So what is exactly stopping me from making Bomber Units?

[ENERG1A]

I'm trying to make a maritime strike mission but i can't seem to put Backfires together into a single unit, i can copy a unit and paste them with a respective way point to follow but instead of the saturation attack i want they just go all in a single file line each 8nm apart and they fire one at a time, which just turns into a fleet defense exercise for the USS Normandy.

 

How do i group Tu-22Ms together and for that matter, any bomber?

[Ironhand]

Last I knew you can't. You have to set each one up individually and set up the attack timings yourself.

[Grimes]

The long and short of it is that the AI don't know how to handle and fly a formation and tasking for larger aircraft. It is all setup for smaller aircraft. One would think that with B-17s on the way that they might implement a more proper tasking for larger aircraft, but I don't know if that is even being worked on. Funnily enough the RQ-9 was first added it didn't have the "large aircraft" property so you could have a flight of 4 drones. This meant that they flew perfect formations and even did formation landings... as drones. If you had a flight of 4 Tu-22, they'd do the same thing because there isn't a specific exception to AI behavior written for the larger aircraft.

 

So you have to accept that they are separate flights and need to set tasking up accordingly. One way is that you can have the AI set to orbit at a given point and when all aircraft reach that orbit, the orbit is stopped and they fly on their way. You could also use time locks instead of speed locks to ensure the flight reaches a specific waypoint at a specific time. If the AI always take off in the same order you can alter each flight's flight plan accordingly to synchronize the attack. If the AI all have the exact same route and orders then the spacing will be dictated to the spacing for whenever the AI take-off.

 

Also worth noting is that the AI sometimes has a tendency to not shoot all their missiles at a target in the same attack run. Though I think this behavior was fixed somewhat for anti-ship missions. Anyways if you see an AI not fire all of its missiles you should modify the tasking to "Attack Unit" so you can be very specific in the orders telling the AI to fire all missiles in one attack. I think the AI only fire enough missiles to sink the ship and don't automatically account for any that may not make it through to the target.

[ENERG1A]

The long and short of it is that the AI don't know how to handle and fly a formation and tasking for larger aircraft. It is all setup for smaller aircraft. One would think that with B-17s on the way that they might implement a more proper tasking for larger aircraft, but I don't know if that is even being worked on. Funnily enough the RQ-9 was first added it didn't have the "large aircraft" property so you could have a flight of 4 drones. This meant that they flew perfect formations and even did formation landings... as drones. If you had a flight of 4 Tu-22, they'd do the same thing because there isn't a specific exception to AI behavior written for the larger aircraft.

 

Are there any scripts/mods out there that override this?

[Pikey]

MOOSE has a follow module. But its not a fix for multiple units in a group. There might be a change to the mods lua, I haven't tried it.