Exorcet

The F-4 will dominate the MiG. Some of the factors that made the MiG threatening in reality like RoE and missile reliability may not be present in DCS. The MiG-23/Mirage F1 will be the fighter to use to go against the F-4. Fishbeds should avoid Phantoms and try to go after Tiger II's.

I've only scratched the surface of scripting, true, though I do know that some of the things I've requested are possible with lua (and even the built in trigger system). I actually do have a fuel monitor script, a few simple event handlers, a couple of short flag scripts, destroy script, and even a simple AWACS script. Part of my wish here is to have everything in an integrated GUI. If there are existing scripts for these tasks I'm open to looking at them though. I've seen DML though I haven't looked into it as a mission monitoring tool. Another idea to consider, thanks.

Mission making can be a big task and some complex missions can involve a lot of testing. It would be nice to have tools to make that testing easier. Here are some common issues I've faced: -The need to time accelerate during long missions -The inability to see flag settings, unit fuel states, radio frequencies, or other mission parameters unless set in the mission beforehand -The inability to hide/unhide units on the map -The inability to show labels for testing purposes -The inability to manually activate triggers -The inability to set immortality/unlimited fuel mid missions -The inability to destroy units at will There can be more than one solution for these problems. A few solutions that I've come up with: -Allow player to fly AI planes - Simpler flight model means faster time acceleration, also being able to take control of AI units might help understand limitations they face like fuel management and sensors -In mission GUI that displays flag and trigger information and allows the user to edit them -In mission GUI that displays unit health, fuel, weapons, visibility settings, and radio settings -Some way to launch a mission in a test mode that overrides mission settings like labels There may be better ideas and if so I'd welcome them.

It's not the only one either. This one might be even worse and hasn't received any attention:

If you use the option "HIDDEN ON PLANNER" for units in the ME, they do not show up on the planner when launching a mission. However, if you click the detection/threat rings buttons in the top right the rings will show around those units, revealing that they exist.

The track system doesn't prevent rewinds, you just need to run time backwards in your physics equations and they will work in reverse. There may be some issues with smaller details like handing the addition or deletion of objects from the sim, like weapon detonation, which would need to be figured out.

Water for this map would be extremely valuable, even if the terrain between is extremely low quality. The ability to fly from carriers and to perform long flights is only a plus.

For what its worth, DCS does have enough tools to make ground combat not completely sterile, but the stumbling block there is that it relies on the mission creator to do everything and it can be a lot of work. Also while a lot of what you said is true, not everything goes as it should in the real world. Yes, ground units probably shouldn't be standing out in the open somewhere, but mistakes or just plain bad judgement can be made. Making AI human intelligent is a tall task, though hopefully that will change in the near future with recent AI developments, so we do have to work with expectations less than perfect. Just in case, I will also stress that I don't think DCS is free of problems at all. Some are pretty glaring too. The problems should be pointed out to ED to address, but we also have to compromise a little with the reality that DCS is complex.

Yes. My position is that weather variation should come to DCS and is an important element in real life flight/mission planning, but we need some control over how much it can vary otherwise we risk breaking missions. The same can be said for things outside of weather too. At some point ED made random AA missile launch range a default setting for fighters. While I can see the usefulness of the setting, it's rendered almost pointless because the randomness ranges all the way from max range to weapon NEZ, so it results in BVR fighters potentially holding missiles until they're so close that they have no chance of avoiding missiles fired at them. That option needs a slider to limit the range of possible random values.

I see it as a map like any other. By offering unique terrain it has value. My biggest concerns at the moment are size, airbase layout, and the availability of water for carriers. If historical Afghanistan in DCS doesn't seem appealing, then create a fictional scenario.

AI aircraft need waypoints and actions in those waypoints to function. If an AI has no waypoints or reaches the end of its waypoints, it will try to land at the closest non hostile airbase. You can find the actions by clicking ADVANCED (WAYPOINT ACTIONS) and adding them to the list. Some are added by default based on the TASK assigned to the AI. The default CAS action is a way to get the AI to act, but I don't recommend it. Most of the default actions give you limited control over the how the AI acts and can make them do weird things. Instead you can use tasks like Search Then Engage to give the AI a mission and better control how they operate by limited range of engagement, weapons used, targets assigned, etc. Keep in mind that the AI has to find a target before engaging. Detection abilities vary with different units. If the AI needs to search an area it helps to give it an Orbit waypoint action to make it fly around a specific waypoint or pair of waypoints. This can be a lot to take in if you're new to the ME, but if you provide more details someone can set up an example for you easily. Or you can share a mission file and have someone add units to it.

You may not necessarily want to preserve the mission (and even if you do, opening it causes no damage, only saving does), but instead want to get information out of it. In that case being preventing from opening the mission is a massive hindrance. Keeping the mission open also makes sharing a lot easier since the person you're sharing it with doesn't need to know what mods are required. You obviously can't share for the purpose of running the mission, but you might for troubleshooting. I don't disagree that it can protect the mission from damage, but it's still a bad way to do it since it also keeps you from accessing the mission at all. Yes it would be frustrating to accidentally save over a mission, but preventing that doesn't require locking the mission. There should be protection of some kind, but I'd rather it not be totally preventing the mission from being open as that just causes additional problems/work. If the functionality is reverted, there should be a checkbox to disable the file locking at the very least. I like having the name changed to prevent accidental saving if the mission cannot be fully loaded, there just needs to be a way to make that clearly visible to the user. Maybe forcing the save button to show a dialogue that explains the issue with the mission.

Having the ability to open any mission without needing to install additional files is very helpful. Locking the mission file completely isn't a great solution to preventing accidental changes, instead there could be a popup box warning about the missing mods as well as affixing a suffix to the mission file name so that if it's saved it can't overwrite the original file unless the user intentionally uses "Save As" (though if people don't notice the file name change, it could cause some confusion). A checkbox option like @Elphaba mention could also work.

This has nothing to do with the MiG-29. It's the conditions that change how the vortices look.

Since the hardcoded (assuming they actually are hardcoded) values were wrong in the past, the radio.lua is probably correct. You can report map issues here: https://forum.dcs.world/forum/520-bugs-and-problems/

Unfortunately I do not. The ME entries may be hardcoded. There was an issue on this map where the ME frequencies did not match the actual ones in the past.

This is correct. I was going to post this when I saw the thread earlier, but I didn't see any mention of the save changes warning in the original post so I thought it might have been a different issue. While it's unintuitive, I can see the mission zoom setting being a save feature. I think it also changes the default F10 map position when starting a mission. That said, it can also be annoying. I'm used to it so I don't find it a big deal but disabling the temp mission feature could be a useful option. Some time ago, the ME would auto open the last played mission in a session which was something I found helpful. It would even open the mission if you had not saved it. I think that would be a nice feature to have return as an option as well.

Going only by the video posted above, at sea level and clean, the F-16 should at least equal to the DCS aircraft currently ahead of it. What you say is true about A, though the C is no slouch and does have more thrust. In fact as far as I know, I think the Blk 30 C's are generally considered the best anecdotally.

It will depend on how deep you want to go. You can give a few groups a route that has them push toward each other, then copy and paste them, and you'll pretty quickly have a large battle. But the two sides will just be charging at each other until one side is dead (or gets stuck where the other side can't see them). A step up from that is to give the group multiple waypoints and then use the go to waypoint command to dynamically make them advance and retreat. The AI isn't going to do this intelligently, but it can increase their survival rate and prolong fighting. This isn't something I've spent much time on as I usually limit my ground units to smaller numbers. You can have large battles, but your PC hardware will have to be factored in.

This is absolutely true, but the process is a bit tedious and without a detection trigger, you can't truly tie SAM behavior to sensors without scripting. I know the IADS module fell through, but some simple solutions for improved SAM behavior would help a lot. Things like a waypoint/triggered action to make SAM's flash on/off, an option to have them turn off in response to attacks automatically, and an option to link a SAM to EWR or AWACS and use radar for "attack only" like planes.

Thanks for the confirmation. The F-16 model is quite good. This is not a massive error, and my flying wasn't perfect, so if it's deemed to be within tolerances I can understand.

The disperse under fire is a very important option for ground units, I'd recommend considering how to set it for every ground group placed on the map. Luckily you don't have to check and uncheck it every time you place a group. I like to place a few groups down when building a mission, set their settings, and then copy and paste them as needed to save some time. DML's spawning tools can probably do something similar.

A campaign built around exploring anti stealth tactics could be fun. I've had an idea for this using the F-117, but have not been able to devote time to creating the missions. AI F-35's wouldn't just have to serve as adversaries though, they could be interesting as allies as well. Fly with them deep into enemy territory and make use of their SA to survive beyond the range of friendly AWACS. Or you act as a supporting missile truck to offset their reduced weapons capacity when flying in a LO configuration. While there are a lot of AI assets that DCS could benefit from, I don't think the F-35 is that wild of a choice to add.

That is an ammunition explosion. Certain buildings will detonate that way, I believe all the ammunition warehouses in the static object list. I don't think you can generate that explosion arbitrarily, but you can place a warehouse nearby and force it to blow up.

This is still labeled as "PM Evidence" so I wanted to follow up. Do you need more source information?