WWSmith

Thanks for the quick reply, and glad to hear that you're on top of it.

When I'm pushing towards the first target, shortly after Reaper 1-1 is cleared hot, I'm told to cease fire, then get a message that I've killed friendly units and have failed the mission. This persists even after removing all mods and running a full repair of DCS.

I just flew Mission 4 today, and the two lead planes tried to take off on a heading other than the runway heading, with the results seen below. I'm guessing that the fixed missions didn't make it into the Christmas Eve update, and the hotfix got overridden?

WWSmith The last shot is what comes of watching The Battle of Britain and The Final Countdown on the same day.

WWSmith

WWSmith

WWSmith

I'm very excited to see this! I love your other campaigns, I love the Harrier, and I've been wanting to buy the South Atlantic map for a while but have held off due to the lack of single-player content for it. This is a win all around as far as I'm concerned.

What's the install size up to now? If I have to buy a new SSD on top of the cost of the map, it just isn't worth it for me.

I can understand that the bomblets require a direct hit to inflict damage, which is presumably realistic given their small size. The trouble is that the hit probability is microscopic. Similar to the tracks above, I've repeatedly been able to produce a nice, tight circle of explosions blanketing a target without scoring any hits, even when dropping pairs. Right now I consider that the hit probability is so low that the Mk-20s are dead weight on my plane, and other cluster munitions aren't much better.

I, too, found this insanely hard until I discovered that you don't need to make the third show of force, whereupon it suddenly became almost easy. After the first two passes, orbit the village at or above 20,000', locate the MANPAD, and make him the TOO for your remaining JDAM, then wait for clearance to engage. The moment you're cleared, break towards the target, drop when in zone, and pull away, flaring like it's the 4th of July for good measure. After that, strafing the bejeezus out of the infantry before they can reach the pilot is 1,000 times easier than dodging a solitary MANPAD. Oh, and Newt flew himself into the ground when I asked him to help with the strafing. I checked afterwards and he wasn't hit, he just plowed in on his own.

First off, I just want to say that this campaign is positively fantastic! I just finished it, which felt like a real accomplishment. One thing I ran across which I think is a bug but which might have been intentional was in Mission 14: one of the targets is an RPG team, which the radio call says is on a rooftop. After wasting a few minutes searching every rooftop in the village, I found them on the ground on the north side of the building which I was told they were on top of. The tricky part is that the building was masking them from view from the IP, so I had to roam out over the village before I could get a line of sight. The drop itself was then very interesting: having marked their location, I returned to the IP, turned inbound, and dropped blind, then put the laser on the enemy as I came over the top of the building, less than ten seconds before impact. It certainly was one of the more challenging LGB drops I've done, but I'm not sure if it was meant to be that way or if they really were supposed to be on the roof. The one other bug I ran across was a lot more serious: in Mission 1, Davy said "whilst." Americans don't say "whilst." Any Americans. Ever.

I also couldn't get more than 50 points on this mission, but something different happened to me: I intercepted the MiG-15 and got the call, "Good intercept, return to base," which I did, but when I was on final I then received another call telling me to follow intercept vectors and keep my radar on standby until I had visual on the target. I had already received that call earlier, prior to the intercept. It happened when I was quite close to the runway, probably around 5km final for runway 06 at Sochi. After that, my score dropped to 0. I then landed and parked and got 50 points for that.

I had no intention of making fun. I was frankly confused about what you were trying to communicate by listing a slew of diverse projects, and I only said that you were referring to rumors because you actually used the word "rumor" multiple times. Examples: I am also well aware that ED does not directly control nor finance the development studios, nor did I ever suggest that they do, although they absolutely do control what is licensed for inclusion in DCS, so there is that. If I was to make any practical suggestion on the matter, it would be that everybody would benefit from some voluntary coordination of overall development. I think that this would not only benefit players, but the developers themselves, as I would expect stronger sales from complementary products than from maps and planes which just sort of exist as outliers. For instance, if someone (I don't know who, I'm just saying) were to release a mid-war Zero or a J2M or something, that would help drive sales of the Corsair and Hellcat. I expect that, if Razbam's MiG-23 sells well, it will be at least in part because we now have the Mirage F1 and (soon) the Phantom, without which it really wouldn't have any contemporaries, outclassing the MiG-21 and the F-5 (except in a turning fight), while in turn being thoroughly outclassed by the newer American fighters. Is this just a happy coincidence, are developers consciously looking to fill a late '70s/early '80s gap, I don't know, but it's a good thing and we need more of it. Anyway, that's all I have to say about that. As for the Sea Harrier FRS1, I'll preorder it on day 1 if that day ever comes.

Most of that Silver_Dragon post seems to be just a list of projects in development, stuff that we might not see for 10 years, and flat-out rumors, but this is exactly what I was referring to as a "scattershot development approach." This is a bad thing. Okay, if you're into DCS just for 1v1 online dogfights, then it's not really an issue (except for the I-16, which literally has no feasible opponents), but if you're like me and want to simulate historical or historically-plausible combat, then you want to see coordination, plans, and a roadmap. Now, I'm not saying that DCS overall is broken or anything, because we can do pretty darn well with Middle Eastern conflicts from the 80s to 2000s, as well as stuff in the Caucasus from that time period, including the aforementioned Cold War-gone-hot US vs Russia/USSR matchups. The issue is that we've also seen work invested in random directions which could have been better used elsewhere. For instance, I've flown the MiG-19 a couple of times on free trial, and I think it's a fun plane with a lot of potential, but I can't bring myself to buy it for the simple reason that there's nothing very interesting for me to do with it. It's kind of like having a snowmobile in Hawaii: yeah, it might be fun to tear up the lawn, but that gets old fast. The same goes for the SA map. (By the way, if they meant for this to be a modern map, why? That's like doing modern Vietnam or 1950s Afghanistan, thereby deliberately ignoring the iconic conflict in the region.) I'm not saying any of this out of spite or anything like that. Are there other planes which I wish were developed instead? Sure, but I'm not sore about it. I don't expect people I've never met to invest their time and money on something just because one guy thinks it's cool. I'm personally not very interested in the F-15E (might still buy it some day, just not at the top of my list), but I agree that creating it made perfect sense because it fits in well with the overall sim and people can get a lot of use out of it. I guess my point is that DCS could be so much better if there was coordination and an overall development plan, but that's probably too much to hope for.