RimanDk

Just finished it. Absolute top marks for characters - Max and Player in particular stand out, but they all felt like they had personality and depth! Amazing job! - atmosphere and story/structure. The missions were nice and varied. This was my very first taste of a Red Flag exercise and I'm happy I got that through this campaign, as it felt very authentic and "lived", if you will. I learned new things and reinforced previous knowledge, falling in love with the Mirage all over again and becoming a better pilot for it. The ride wasn't purely smooth and all rainbows and unicorns, however. Especially at the beginning, it can feel overwhelming and chaotic. I have needed to re-do multiple (most!) missions because of malfunctioning or missed triggers (lacking guidance on needing to pass a given waypoint within a certain distance to trigger, or needing to be on a certain frequency at a specific time, but not learning about it anywhere). I persevered and got to the end, but it's not a campaign I would currently recommend to people, unless I knew beforehand that they are handy at getting around that sort of thing and don't mind putting up with some frustration to get the full experience. Overall, it's been an amazing ride! If the critique above were to be addressed, so that everybody would get a smooth ride on their first play through it, I would recommend it in a heartbeat!

No worries, mate! I'm mostly managing to figure out the bugs and navigating my way around them through trial and error. Annoying, but still making progress. I did a 4th run at it and passed it with an 80 (was Winchester and couldn't deal with the follow-up). To any, who might be running into issues: The mission appears to be on a script with rather tight tolerances. You must overfly WP3 within 3nm for everything to trigger correctly! If you do, the script plays out as expected. If not, trouble ensues. I still didn't get any comms telling me the Migs were down and I got no indication that I should switch frequencies towards the end, so I only learned about additional tasking when an F10 prompt description came up. Suffice it to say, without having heard the radio call preceding it, I was pretty lost on what was expected.

I know this response comes almost a year after the last post, but it's still relevant. My experience on the first try was great - right up until I got shot out of the sky by a surprise Igla at point blank... My bad, I suppose. Second attempt included an unfortunate accidental ejection between WP2 and 3. We won't go into that... Third attempt is the one that matters, as it appears it missed a whole lot of triggers. I flew past WP3 on the left and anchored around it in a circle with a radius to WP3 of maybe 5nm, while climbing to 25k. Chevy 2 remained glued to my wing throughout, where, in my first attempt, I flew right over WP3 and Chevy 2 detached straight away. Got the migs spawn, pointed East and lit the burner, while CAP dealt with the threat, but got zero indication that the Migs were down. No comms or otherwise. Turned back when the M disappeared from my RWR and a quick F2 step-through of air assets revealed no Migs around. Went back to tracing circles above WP3 and must somehow have gotten accidentally close enough to trigger Chevy 2 leaving (didn't realize what the trigger to get them to leave was, but I guess it's actual proximity to the WP)... to go... on a merry patrol of the area, nowhere near the target, never dropping bombs on anything and never making a radio call for me to follow up with a run in. After a while just tracing rings in the sky, I finally got a "Good job, everyone! Let's RTB!" call from Twister... Stepped through the dialogue, then decided to go <profanity> up my target anyway, because I felt rather cheated... but no iglas this time and no active target assets. RTB'ed uneventfully, got a 55 score with zero mention of me launching rockets nor of my rockets hitting anything at all, though I clearly hit some mockups.

Thanks, BD - I think it would help to just get a run down of how the mission is supposed to play out after the intercept point. The B-1 does its attack run and turns around, of course, but I lack some comms calling me out of the CAP point, so it becomes a little bit murky when to leave, particularly if I'm in doubt whether any bogeys are left alive or not. Once I leave, what more is supposed to happen? What radios am I supposed to be on while retreating out of the strike point? Are there any interactions I should be getting? What triggers am I missing? I assume there's some radio chatter that I'm not getting because I'm on the wrong radios, and that's where the triggers are that I'm not catching. Guidance for when to switch radios is missing from the strike point onwards, which is where I get turned around, I think. If you could provide a comms timeline past the strike/intercept point, I can try and follow it and report back whether it changed anything or not. The campaign is excellent so far, with some fun, quirky characters and excellent voice acting. It's extremely chaotic, though, but I put that down to the confusing radar with all the spurious contacts and the lack of datalink resulting in lacking SA. Makes it very hard to tell what's going on a lot of the time - no fault of yours, just an observation of how this campaign is challenging in different ways than others I have played. I'm enjoying it, but the comms are a problem. Particularly the first couple of missions are pretty broken in that regard. Could just be kneeboards need updating or something =). Cheers.

I go through the escort portion and the attack run, intercept the bandits (AI is quite effective and kills them before I manage to get a shot off), circle a couple of times and F10 Darkstar to get a bogey dope, get a "picture clean" and try to leg it back to the Bone. I rejoin it, but get nothing on comms. No triggers. Nothing. It gets back on station in the whereabouts of WP3/6, but hanging with it does nothing, so I push red 2 and green 7 and head home. En-route I get a message to F10 to Nellis manually when I get close to the WP, which I do (pushing green 10 for approach). I land successfully and switch to tower on one radio and ground on the other, but get no comms from anybody. I park and turn off the plane, but... nothing. 50% score. Something ain't triggering. Where am I going wrong?

Okay, cool! Thanks! I set mine up on Ace, which is... more than a challenge! I will adjust my own training scenario to reflect this change. Hopefully, I'll start getting some results and building the confidence to get back to doing the mission proper! Cheers! EDIT: Lowering the difficulty definitely made the fight more approachable in my custom training scenario and I have started to see some success. Hopefully, I can translate that to the real mission! EDIT2: Managed to pass it. Turns out practising against considerably harder opponents pays off! =). It's still a hard fight, but it's approachable now, whereas before it would take a combination of skill and luck to survive it and would lead to a lot of frustration and painful re-do's. The way it is now, 15 is an amazing mission that offers a bit of everything, from carrier ops to strike coordination and tough formation flying (quite a tight turn with quite a lot of bank!) to air-to-air knife fighting to strike and cas... it's a ton of stuff crammed into a single mission! Marvellous fun! One of the best-designed missions I have ever flown (could only be improved by an optional tanker en-route home - which would be far from unrealistic for a strike of this size).

What are they set at? I think the ones I added to my own mission are set pretty high - would like to practice against the right difficulty, if possible =).

Doing this mission again for my second playthrough and I find them near impossible to deal with. I have a thread on hoggit about it, actually. Would absolutely love to see a video of you doing it. No matter what I try, they tend to fly rings around me and tag-team me to death. It's gotten to the point that I'm just practising that one encounter in a separate mission that attempts to recreate the parameters without Paco, as he's utterly useless in that fight. Say, it's not possible to just blow through them and keep going with the attack, is it? An optional tanker would really mean the world in this mission...

Yeah, I suspected as much. That would be why I mentioned keybinds . I have recently done a file verification/restoration. I do have mods installed. I can try to remove them.

I have been playing this again and I got shot in the face by flankers in both mission 11 and 12, but somehow walked away without a scratch both times?! I have checked and I do not have immortality enabled in the game options. Is there some sort of key bind I could have accidentally hit to enable it?

Thank you. I'll try that, then =).

Unfortunately, as already mentioned, that was the first thing I did, to no avail. The most important part is being able to play the mission at all, of course... but I would also like the campaign to progress naturally! As a work-around, can I play the mission as mentioned (through the Mission menu point) and skip it in the Campaign menu? Will that progress me to 16?

As per title. Just tried tonight. No mods (I cleaned them out for this). It launches and plays the intro sequence with the external view of the carrier. That finishes up and it goes to load the proper mission, but it gets stuck on "Wait for pooled tasks - 1". I've left it there for 5 full minutes and... nothing. For context, I'm on a brand new system with a Ryzen 7 7800x3D, 64 gigs of ram and a 4090. DCS is installed on a Samsung 980 PRO - missions typically load within half a minute. I seem able to launch any other random mission I have tried (tried about a dozen between campaign missions and instant action ones), but not this one. I have already verified integrity of files and repaired (I'm on Steam - there was nothing to repair) EDIT: If I load 15b through the Mission menu point, it works just fine. EDIT 2: Loading 15a through the Mission menu point works as well; it loads in 15b just fine =/. Not sure what the heck is wrong... I copied 15a and 15b into my Missions folder so that I could get to load them, for what it's worth... (The Mission menu point doesn't allow me to backtrack out of my Saved Games on C, all the way to the root, so I can switch to my secondary drive, whereon the DCS proper installation resides)

Situation resolved. I was missing the whole helicopter sequence. I never get the "Chig, I'm closing the canopy" dialogue, but if I wait out the helicopter, the rest works as expected. Cheers, guys!

I waited about 3-4 mins. I didn't notice any change of direction in the ship and the conversation never triggered regardless of whether I closed the canopy or not. I have a couple of mods installed: A-4 T-45 F-22 Bronco Blackhawk English cockpit for the Viggen Community keybinds I haven't noticed a helicopter launch yet. I'll try again and pay attention to it - thanks!