ClydeBigBird

Also hyped for The Gamblers and curious if the recent F16 + Syria developments mean we might see it before too long.

Oh yeah one other thing @Reflected. You mentioned reading a bunch of books to do research for this campaign, if you could only recommend one of the books you read, which would it be?

Finished the campaign earlier today and had a great experience overall! This campaign oozes with character, and given the resources available (Marianas as a substitute), it's difficult to imagine how another campaign could nail the Vietnam vibe much better. I really appreciate it when campaign creators pay special attention to creating a mood using the weather and time of day, and this element is executed extremely well here. The missions all felt varied; I never felt like I was repeating the same scenario over and over. 12 missions was the perfect length. I actually got the Huey just so I could play this campaign, and being a new 'copter pilot, I found mission 1 where you have to land in a very tight space to be the most challenging part. From there, I gradually found my feet in the bird, and the difficulty of the rest of the campaign felt perfect. The gunship missions in the latter half of the campaign were generally easier to complete since they were looser with what you need to reach a mission success state. However, this was balanced with the gunship chopper being a bit of a dog to fly, and I really felt like I had to keep a close eye on my instruments while executing passes on the enemy, as my first couple attempts in the gunship ended with engine failure (I was probably redlining the exhaust temp too much without realizing it). Some of the flights felt a bit long (even though they actually aren't really), but that's probably just my attention span talking, and me being used to flying much faster machinery in DCS. Perhaps a little bit more dialog to fill up some of the transit to and from the base would have been nice, even though there's already a decent bit of it in these parts. This map combined with the great choices of weather conditions does give you some beautiful scenery to look at though! Great work as usual Reflected! Am hyped for your future work (especially another F-14 campaign)!

Also just experienced this issue, with a soldier walking into the tail rotor shortly after startup. Mission 8 is also the only time this has happened to me so far.

I feared that might be the situation, and that there is no way to easily "copy-paste" part of the mission in an alternate version. Appreciate the insight though!

I've played a pretty big percentage of the DLC campaigns for modern military jets (basically everything but the training campaigns), and this one has to be tied for 1st in terms of how much I enjoyed playing through it!

Really cool to see some behind the scenes of how these campaigns are created! I hope the video will inspire others to get into the DCS campaign game. As of now it seems like you and only 2 or 3 other guys are consistently putting out great campaigns, and it can feel like there's a bit of a drought much of the time. Going off on a tangent here, I'm curious how big of a market there is for DCS campaigns, as it seems like a niche of an already niche product. It'd be great to see campaigns get a lot more popular and become more lucrative for the developers, as we'd inevitably see a lot more high quality content if that happened. If I had to think of a single thing that keeps players away from campaigns, it'd probably be DCS' lack of a quick save feature. Probably the one thing that campaign creators could do to widen the audience is create alternate mission files that start right before the action beings, as it can be frustrating to go through the whole startup and transit process of a mission, get shot down, and have to do it all over again!

Has anyone successfully used Windows 11's Auto HDR feature with DCS yet? Could be a reason to upgrade for me.

Yeah I can really tell you put a lot of effort into getting the atmospherics just right. I picked up Serpent's Head 2 last weekend and have noticed a lot of cool aesthetic moments with that one too, like in Mission 5 the juxtaposition between floating at angels 40 and being blasted with rain below the clouds. Great stuff!

Oh yeah another thing I wanted to point out is that the inclusion of the tips in the briefing was a really good idea, and something I'd like to see other campaign creators do as well. The briefings in this campaign are just about perfect. They are the perfect length, they are well written, they do a good job setting the atmosphere for the mission, and they make it very clear what you need to do to pass the mission.

Finished the campaign last night. Overall I really enjoyed it! I encountered no other issues after Mission 8, and all AAR worked for me as expected from that point on. There are a lot of great missions when you really get into the meat of this campaign. Lots of memorable moments too, like Overall great job Badger! Looking forward to your future work!

IIRC I had about 3000 or maybe 2800lb of fuel left after we finished up the enemy aircraft.

I just played mission 8 and encountered an issue that is different from the one discussed on page 1. The island that 410 lands on had active SA-6s that shot him repeatedly as he was approaching (but he was invincible). Because of this I wasn't able to get close to the island, and failed the mission from not observing 410. Shame cause the mission was a lot of fun up until that point. Here's the track file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1edLbyG-NCUw_rorseEJvZlEKlXEyABJc/view?usp=sharing

Okay, thanks. Will try using the port side next time I try AAR alone.

Okay I just tried the F/A-18C Aerial Refueling mission and had no problem there, hooked up to the probe on the first try. That was with the 5-3B tanker however, so the parameters are not the same as the campaign which uses the KC-130 if I'm not mistaken.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this. Yes I was calling pre-contact, and receiving the "cleared contact" radio call before attempting to connect. I think I will have to give this a try outside of the campaign and make sure it's not a more general issue I'm having.

Yeah, all of my attempts in all three missions were on the starboard side.

Hi Badger, thanks for the reply. This has happened in missions 1, 4, and 5 so far. I just played mission 5, making multiple attempts at connecting to the basket, and saved the track. Here's the file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LWtx6TOBnUHc3WE0oeamyxPzY5OGj72E/view?usp=sharing

Hyped for this! Been looking forward to a campaign that will give me an incentive to buy and learn the F-16.

Enjoying the campaign so far but I haven't been able to get AAR to work as I would expect it to from past experience. Just as I'm getting close to the basket I get a radio call "breakaway beakaway", and the basket won't hook up to the probe. This happens every single time. Is this a bug with the current beta version of DCS, the campaign, or am I doing something wrong? I've been out of the F/A-18 for a while, but I didn't have issues with AAR in the past.

Having an issue with mission 10. After taking off and en route back to WP6 I get a message saying to contact Overlord using the F10 menu, but no F10 option appears in the comm menu. I kept flying all the way back to the city and eventually got another message saying to contact Whiplash using F10 menu, but again there was no F10 option in the menu. I tried this twice with the same result. Other than that great campaign! Probably my favorite in the A10 so far.

Pro tip for any other lazy people who usually do quick and dirty startups - if you're having trouble with the gun not working, make sure to set the counter and turn on the engine air supply.

What is this autostart cheat you speak of? I usually like going through the whole process, but if I die and retry a mission it would be nice to be able to skip the startup!

Completed the first 9 missions and so far this might be my favorite DCS campaign. The campaign really succeeds in its goal of walking the line between realism and fun. On one hand the take off checklists and procedures provide a nice level of authenticity. On the other, the missions do a good job getting you into the action fairly quickly, and have some genuinely entertaining/funny dialog. I also like how most of them don't require you to land to finish, but if you choose to, you're treated to some cool period-correct radio excerpts on your way back to the ship.

I failed mission 7 twice earlier today. Sounds like I exceeded the max closure rate the radar could track (after launch in the first attempt, before in the second). Is the way to deal with this to jump in the back seat and switch the target aspect switch to Nose (or just reduce closure)? One of the HB guys said on Sunday that it would be set to Nose by default in the next patch, but the patch notes from two days ago don't have any F-14 changes listed. EDIT - yeah, flipping the target aspect switch to Nose sorted it out and the Phoenix missiles worked as I would have expected in previous versions after that