Have miniguns been toned down?

Hey all - some buddies and I flew my Godfinger mission for the first time since April and noticed two large differences.

1. Very difficult to take off now with full fuel. Have take off parameters changed between 1.2.8 and 1.2.10?

2. The miniguns seem far less effective now. We used to team up on the mission and hit the AI like a hammer of the gods using our AI door gunners and the miniguns.... it wasn't atypical to rtb with 20 kills.... we were lucky to post 4 per run. Has anything changed?

Thanks !!

... ok, we just flew the miz again and this time our door gunners missed everything. 0 kills. my MP wingman could not even get his gunners to fire.

miz attached.

DCSW_UH1 Co-op OP GODFINGER _v1.6.miz

Any feedback ? Has the killing power of the mini guns/ ai door gunner effectiveness changed or is my old mission just behaving strangely in 1.2.10? I would really appreciate any confirmation/ denial of our observation as it will inform if the mission gets rebuilt or not... I'd rather avoid that time investment if possible

Yes the Door gunners seem to take a lot longer aiming at a target as well as missing the target more.

I think they realized that the Huey was just a machine of Death as it was.

If no one can confirm anything with the gunners before I get home (will be awhile) I'll fire her up and do a gunning run to see what happens.

Thanks guys!... if that is the case then I will have to drastically reduce the number of targets in the cities and maybe introduce the Sabre in a support role. I just really want to know if the mix broke somehow or not... feel free to download my mix in post #2 and compare it to your other huey experiences.

Is the combat employment to let them fire from a hover position? They used to rack up the body count pretty quickly from a moving platform.

There is a slider on the last tab. AI gunner skill, default is 90, set to 100 it is better...

One thing I noticed: if targets are set invisible, they seem to be for the hosts AI gunners, but not for the clients'

Also line of sight seems to break targetting for the gunners, and prioritizing is a bid strange...

@Doom, there is a script out there "Fire suppression" - I use that on most missions to tone down the fire from AAA and somtimes infantry, yet you need to tweak the "dizzy" time a b it down... quite realistic way to manage ground fire :D

I'll have to try your mission out tomorrow, got back later than I expected. However, just running through some of the small practice missions I've made previously for myself as a bit of a shooting range I did notice that the gunners do not seem to be as effective as they used to be, gunners were not as quick to kill things with the miniguns as I remember them being. Not that I mind the change, but definitely means it has to be taken into account when attacking.

I didn't see your post asking about combat employment from hover until after my testing, but I do feel as though my speed had an impact on the gunners. Will have to test this out more in depth tomorrow.

Thanks guys. ... Confirmation that I am not crazy is welcome... I'll have to check that slider

I share your pain..While playing Huey Drop 2 I held an orbit @ 65 KTS allowing my door gunners to fire all rounds..They each got 2 kills before having to RTB.

Something is definately wrong.... i just flew the UH-1H INSTANT ACTION, TARGET PRACTISE mission and my AI gunners expended 100% of their ammo for ZERO kills. They were flailing around like epileptic blind breakdancers...

I flew a straight heading at medium velocity

I flew straight heading at low velocity

I held perfect hover at different altitudes.

No kills.

I checked the OPTIONS and do not see any slider for AI gunner effectiveness as suggested earlier in this thread.:joystick:

I checked the OPTIONS and do not see any slider for AI gunner effectiveness as suggested earlier in this thread.:joystick:

Not options, but in the ME: the additional tab in the aircrafts properties, next to the one where you can set up the random failures.

ah got it.... OK i just tested the slider against the target practise mission and the gunners were not acting labotomized any more. it seems there is a HUGE difference between 90% and 100%... I'd suggest 90% is more like 0% and that they need to work on that fidelity a bit.

thanks all for helping me figure this out.

Speaking of mini guns, are they not available for use in the mission editor? They aren't in the armament options in my system.

That's strange. But you are aware that you can change the existing loadout configurations in the ME by RMB click over an entry for a pylon?

OK....this may be a silly question but I don't set up elaborate missions in the mission editor......RMB over a pylon.....I have right clicked over just about everything in the ME. What is a pylon?

 

Thx Flagrum

A pylon is that piece of an aircraft which actually connects the weapon to the wing or fuselage.

In the ME you can select a pre-defined loadout by selecting a line. You can also create a new loadout or modify an existng loadout by right-clicking on a row (aka "Pylon", see picture above at the top). From the context menu that opens, you can change the weapon that shall be loaded at that pylon.

(if the term "pylon" is actually used for the devices, that the Huey uses to mount the weapons ... I am not really sure. But it is the general term that is used within DCS for all aircraft)

About the performance of the AI co-pilot in regards of minigun employment ...

I experimented with it now as well. With the default settings of AI skill = 90% that guy can't hit a barn at arm length in front of him. He keeps the gun quite steady - but totally fails to aim at a relevant target. He happily focuses his fire 50 meters left or right or above or below the target... He was way better than that before.

Now the funny part: with AI skill = 10% he doesn't really hit much as well, but generally his fire seems to be better. At least he _tries_ to fire at a target and not deliberately besides it.

Woha. Now AI skill 100%: Pure awesomenessniper. As he never did anything else in his life. He starts shooting about 1.5 km out ... and even scores the first hits. At about 500 meters he plinks the targets away as if his life would depend on it ...

Maybe this change in behaviour is related to the general AI skill change with the last patch? ED reversed the ordering of the skills internally and perhaps calculations based on those skills, i.e. applying the AI skill percentage, is now having the opposite effect or something? And a factor of 100% or 1.0 doesn't change the base skill and thus is not affected by this bug somehow?

Anyhow, I am led to believe that this is an actual BUG and needs FIXING.

edit:

thinking about how he actually performs a bit better with 10% skill ... I think, he has the same problem as with 90%, i.e. he aims at the wrong spots, but he keeps the fire not as focussed and wobbles all over the place. So that he actually hit something was probably more because of pure luck because he was all over the place with his fire... lol.

^^yup... The AI gunners have sapped some joy from my uh1h missions lately. Looking forward to it being revisited if possible

I tried this again now (1.2.16) - seems the AI gunners are doing quite well now. Bug been fixed - can anyone else confirm?

Flagrum, I just can't see how this has been fixed. I don't know what it was like before, but in the following .trk this is what "98%" Gunner AI skill looks like for me in version 1.2.16. All of the firing is done by the AI, and I think their accuracy is rotten. A human door gunner or copilot on the flex guns would have taken care of most of those vehicles in one or two passes.

UH-1 AI Demo.trk

I wanted to bump this topic once again, because I think it is a pretty serious bug when trying to use this helicopter as part of a "combat simulation", that is, the role of a gunship. The .trk file above demonstrates that the AI gunners can't use their weapons effectively. Of course, you can always jump into their positions and do their job for them, but that is not very realistic. The only effective way to hit anything is to either do that, or else to fire fixed weapons from the pilot's position, which limits the combat capabilities that this helicopter possesses. I don't want them to have God-like accuracy, but there is something very wrong. I'm new to this forum, and I'm operating under the assumption that the Belsimtek developers and beta testers actually read the English language sections?

Set AI gunner slider in Mission Editor to 100%

Only way to make them hit things. Then they are deadly.

Flagrum, I just can't see how this has been fixed. I don't know what it was like before, but in the following .trk this is what "98%" Gunner AI skill looks like for me in version 1.2.16. All of the firing is done by the AI, and I think their accuracy is rotten. A human door gunner or copilot on the flex guns would have taken care of most of those vehicles in one or two passes.

 

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Hrmmm... yeeeah....

Well, that looks similar to what I remembered it to be before. They accurately (more or less) shoot at one point - but that point seldomly coincidence with an actual target.

I am not exactly sure what I did differently in my last experiment - so I tried it again. I managed to get the door gunners to take out all of the trucks. But I noticed something: you flew _very_ low. And when I did the same, the gunners had similar troubles. But when I flew higher (200-300 ft), they did a (somewhat) decent job.

Seems their aim is way off when flying "too low", above 200 ft they seem to get better. So, yes, not sure if the bug got worked on, but at least it is still not really satisfying, yet.

Even though I thought I had tried setting it at 100% previously, maybe I hadn't. I went through the same basic test scenario as seen in the previous .trk, this time with gunner accuracy definitely set to 100%, and the 3 gunners took out 9 out of 10 with one pass, including the lighly armored ones. I tried it again after reading Flagrum's post above about altitude, so I ran abreast those collumns again at an altitude of 30-50 ft, and the AI door gunners hammered 8 out 10. You're right Flagrum, maybe altitude has something to do with it, when the setting was 98%, but you would think even at low alt, if 98% were what we think it is, that they wouldn't do that bad. So it looks like what we have here is stunning accuracy at 100%, just as Shagrat (and Flagrum previously) have reported, and as you would expect for a slider set to the maximum, even at NOE, but horribly bad, or at least very restricted accuracy at anything else. I think it might be possible to conclude that the Skill Slider is broken. Knowing that those AI gunners can fight now is good indeed, but hopefully the developers don't completely abandon this issue, because I still think that something buggy, or else, incomplete. However, thinking that the AI gunners were totally broken beyond repair before, I'm certainly happy now to know that they work, that I can go into missions with them, and at that one setting of 100%, probably as good as a human can do with the mouse. Thanks for your help shagrat and Flagrum.

Did you guys see the latest open beta release notes?

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2386055&postcount=7

Helicopter AI shooting on ground targets - fixed

Not sure if that is only for AI helicopters or also for AI gunners in human played helicopters too, but may be related to this thread.