Strike Tutorials - testing

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marksdoran
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by marksdoran »

OK so scenario #3 presented some more challenges; for me at least.

Right off the bat, the first time I entered the scenario it put me in the game on the RED side. Total air assets: 5 Cessna's. So far as I recall I just selected the scenario from the usual dialog list and when the briefing popped up I read through it and then used the enter scenario button on that window. After mucking about disoriented for a few minutes and looking for a "switch sides" option, I gave up and reloaded the scenario. This time it put me in on the BLUE side (i.e. Soviet equipment) with the expected air assets and the target base icon rendered in red. Not sure what happened there. OK, on to the real work...

So after reading through the extensive and helpful briefing, I agreed mentally with the advice to send out the recce pod equipped jet first. Which is fine but...how does one do that in game mechanics terms??

I recall setting up a patrol mission for scenario #2 to find the target building. This you can do with the airbase target (I just did a "define area" to cover the base and a small surrounding area). The MR jet dutifully takes off and flies over there (showing the two sensor "pies" out along the 3-9 line). However, I could not see any detection messages in the log and I could not see any change in the information about the target base components either. That leaves me with the question: OK, how does the recce bird help you figure out which parking areas have aircraft on them -- how do I set up for the recce bird to see that and how will such information be reported, as in: where do I go in the UI and how to see that sort of thing?? I left the patrol in place over the target area for perhaps 40 minutes of game time...so far as I can tell for no useful result at all. I think there needs to be a bit more guidance in the instructions to link the ideas of "send the recon aircraft out first" and "recon aircraft can help you figure out where aircraft are parked".

Now the patrol loitering at 36k feet over a target for more than a half hour that would normally be heavily defended for made me think...

There's no way that IRL anyone would set up a patrol like this for reconnaissance over an airbase. More like a [stealthy] drone would be used and/or real time satellite intelligence but given the older equipment in this scenario those are probably not contemporaneously reasonable to assume. So how would one use a Fencer with a recce pod on something like an airbase?? From what I've read it would more likely be a quick one-pass-haul-*ss kind of approach. So I thought: OK, let me try again only make the Fencer do a strike/ASuW mission so it might follow that kind of an in-and-out profile. I tried that with the RED airbase objects selected as the target list. Of course this kind of mission doesn't take off at all (wrong loadout I presume??). I manually launched it and it took off and then instantly landed.

Net result: neither approach to deploying the recce bird seemed to work in that I got no better information than just looking at the initial state of the map. So what's wrong here?? Am I expecting too much in imagining that I'd get new information from using a recce bird?? Am I just not using that asset correctly?? Have I missed something in the UI that would give me said extra info if I just knew where to look??

Given that the advice in the set up briefing is to send the reconnaissance sortie out first, which seems like a very sound game plan, and my inability to make that work apparently, I feel like I'm blocked on getting anywhere with this whole scenario more or less before I get out of the gate.

May I have a little shove in the right direction, please?? Thanks!
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Gunner98
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by Gunner98 »

quick one-pass-haul-*ss

This is the way to do it. Let me check it out and see if something is wrong.

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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by Gunner98 »

OK so things seem to be working well. My Fencer at 400ft AGL at about 5 miles out ID'd all the units on the base as being undamaged (OK the strike has not gone in yet) and it ID'd at 8:21:39 2 Cessna 337s on one of the parking spots

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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by Gunner98 »

In a close up view you can see which parking space it is - you only see 2 of them and you suspect more so they are probably under cover in the hanger.

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marksdoran
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by marksdoran »

OK, so already you are doing something different than I tried with either a patrol or a [bad] strike mission for the recce sortie. Are you launching it manually and just plotting a course for it??
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by Gunner98 »

Are you launching it manually and just plotting a course for it??

yup, and you see the detail by selecting the airbase or if you go into unit mode (Keypad 9)

I'll put something in the brief

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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by marksdoran »

OK, that sounds like a good idea. Since this scenario is zoomed in on using the mission editor, I got fixated there and stuck as a result. If I did others might too I guess.

Just to confirm: there's no way to use the mission editor to have a single jet sortie that does the one-pass style recon, correct??
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by Gunner98 »

Just to confirm: there's no way to use the mission editor to have a single jet sortie that does the one-pass style recon, correct??

Well I didn't say that. You can do it - Support mission, Radars On, Set the points around where you want to go, set the altitude, and you should be good to go. You can do it as a single loop or as a continuous loop.

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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by marksdoran »

Ah, I see. That wasn't obvious. A support mission uses reference points but not to make an area so much as a path to follow. BTW, using that approach one does not need to light up the radars (I noticed that the Cessna detection was down to the 5nm max range side looking cameras, not the radar sensors).

OK, now I see how that works, on to the actual fun...thanks for the steer.
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by marksdoran »

Once I got over the above mentioned issue with making a recon mission work I started to have much more fun with scenario #3 :)

Feedback...

I like the way the briefing is arranged, reviewing the target and then the assets to hand and then giving you a hand with the first couple of mission add suggestions. I think it's well judged, in terms of balance between spoon feeding to get you going and then making you think a bit about how to make the most of your loadouts.

I ended up making a support mission for the recon flight and setting the station altitude for that manually. This worked out well. However...

The one general suggestion I have for this one still comes back to the recon mission. It occurs to me that in an ideal world you want recon results in time to brief aircrews on their targets before they leave the ground. Taking the approach of staggering the flight active times by a minute between each and leaving them all active results in a mad rush by strike flights that end up outstripping the recon bird. Strike flights defaulting to 580kts dash speed while the recon bird flies at a more moderate 480kts by default. Long story short, first time through my strike flights found the Cessnas well before the recon sortie got in camera range.

On a re-run I went back and let the recon flight have a clear 15 minute head start -- very rough timing so that, give or take, the recon flight turned for home a couple of minutes before the flight tasked to hit parking areas took off. I used the editor to reach into that mission, originally set to attack all three parking areas, and deleted from the target list all but the one reported to have the Cessnas [BTW, the briefing doesn't mention that you can use the contact report button for the parking area and see the Cessnas under "hosted units" tab -- might that be worth adding??].

I know you probably don't want to get into the whole intricacy of coordinating Time-on-Target for multiple flights at this stage but I do feel like if the suggestion is to run the recon sortie first, some consideration must be given to spacing out the missions so that the recon sortie can be successful (i.e. be the one to find the Cessnas [and might it not be possible to assign that discovery some points reward perhaps??]).

First time I tried to get the recon sortie on target ahead of the strikes I had not understood how the active/inactive settings in the mission editor work at all. I changed the active times and the flights went red with a 'D' but I wanted them to take off, so I made them all active with the drop down above the time entry area... That didn't do what I wanted at all since when I started the clock the same mad rush to launch the entire set of flights ensued with no attention paid to the delays I dialed in to the editor. I'd recommend a more complete discussion of the association between the "active" choice in the "add new mission" dialog and the active/inactive drop down along with the active/deactive date & time gadgets to avoid the confusion I ran into and the worry that anything red means it's not going to work at all (versus the reality in this case being that the missions will kick off just fine and red is more of a "just not yet" message).

I redid the mission and this time I went back and set all the missions with active times set to more than 15 minutes past 8am to "inactive" and ran it again. Ah -- much better. Recon bird takes off does the solo fly-by and then the rest of the air armada follows on [my plan was roughly: blind the radar, hit the runway access to stop counter launch, runway denial and then missions to mop up the rest of the targets].

One trouble with this approach was that the pop-ups for this mission seem tied to timing and if you mess with the mission timings as I did, the pop-ups are in the wrong places along the timeline. Not sure what to suggest about that but if you do maintain the suggestion to have the recon flight go first then I think you might want to consider adjusting the relative placement on the timeline for the in-scenario pop-ups.

Phew -- I learned a lot from this one... So clearly it's a great tutorial exactly as it is already! :)

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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by Gunner98 »

Thanks again

Will adopt those suggestions.

Have been playing this game and almost nothing else from the release date in 2014, so I do forget the issues that new plyers might have - appreciate your perspective.
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marksdoran
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by marksdoran »

So, on to Strike #4...

This one is pretty straightforward it seems. Follow the instructions and the right magic will occur. Couple of minor observations only to add for this one:

The briefing mentions S-400's but I guess at least the western SAM is of type SA-10b (S-300)...perhaps the use of 400 is meant to simulate fuzzy intel data though(?) -- might be a feature :)

The advice talked about watching the Harrier pop-up to 12k altitude, release and then drop down. I'd plotted a manual path and set the manual override for terrain following at 200 feet. Sure enough after the first LGB release the jets ducked down again. Couple of points...

I'm not clear why but the Harriers would not apparently fly below 400' AGL -- is there a limit to how low you can make them fly?? Is that platform specific or are all jets similarly limited?? [yes, I know 200' in a fast jet is pretty "sporty", especially in significant terrain, but I was trying to see how low the AI would get comfortably...apparently 400' AGL ;)]. Might be useful to cover that if there are rules of thumb that apply to going low and fast.

The other thing was that after dropping the second LGB, the Harriers bounced up to default altitude of 36000' -- I wasn't paying close attention I guess. Now, if the tutorial intends to catch you out like that -- and I'm wondering if that's the idea and that the fact that the pop-up regarding "vampires" exists suggests that -- mission accomplished...the siren sure got my attention :) At any rate, it might be an idea to add an explanation of what aircraft default to when they run out of weapons and waypoints if there's consistent behavior that one should expect.

Love LGBs -- much more satisfying to have a decent number of hits and few weapon malfunctions (the EO weps in scenario #3 seem rather fragile in that way).

Similar observation about scoring...perhaps assign points for each of the target buildings rather than 100% for the RTB?? Scoring isn't a big deal but since the game UI provides that as a way to measure incremental progress it seems [marginally??] better to use it if practical.

One other thing: this scenario was very fast to play -- perhaps 20 minutes. That made me wonder if it might be an idea to add a rough estimate of wall clock time likely needed to play through the scenarios?? One of the nice things about them so far is that they feel fast and good use of time but C:MANO scenarios can be quite long (the original air to air tutorial for example sucked up a lot more of my time, partly for lack of structure and support through the process but still...] -- I guess I'm thinking that advertising the relatively quick play-through time on these might be encouraging to new players(?).
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by Gunner98 »

Thanks again, should be able to get to these next week.

Very helpful reports.

B
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by marksdoran »

#5 peeling the onion... OK that took a lot longer to run through. Very interesting and the first of these that definitely felt like a challenge.

First... The brief mentions that the F-18C with a SEAD loadout is range challenged. Boy howdy. With the loadout profile and just using a mission to strike at the radar sites and limiting ordnance for that to the CBUs (as recommended), the southern radar site is completely out of range! That's kind of a surprise. I let the mission run with a single a/c, intending to hit the radar and then skip on to attack the SA-2 with HARMs but even before releasing the CBUs the Hornet hits BINGO and RTB's. Hmm... Do I need to discover this by trial and error or should the set up talk me through not choosing that mission option?? I tried it again with an attempt to manual override the flight profile -- so set higher alt for greater range on the transit but that merely results in 2000' AGL even though I set 36k in the F2 dialog...that seems, unexpected. I could not figure out a way to change the flight profile that seems to originate with the loadout...fair enough, data has to come from somewhere but it looks like the loadout-derived flight profile cannot be changed or overridden if you just let the AI go on a mission -- is that right??

Upshot, I redid the mission and switched to micro-managing the SEAD Hornets and they dutifully clobbered the radar sites and SA-2's in sequence as I wanted.

I followed that up with the Prowlers. These I set on a support mission with a couple of ref points each -- one on the northwest flank and one to the southwest. Continuous loop on the two points with the nearest (to the target airfield) just outside the SA-2 range ring. I set the EMCON so they'd emit on station -- that's pretty neat to be able to pre-plan that. I notice that you don't get any kind of indication of area jammed...I mention that because I know from other contexts that sometimes jammers are directional...if the EA-6B's jam mostly to the sides then I probably wasted them by giving them tracks that were radials from the target base. In other words, if it matters how they are oriented, it might be a good idea to say that in the instructions.

Ah yes, the TARPS mission. First send one in high -- I think 19k was the advised alt. You are also told to pass very close to the base so the TARPS sensors can see. You are also told to have the Tomcat rip by the base in full afterburner. First problem, on attempt one the Tomcat hit bingo before getting within 15 miles of the airfield and RTB'd. It seems like there's a timing issue with the pop-up that advises using the burners and whether or not I launched that mission at the "right" time to make it possible to hit the burners right when it says to do that. OK, restart and use the burner but nearer in to the base this time...

Next problem... The SA-8 on the eastern edge of the airfield downs the Tomcat. OK, maybe that's fair. But, to get a pop-up that says words like "that didn't go so well might want to rethink and try again" seems like bait and switch...I did what the pop-ups recommend and then it scolded me for not being very smart about it. That was..."interesting" :)

The TARPS sortie before it bravely gave it's all did reveal SAMs and AAA (and not a few parked in the open MiG's -- ah juicy targets!! ;)). With the outer layer of defenses gone seemed like time to send in some standoff weapon equipped jets to surpress these shorter range defenses. Given that Shilka's and Gecko's are nominally mobile that seems like a job for mavericks and maybe skippers since I'm a bit short of AGM shooters.

This is where I got my biggest surprise. Not from the tutorial perhaps but from the game mechanics. I had never heard of SAMs like an SA-8 being able to target and shoot down AGMs. However, that's what happened...the SA-8 sites shot down every single maverick and every single skipper and then the pair of SLAMs (which I diverted from mopping up the SA-2 sites when I saw the AGMs fail to even reach the SA-8's). YIKES!!

While it seems counter intuitive, it ended up that the GBU equipped jets were the best SAM/AAA suppressors available to me. Apparently the SAMs and AAA can target anything "AGM" but not dumb bombs or GBUs [although to be fair, it's possible that by the time I got around to plinking the SAM and AAA groups with GBUs they might have been more or less out of ammo).

At any rate, if this is typical of how the mechanics work then advice about using the Hornets with AGMs to deal with "surprises" the TARPS finds is at least based on my experience here futile. Am I just doing this wrong and there is some way to make the AGMs more effective?? [perhaps referenced back to the OECM orientation question above...perhaps with different jammer coverage the AGMs can make it through??). 100% miss rate for these AGMs seems harsh though; and more to the point makes the scenario more difficult to prosecute in the way the instructions suggest.

I ended up using my GBU equipped Intruders and Hornets to clear the SAM/AAA threat leaving the HDGP equipped intruderss and CBU equipped Hornets to plaster the parking areas which netted a gratifying total of destroyed MiG's. [BTW, the DB reports the Mk 82 "Snakeye" as a Low Drag General Purpose bomb...I always thought the snakeye tail kit made it High Drag like the AIR ballute tail kit, no??].

Lest that all sound like bad news and complaint, I really enjoyed playing through this one. I think it also illustrates that I'm learning enough of the mechanics to improvise now. For example I figured out how to temporarily detach a Prowler from it's support mission to have it use it's HARM and then put it back on the mission for continued OECM duties. Plus I changed a few mission parameters on the fly to see if those changes (moved ref points, adjusted planned speeds and altitudes, etc.) took effect, which mostly they seem to in predictable ways (the manual F2 settings not really overriding the loadout profile notwithstanding). In other words, I'm getting comfortable and finding my way around and starting to grapple with strategy and tactical considerations more than game mechanics. The tutorials are working their magic apparently! :)

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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by fortyporkpies »

Thank you this is an excellent resource!
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by kch »

I have now played 1 through 4 and I must say that it has been a lot of fun and I have definitely learnt a few extra tricks. Thanks and keep up the good work.
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by Gunner98 »

Marksdoran

Some fair points in the #5 review, going to scrub it a bit. Save the surprises for scenarios not tutorials [:'(]

I've cleaned up 1-4 and will work on 5 tomorrow AM.

Has anyone had a chance to go at #6 yet? If its too difficult I can tone it down but I just want to get it right before moving onto #7.

Thanks for your feedback so far.

B
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by Gunner98 »

Mk 82 "Snakeye" as a Low Drag General Purpose bomb

Your right a Snakeye is high drag. The 'low drag' comment is in the description which in this case looks like a Wiki quote. Like the photo's the descriptions are quite helpful, but they are user created not part of the game. They are generally correct but if something looks wonky its usually because of that. If you find something wrong in the DB entire itself the Devs are good at fixing it if you have references. Not sure how to get the descriptions altered.

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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by Drivingguy »

ORIGINAL: Gunner98

Has anyone had a chance to go at #6 yet? If its too difficult I can tone it down but I just want to get it right before moving onto #7.

I must be blind, but I can't find a #6
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RE: Strike Tutorials - testing

Post by marksdoran »

I'm working on #6 now. As a result of 'expertise' built in the previous tutorials, I'm building up layers of plan and missions to execute that plan; sort of piece meal, dry running a piece at a time. I've done the whole scenario a couple of times "to the end" now and I have to say that I haven't achieved a victory yet but I am learning still. I did figure out a way to knock out the SA-10. I did not figure out a way to do that and close the runway before the Typhoons get airborne and, as predicted, that eventuality spells disaster.

So this isn't a complete report -- I'll try to do a more thorough job after a couple more tries -- but I would say that the degree of difficulty is probably pretty good in that this clearly requires a good plan and solid execution skills to get to the objective without getting your head handed to you but not so tricky as to be impossible. At least that's my perception so far.

The biggest challenge remaining for me at this point is to get clobber the 1) SA-10 _and_ 2) close the runway in time to avoid enemy fighter launches. I've got a handle on #1 but not #2 yet. I think the only thing preventing me from achieving the second at this point is properly timing the launch of the follow up strikes. In other words, it's not an issue with the scenario so much as it's more demanding of me in terms of coordinating those second wave strikes in mission time sequence. If there are other assets that I haven't discovered yet that will blast the bombers I want to send in next (right after the SA-10 is dealt with), then I may have to change my mind about degree of difficulty.

I'd add that by this point in the tutorial sequence personally I would expect to face a pretty big challenge and 'Dodging the Bullet' certainly matches that description. I feel like I'm learning a lot and really starting to have more fun! :)

Stepping outside the frame of any one of the tutorials alone, it's clear that a _lot_ of expertise and effort has gone into building this series of tutorials so far...kudos on a job very well done.
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