Air ops: questions re. waypoints & manual navigation

[$trummer]

During one of Gunner98's excellent strike tutorial missions, I plotted low-altitude ingress courses for two Harriers to take advantage of terrain and avoid SAM detection. However, after one of the jets expended its last LGB, it ignored my manual egress route, climbed to cruising altitude and RTB-ed. Repeated attempts to get it out of harm's way failed and it got shot down (even after it went defensive and tried to egress low again, which was impressive,but sabotaged by its choice of a direct route that put it in the SAM envelope).

I realise I can play with the doctrine settings to cancel any "RTB when Winchester" orders but am I correct in assuming that if those orders exist, the AI will refuse to allow me to plot a better, if longer, RTB route/altitude? Also, when doing strikes manually or using missions, is there any way to pre-plot egress speed/route/altitude rather than waiting until just after the strike to put the unit on a suitable route using F2/F3 when terrain is an issue?

Thank you!

[ComDev]

Hmm this should have worked fine. Can you post a pre-winchester savegame?

I assume you use v1.14?

[Primarchx]

It depends. If you had an egress flight plan in place it was likely ignored if you had your air missions set to RTB after expending ordnance. In this case the a/c will immediately RTB on the straightest course at their most fuel-efficient/fast profile.

[HaughtKarl]

ORIGINAL: Primarchx

It depends. If you had an egress flight plan in place it was likely ignored if you had your air missions set to RTB after expending ordnance. In this case the a/c will immediately RTB on the straightest course at their most fuel-efficient/fast profile.

^^
This! I think you'll also want to disable Fuel State RTB as well.

[$trummer]

Thanks very much for the responses, gents. It’s such a pleasure to re-learn this game after a four-year break and to see all the amazing enhancements in logic, mission-planning, UI and flexibility.

Emsoy, I may have a saved game, I will look. I suspect Primarchx and HaughtKarl are correct and that existing RTB orders defeat manual attempts to impose a safer RTB route. Of course I may be mistaken, as I am down near the bottom of the learning curve once again but I can say that when I altered the fuel and weapons RTB doctrine I did not experience the issue again and was able to plot safe egress routes even when Winchester.

Thanks again.

[mavfin]

Yeah, I can duplicate this with helicopters attacking at 20m below a no-sea-skimmer SAM threat; i.e. Nanuchka vs helo in the intro surface warship tutorial will do fine. There's basically no way to do the attack under mission control and live, unless you get a crit and sink the boat before running out of weapons, or get really good dice.

If you want to get out alive, you have to manually path out, and not hit RTB till you're out of SAM range. If you, for any reason, whether fuel, weapon state, or even manual RTB (B key), the helicopter will completely ignore where it is, and start climbing, and then the launcher that couldn't see it before kills it.

I have found *NO* way to avoid this, except making no RTB possible (i.e. fuel and weapon doctrine) under program control, and doing it myself when weapons are gone.

[ComDev]

Guys, savegames?[:)]

[ComDev]

Bump!

[mavfin]

ORIGINAL: emsoy

Bump!

While I'm making a scenario to illustrate things, I have a question/comment about Mission Editor. Isn't it a bit weird that I can use this on a patrol mission, but not on a strike mission? i.e. if you set up a strike mission, or at least for a ASuW Strike(Naval), those settings are not available. But the patrol will let you.

[mavfin]

ORIGINAL: emsoy

Bump!

Ok, here's some testing for you, Emsoy. There's one helo near the Nanuchka, and another on the way from the DDG. I have found no way to *under program control* fire the missiles at the missile boat, and RTB *without climbing while still in range of the SAMs from the Nanuchka*. Most of the time if the helo climbs, it's dead. If it instead stays low till out of SAM range, all is well.

Sure, I can set the RTB setting so that it doesn't auto-RTB at all, and after firing its load of missiles and making sure they guide, I can unassign it from the mission, hand-fly the helo to outside SAM range, and *then* hit RTB. But that's something I have to micro-manage.

This is actually continuing stuff from tm.asp?m=4263916&mpage=1&key=�

The missile fires and illuminates correctly now, you fixed that, but I still don't see a way to get the helo out intact w/o my intervention unless the SAM launcher takes a lucky hit. Even under a patrol, once it decides to RTB, it climbs out, for the reasons you mentioned in tm.asp?m=4263916&mpage=1&key=&#

I saw in that same post the comment about using patrols. I see that you can indeed turn off RTB, and I have done so before, but then I'm back to micromanaging small tasks, but...what do you do when weapons are expended? I'm missing something, I guess.

Andy

PS: I'm loading the file I sent you, and turning off RTB, and see exactly what happens under mission control with that RTB Weapon state set to No (i.e. no auto-RTB because of weapons). Will see what I see.

[mavfin]

Here's a file set to no auto-rtb for weapon state on both missions. Then we'll see if this actually helps anything.

Watch this one.

Note 1: The helo under Patrol mission control, no weapon state RTB: once having fired the missiles and letting them guide, it did turn away. However, in doing so, it climbed to ~60m briefly as it changed direction before dropping back down. If I hadn't hit the SAM launcher on this pass (I checked) this one would likely have been lost as well. However, since the SAM launcher was down, it realized after a couple seconds it wasn't actually RTB-ing, dropped back to 30m and went back to its patrol box. It'll RTB for fuel later, I guess, until/unless I RTB it manually myself. Still not quite what I wanted.

Note 2: The one set for strike wouldn't have worked at all w/o intervention. It didn't go to terrain-following till I told it to. If I had left it alone, SAM would have killed it, probably before the first Hellfire could get there. That's why I'd like the settings box that Patrol has for attack speed, altitude, etc. So, with it set to terrain-following, and no auto-rtb due to weapon state, it now loiters near (~2.1nm) the target at low altitude. It's safe...till it runs low on fuel, or the ship gets closer and gets guns shooting at it.

Neither one is a great compromise. As you say in tm.asp?m=4263916&mpage=1&key=&# the Mission AI doesn't trust the human player so it won't let you modify RTB conditions under mission control.

So, I don't see a way to do this under true mission control w/o climbing while still in SAM range. You already have a ton of buttons. Oh well.