Terrain based objectives..?

[DazaKiwi]

I am playing the first Marine mission in the campaign. And im suppose to occupy 4 areas, the manual states you must clear out enemies and leave some troops there until battle ends. Well i have done this and the countdown now is red and counting up.

The briefing info such as Op 101...Occupy...

Update: the mission finally ends after about 6mins over-time, i didnt really do anything to trigger it to finally end. I expected the mission to end when the timer hit 0.

[Saavedra]

Missions end either when you offer a cease-fire, or when the enemy surrenders. The first case uses the score from the briefing´s victory conditions to dictate how well you did, whereas the enemy surrendering invariably gives you a total victory.

[TamaDasha]

You are supposed to manually hit "Cease fire" when you believe you've completed all objectives. This is useful in several situations: if you've occupied all terrain objectives, but also have an "inflict casualties" objective, you don't want the mission to end prematurely. If you've put troops into a terrain objective, you still have to sweep it - if you hit cease fire and there are still enemy troops in there, you won't have it secured. Ending automatically would remove that uncertainty. You can also hit cease fire before occupying everything if you believe continuing the mission will be more trouble than it's worth - you don't need a total victory in every campaign mission.

The only time the mission will end automatically is if the enemy surrenders. In that case you get an automatic total victory. AI surrenders if all its surviving troops are on very low morale.

[DazaKiwi]

Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense.

[Heirloom Tomato]

Some scenarios have a "hard" time limit, say 1 hour. The battle is done at exactly 1 hour of play time regardless of what is happening in game. Other scenarios have a variable timer of up to 15 minutes of extra play time. This helps to prevent battles where you are contesting the last objective and have run out of time from ending too early. The game then gives you a few extra minutes to finish the final push of the battle. Usually the scenario briefing will let you know if there is any extra time available.

[Actionjackson]

The overtime is a remainder from the old CMx1 engine, the idea is that the player does not exactly know when the scenario end. Normaly the scenario designer does write how much overtime there is in the briefing, at least that was in CMx1 games. Let say you had 60 turns +10 overtime, means the game could end after 61 or 70 turns or something in between.

It is to create more tension in the end, often you try to rush for that one last flag(CMx1 had flags) in the last few turns, and with overtime you did not know exactly when that is, so its is more exiting and harder to time it right. CMx2 scenarios do not use overtime as much as in the old games.