I also set up a small group of playable units that spawn in a little landing area on the coastline. The string of modules between the coast and the HQ Objective are the Effects > IR Grenade modules that give our units a little path to their FOB.

The IR grenade path between the landing zone and the FOB. The bright light at the bottom is a chemlight at the landing zone, and the brightness at the top is the campfire at the FOB. In between, you can see the IR strobes that form a makeshift path.

Our Commander settings are similar to before, except now we select Invasion rather than Occupation or Asymmetric. This will cause our commander to put a high emphasis on assaulting and clearing objectives, but less on defending them.

The Invasion force’s Commander configuration

It’s worth mentioning here that for some reason, just setting NATO in the Faction box was not enough, as I thought it should be. This gave me an error saying there were no acceptable units to command. I had to specify BLU_F in the Override for the Commander to take charge of the NATO forces.

In this scenario, I only want NATO trying to establish a tactical foothold, so they will only be assaulting military objectives in their vicinity. I want to keep them concentrated in the north working towards the airfield. Therefore, I’ve only synced my NATO commander to the northern Military Objectives and ignored all of the Civilian Objectives. I’ve also given them a much smaller, but more advanced force to work with. At the HQ objective, I’ve given them access to 1 infantry and 3 spec ops groups, while with the Logistics module, I’ve only allotted a Force Pool of 100 infantry-only units.

The Attacking force’s Logistics configuration. Note the much smaller pool size and the fact that only Infantry reinforcements are allowed.

And once again, that’s it! We’ve now got three factions of AI troops wrestling over control of Stratis. In the next article, we’ll focus on adding playable units and enhancing the player experience.