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 are 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. Then check the airbase that is targeted to see if it has high threat aircraft squadrons in it.
You can check the squadrons in that airbase by reentering the campaign on the enemy side and then looking at what squadrons occupy that airbase. While you are at, you might as well get to know where all the major airbases are on the enemy side. When you are done, exit the campaign and and then reenter on the allied side.
In doing the process below to keep your package alive, you will need to monitor all the flights 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 that you have selected a good OCA strike mission to 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. To work with the artificial intelligence well, you first need to know what its limitations are.
Here is how the artificial intelligence should ideally behave. The escort flights and all other flights should all fly together. When a threat is encountered, the non-escort flights should turn away from the threat and runaway. The escort flights should then eliminate the threat. After the path along the mission waypoints is safe, all flights should join up with each other again and fly together. This process should repeat for each and every threat.
Unfortunately the flights within a package are not this well coordinated. How the AI works is that the escort flight initially starts ahead of the non-escort flights. The escort flights are tasked to clear out enemy aircraft ahead of them and ahead of the other flights. As long as the escort flights do not need to turn around, they will stay the same distance ahead of the other flights. The path ahead along the mission waypoints will then be cleared of enemy aircraft.
However, if the escort flights are fired upon, they will need to turn around to avoid the incoming enemy missiles. This will likely mess up the spacing between the escort flights and the non-escort flights. This is because the flights will act independently of each other. Each flight will only turn around if they are themselves under threat. This creates a a problem in maintaining the following distance in the spacing. All non-escort flights should head away from the threat as soon as the escort flight encounters it. This is because engaging threat aircraft should be left to the escort flights, in which they let them clear out a path ahead of them.
Since the non-escort flights act independently, they will wait to turn around until they encounter the threat aircraft themselves. This will make them gain on the escort flights and eventually pass them up. This problem can be compensated for by flight switching. But before you roll your eyes and stop reading, I only recommend doing it once. I only recommend looking at the 2-D map and judging whether the following distance between the escort flights and the non-escort flights is large enough. In Falcon 4 Allied Force the following distance is always way too short, but in Falcon 4 BMS 4 it is a reasonable amount.
You could flight switch to increase the following distance after every engagement. But that would be micromanaging too much. And you would lose the ability to fly the entire mission at once and thereby get a mission debriefing of the entire mission. Instead, just increase the following distance once at the beginning of the mission. Do this by doing the following.
Select a mission just before takeoff time. Time accelerate the mission to about 2 to 3 minutes past take off time. Then slow down time acceleration to something like 4X(4 times acceleration). Enter as flight leader for each non-escort flight and head away from the escort flights for something like 45 seconds to one minute 15 seconds. The idea is to increase following distance by 10 miles or more.
After you have done this, the next question to ask yourself is what flight should I fly in. My recommendation is to fly the escort flight and SEAD escort if that flight is available in the flight package for the mission. Load up that flight with lots of air to air missiles. Also load up with some bombs and try to carry out the strike part of the mission by yourself. The loadout I recommend for SEAD escort is one harm anti-radar missile and three bombs rather than six bombs. Having just three rather than six bombs makes you also able to take out surface-to-air missiles in addition to striking the mission target.
If you are flying as SEAD escort, try to initially be ahead of the all the other flights. This is so that you can take out a surface-to-air missile ahead of the other flights if your flight package comes across it. Then just focus on the success of your flight and try to rack up as many air to air kills as possible. To do this, you need good wingmen management.
Here are some wingmen management tips. Order your wingmen to destroy the aircraft in front of you. If one of them says that they are engaged defensive before they are able to fire, order another wingmen to engage it. What do I mean by order another wingmen? If you are the flight leader, then then this will be your wingmen or the element part of your flight.
Order your wingmen to fire at a distance of 20 miles or more. Do not worry about wasting missiles. It is hard to keep your wingmen alive and have your entire flight score 8 kills. This means you should expect 2 to 4 missiles to be needed per kill.
So here is the strategy. Order each wingman to fire at the enemy aircraft far away at 20 miles away. Then order the wingman that just fired his missiles, to turn around and run away. A good way to get them to turn around and run away is by ordering them to return to base. Fire at two more aircraft yourself. Next watch the enemy aircraft you just fired at to see whether they are running away from you or have turned around towards you again. Fire at the aircraft again when they have turned around. You will know that they have turned around by watching your radar warning receiver and waiting for it to display the aircraft radars you are engaging on it.
Doing this may seem like it's wasting missiles but what matters
is how many kills the flight gets and not just how many kills you can get. You want to do what's best for keeping the flight alive. And to keep the flight alive, you want to keep the enemy aircraft in front of you avoiding missiles and keep your own wingmen out of harms way. Survival of your flight is what matters, not conserving missiles.
Now turn around and find your wingmen. Head towards them and order them to rejoin information. When they get close, help them rejoin information by putting them at your three or nine o'clock. They will then circle around you and get behind you and in position.
If you get shot down, the mission is not over. Ask your wingmen how many stores they have. Order the wingmen with the most missiles to take lead of the flight.. Pause the game so no more wingmen get killed. You want the battle halted. Exit the mission by pressing escape and then 'E'. As soon as you get to the map screen, move the mouse pointer to the top right of the screen. Then put time acceleration to stop so the battle is stopped and no more wingmen get killed. Select the wingmen with the most missiles. Then fly the mission being that plane in the flight group.
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 want to destroy 25 ground vehicles per hour 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.
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 an airbase. Or you could just load air to air missiles to do a fighter sweep to degrade the air superiority along the route to the airbase.
|