MilesTeg

Reason being is because the dumb ATO always has the AWACS flying over enemy territory which inevitably means it gets shot down and we all know what a nightmare it is flying the Balkans theater w/o AWACS support. From my experience in the Korean theater the AI never routes the AWACS north of the FLOT and they're always protected with a HAVCAP.

Until we're able to task our own AWACS w/o fear of crashing the server I recommend we switch over to Korea until patch #2 is released.

USN_Squid

.....especially now that we are running into friendly mig-21, and 29s. It's a nightmare up there. It's just about impossible to find Interdiction ground targets as well.

/whaa!

TG_PolishBoogieman

Any chance we can win the current campaign relatively quickly? Here are the victory conditions:

- NATO wins (Serbian forces pushed back to their borders) -> Control ALL of: Zagreb, Zadar, Banja Luka, Split, Mostar, Gornji Vakuf, Tuzla, Bijeljina City, Osijek, Sarajevo, Gruda, Bihac

Looks like a pretty tall order. I'd hate to abandon this campaign though.

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Vulcan

The campaign can be saved and ran later afaik.

Boogie i bet you had to write all those down :P If you did it from memory, WOW. :P

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USN_Squid

Is there anyone with more campaign experience that knows a way to force resupply of AWACS and re-reroute them?

If not, let's set up some flights to go take down their IL-28s

MilesTeg

I don't think there's anything players can do to affect resupply, however you can easily manipulate the AWACS waypoints just as you would your own flight. Call up the ATO, look under C3I and find and click an AWACS flight and see if its routing takes it over enemy territory. If it does simply pull the waypoints back well behind the FLOT and it should be safe.

You can also right click on the map and add your own AWACS flight but from what I've been told adding packages is frownded on because it can affect server stability. I really can't wait for the next patch.

jex

Adding packages may cause problems (and may be why AWACs goes AWOL ) but it also takes packages away from other area's. Adding a package does not make a flight magically appear, the resource comes from somewhere else. Adding a package here, takes away a package there and at present, the campaign has only just crept back to 'fluid' from 'fragile', or something like that - meaning we're not doing to well.

To keep things simple, and realistic, the server is being ran on a 'you're here to fly the war, not be a mission commander", hence we would prefer that packages not be added. An F16 pilot does not get this option in real life.

Also remember that you can host your own missions as well if you so wish. All campaign missions get recorded against your log book, wherever you fly them.

At this time this is still the first campaign to be ran here at TG and as such, we are using this time to stress test the server. Once this campaign has finished we will move to Korea but until that time please be patient. Unbeknownst to most of you the admin team is actually working (rather hard I might add) to make sure that we have a great server and a great player base. This of course takes time and why we're sticking with the balkans for now and believe me - I hate having no AWACs either lol.

Once we''ve finished this campaign, we should know a lot more about how to work the server and from there we should all benefit. Hopefully it won't be much longer.

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Jex

MilesTeg

I understand where you're coming from and I certainly won't fiddle with flight tasking but there's a couple of issues I disagree with:

Adding a package here, takes away a package there and at present

The ATO is notoriously stupid and always has been. There are countless threads on the topic at Frugals and SimHQ. The ATO constantly needs to be coddled and nudged along through player input or else you'll end up with unrealistic scenarios like no AWACS or tasking 2 F16's to fly 200nm into enemy territory without any kind of escort whatsoever. And of course I’m sure you’re all acutely aware of the endless BARCAP flight it generates, and so if the AI isn't going to do anything usefull, let's put it to good work. However, it’s your server and your rules and I’ll abide by them.


To keep things simple, and realistic, the server is being ran on a 'you're here to fly the war, not be a mission commander", hence we would prefer that packages not be added. An F16 pilot does not get this option in real life.

I understand that as well but we have to keep in mind that a real F16 pilot would not have his missions tasked by an AI designed by a development studio making a flightsim for the home PC market in the late ‘90s. In my own campaigns I've tried to play as a "cog in the wheel" and let the AI generals dictate the flow of battle, but I always ended up with suicidal flights that caused obscenely high attrition rates for my side. No doubt F4’s AI is a complex monster but it still needs a human hand guiding it along, IMO. But once again, it’s your server and your rules and I won’t break them.

Ok my next question: What about changing waypoints for the packages we want to fly ourselves? Let’s say I’m tasked with taking out an armored column and that column is arranged in a east-west line but the AI has me setup coming in from a northerly direction? Can I adjust my waypoints so that they set me up to fly over the length of the column? Doing so will allow my flight to annihilate the column with a hefty load of CBUs.

I sincerely hope patch2 addresses some of the more serious server instability issues when it comes to player fiddling with AI tasking. Most of all I hope the AI is improved to the point where human intervention won’t be required but that probably won’t happen until we have HAL9000s in each of our homes. :P