ALiVE : Uprising — Creating an Occupying Force

After familiarizing myself with the ALiVE modules and setting up a base mission, I was ready to start in on the actual work of creating Uprising. I decided to start by focusing on the occupying force. There is no particular reason for this, and you can create your forces in any order you wish.

Tutorial Series

1. The Uprising Backstory
2. Familiarization and Resources for building with ALiVE
3. The Base ALiVE Mission
4. Creating the Occupying Force (You are here)
5. Creating Civilian Population
6. Creating the Asymmetrical Force
7. Creating the Attacking Force
8. Creating Playable Forces
9. Troubleshooting Information

My occupying force will be the Eastern European rebels from the CAF Aggressors mod (@CAF provides some fantastic OPFOR units if you’re not yet familiar). The militia will hold all military installations on the island and will be conducting missions to secure civilian areas as well.

The AI Commander

The first step in building any AI force in ALiVE is to place the Military AI Commander module, also referred to as Operational Command (OPCOM). This module is responsible for prioritizing targets and sending orders to units of its faction. You will want one of these modules for each military faction involved in your scenario, but for now I’ll just focus on the occupying force’s OPCOM.

As far as I can tell, the position where you place the module makes no difference, though the documentation seems to indicate otherwise. At this point, the module does not need to be synced to anything else. Here is the module’s configuration in Uprising:

The Control Type tells the module which command style to use. You can choose from:

• Occupation — AI commands will emphasize a defensive posture and holding on to secured objectives.
• Invasion — AI commands will emphasize securing the next objective as quickly as possible, leaving very little defense at previous objectives.
• Asymmetric — AI commands will emphasize sabotage and subterfuge; units will attempt to recruit civilians to their cause.

For our occupying forces, we will of course be using the Occupation mode.

The Reinforcements option dictates at what point OPCOM will request reinforcements at any given objective (taken directly from the module description wiki page):

• Constant: Requests sent at 90% Combat Effectiveness. Effect: Reinforcements will arrive in a constant trickle.
• Packets: Requests sent at 75% CE. Effect: packets of reinforcements will arrive at intervals.
• Seldom: Requests sent at 50% CE. Effect: large block of reinforcements will arrive but very rarely.

For Uprising, I liked the idea of a massive, brutal retaliation, so I chose Seldom. At the bottom, you can see I’ve specified the custom CAF faction instead of using the dropdowns to select a built-in faction.

By keeping Debug enabled, when I preview the mission, ALiVE will display radio messages whenever it issues orders to a unit and whenever a unit completes an order. Not particularly useful other than to let you know your module is active.

I definitely recommend focusing on a single force at a time; your map can get very confusing very quickly if you try to throw down too many modules at once.

It is important to note that the Commander module has nothing to do with identifying objectives or spawning units. Before we do either of those, we need to tell our Commander what area it is responsible for.

Tactical Areas of Responsibility (TAOR)

TAORs are a crucial piece of mastering ALiVE; these are markers on the map that indicate the areas in which the Placement Modules will search for objectives and spawn units (if configured to do so), or the areas in which they are restricted from doing so (blacklist).

I decided to divide Stratis into several smaller TAORs to focus the forces in specific areas. In the end, I went with something that looks like this (ignore the modules for now, we’ll get there):

The eventual set of OPFOR TAORs in Uprising.

Note that any markers that ALiVE uses for TAORs will not be visible on the map during gameplay.

Each red marker will have its own set of Placement modules dictating objectives and units in that TAOR. For naming my TAORs, I follow the naming convention outlined by the ALiVE Team:

A good convention is to use the format TAOR_Faction_xx (e.g. TAOR_BLUE_1)

I named the southernmost TAOR: TAOR_RED_S because it is the southern AO for OPFOR (red). In addition to focusing on one force at a time, I also recommend focusing on one TAOR at a time. For this part of the tutorial, I will focus on setting up TAOR_RED_S with occupying militia forces.

Military Placement Modules

Now that we have a Commander in place and our area of responsibility marked, we need to provide our Commander with some units and some objectives in that TAOR; this is the responsibility of the Military Placement modules. There are three different types of these modules; I will be using one of each for this TAOR.

• Military Placement (Mil. Obj.) — The Military Objective Placement module will scan associated TAORs for any military targets (airfields, barracks, outposts, helipads, etc) and identify them for the Commander module.
• Military Placement (Civ. Obj.) — The Civilian Objective Placement module will scan associated TAORs for any civilian targets (power plants, factories, harbors, etc) and identify them for the Commander module.
• Military Placement (Cus. Obj.) — The Custom Objective Placement module lets you define your own custom objective and identify it for the Commander module. ALiVE provides several very cool pre-built objectives like camps and fuel stations that you can play around with.

Pro Tip: If you want to check out what each of these pre-built objectives looks like, just preview your mission, pull up the Zeus interface, and go to Groups > Empty > Compositions > ALiVE, and you will find them all there. Drop them on the map and check them out!

Placing and Populating Military Objectives

To get started, I want to place my militia forces in all of the military outposts inside our TAOR. To do that, I just drop a Military Objective Placement module and sync it to my Commander module.

The Military Objective Placement module (located in Camp Maxwell) synced to the Commander module.

The position of your Placement module can matter if you want it to act as a Headquarters. In this case, I want Camp Maxwell to be the HQ for the southern TAOR, so I placed the module there. There are a lot of configuration options for these modules:

The Military Object Placement wiki page details these settings, but here are the highlights:

• This placement module will scan TAOR_RED_S for military objectives. You can specify multiple TAORs here by separating the names by commas.
• All ALiVE objectives have a Size and a Priority. You can set up these modules to ignore objectives with certain sizes or priorities, but I’ve set this one up so that it doesn’t ignore anything.
• With the Place Units setting, you can tell the module whether it will be spawning units inside of the objectives it finds, or merely identifying the objectives. In this case, I want the module to populate the military objectives it finds, so I’ve set Place Units to “Place Units.”
• Using the Force Size, Force Weighting, Force Faction, and Override settings, I’ve set this module up to spawn a small Platoon (30 units) of Eastern European Light Infantry, except that it will spawn two groups of motorized infantry as well. No other types of units will be spawned.
• A Medium amount of Random Camps will be spawned and populated in the wilderness where there are no objectives. I like the possibility of stumbling upon a camp at night, and the constant threat of danger anywhere, not just in towns.
• The Readiness at 75% means that three quarters of the spawned infantry will be active, alert, and patrolling. The rest will be idling inside of the objectives.
• By specifying Create HQ as “Yes”, ALiVE will look for the nearest suitable Headquarters building and establish an HQ there. This will make this location a very high priority target. This will be useful both for the attacking forces and for the Logistics module later.
• The last three settings mean I’ve configured the module to spawn air units where applicable (i.e. on helipads), to place supply boxes around the site, and to spawn a small amount of ambient faction vehicles in the area.

If we preview our mission at this point and check the debug info on the map, we’ll see something like this:

Camp Maxwell identified as a military objective by ALiVE

As you can see, the module has identified Camp Maxwell as a military objective. The little red dots are not units but are military environmental items like H-Barriers or guard towers. The overlayed marker is a circle inscribed inside a square. Each shape can take on a different color. I have not quite been able to discern what the color of the circle means yet, but I have confirmed that the color of the outer square indicates which faction currently controls that objective. The green flag marker indicates that there is an HQ there.

Placing Civilian Objectives

Now that I’ve garrisoned the military outposts in this TAOR, I want the Commander to order units to secure civilian positions as well. I don’t want any units to spawn in the civilian areas, but I do want them to move in and secure. I do this with the Civilian Objective Placement module. Simply place it down and sync it back to the Commander module as we did before.

The Civilian Objective Placement module (located in Agios Ioannis) synced to the Commander module.

This module is nearly identical to the Military Objective module, except that it will identify civilian targets like gas stations, harbors, power plants instead of military outposts. I won’t point out all of the configuration settings again because they function the same as the Military Objective module. However, it is worth noting that because I do not want units to spawn in the civilian objectives, on this module I set Place Units to “Objectives Only.”

If we again preview the mission and check the debug info on the map, we’ll see something like this:

Civilian and Military Objectives identified.

Here you can see that ALiVE has identified Camp Maxwell and LZ Connor as military installations and the town of Girna as a civilian objective. You can also see that several OPFOR units (e1, e2, e4, and e5) are on their way to secure Girna (note that the markers for these units are slightly transparent; this is because those units are currently operating in the virtual space and are not actually spawned in). Once the units reach a civilian objective, they will take up positions in and around buildings to hold the area.

Placing Custom Objectives

So far we’ve demonstrated some real power that ALiVE provides. By placing just a handful of modules, we have a fully functioning, dynamic scenario. We didn’t have to hand-place any units at all (except our debug unit, I suppose). ALiVE takes care of it for us. But what if ALiVE doesn’t pick up an area that we want as an objective? No problem — Custom Objective Placement module to the rescue!

The Custom Objective module allows us to place objectives of our own design that are recognized by the Commander module. They will be treated like any other objective identified by ALiVE. In this case, I wanted to put a small patrol base and MG nest around the lighthouse in southern Stratis. Like always, I just dropped a couple of the custom objective modules and synced them back to my Commander.

Here is the configuration for one of the camps:

The Custom Objective Placement module configuration

The settings are somewhat similar to the other placement modules, with some differences:

• We set the size and priority of the objective ourselves in the config.
• We tell ALiVE how many and what type of groups to spawn at each location. In this case, I’ve chosen to spawn 2 Eastern European infantry groups at this objective.
• The Spawn Composition tells ALiVE what camp layout to spawn. I’ve chosen “MG Camp 1.” There are a ton of good options already here, and according to the wiki, “hundreds” more are in the works. Once again, you can jump in to Zeus to preview what each of these looks like.

That’s it! My custom objective looks a bit like this:

My custom MG nests around the lighthouse

At this point, we actually have a functioning occupational force. They spawn in military installations and garrison them, then dispatch some units to secure civilian objectives. We’ve even added some objectives of our own making. But what happens when the fighting starts, and our occupational force starts losing units?

The Logistics Module

Enter the Military Logistics module, also referred to as Logistics Command (LOGCOM). This module is responsible for supplying your Commander with reinforcements and supplies. Remember the setting in the Commander module for Reinforcements? This is the module that puts that to use.

As usual, we just drop the module on the map and sync it to the Commander module.

The Logistics module synced to the Commander module.

The position of the Logistics module is irrelevant. The Logistics module will choose the nearest, largest friendly-controlled military objective to trigger resupplies and reinforcements from in the manner dictated by the Reinforcements setting on the Commander module. Here is its configuration:

The really important settings here are the Reinforcement Type and the Force Pool.

A Reinforcement Type of “Dynamic” means that if the original resupply spawn point selected by LOGCOM is taken by the enemy, LOGCOM will fall back to smaller and smaller objectives to continue the supply chain. Setting this to “Static” means that logistics will cease to function if the originally selected objective is lost. LOGCOM will resume once the objective is secured again.

A Force Pool setting of “Dynamic” means that the more objectives this faction holds, the larger and better equipped the reinforcements will be. Instead, I’ve set this to a fixed number of 100 groups; LOGCOM can resupply the synced Commander with up to 100 groups before it ceases to function. There is also an option for “Infinite.”

You can also use the Allow Unit settings to determine what types of reinforcements can be requested. I want Uprising to be an all-infantry experience, so only light vehicles are allowed.

All Together Now

In the end, our occupying force configuration looks something like:

The modules for an Occupying force depicted together

We now have a fully functioning Occupational force that garrisons the military objectives, moves to secure civilian objectives, and has a reinforcement supply chain.

This is actually the basis for any type of force, not just an Occupying one. You will use the exact same patterns of markers and modules to make asymmetric and invasion forces as well; the only major difference between them will be the settings inside the modules.

Next up, we’ll look at creating the civilian population across the island.

Tutorial Series

1. The Uprising Backstory
2. Familiarization and Resources for building with ALiVE
3. The Base ALiVE Mission
4. Creating the Occupying Force (You are here)
5. Creating Civilian Population
6. Creating the Asymmetrical Force
7. Creating the Attacking Force
8. Creating Playable Forces
9. Troubleshooting Information