Yet Another Cheering Review

[Yurgon]

I finished the campaign yesterday and I just love it!

Some of the things I really like about the campaign:

• Excellent setting at the Marianas map; for the time being, it's as close as we can get to a Vietnam War campaign in DCS
• The missions are very straightforward, with just the right amount of surprise-elements to be entertaining all the way through
• I totally love that the player can disengage at any time and just land back at Andersen to get a perfect 100 score. When I get my bird shot to pieces, it's always because I wanted to stay and support the pixels on the ground for immersion
• Really good length for the missions. Not too short, not too long, except maybe for one trip to a neighbor island which was just not very eventful
• Very creative use of the new features that ED made available, like showing images within a mission; I always had a hard time figuring out what purpose that could possibly serve; well, Reflected certainly made a great start with this feature, and I'm curious what Reflected and other mission designers will come up with in the future
• Great voice acting; maybe a little over the top for my taste in a few cases, but all things considered it was great
• Call me masochist, but I liked the notoriously heavy Hueys
• Having a local contemporary radio that could be tuned with the Nav radio is a fantastic touch
• Historic broadcasts at the end of some missions were really cool

And two aspects I felt could be better:

• In some missions, I had notable stutters around Andersen. Don't remember which missions those were. My PC's performance around Andersen isn't great to begin with, and I'm really hoping that ED can improve the map in this regard. I didn't run a side-by-side comparison and can't say that it's 100 % the campaign's fault when I have stutters there, but for anyone with bad performance at Andersen, I guess the campaign isn't going to improve it.
• For my taste, there were too many ground troops and vehicles running and driving around the helipads at Andersen. They delivered a great sensation of a busy airport, but I also felt that I often had to avoid them on the apron when going for a ground-effect takeoff, desperately trying to reach ETL without burning the engine and without running into anyone or anything. There never was a collision, but some of those soldiers should really avoid aircraft's movement areas

The flight out of the AO was a perfect way to say goodbye to the campaign, and I can't help but wonder if the GIs felt that same strange and somehow conflicting mix of "Yeah, I did it, and I'm OUTTA here!" and at the same time "Man I sure had some great times down there."

[Reflected]

Thanks so much @Yurgon !

[Yurgon]

No man, thank you! Fantastic work with this campaign! 

[DCoffey]

It is an awesome campaign so far, how did you get past mission 10? Last night some soldier kept running into the tail of the Huey before I could take off causing damage. Enough that I can't take off.

 

[Reflected]

Opening a topic in the ‘Bugs and problems’ section may have been slightly more appropriate than a reply to a thread titled ‘Cheering review’ but here we go:

AI pathfinding has been completely broken for years, ED is aware, yet it has not gotten any better over all this time. AI ground units go very far from their assigned route, and they run through aircraft too. Randomly. Hueys, Thunderbolts, everything. Those soldiers should be anywhere near your Huey if they only followed their route. I’ve seen this a 1000 times but never have I seen the aircraft get damaged, not even a little. 

[DCoffey]

thank you for your reply, I didn't mean to open it as a bug just was asking. I'll record it tonight. It actually sounds like when you get hit by enemy fire maybe a dozen times as he walks through the tail, first and second time I thought he hit it, got mad and plugged me, third time I watched in external camera and he didn't shoot but it sounds like it. 

[Yurgon]

3 hours ago, DCoffey said:

Last night some soldier kept running into the tail of the Huey before I could take off causing damage.

That never happened to me. Like I wrote above, I sometimes had to navigate around soldiers and vehicles during taxi and takeoff, but they never crashed into my chopper.

When that happens, remember to tell the crew chief to be careful how much booze he hands out to the mechanics.

Edited February 14, 2022 by Yurgon

[shagrat]

vor 8 Stunden schrieb DCoffey:

thank you for your reply, I didn't mean to open it as a bug just was asking. I'll record it tonight. It actually sounds like when you get hit by enemy fire maybe a dozen times as he walks through the tail, first and second time I thought he hit it, got mad and plugged me, third time I watched in external camera and he didn't shoot but it sounds like it. 

Sounds like the soldier is set to invulnerable. If they run into tail rotors etc. they usually die. At least a while ago, they did. Hmm, may be the WWII infantry model is different?

[Reflected]

It's a modern infantry unit. But it's the same with WW2 ones. Fortunately, no damage is done to the player. WW2 soldiers have ran through my P47 many times.

Sorry if I sounded a bit grumpy, but it's quite annoying to have such a bug plague my missions for years, and then I always get user reports and have to apologize and explain that the AI can't follow a simple path, and then I have to write the same answers over and over again, 'yes I've tried to move them farther', etc...

Actually the only solution would be to remove moving infantry from within 100 meters of the player, but that would take a LOT of work, take a LOT away from the missions, and take a LOT of work once again to put back if it ever gets fixed.

[Gunnar81]

I finished the campaign a couple weeks ago. Just wow! What a step forward in everything that DCS can be, and such a nice treat for the Huey as well which is just one of the most solid modules in DCS. Thanks so much for taking the time to make this campaign, everything about it was perfect, never encountered a single bug!

[DCoffey]

On 2/14/2022 at 8:17 AM, Reflected said:

Opening a topic in the ‘Bugs and problems’ section may have been slightly more appropriate than a reply to a thread titled ‘Cheering review’ but here we go:

AI pathfinding has been completely broken for years, ED is aware, yet it has not gotten any better over all this time. AI ground units go very far from their assigned route, and they run through aircraft too. Randomly. Hueys, Thunderbolts, everything. Those soldiers should be anywhere near your Huey if they only followed their route. I’ve seen this a 1000 times but never have I seen the aircraft get damaged, not even a little. 

I finally found time to get back to this and you was 100% correct, it must have been DCS itself. I tried twice after waiting for the "incident" and the huey was fine.

 

Thank you again for an awesome campaign!

[Reflected]

Happy to hear!

[Comes]

Completed it now and can't praise it enough. All the missions were very engaging and I did not encounter a single bug...

Thank you for this awesome campaign.

The only minor gripe is the performance, but I'll refly the missions when ED has optimized the Marinas Map or I upgraded my system :D