How to limit the anti air power or the ships?

[e32lover]

Hi,

I just made an epic naval warfare mission but even on Average the ships are too deadly for my amateur flying skills. As soon as I get airborne I immediately get blown out of the sky. 

What are the ways of limiting the firepower of the ships the most fun way possible?

Is it possible to make them only use guns?

My mission is a modern one so I am using like 6 modern warships on each side. 

 

Thanks!

[Exorcet]

Under the Advanced Waypoint Actions you can limit ships anti air attack range from 0-100%, allowing you to get closer before firing. Be warned though that missiles fired at close range are also harder to avoid. You can also change ship RoE so that they won't fire unless fired upon.

If you're being attacked as soon as you're in the air you might also want to put your spawn point a little further out. In the mission editor the rings around the ships show detection and weapons firing range (though these are absolute maximum and may exceed when they actually fire in mission).

[Blackjack_UK]

Can you also set ammunition states on the ships? 

Sorry - I can't check that myself at the moment, but seem to remember seeing it somewhere...

[e32lover]

The inception range has helped a lot but I was wondering if there's anything else that can be done?

 

Can you make certain ships not engage planes but still engage other ships? Also is it possible to limit their ammo?

 

Thanks

[Exorcet]

We only have control over aircraft ammo. Options to limit other vehicle types have been requested, but are not available currently. You can try to force it by running a ship out of ammo. They only carry a limited amount of missiles, but the amount is quite a lot:

Something else that you can try is setting a plane to invisible. This makes the AI unable to see or attack it, but this applies to all AI.

Actually come to think of it, doesn't the intercept range go all the way down to 0? If you set it to 0 the ship should ignore planes but still attack ships (though it might not be able to defend against antiship missiles).

The last thing I can think of is to try to use ships with limited or no air defense. Ticonderoga, Burke, Pytor Velikiy, and Moskva have ridiculous SAM capability. Oliver Perry is a step below, but it still has good missiles. The British and Argentine ships recently added have less capable SAM's. On the Red side you have smaller ships like Molniya.

[e32lover]

Thanks heaps for all the helpful advice. Very much appreciated. I ended up playing around more with the inception range, I think I settled on either 1 or 3% which was awesome.

 

With this range the ships mostly use the CIWS? Machine gun, and we were able to have heaps of fun dodging the machine gun fire and eventually sink the fleet using mark 84s believe it or not. Still lost a lot of planes but it was the perfect balance for our skill level and the mission. The ships still engaged other ships with missiles. 

[Dscross]

@e32lover

Yes you can have ships not fire at specific units. If a unit it invisible, the AI on the opposing team won't see it, therefor won't engage it. 

When you make a unit, go to the advanced waypoint options menu, perform command, "invisible" (make sure the box is checked.) 

Then if later you want the unit to be engaged, or say you want the ship to start shooting at a very specific range you can go to "triggered actions" and put "invisible off" (uncheck the box). Then set a trigger such as "unit inside moving zone" and set the moving trigger zone of your chosen size and hook it to the ship. That way when the aircraft gets to, let's say 5 miles, the ship will start shooting at it. 

Furthermore you can also set a minimum / max height for the ship to engage targets. Let's say only target between 10,000-20,000 feet, then have you aircraft fly outsize that altitude range. You could also set your triggered actions to a specific altitude, for example triggered when unit is above 1000 AGL, or above a specific speed. 

There's a few ways to do it I guess is my point. 

Oh, and FYI the AI is broken as all get out. Even at the lowest level ground units will still pilot snipe you if given half a chance. Real soldiers sleep, take bathroom breaks, and can't stay on alter 24/7. The AI can. Keep that in mind. 

I personally tend to restrict the ranges on the air defense systems in my missions based on how the unit performs. I want them to perform more realistically, so I usually limit them to about 60-65% almost always as this baseline gives good performance and still enables them to shoot. 

I hope that helps you out. Feel free to message me either on these forums or on discord if you have any more questions that I might be able to help with. 

Dscross#3705 on discord. 

[AH6OY]

You could try having AI planes fly near the ships so they eat up the ship ammo before you get into the altered range of ships zone. They'll have less ammo but I don't think you can alter the range of the missiles so those missiles are yours to enjoy all the way out to their max range

[Aquorys]

...or just use ships with less capable air defense systems. The Grisha and Rezky have the Gecko system, the Molniya appears to have only guns, the La Combattante doesn't have missiles either. The Neustrashimy is somewhat more powerful with the Tor system, and the 054A has more or less an imported or chinese copy/modified version of the Gadfly system.

[silverdevil]

this is an interesting topic. i tried to recreate an attack on ships from the south atlantic war. had a single A-4 flying low level through terrain. got into the open and got vaporized. i am going to look into the various ship types and use the guns only model i guess.

[Exorcet]

10 hours ago, silverdevil said:

this is an interesting topic. i tried to recreate an attack on ships from the south atlantic war. had a single A-4 flying low level through terrain. got into the open and got vaporized. i am going to look into the various ship types and use the guns only model i guess.

Also try changing Alarm State to green, this will slow the reaction time of SAM defenses.

[Dscross]

In a recent update we got the ability as mission makers to give tanks a specific load of ammunition. Personally, I'm hoping that we get the same thing for ships. being able to choose the payload of a Mk41 VLS would be pretty handy. 

As for the ships, another thing you can do is set the range at which the ships fire, something like 10% on the Tico or Arleigh Burke still gives the ships a formattable air defense system. You can also use mission editor to "tune" things a little. For example, make your plane "invisible" but put it in a really big trigger zone and then put in a trigger with a switch condition so that if you fly over, say 500 feet, "invisible off" (under trigged actions.) You can hook "invisible off" to all sorts of triggers, such as altitude, airspeed, zone, or who knows what. 

If you're not worried about the ship shooting you, lets say your in a hornet shooting Harpoons as 60+ miles, you can put a trigger zone around the ship. Then put "missile in zone, flag on" and pick the harpoon. then go "if flag true, unit emission off" (unit is ship). There are lots of ways to tune ships air defenseand depending on the mission you might need to use some or all of them. 

Good luck.