Exorcet

You'll probably want to practice working with triggers and flags if you haven't already. The ground AI isn't very dynamic on its own. You can make them move around and engage in various tasks to a degree with commands like Hold, or go to waypoint, or passing them tasks to shoot at points or engage certain targets. While this can work to an extent, it's also a bit tedious to do. My suggestion for mission building is to set up one semi complex mission with features like this and then when ever you want to make a new mission, start from the prebuilt mission with many triggers etc. That way you can save some work. You may spend a lot of time on the original mission, but hopefully not so much on subsequent ones. Pick your map wisely since we don't have an easy way to copy between maps. Something useful for more than COIN is learning how to set groups to spawn randomly as it makes missions more fun to replay because they become dynamic. Do this by setting multiple groups on the map with "Late Activation" checked. Then on the trigger page you can set triggers to assign a random value to a flag and then make each value of the that flag spawn a different group in the mission. Also a tip on the suppression idea that you mentioned. Don't use deactivate, unless you want the group to vanish forever. You can instead turn the AI off. This leaves the units in the mission and allows them to be turned back on.

This is long, long overdue. It's needed everywhere for every aircraft. ED doesn't want to populate every map with every airport on it. OK, fine, but at least let users fill in the gaps. I appreciate the work done on maps, but Hormuz for example would benefit greatly from Chabahar, Bushehr, Al Udeid, Doha, and Prince Sultan. Not only would the variety of starting locations be nice, it also allows for wider areas of aircraft coverage without resorting to in air starts and allows the maps to support more aircraft. DCS airbases sometimes have limitations that make handling large volumes of aircraft difficult, so a large number of bases may be needed even if the bases on the map have a lot of parking. If we do get placeable airfields they should probably come in a few different sizes. All of them should have taxiways connecting to both ends of runways, otherwise a number of AI taxi issues might spring. Parking should also be available near both ends of the runways, again to facilitate known issues with DCS taxi behavior.

Bandar Abbas is a weird place. Not only with the large aircraft parking issue, but there are only 3 spaces on the south end of the airport. If the wind blows the wrong way the AI will spend forever taxiing for takeoff. Because of this I've been forced to use the same weather for nearly every mission. DCS airport operations need an overhaul.

I'm not sure about this. The vehicles may have safety systems to prevent catastrophic failure, like blast doors for tank ammo storage. And generally a random bullet won't cause a fuel tank to explode anyway. Bombs are a different story.

By making practice more accessible since you no longer have to choose between a dedicated practice session or flying a mission with refueling. Says who? So now practice isn't important because it's not the part you deem randomly important? If you're going to refuel for the sake of flying a mission instead of just randomly hooking up to a tanker, all of the things I mention matter and should be covered in training. If you want to make AAR into some kind of contextless minigame, you can ignore them, but not everyone wants that. You're wrong, but then you've been wrong every time you're tried to bring this up. Not at all. So let them have it.

Unless you consider finding the tanker with something like TACAN, and remembering to set your radios properly to communicate, or managing fuel to know when to go to the tanker. There is plenty of training value. No it's not.

There isn't anything unfair about a refueling assist since refueling isn't a competition. Though if the person running the server wanted only people who could AAR, then the option to disable it would be needed. You'd have to get 1000 yards from the tanker, requiring more skill than using unlimited fuel, so it would still help even if you make up an arbitrary number. And as for disabling it online, there is no real need since it doesn't provide an advantage, but the option should exist to suit the needs of whoever runs the server.

Depends. I think it would be nice to have a way to force disable it.

It helps by making AAR more approachable. More missions can be built around AAR, allowing more practice, allowing for faster learning. It has been explained many times how it is helpful.

OK I guess we're getting somewhere if you can see that development can be planned in an ordered fashion now. You're not in a position to say that unfortunately. It's a reasonable concern to be sure, but not something that can you can say with certainty without information on how DCS is developed. Where is the counter for these disagreements? In any case since I'm not the one arguing for majority rules, I don't care how many people agree or don't. What I care about is finding solutions to various user desires. Something more helpful and less short sighted than "I don't personally want this, so it can be never be added." You know even less what works for them, so your advice isn't worth much. Feel free to share it, but try to realize when it's not helping. Learning AAR gives you no authority because it still doesn't make you the person requesting the feature.

OK, but where does the idea that AAR assists can't coexist with all these other things come from? If you want a really, really simple example of both coexisting with no negative impact to your list, here it is: Add DC, AI, damage, SAM's first, then add AAR assists later. This is why the against argument seems so ridiculous. Wanting something more than something else is absolutely reasonable. Acting like adding a specific feature will shut off other features of the game makes no sense at all. Being completely against something without even considering a workable solution for all sides comes across as being against something for the sake of being against it and nothing else. Based on what though? ED is not a 1 person developer. Work on one project does not mean resources are taken from another. If people were genuinely interested in friendly discussion I'd expect that people would at least make room for an idea instead of trying to shoot it down at every opportunity. Also what if a large portion of people disagree with you? Does that mean your desired features should be barred from the game? People that like to speak for other people are the kind of people that probably shouldn't speak for other people. I think it's fine to give your opinion, but if someone else says that their ways work better for them, well people generally know themselves better than strangers.

That's actually a complicated question. If a new feature takes nothing away from the sim it's fair game. Adding Mario Kart banana peels to DCS isn't something I'd care to have, but if I didn't have to use them then they are as good as non existent. No reason to care about of them if you don't like them. Unfortunately though, ED have limited resources so sometimes choices need to be made on what development work to prioritize. I'd like to see this done with back and forth communication between ED and players We as player have wants while ED knows its own budget and time constraints. To effectively make a realistic list we could ask ED what resources it would take to add a feature while they could let us know what resources are available. Shouting "no, never add this" to an idea right away is of no help. Well look at that, the feature that is ridiculous to expect in a simulator, was in a simulator. This is from the Jane's USNF manual. Not a DCS level sim for sure, but something that took a good few steps to represent realistic air combat for its time. Aids fit in perfectly with simulators because simulators allow us to control things that are beyond our control in real life. So all the things you mentioned are totally fine for DCS. Now if people were asking for these things we'd need to decide how to prioritize them for inclusion as I outlined above. Some things may end up low on the list. That's the nature of finite resources. An outright no however doesn't make sense very often. Maybe. No reason to be upset about it though. No there was a perfectly reasonable request for an assist that with met with off topic replies. It doesn't seem arbitrary when it's a popular request with a lot of community support. And the reason for wanting a refund was more to do with people denying training aids to new players than anything else.

That option exists to level the playing field, but the newsletter mentioned degraded error correction for RED side. I'm not sure if that means always or only when unrestricted SATNAV is unchecked.

The ME allows us to view lists of objects in our missions which is very helpful, but we can't edit the information in these lists. This would be helpful, especially if we could multiselect, allowing us to change to change things like skill level for many groups at a time. I envision something like this: An "Enable Editing" checkbox that can allow for the unit list to be locked to prevent accidental changes. There could also be additional options like setting the ME to automatically add unit or group name prefixes or suffixes. The ME does this automatically as of now, but is limited to numbers. In the example image above there is a dropdown for unit Skill for Ground-1. If multiple units were selected, the screen should appear the same but with the light blue highlight on more units, and the dropdown menu should impact all selected units. It might also be nice to expand the unit list to show which liveries are selected. At the moment it can be a big hassle to set camo for different ground units across a mission.

The Strike Eagle is technically multirole, but in US service it's a bomber. It has radar performance as good as the C Eagle, the same weapons, and better engines to offset its heavier weight and higher drag. If you want to fight in air combat it might be a good pick if you don't mind stretching its in service use or pretending it's not a US version. The F-16 is the primary fighter of a few air forces and the most numerous in the USAF. While the F-15C and F-22 would be the primary air superiority fighters, the F-16 was designed for air to air first and will sometimes perform air to air missions. It was actually the first fighter to score an AMRAAM kill. It's a great airframe, the only downside is the lack of space for a big radar.

GPS is separated by coalition. Ideally the F-16 should always be on the Blue side to get its actual performance. Red side is hardcoded to have reduced performance. See here for more info or if you're interested in revising how DCS works in this regard: https://forum.dcs.world/topic/343270-modified-unrestrictive-satnav-option/

It's not only ammo but fuel that you need to worry about. I haven't played this mission, but if the AI uses afterburner a lot of fuel dips below a certain amount they will refuse to attack anything. Something that might help, with R Alt + J you can jump into any friendly flyable aircraft. If you need to, you can fly your wingmen's planes for them.

You would need to ask the poll respondents if you wanted to find out since the poll isn't very specific. Looking at the poll itself, the most straightforward interpretation is: Yes - I want this badly vs No - I don't want this badly And as it turns out the 33/66 split is compatible with a 100% vote of wanting easy AAR, but where only 33% of people want it "badly". No supporting evidence for this statement anywhere.

If 33% is not enough to warrant support of a feature, then what does that say about something that supposedly only has 10% support? From Sharpe's logic, AAR assist has around 3 times the support of MP and should take higher priority than it. If an AAR assist isn't worth developer effort, presumably MP is even an even bigger waste of resources. On the other hand if MP is fine, then AAR assist has more than enough support to warrant ED's resources. There's nothing to grasp for here.

Nowhere in the poll does it say against. I await your post requesting the cancellation of multiplayer

It actually turns out that they can. If the assist did exist and people used to refuel in missions, it could help get them accustomed to the idea of doing it manually. One real life analogue, training wheels, are intended to help the user work up to the point where the training aid is removed. Even if the user at first never considers moving up the ladder, they can change their mind later. Some people may never move up, but that's also fine. If it doesn't impact you, who care? No where does the poll say against. 33% support is a sizeable amount of the playerbase, so that poll seems like a good indicator that it would be a popular addition in a sim where not everyone is going to be interested in every feature.

And that goes for everything. If we needed 100% approval for new features, would DCS have any features at all? You're waiting for ATC and so am I. How many people at ED work on both? I don't know. Unless somehow AAR assists and ATC were totally mutally exclusive I see no reason to be against one or the other. Giving your opinion on what is higher priority is fine, anything else beyond that without even knowing how ED works internally just seems odd. And worthwhile is a subjective assessment, meaning it will vary from person to person, meaning AAR assist could be among the most worthwhile additions to DCS.

You're not really going to be done with this topic as it's popular enough that new people will pop in and ask for it every now and then. A poll was already made showing a good amount of support for the feature, but this topic has come up multiple times over the years that a poll isn't all that necessary to see that it's something that people want. As of now ED has no plans for a refueling assist, but it's good to let them know what players want. Or just refine the exist AI control of player aircraft. Done, no new flight model needed. There are many ideas that have been proposed if you have a problem with one, there are many others. Although since it would seem you're not interested in using the assist, you shouldn't care in the first place. You can provide AAR tips if you want, but that's not what people are asking for. So it doesn't really help. WT has nothing to do with this as people would just play it if it suited them better than DCS with an assist.

The subject covers a lot of things. Though even in that case, fuel weight and management does play a role. If your fuel is fixed to a specific amount you're losing part of the experience, which can be a hindrance to learning depend on what you want to do. If it's just AAR for the sake of AAR I guess it's not a big deal, but I'd think some people would want to learn AAR to perform in a mission environment. Stopping all development of DCS also requires no extra work from the devs. Why would AAR assist be better than unlimited fuel? For the reasons mentioned many times now: more realism, better learning, and the ability to assist mission makers/testers.

There are more situations that just that one, as was explained. If you don't have to worry about being able to successfully AAR, then you can fly any mission regardless of fuel requirements or length. In that case having fuel management is a plus as it's part of the mission experience. Though even in the simple AAR in a vacuum mission, fuel management is extra realism. So why not have the option? Then pretend you're flying a plane and save yourself $60 on a module.