Carrier Attack

[C4Irishman]

I was in the mission editor today trying to coordinate an anti-carrier strike against the stock Russian carrier in the game, but the AI was giving me some trouble. I had 2 groups, each converging from opposite directions, each group had 2 flights each, and every flight was composed of 4 F/A-18C's. Each F/A-18C was armed with two AGM-84A's (Harpoons), that makes a total of 32 missiles split into two groups and fired at the same time and from the same distance away. As soon as the two groups of missiles would get within the range of the carrier's point defenses, they are effortlessly destroyed by a combination of SAM's and lead slugs. I have only gotten one missile to hit the carrier so far and all of my F-18's are on expert and the carrier is only on average. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

[S77th-GOYA]

Probably the distance to the ship when the hornets reach the Attack waypoint. Could you zip the mission file and post it here?

[C4Irishman]

why would the hornet's distance to the ship matter? it's the missiles that are getting shot down. as of now, I have the hornets just outside of the identification range of the ship's radar

[Brit_Radar_Dude]

The Admiral K can seem a read bad @ss mother to sink. I've tried this with the AI in the past. To overwhelm the K's defenses you need a whole bunch of missiles arriving at pretty much the same time. To do that you need to ensure all the aircraft launch at the same time from the same range.

 

You need

a) All your AI aircraft on the same expertise setting.

b) Firing identical missiles therefore travelling the same speed.

c) Firing missiles that fly really low around 15metres eg Harpoon...

d) ...or try having the aircraft flying high and launching missiles that will fly a high profile eg HARM, Shrike, ALARM so they dive from a real steep angle. That limits the engagement range of the K's SAMS

e) Aircraft are flying together at same speed and height, so they are all the same distance from the target.

 

What wont work is small bunches of missiles arriving one bunch at a time with several miles between them.

Making a number of flights (of four) can fail if each aircraft only carries a coule of missiles as subsequent flights are a mile or more behind the previous one. This leads to a number of small bunches mentioned above. It will work if each aircraft has a large number of missiles, eg 4 or more.

 

Cruise missiles like AGM-86C fly higher, eg 50metres and are easier for SAM's to hit, so use Harpoon, Sea Eagle, Kormoran etc.

 

My personal favourites -

8 Tornadoes with 6 ALARMS each. Not much of a bang per ALARM, but it's like being hit by grapeshot.

8 Tornadoes with 4 Kormoran each. Nice smoke trails....

8 Turkish F-4E with 4 Shrike is enough to damage but not quite sink it, so follow them in yourself to finish her off with some dumb bombs.

 

Or go heavy duty, a single Ukrainian T-22 with 3 Kh-22, he'll only actually need to launch 2 of them and the K is toast!

 

If you want to use something like F-18 which only carry 2 missiles each, then use the editor to place a bunch of them running parallel tracks so they all lauch at once and then the K will be hit by a wall of missiles all at once.