Small Up-date on expanded Campaign...

[WOLF-257]

The Campaign runs in the Iron Fortress slot.Eveything seems to be working as it should.The main bases are Korat and Sakon Nakhon with 2 Squadrons of F-4E's each,1 Squadron of F-4G's each and an F-5 Squadron at Sakon Nakhon.The Weasels are being tasked with SEAD missions so it appears that the game is reading their type correctly and the default load-outs are logical for this type of plane.I've still got to figure out why the stockpile of AGM-88's and AGM-46's are being exhausted so quick,I edited the squadron stores to increase the numbers of these but it didn't seem to work.

The main purpose of this project was to focus on Route Packs 5 and 6 which are both north of Vihn and so far we are being assigned more missions in the north than in the regular Vietnam Campaign.I lowered the priority on the objectives south of Vihn but we are still getting tasked with a lot of Pre Planned CAS missions to Dong Hoi.

Because I'm basically trying to simulate a completely different operational area I wonder if it might help to remove all enemy targets south of Vihn?

Opinions are welcome.

WOLF

[sparks1]

Go ahead and give it a try. If you can get it to work the way you want, you can always put some of the southern targets back in. Not a whole lot of worth-while targets south of Vinh anyway, are there? "Suspected truck parks?" I don't see that you have anything to loose. Good Luck! Sparks

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by WOLF-257:
I wonder if it might help to remove all enemy targets south of Vihn?

Of course, if there are no targets... no flights get scheduled.

Did you try to add the object priority to 10 or so for the southern targets? I'm not sure how the engine handles priority 0 but you might try that too.

Please let us know how you proceed with this, all campaign info is highly appreciated.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[Zaggy]

F-4G's in vietnam??? Id double check that... In Vietnam, the Thuds were used as Wild Weasel aircraft, towards the end of the war, as the Hunter element of F-105 and F-4 Hunter Killer teams.....

Just double check, I may be wrong....

[WOLF-257]

Well,it seems that there is more involved with removing targets than I was aware of,I removed all NVA targets south of Vihn and soon as I selected a flight and clicked fly the game crashed to desktop.

I set the priority of the targets to 10 already so I'm going to reduce it to 0 and see what happens.I guess I'm doing ok so far,I haven't completely wrecked my game yet.I'm going to keep working on the priority angle as I feel this is probably the best way to go about doing it without creating more problems.I'll post the results here.

I wasn't real happy about using the F-4G either but I needed a Wild Weasel and we don't have an F-105 yet so it was either the G or nothing.I have references showing the G model being used in Vietnam but from the dates given I would have to conclude that there weren't very many and they probably didn't see much action.

[WOLF-257]

It appears that the 0 prority setting didn't make much difference.The game still runs properly but there did not seem to be any changes to the mission types or locations.

Next question,can the PAKS and their priority be changed with Tacedit?If the individual target priority doesn't alter the mission generation then maybe if it's possible to change the PAK priority that would get the mission generator to start tasking flight up north more often.Is the PAK data accessable with Tacedit and if so is it located in the savex.cam file?I'm going to do some digging and see what I can find.

I'm very concerned about the online playability of this so we've been testing it after each major change and so far we are flying 3 players with no trouble.

Snake Man,I've been following your posts concerning the 128 map with great interest.I hope you going to apply this to the Vietnam Theater at some point.If there's any help I can give just let me know.

Sorry for the rambling nature of these posts.

WOLF

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by WOLF-257:
I removed all NVA targets south of Vihn and soon as I selected a flight and clicked fly the game crashed to desktop.

You probably lost a link (path) between NVNAM and SVNAM units (team).

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by WOLF-257:
It appears that the 0 prority setting didn't make much difference.

Hmm thats weird, I definitely remember Julian Onions told me once that the target needs to have priority 30 or above so it will be assigned as target in ATO.

We are talking about factories/airbases now with the priority of 0 which got attacked?

quote:can the PAKS and their priority be changed with Tacedit?

I'm not too familiar with PAK's yet, the city objective with priority of 81 or above becomes a center of PAK (the HQ city I guess).

quote:maybe if it's possible to change the PAK priority that would get the mission generator to start tasking flight up north more often.Is the PAK data accessable with Tacedit and if so is it located in the savex.cam file?

Yes like I said in the above. To think of it more, it just might be that the number above 80 should contain some info of the PAK priority, the 81 being lowest and 100 being highest... hmm wonder if the PAK numbers can go beyond 100... ah, this is area where Julian's comments would be welcome.

quote:Snake Man,I've been following your posts concerning the 128 map with great interest.I hope you going to apply this to the Vietnam Theater at some point.If there's any help I can give just let me know.

Yeah its very nice that the sqdrn window fix is available now. The campaign itself has some problems running, if you look the example screenshots from ODS forum you see the pattern. Airbases (or carriers) long distance away from the enemy postions dont schedule flights. Also I saw this weird cancelling of already scheduled flights last night. But, all of this is to be gone through a major testing in next couple of days, I'll be hoping to learn a lot from the 128 campaign engine by that time. Lets keep our fingers crossed.

Btw if you are extremely interested of playing around a Vietnam/Vietnam 128 campaign, I could arrange you a private preview of the 128 theater. There you could play around with different settings to get Thai airbases attacking North Vietnam postitions etc. Let me know if you are interested.

quote:Sorry for the rambling nature of these posts.

Dont be sorry for writing excellent posts !

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[WOLF-257]

I reduced the priority to 0 of all the villages,towns,cities,factories and installations south of Vihn.I also went back and changed the status of all these in Tacedit to destroyed.

We did notice last night that while we are still getting sent into the area south of Vihn it appears that the mission pattern is different from what it had been.There seems to be more CAS missions directed at ground units and fewer missions directed at static ground targets such as airfields and depots ect.We also seem to be getting a higher percentage of missions into the area north of Vihn.

After giving it some thought,it looks like we might have a situation where the campaign engine is doing what it was designed to do.We get Deep Strike,OCA or BAI missions north of Vihn to start with and then an enemy ground unit,in this case the NVA 399th Armored Battalion,get's too close to a friendly ground target so the campaign engine starts tasking Strike and CAS flights to remove the threat.We probably have not played out the campaign far enough yet,it may be a case where we have to fly the CAS missions and remove the threat ourselves,the AI is aborting most of these and their loss rate is high,before the campaign engine will shift it's attention back to the north.All in all it looks like we've got a very long war on our hands.

As to whether or not I'd be interesting in the 128 segment Vietnam,HELL YES!,please send it to me or tell me where to go get it.

WOLF

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by WOLF-257:
As to whether or not I'd be interesting in the 128 segment Vietnam,HELL YES!,please send it to me or tell me where to go get it.

All right, the current "VLARGE" Vietnam theater is too limited I think, but it will not take too much time to fix you up with nice VLARGE installer which has everything working more or less. Instant, TE, one campaign, cmp squadron window fix etc.

I'll get right on it, you can expect it sometime later today. You might want to email me at nospam so we can discuss the details of transferring this baby.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[ccc]

ya, WOLF-257 just be nominated as lead designer of Vnam campaign section

[WOLF-257]

Snake Man,email sent.

ccc,be careful with nominating people,you never can tell what kind of fanatics you might wind up with LOL!

WOLF

[WOLF-257]

The 128 segment Vietnam brings up an interesting option.There was an airbase in Thailand named Takhli that was just about as active as Korat as far as F-105 squadrons were concerned.It was not possible to accuratly place it with the 64 segment map because it's located northwest of Korat.

Now comes another in an endless string of questions.If I use Tacedit to move and rename an existing airbase in Thailand will it phyically be moved in the game?More importainly,if it is moved,will it be usable?
There were 4 F-105 squadrons and 2 Wild Weasle squadrons at Korat and 4 F-105 squadrons at Takhli.

Does anybody have a list of Phantom squadrons operating in South East Asia and the bases they were flying from?The time period I'm most concerned with is before 1972.

What I was considering doing goes something like this...we have 3 different operational postures.

1.General TACAIR and CAS operations in South Vietnam and southern North Vietnam along with the occasional deep strike into North Vietnam.

2.Linebacker I and II as well as Rolling Thunder,I group these together because even though the objectives were somewhat different they deal with basically the same thing,attacks directly on North Vietnam.

3.Interdiction and Strikes on the Ho Chi Mihn Trail flown into Laos,Cambodia and along the border between these countries and North and South Vietnam.These include the Steel Tiger night missions flown by the USMC out of Da Nang.

We have three campaigns so it might be possible to set them up to simulate the conditions I listed.

Snake Man's original campaign works well with the first situation.

It might be neccesary to remove all the moving ground units and all NVA targets from Vihn south to simulate the second situation.Both Line Backer and Rolling Thunder were basically strategic operations to hit fixed targets such as factories,depots,railyards and CnC sites in the North so removing the moving ground units and the more southerly fixed NVA targets might force the war farther north.

The 3rd situation might be the hardest of the bunch to get working.It would require removing all the fixed NVA targets as well as all the moving NVA units and replacing them with moving NVA units along the border of Laos and Cambodia as well as selected types of fixed targets such as fuel and ammo dumps,road junctions and bridges.

Those were just my thoughts on some possible options,I'm always open to comment and suggestion.

WOLF

[Snake Man]

quote:Originally posted by WOLF-257:
The 128 segment Vietnam brings up an interesting option.There was an airbase in Thailand named Takhli that was just about as active as Korat as far as F-105 squadrons were concerned.

If I use Tacedit to move and rename an existing airbase in Thailand will it phyically be moved in the game?More importainly,if it is moved,will it be usable?

Well when you receive the 128 Vietnam "VLARGE" theater you see quite nice setup on the te/campaign objects, believe me.

quote:Does anybody have a list of Phantom squadrons operating in South East Asia and the bases they were flying from?

Brewskie has always been very helpful with Vietnam stuff, maybe he can help us out again.

btw I'll try to work on the 128 Vietnam theater today, who knows it might be even ready for download in the evening.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[WOLF-257]

Thanks Snake Man,I'm looking forward to this.

I did some experimenting last night and it looks promising.I removed the NVA moving ground units south of Vihn and reclassified Vihn as destroyed and the Campaign Engine started generating missions to targets well to the north,one in particular was a strike on a factory north of Haiphong.This one should be fun online as it's a 4 ship flight with a 2 ship Wild Weasle escort.There were several other missions to targets near Hanoi.The mission pattern looked good overall,I let the clock run for 16 hours or so and all the missions appeared to be north of Vihn.
I tried changing the Fatigue and Moral of those ground units but the Campaign Engine was still tasking CAS flights to hit them so I removed them to see what would happen.I'm also not entirly sure what will happen to the mission pattern when the repair time on the fixed targets cycles through,if these fixed targets come back online they will probably have to be destroyed again but that's acceptable to me anyway as it's realistic and logical.

WOLF

[brewskie]

This is for starters.
Phantoms from the 469th TFS flew out of Korat, Thailand.

433 TFS was out of Ubon.

555 TFS triple nickle out of Udorn Royal Thai Airforce base.

[WOLF-257]

Thanks brewskie,keep em coming.

WOLF

[Snake Man]

Vietnam 128 "VLARGE" Theater is ready to download. The size if not too big, only 13.4mb

I'll be emailing you for details.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[WOLF-257]

Package downloaded but there is a problem.Email sent.

WOLF