Sandman Simulations

Hi, Nice to hear. To make a dynamic campaign you only need couple of years of spare time and no other life

Don't worry. At that stage of the campaign it's very hard to push them back. You should have almost full air superiority to be able to attack strategic targets too. You can delay the attack before USAF and army will come to help you.

I did some more testing. It’s true that at the moment the flights assigned to the CAS mission seem a bit too eager to attack enemy attack helicopters. Important work as well, but destroying ground forces should be prioritized. I’ll make some adjustments in this regard, but that doesn’t change the fact that a war cannot be won by destroying ground forces alone. Taking out logistics is essential. That in turn requires sufficient air superiority and suppression of air defenses. By these means, the enemy’s advance can be slowed down or even stopped until reinforcements arrive.

Thank you for reporting. If you have tacview file please send it too. How many dynamic missions you have played?

You are getting those Jester calls after landing about missing check list items. It was once fixed long time ago but seems to be back. I need to check.

Thanks. I'll try that.

Hi, Thank you for your feedback. I'll take a look if there is any other way around the taxi issue but removing all statics from the deck.

Hi, Think you mean my previous dynamic campaign Flaming Sunrise. Last time it was broken due to DCS AAR problems. They have fixed it now. As the AI AAR will certainly be broken again in future I'm just working to change AI flight behavior to prevent that happen. So at the moment it should be working normally.

Hi, Thank you for your message. And thank you very much for the Tacview file. It helps a lot. I don't think you are doing anything wrong. After achieving air superiority level high enough you need to protect blue ground troops from enemy attack aircraft and helos and destroy enough enemy ground troops. And I think that's just what you tried to do. From Tacview we can see that Devils 3 and 5 are tasked to CAS area Lima instead of India. Lima is at north. Sometimes it is possible that F10 menu gets overwhelmed and something else is activated even if you push just right row. Shouldn't happen very often but it's good to check the text after selecting task for AI units to be certain that right task is given to them. Please try that again and if still a wrong CAS area is given report me the name of the mission and how many dynamic missions you have played so I can check if there is something wrong. Time to get all units airborne is now longer than it was when the campaign was made. After the DCS deck crew update things have changed so that those AI units will only taxi after you. Unfortunately there is no way I could tell them to taxi first as the AI deck behavior is determined by DCS.

Since this is the F-14B the player can plan both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions for his own flight. Of course, the Tomcat is at its best in air superiority missions and as an escort for the Hornets. For AI aircraft the F-14 mission options include fleet defense, escort missions, as well as CAP and sweep tasks in different areas.

Thank you. You are absolutely right that in this campaign the player carries a lot of responsibility. The campaign is completely different from a typical scripted one and is specifically designed for players who, in addition to flying, are also interested in planning missions and assessing the bigger picture in order to define and achieve strategic objectives. Fortunately, there are dozens of scripted campaigns available if mission planning doesn’t sound appealing. The ED team has now reviewed the campaign and some fixes have been made according to their requests. It looks like things are moving toward release.

Hi, Sorry for the delayed response. ED has done some magic because labels are now working but not in all missions. At the moment, for an unknown reason, in missions 3, 8, 9, 13, and 15 the labels still don’t work. The reason remains a complete mystery, since the settings are identical to the other missions. If you want the labels to work in any of these missions, it’s possible by opening the mission (not the intro) through the mission editor. In that case, the labels should work.

23/07/2025 update Mission 12. Kneeboard and briefing documentation fixed All missions: AI AAR changed for better reliability (was not mentioned in DCS change log but should be there)

23/07/2025 update Missions 3, 8, 13 and 15: AI AAR changed for better reliability

The mission should work after todays update.

Thank you for your message. There is a DCS core bug causing ai to stay behind the tanker after AAR if there is more than one aircraft in the group. This is reported to ED and I really hope they will fix it ASAP. I have also made a patch for the campaign to bypass this issue. It should be out in the next DCS update.

The big day has arrived. No, not the campaign release day, but I submitted the campaign to ED for evaluation today. And now we wait. The review process is usually long—months. Since this is clearly an unusual campaign, with two flyable aircraft types and a dynamic structure, there may still be challenges ahead. Below is a tutorial video that walks through the planning and execution of a simple mission in the campaign.

Hi, Thank you for your report. I have noticed the same and it seems to be DCS core problem. Single AI refuels normally but a pair doesn't leave the tanker. I have reported this to ED and hope they will fix it ASAP.

Thanks. Hope I will get it out some day

I'm just trying to test this but it seems that in development version AAR is broken once again so can't play the mission yet. Just reported this to ED and hope it won't get into release.

The liveries are ready. Lately, I’ve been working on testing and battle outcome calculations, trying to get the difficulty level balanced properly. The campaign documentation is also nearly complete—about 150 pages including instructions for playing the dynamic campaign, along with plenty of intelligence material for mission planning. Testing and fine-tuning will still take some time. In addition to that, both the campaign start and the various end scenarios are still missing.

Hi, Thank you for your report. Good to hear you made it back to the carrier and got the debrief as supposed. Still it sounds to me that everything didn't went just as is should. I suppose you don't have a track saved but if you are using Tacview please send me the file. I'll try to find out if there is some new bug introduced.

Thank you for your feedback. After playing the Arctic Thunder campaign, I’ve been planning to implement this innovative idea into my own campaigns. It’s a task that involves testing and will take some months to complete, so I haven’t had the chance to do it yet, but I believe it will happen at some point.

Hi, Thank you for your message. It would naturally be possible to create the campaign in such a way that all friendly and enemy units are visible on the map. However, the difficulty level of the campaign has been carefully balanced, and changing this setting would have a significant impact. It would not only make units visible on the map, but all units set to be visible would also be listed in the briefing — and to my understanding, this cannot be disabled. That would spoil many of the intended surprises. In reality, not everything the player is led to believe is happening around them is actually taking place. For the sake of performance, units may appear and disappear in areas where the player won’t notice — actions that would look strange if shown on the map. So unfortunately the answer is no.