The first limitation to be aware of is that the computer controlled flights tasked by the air tasking order in the dynamic campaign tasked to do interdiction of vehicles destroy very few vehicles per mission. Most of the time, I have observed, the flights tasked to interdict vehicles destroy just about two or three vehicles per mission. The good news is that between all the flights they end up destroying about 100 vehicles every four hours. That is about 600 vehicles per day. The vehicles destroyed per day can win the campaign but the computer-controlled flights need long periods of air superiority. In fact, this says that air superiority is the single most useful thing you can do. It is hard to destroy 100 vehicles every four hours by yourself. To do this often distracts from the more important priority of getting air superiority. Here is how to get air superiority. Look at the air tasking order and look at the airbases that our to be tasked for an airstrike. To do this, look at the OCA Strike missions in the air tasking order. Click the checkboxes next to a mission in order to see the target airbase of an airstrike. Choose an offensive counter air airbase strike that attacks one with the highest threat aircraft. Look for one with a big airbase icon. The little airbase icons are just airfields which are not major airbases. Choose one with a big airbase icon. Right-click the mission and then click join. Thing check the airbase that is targeted to see if it has high threat aircraft squadrons in it. In doing the process below to keep your package alive, you will need to monitor all the flight in your package. In Falcon 4 BMS 4, it is possible to monitor all your flights on the horizontal situation display. You should look in the manual to see what settings you need to set on the upfront control panel to get the horizontal situation display to display all the flight in the package. Now you have selected a good OCA strike mission the fly and know how to get all the flights to appear on the horizontal situation display if playing BMS 4, the next step is to fly that mission. In order to do this, you will need to work with the artificial intelligence well. If you are flying the strike part of the package, then you need to work with the escort mission well. If you are working with the escort part of the mission, then you will need to work with the strike part of the package well. Here is how to do just that. The escort flight in the package will have a limitation that it just starts initially ahead of the other flights, but will not stay ahead of the other flights if it needs to turn around to avoid a missile. It may also not turn around to avoid a missile at all and stay ahead of the other flights but get itself killed in the process. You can avoid both problems by doing the following. If you are flying the escort mission in the package, turn around by doing a split S maneuver when you need to avoid a missile. When you reach the planes being escorted, exit the mission to the 2D map. Then take control of the flight being escorted by joining that flight. Turn that flight around so that it is heading a good amount behind the escort flight. Then exit to the 2D map again and then rejoin the escort flight. If you are flying the strike part of the mission in the package, do the following. Observe the escort flight and when the escort flight needs to avoid a missile, exit to the 2-D map. You will know when the escort flights needs to avoid a missile by listening to the radio communications. When the escort flight says the radio message indicating it fired a missile such as Fox1, Fox2, or Fox3, you will know it needs to avoid an enemy missile from an enemy aircraft. If you are playing with labels, then you can see whether a missile launch has originated from the escort flight. When you have observed that the missile launch from the escort flight has taken place, first order the flight you're in to return the base. Then take control of the escort flight and turn it around to avoid the missile. Do this by exiting to the 2-D map, and then join the escort flight. Once you have entered the escort flight, turn it around and run away from the missile. When the escort flight reaches the flight being escorted, exit to the 2-D map again. Then retake control of the flight being escorted. Place this flight well behind the escort flight. The idea behind the tips for flight switching above, is to make it so both flights turn around to avoid hostile enemy aircraft. This will increase the likelihood that both flights survive. From observing the artificial intelligence, the strike flight does not get word from the escort flight that a threat is ahead. Because of this, the strike flight will not turn around when the escort one does. Fight switching is necessary to make it so all flights turn around from a threat early enough. It also helps the flights keep their spacing. This process for the strike flight described above can be too proactive. It can be proactive taken to an extreme. Here is a more reasonable procedure when flying the strike flight in the package. Observe the escort flight. Observe whether the escort flight goes too far off course when trying to engage enemy aircraft. If you notice that it wanders off and chases after enemy planes, then exit to the 2-D map. Join the escort flight. Then fly the escort flight so that is back on course. Exit to the 2-D map and then rejoin the strike flight again. Place the strike flight behind the escort flight. When doing the above processes in which you exit to the 2-D map in order to switch flights, you don't want to do it too far into the mission. You may not In the mission closer than 10-20 miles from the mission target. Otherwise when you end the mission and exit to the 2-D map, the mission debriefing may say mission failed instead of mission in progress. This means that the artificial intelligence may give up on the mission. But even if this happens you still may be able to control one of the flights in the package. You can take control one of the flights in the package all the way until that flight aborts the mission. To do this, do the following. Go to the air tasking order. Check show all fights. You will need to know to either know where the exact mission you flew was or find the mission by package number. To find the mission by package number, you will need to have written down the package number before you would have begun the mission. A good place to write it down would be in the Notepad or WordPad program. Once you know the package number, go to the mission type and then go to the mission by package number. Then select the flight you want to take over. To ensure mission success, you will want to take over the strike flight in the mission. This is because the artificial intelligence might give up on flying the other flights in the package. The success of the strike flight in the package will determine whether the mission succeeds or fails. The above tips involve a lot of flight switching. There is an alternative method for keeping your flights in the flight package alive. You could just stay on the 2-D map during integration every mission and just observe the flights in the package from there. When enemy planes come up on the 2-D map, then you can fly the escort mission. Here is how to do just that. When something on the 2-D map comes up, change the time acceleration in the top right corner to stop. Save the campaign using a new filename such as engagement save point. Then time accelerate to something such as 4x or 8x. Then watch the engagement on the 2-D map take place. Pay attention to the events in the intelligence section. It will say whether there is engagement or whether a plane has been shot down. Once the engagement is over, hover the mouse pointer over the escort flight and see whether is it is missing any planes. If it is not missing any plans, then the escort flight did not need your help. You could in this case time accelerate the game until there is another engagement with the escort flight. On the other hand, if there is any missing planes in the escort flight, then that flight will need your help. Load the campaign you just saved. Join the escort flight. Pilot the escort flight making all its wingmen turn around at full acceleration. Order them to close up formation. Keep heading away from the missile until it is no longer a threat. Then exit to the 2-D map. Watch the flight proceed forward to the mission target. Then do the above process of watching the engagement, observing whether any planes were lost, and then take control of the escort flight if necessary. Here is a more hands-off approach. Pick a flight in the package to fly at the beginning of the mission and then stay in that fly for the duration of the mission. In other words, just fly a mission normally. It is recommended that you do the strike flight in the package. Just let the artificial intelligence of the escort do its thing and clear out enemy fighters from the path to the target. Turn around when you need to in order to stay behind the escort flight. When doing this hands-off approach there is one thing you need to be aware of. If the escort flight has been heading back to base for a while, then that means it has taken too many losses and it is aborting the mission. This means it is heading back to base. In that case, you will have to do without your escort flight. Once your escort flight is out of the equation, you will have a decision to make as to whether to continue the mission. If you notice that there are too many enemy aircraft ahead of you, then your flight should abort the mission as well. If there are not too many aircraft ahead of you at the moment, then you can proceed to the mission target and attempt to carry out your mission. Later on if you run into too many enemy aircraft, then you should go defensive and have your flight abort the mission as well. You can also choose to do the escort mission in the hands off approach. If you do the escort mission, it is important to try to stay ahead or at least close by to the strike mission in the package. To continue to be able to stay ahead of the flight being escorted, it is important that you continue to move forward. To do this, it is important to learn head-on maneuvering for avoiding missiles. Head-on maneuvering for avoiding missiles is quite doable, especially if you have long range AIM 120s, and just have a semi active radar homing missile to deal with. If you have a active radar homing missile to deal with, such as the AA-12 Adder(R-77), then it will be very difficult to do head-on maneuvering to avoid the missile. If you do have to turn around to avoid a missile, then you will keep the time you are turned away to a minimum. To help shorten the duration of the time you're turned around, it helps to do a barrel roll to try to quickly bleed off the speed of the missile. Then you can climb and turn to put the missile at your 7:30 o'clock or 4:30 o'clock. This is not quite a full turn to your three or nine o'clock. Roll a little left and right before the climb to do this. Then dive and turn to put the missile at your 9 or 3 o'clock. Doing this maneuver will speed up your defeating of the missile, which is what you will have to do to be a good escort. This will make it so the flight being escorted when I catch up to you. As far as your wingmen goes when doing this, just give them the weapons free command for the whole time. Hopefully by flying a perfect mission in just your aircraft, you will be all to greatly add to the amount of aircraft destroyed by your flight. The above tips have been about switching between flights in a package to better the outcome of the mission. You can also better the outcome of the mission by switching between aircraft in a flight. The artificial intelligence of the wingmen does not do a very good job of staying alive or getting a lot of air to air kills. You can increase the amount of air to air kills within your flight, by increasing the following distance that your wingmen are following you. Increase the following distance of your wingmen by using the kickout command multiple times until you get your wingmen as far away from you as you can. Another way to increase the following distance of your wingmen is to order them to return the base. Then when they have gotten far away from you, order them to return to formation. The idea behind increasing the following distance of your wingmen is to keep them on standby and use their air to air weapons yourself. if you are flying flight lead into use all the air to air weapons of that aircraft, then you can switch to the other aircraft and use all its air to air weapons. If you have used all its air to air weapons, then you switch to the other aircraft- and so on. Here is how to do this When doing any of the above procedures to try to help the artificial intelligence stay alive or destroy more planes, it is important that you not make the artificial intelligence do any worse than it otherwise would if left alone. To check for this, observe how many kills the escort flight would get if left alone for the entire mission. To do this, do the following. Join the strike flight. Stay in this flight for the entire duration of the mission. If you have trouble staying alive then change the settings to invulnerability. You can time a accelerate if you wish, but don't time accelerate more than 8 to 16 times. If you time accelerate more than this, it may make the game so that it does not process things properly- or process things in the same way it would as if it were not time accelerated. When you have reached the mission target or the mission is over, exit to the 2-D map. Observe in a debriefing how many kills the escort flight got. Then try being proactive in trying to help the artificial intelligence using any of the above tips. See if the amount of kills that the escort flight gets increases or decreases. After doing airbase strikes many times using the above processes, you will gain air superiority. It may take a while. But you should not spend more than about two days getting air superiority, because you will want to participate in the interdiction of ground vehicles. Since the artificial intelligence will destroy about 25 ground vehicles per hour, you can greatly contribute to that. You might appeal to destroy 25 ground vehicles per target by yourself. If you are able to do this, then you can double the amount of ground vehicles destroyed per hour. Therefore, it is important to gain air superiority within a reasonable amount of time and not spend day after day doing it. You only have about two weeks to destroy the enemy ground vehicles and have the allies advance toward enemy territory. During difficult campaigns, you cannot expect to get full air superiority. You may only get diminished air superiority. It might be a good idea to have your missions do double duty. After you finish your interdiction of enemy vehicles mission, you might want to add a waypoint to an airbase. You can load some bombs to strike the runway or just do a fighter sweep to degrade the air superiority of the enemy.
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