A suggestion, maybe, for mission 5 radar intercept

[Rolds]

I'm pretty sure the mission is i am talking about is Constant Peg 05b ACM. When I load it in the mission editor I cannot see any of the triggered actions but surely there are some there. Anyway, when I flew this mission (repeatedly) I could "kill" one F15C, then moved on to help my wingman with the other. The trouble is that since the F15C's are a single group set to immortal, the F15C I hit continues to attack me, and when that "dead" one hits me I get the terminate call.

The first part of my suggestion is straightforward enough, if the F15C's are different groups you could push a task to each one to go back to ROE weapon hold if hit. Except this brings me to the less straightforward part. I do not know of any trigger that could push an "ROE to weapon hold" task upon taking a hit when the AI are set to immortal! It appears to me unit damaged doesn't work when the unit is immortal, and obviously not unit dead. Unit hits refers to a unit scoring a hit on another unit so if you tried to use this for the player Mig you wouldn't know which of the F15's to push back to ROE weapon hold.

So the second part of my suggestion, and I have a feeling that the devs of constant peg understand my issue. It would be great to have a trigger that was "unit is hit" or "unit takes a hit". Regardless of damage or outcome, if we had that then we could build training missions where immortal units respond by disengaging, RTB, whatever. I can very much image you wanted to do this in the red flag type mission 3 but like me came to the conclusion it cannot be done with current in game options which is why the blue air aircraft are not set to immortal. Perhaps with your clout inside ED you could ask for this? And maybe also an immortal to damage but not collisions with the ground option maybe (but I know now I am pushing it).

Baring this the only other workaround I can think of is have the F15C's not set to immortal but that just ruins the feel that this mission is going for.

Hope that makes sense, great job with these missions I am having a lot of fun!

Rolds

[Bunyap]

Thanks so much for the great suggestions, and thanks especially for understanding the challenges involved. 

When deciding to leave the F-15s immortal, I asked myself if there was any situation where the 'dead' aircraft would cause problems before the engagement terminates.  If you noticed it, then the answer is probably 'yes'.   This only comes up one other time in mission 9.  I will consider alternatives and tighten that aspect up if possible.

Your idea about splitting the F-15s up into two groups would absolutely work.  I think there was a bug for a long time that prevented 'hits' from being detected on immortal aircraft.  (That is one of the many reasons I delayed submitting the campaign since 2018.)   If you try it again, I think you will find the 'UNIT HITS' trigger actually does act as 'unit takes a hit'.

The more reliable solution would be to have the F-15s destroyed like on a normal mission.  Until recently, the mission flowed from startup to shutdown without the need for new missions to be loaded.  The aircraft had to stay immortal or the mission would be over after the first engagement.  So many things change or stop working from DCS update to DCS update, I had so split the missions up like they are now to keep them working 100% of the time.  In hindsight, the need for the blue aircraft to be immortal is not as urgent now.

I'll put some more thought into it and see if there is anything I can do to keep the situation you describe from coming up again.  Thanks again!

Edited October 29, 2021 by Bunyap

[Rolds]

You are right about the function of unit hits! In a test I hit an immortal target and having a "unit hits" trigger set to "1" on that target caused a message output and ai task push output as I was hoping. Thank you for pointing that out, I could have sworn I read somewhere that it had a different function and had somehow convinced myself of that in a mission editor test.