hour in Allied Force.

Assuming your campaign start time is 0900 hours on day 1, then if you want a bunch of BLUFOR ground forces to show up 2 days into the campaign then put in a time of about 36 hours for a couple of them and then run the campaign at 8x until it gets to day 2. You will have to “play around” with the timing a few times until you get a good idea of what the real show time is versus the value you are putting in. I know it is time consuming but that is the only way I have found to do it.

Note that my experience is with Allied Force. For Red Viper/FF5 I have no idea if the above is true or not.