Neutral Coalition and changes to Airbase owners

[Pikey]

The OB of the date of this build brought about the implementation of Neutral coalitions to DCSW. We saw this commented out for some time. There's a some things that experienced mission builders and scripters need to consider.

 

 

The actual Neutral coalition units don't interact in any special way. They wont fire back, wont be seen on the map and are not targetted by the other red and blue coalitions.

 

 

Detection is (so far that I've found) excluding Neutral coalition. This is a good thing, or certain scripts would start detecting them as "not their coalition" and firing on them. This would have been true in the case of things like Moose Dispatchers. So far as I can tell, they are not detected with the https://wiki.hoggitworld.com/view/DCS_func_getDetectedTargets function in the SSE. Think "invisible".

 

 

Airbases are somewhat changed. Firstly, Farps could never be Neutral, unlike Airbases, which can be set to either. Now they can, so this changes the gameplay of capturing Farps a little, they behave almost exactly like Airbases did, retaining their original colour and reverting once no opposing coalitions are in the 2km zone. However there are a few things to note.

 

 

Neutral units cannot block airbases from being captured or capture airbases. They are simply ignored.

 

 

There is a new coalition enumerator of "3" for airbases. 0,1 and 2 (neutral, red and blue) still exist, so what is this 3? Well so far as I can work out in testing 3 == contested and 0 == empty. Neutral units don't contribute to contested, just red and blue. The getCoalition of an airbase with both coalitions present in the 2km zone now shows 3 and 0 when it's vacant. This presents a problem for some scenarios. Farps have increased from 2, to four possible returns when you check their coalition. Previously and for many years folks may have been checking this expecting 1 or 2 only, which could have come out as if red then ... else (it must be blue). Now that logic will fail. Additionally airbases have 4 returns, up from three, and they also have two states that are not red or blue and are neutral types. Again, anyone writing if statements expecting 0,1 or 2 as the result, will have to consider 3, the new contested.

 

 

I suspect there will be some issues that are fixable, as long as scripters are mindful of these new possibilities. I think the possibility of excluding airbases that are being fought over, is a good one, you no longer have to do extensive zone scanning to work out who is in an airbase zone. You can leverage that for interesting (or shorter) logic you can act on.

 

 

If you find out more detail on Neutral coalition, please add it to the post.

[Pikey]

I've noticed that Neutral is hostile at the moment when refered to via DataLink and AWACS "declare".

[QuiGon]

I've noticed that Neutral is hostile at the moment when refered to via DataLink and AWACS "declare".

Really hostile (= "bandit" displayed by red diamond) or just unkown (= "bogey" displayed by yellow square)?

[Vanguard]

I was playing the exigent riviera campaign and noticed that all the "commercial" traffic showed up as hostile as well, which raises a question... IRL, would that be the case? I think we need a new Country, similar to USAF Aggressors, called commercial traffic or something that we can put in the neutral category and assign to random air traffic.

 

Actually, I'm building a campaign at the moment and this is all quite limiting. I want the general airfields to be neutral and the military airbases to be blue/red, and at the moment all I can do I select a random country as being the owner of the other airfields.

[Bananabrai]

I think what we need is a ArmA style four coalition setup.

 

If I remember correctly, there was

- Bluefor

- Redfor

- Independant

- Civil

 

which for DCS could translate to:

- Blue

- Red

- Independent

- Neutral

 

With neutral being not aggressive but could be engaged.

And most important, choose for each and every mission whether Independent is:

 

- hostile/friendly to Blue and Red

- ... to Blue

- .. to Red

- ... to none