Bahger

Thanks, grimes. I will experiment with this.

In previous missions I have built a scoring structure to evaluate the player's performance based on the number of friendly ground units that survive the battle for which he is providing CAS. The only way I've been able to do this is to painstakingly set a 'flag decrease' for every individual unit that is killed and at the end of the mission (per trigger) a level of victory is awarded according to the flag score. I cannot do this in my current mission, as it's very big, with battalion-strength Blue infantry, maybe 70+ units comprising 12+ company/platoon-sized groups. There is no "coalition alive more than" (as opposed to "group more than") condition available. I'm wondering if there is a way to script a scoring condition based on "coalition alive more than" or, better still, "coalition ground forces alive more than", which would exclude allied aircraft that are irrelevant to the player's performance. A word of caution: I think I'm a decent mission designer with a thorough knowledge of the ME, but I am a programming/scripting/lua moron of astonishing obtuseness. If one of you guys is kind enough to help me out with a scripting, as opposed to ME/trigger, solution, please bear this in mind, please be patient, and please explain it to me as though addressing a ten year-old who hasn't had a good night's sleep. Thank you!

Thanks, Grimes. I'd better learn a bit about the post-CA mechanics for this kind of thing. Ideally, I want a C-130 to fly in once the airfield has been captured, and offload whatever it might take to enable the player to refuel and rearm. Will simply having the AI C-130 fly to the airfield, land and taxi to a certain location accomplish this?

I'm trying to do something I've never done before in mission design, which is to take an airfield, bring in a cargo jet and spawn everything the player needs to refuel and re-arm his Hog. I confess, I don't even know how to use the radio to re-arm/refuel, let alone equip an airfield for this operation. Can anyone take me through it? Many thanks.

Hmm, I would say "RTFB", but that would be obnoxious. I hope you enjoyed the mission anyway.

Today I placed a mortar battery in my mission, with a fire at point command strictly limited by trigger. When the mission commenced , the mortars opened fire, perplexing me for a moment until I suddenly realised; they had LOS to their target, which overrides their fire at point fire discipline, so I stuck them behind a building. What an odd way to program mortars and artillery, i.e. to invalidate indirect fire orders when there is a direct fire option.

I'm baffled re. how this could have ocurred, Aries, for the following reasons: - No JTAC is close enough to a target to be in lethal range of a GBU accurately deployed against that target. - The HVT column can only roll out 560 seconds (i.e. over 9 minutes) after OPFOR has taken its first loss. A voice message should tell you to intercept them. - The Apaches will launch by timer 1200 sec from mission start. The Chinook will launch once the Apaches hit a trigger zone on their route. There are three ways that the airborne assault helos can be prevented from deploying at their LZ: they can be shot down by the SA-9s or MANPADS, or, as I suspect might have been the case here, by cannon fire from the APCs guarding the northern end of the town. Maybe try it in singleplayer. However, none of the triggers except those that govern client a/c are different in SP vs. MP. I'm sorry if it did not seem to play out for you guys but it was very thoroughly playtested and I'm confident that the triggers and scripts are pretty robust.

My arty is behaving much more like arty should, now that it has no LOS. Strangely counter-intuitive, giving arty LOS functionality. Anyway, no real complaints now, the batteries are doing what they should, which is providing indirect, supporting fires.

Which one of these do you think would work better?

Do you think the fact that I could trigger the arty to start firing at a point but not to stop, indicates that giving the unit a two fire at point orders for separate locations, each triggered by the presence of Blue, will not work in simulating adjust fire? The 3 minute prep time might not be too much of a problem if the second location is Blue's last plotted WP.

Very helpful, gents, thanks. it's aggravating to have to trial-and-error airspeeds at altitude.

Interesting responses, gentlemen, thank you. Grimes, you are right, as usual, about using triggered action vs. advanced waypoint orders. I'm going to make that change but assumed that non-mobile arty would acknowledge orders given for their static WP because the advanced WP menu for its only WP is available, after all. I'm using Akatsias. I'm hoping that switching to triggered actions will enable the on/off toggle, as I have BLUFOR vehicles in a Russian town and do not want the batteries to be shelling their own people; I want them to hit the Blue vehicles when they emerge into the open, so I have given the arty a fire at point order linked to a trigger but here is the big issue: Once the arty is enabled, I think it will hit everything in its LOS. If there are no vehicles in the fire-at-point zone, rather than ceasing fire until more appear, I strongly suspect that the arty will hit vehicles moving in the town in its LOS. I haven't tested this yet, but that's my hunch. I'm hoping somehow to jury-rig some form of both fire discipline and indirect, supporting fire behavior in the artillery, rather than have them use LOS, which makes them just another visually-aimed direct-fire weapon system, which, by definition, atillery ain't. EDIT: using triggered action for the arty toggle works better than forcing the action via disable/enable AI, thanks, Grimes. One thing, though; with a switched condition monitoring the presence of the Blue coalition in "Killzone EAST", the arty opens fire when "part of coalition in zone" but does not cease fire when they've passed through. So it appears toggle ON works but not toggle OFF yet. Do you think it will be possible to manage the arty with enough ptrecision to have them fire only when Blue units are in the zone? Also -- stating the obvious -- the arty is now so far away that it has no LOS to the town, therefore eliminating the problem I was having with uncommanded shelling of civilians.

I'm pleased that my mission is deemed worth the effort of fixing scripting elements broken by changes in the way the engine handles randomization. I did indeed consult with Druid -- and, of course, Grimes -- in getting a simple randomization routine to work and, yes, all it does is vary the placement of defensive units by selecting amongst five possible arrangements. Various people have taken it upon themselves to fix my missions post-DCSW, and, as I said, I'm flattered and grateful. Going forward, can anyone guide me re. how to accomplish the kind of randomization I was able to achieve -- via having my hand held by Druid and Grimes because I am a moron with scripting -- in the ME? If all I want to do is get the engine to choose one out of five arrangements of defenses, how would I do this in the ME?

Ever since the early Betas, there seems to me to have been a huge problem with the modelling of indirect fire (artillery, mortars, etc.), one which appears to exist even now. It is: artillery in this sim works by line-of-sight. This is hugely problematic. The whole point of indirect fire is that it needs no LOS but can be directed by coordinate or via a spotter. However, neither one of these is implemented in the DCS world and arty will fire if it "sees" a target, which makes it a direct fire weapon, and therefore no more than a beefed-up tank. In a mission I'm working on at the moment, I wanted arty not to open fire at all, until its targets entered a killzone. However, ROE/Weapons Hold with a condition linked to a flag (All coalition out of zone) did not work. I had to brute force the arty not to fire by disabling its AI via a trigger (Mission Start > All of coalition out of zone > Group AI off). Even though I was able to switch on the arty AI when BLUFOR entered the zone (Once > Part of coalition in zone > Group AI on) this is a kludge, don't you agree? It bugs me that even though you can get arty to "Fire at point", which is appropriate behavior for indirect fire, it will also engage indiscriminately at targets to which it has LOS. This behavior is wrong for any indirect fire weapon system and, as I said before, it makes arty function like glorified tanks. I would think that, with the advent of CA, DCS would be obliged to improve their arty AI to incorporate AI spotters and target grid references. Even without CA, plotting arty realistically in an A-10C mission is a matter of working around its irregularities (LOS targeting being the most egregious) and kludging my way around certain gaping problems such as the failure of ROE/Weapons Hold AI. Once I got all these workarounds in place, the performance of the arty was great, but, yet again, it was dependent on LOS. If it sees it, it shoots it, which is fine for tanks but I want arty to shoot by coordinate or spotter's LOS. I suppose I could post this in the bug forum but I have no idea at all if the devs ever read it and, as a dedicated mission designer, this is my "home" forum. I'd be very appreciative of any knowledgeable comment on this issue, from a visiting dev or ME power user.

Thanks, Keats, I really appreciate your work in making my mission playable after several code updates. It's sad that the "lase" and "mark" JTAC functions are broken; JTAC is the heart and soul of this hi-fidelity A-10C sim and the devs should not allow it to deteriorate to this extent, especially as in some ways it worked better in Beta. I look forward to playing MR in this latest form. It's actually quite a tricky mission; totally dark and very task-saturated. Spotting a moving convoy from 18,000ft at night with nothing but no-grid directions from ground forces is nothing short of sadistic...who designed the wretched thing? Oh, whoops. In testing the .miz I got good at using "Mark" (TMS right short) to put a mark on the ground that I could slave my TGP to but you still have to be quick, have decent SA and be able to identify landmarks on the TAD. Not an easy mission.

OK, small confession: I forgot to remove the ammo from one of my Tornado SEAD flights. As you said, without it, their suicidal behavior is kept in check. Another thing I did was to task them to attack a specific group, which made them much more efficient but it bugs me that AI SEAD routines are insufficient to complete the task at hand and that you have to essentially simulate it by brute force, i.e. basically lead the AI to the target by its nose. I'd rather use the SEAD command, as this at least causes the aircraft to behave properly, i.e. to seek and decapitate the radar first. With SA-19s, the AI calls out "triple A" not SAM, which is revealing; Tunguskas have colocated AAA but if the AI cannot recognise these units as missile launchers, no wonder they try to roll in with guns. Thanks for monitoring the devs. As a loyal, and fairly advanced user of the sim since closed Beta, may I add two particularly egregious problems that ought to go on that list? 1. The AI callsign routine is comically broken. Mission makers might as well not assign callsigns -- not that they have a choice -- as they are now so out of kilter that the pilots (including the owner of the callsign) and the controllers always use the wrong ones. Always. 2. JTAC "Mark" and "Lase" is borked, producing false calls such as "Mark...No mark" and rampant "Terminate" calls when all procedures have been followed and the attack run is legit. DCS have improved a great deal, but it's annoying to see that certain things, like both of the above, that worked perfectly in Beta are now completely broken in the "mature" product. JTAC is the heart and soul of this high-fidelity A-10C sim; Wags and his crew should not allow it to malfunction quite as badly as this.

Yup. Here's what they do: - Hit the HQ radar units from a safe distance and altitude - Fire ALARMS at the remaining launchers So far, so good. Then: - One SEAD jet dives directly towards the remaining SA-19 launchers, causing them to fire several volleys, which, of course, knock him out of the sky. Gah... I think the AI Tornado pilot is behaving as though he has ammo for his gun, although I removed it in an attempt to prevent this stupidity. Perhaps this is what SEAD flights do when they run out of missiles but there are still AD targets left. It's kamikaze behavior. Can anyone think of how I might get these aircraft to RTB or disengage when out of ALARMs, rather than attempt suicide passes with their guns?

Trouble is, the TAS/IAS relationship varies enormously by altitude. I haven't yet found a usable conversion calculator. Are you sure the ME uses TAS, not IAS?

Thanks, grimes. I pushed the airspeed to the (post-IP) WP 3 up to 350kts (IAS?) at 25000ft, what did you put in?

I had forgotten what an English concept "eccentric" is... You make a very good point. I am hopeless at choosing the right airspeed for diffferent aircraft at different altitudes and cannot convert IAS to TAS (additionally I'm not sure which type is indicated in the ME planner interface anyway). Can you advise re. what you condiser an appropriate mil (i.e. non-burner) airspeed, as plotted in the ME, for an F-15E at 27,000ft?

I'm making a mission that is quite a large set-piece battle. In "laying the groundwork" for the Hogs, I have two flights of Tordados flying SEAD against a pair of SA-19 batteries and two flights of F-15Es timed to ingress a few minutes later. One of these flights (named Anti Artillery Strikers) is tasked with flying over the AO at 27,000ft and doing a "one pass, haul ass" attack on two large artillery batteries with cluster munitions. The problems are as follows: - The anti-artillery pass is extremely effective and looks great, when it happens, but the Strike eagles take a ridiculously long time setting up for it, turning and burning and varying their altitude and airspeed for no apparent reason at their IP. This delay is goofy and throws off my desired timing for the mission. I have tried every type of threat reaction behavior ("No Reaction", "Passive", etc.) in case the F-15s' behavior is some sort of maneuver against the remaining AD, but they behave like this even when all the AD has gone and SA-19s cannot reach up to their briefed altitude anyway. All this pre-strike messing about looks idiotic and I'd love to get rid of it. The attack itself seems effectively programmed. - The other F-15E flight (named F-15 CAS) is supposed to orbit at altitude picking off ground targets of opportunity. I have experimented with many ways of getting it to engage ("Search and Engage in Zone" etc.) but it will not engage, even when I reduce its target types to armor only. It flies directly over several armor groups without engaging. I suppose I could bully it into engaging by tasking it against a specific group but I want there to be more unpredictability to the mission and enable this Strike Eagle CAS flight to find its own targets. These are two aggravating AI fails. It's possible I've not set things up optimally so could someone please take a look? I'm out of ideas. You can run through the .miz very quickly by selecting one of the A-10 client flights that are on the ground and jumping around in F10, F2 and other views, speeding the sim up if necessary. I'd really appreciate it, thank you. Mission attached. Crossroads_05.miz

Got it, many thanks.

The only target order that appears available is "Fire at Point", right? (I'm not counting CA, which I do not own yet.)

I have a mortar battery tasked with firing at a point...but they don"t. Artillery does when I swap them out. How do I create an AI mortar barrage? Do they need LOS (i.e. a spotter)? Thanks!

Bloody right, Eno.