Importance of Mission Speed and Altitude settings

[Whicker]

I'm setting up a SEAD mission for the AI side. There is a patrol area, and then a Prosecution zone around the units it should attack.
This is 1000 miles away from the base so I have a refueling mission as well.

Since it is the AI side, and I am just setting this up, the enemy side is not necessarily hostile so while testing the mission to see if there is enough fuel I noticed that the planes involved were using different amounts of fuel based on when I set the other side to hostile.
After playing around with it a few times I now see that as soon as I set the enemy side to hostile, the AC go to 300' altitude. Even though they are 1000 miles away from the patrol zone. This is because they go offensive immediately and go to their desired attack altitude.

If I turn off `Investigate contacts outside the patrol zone` they go back to their cruise altitude.

Ah hah. I was trying to control their altitude with the transit altitude setting, which was being overridden as soon as there were hostile units in the prosecution zone... but if you set the Attack distance you can get control back. So attack distance set to 150 miles, now they respect the transit altitude until they get closer, saving lots of fuel.

just posting in case someone else runs into the same thing. Some of the settings get a little complicated.

[daveoreno]

Great info. It would take quite a bit of time and testing to figure out what was going on here.

[Whicker]

it also seemed that just setting the attack distance overrides the built in attack altitude - so just setting the range to 150nm the AC didn't seem to go to 300' when in attack mode, so I also set the attack altitude to 300' as well as the attack dist. Out of an abundance of caution I set all of the Speed/Altitude setting just to make sure.

[magi]

ORIGINAL: Whicker

I'm setting up a SEAD mission for the AI side. There is a patrol area, and then a Prosecution zone around the units it should attack.
This is 1000 miles away from the base so I have a refueling mission as well.

Since it is the AI side, and I am just setting this up, the enemy side is not necessarily hostile so while testing the mission to see if there is enough fuel I noticed that the planes involved were using different amounts of fuel based on when I set the other side to hostile.
After playing around with it a few times I now see that as soon as I set the enemy side to hostile, the AC go to 300' altitude. Even though they are 1000 miles away from the patrol zone. This is because they go offensive immediately and go to their desired attack altitude.

If I turn off `Investigate contacts outside the patrol zone` they go back to their cruise altitude.

Ah hah. I was trying to control their altitude with the transit altitude setting, which was being overridden as soon as there were hostile units in the prosecution zone... but if you set the Attack distance you can get control back. So attack distance set to 150 miles, now they respect the transit altitude until they get closer, saving lots of fuel.

just posting in case someone else runs into the same thing. Some of the settings get a little complicated.

well... thats very interesting.... thanks...