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Command: Modern Air & Naval Operations: Let's Play and Expansions

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Dimitris said:
A critical factor that has not been mentioned in these posts is the doctrine setting "engage non-hostiles" (aka "shoot first, ask questions later"). This drastically alters the ranges at which the defender (or also the attacker, depending on the circumstances of the engagement and the presence of other scout/surveillance units) can actually begin to employ its weapons.

In the Type 052D example, from the description I understand that the destroyer had this setting set to NO, thus its hands were tied in terms of engaging incomings before they were identified as hostile. This explains why the F-16s were not engaged early with HQ-9s even through they were detected and tracked quite early. If the destroyer had been given a free hand at shooting suspect incomings, either with this doctrine setting or via other means (e.g. establishing a forbidden zone anchored to it and configuring it so that violators are marked as hostile, or having a forward picket visually ID the unknowns as bandits) then I seriously doubt any of the F-16s would have managed to close to release distance. (If you've kept a copy of that scen file, set that doctrine option to YES for the destroyer and observe how the flow of the engagement changes.)

For a demonstration of what happens when the defender has free reign in shooting early, see the very first video of CMANO we ever published:


On paper, the Turkish attack force (8 F-4Es with 2x AGM-65G each) is much stronger than the Type 052D attack setup, and the defences of the Greek convoy are much weaker (the only decent SAMs are the Hydra's ESSMs). However, the Greek force has pre-emptively marked the bogeys as hostile, and begins shooting as early as possible. This makes all the difference.

(It is both funny and frustrating at the same time, how many folks still think of Command as a strictly hardware-contest simulator when in fact we've gone to great lengths to include a myriad of "soft" factors like proficiency levels, RoEs, doctrine options, fire discipline etc. etc. You _can_ equalize these factors if you want to reduce an engagement to a steel-on-steel thing [this is a particularly popular sport on battleship enthusiast forums apparently], but RL conflicts and their representation in Command are usually much more complex than that.)
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Yeah I was going to cover that in follow-up part about defending from these sorts of attacks (featuring me demonstrating how to defend or mitigate attacks on my ships with positioning, RoE changes and exclusion zones). I personally prefer not to turn on "Engage non-hostiles"/"Engage Targets of Opportunity" because units tend to go insane and fire at EVERYTHING they have weapons to engage.

That being said the difference IS like night and day, like anything else that causes your aircraft to to become engaged before they can fire it completely spoils the attack. My example instead was going to be the previously posted of massive bomber attack with supersonic missiles and the importance of dispersing ships and posting pickets to force an attack to play their hand early and work to locate their most desired targets or risk a spoiled attack.

Along the way it allows me to play with the scenario editor and figure out it's specific bugs (or nuances, I don't have flawless judgement in telling the difference). At any rate, it gives me a reason to keep learning the system, it's limitations, the things it doesn't do well and possible things that can improve the experience. For example, while trying to create a more realistic experience in my scenarios I decided to add layered exclusions zones (an outer "Unfriendly" zone and an inner "Hostile" zone) on bearings fixed to my CVBG. In doing so I found out that placing EZs within one another doesn't work (it just flips back and forth between Unfriendly and Hostile) and that if EZs created out of ref points fixed to a group won't trigger. But report made, and I can adjust the scenario I'm making accordingly (avoid the use of Unfriendly EZ and fix the ref points for the hostile EZ to the carrier itself, even if that means that it will break if the carrier is sunk) and report it on the tech support forums.

Anyway, what I have works well enough.

Total unrelated aside:
What was this, "- 0007559: Exception Changjian Strike" in the patch notes? I ask because I don't want to recreate bugs that require developer intervention in the scenarios I make.
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As far as defending my fleet against a MMM the best way to save the CV was to post a picket far (50nmi) on whatever bearing you expect an attack. Doing so allows early enough detection to launch fighters, shift formation (putting more escorts along the bearing of the expected attack), and turn on ECM (you really shouldn't be sailing around with every ship radiating) which is probably the most substantive defensive counter-play you have once missiles are launched (killing the bombers before they launch is even better). More capable AAW ships can treat the picket as an offboard sensor and use it's tracks to engage, an enormous boon. Which bring me to another point...

Being America is cheating*.
I'm completely serious, against a solo ship attempting a WVR range attack with gravity bombs (guided or not) is suicide. They identify you via FLIR as soon as you come over the horizon, and the missiles aren't far behind. Even an insufficiently long range AShM is a recipe for disaster because they ID you via FLIR/CCD camera at 100nmi (I'm not sure if that's right) and start firing very long ranged SM-6s (130nmi) from very deep magazines, after that are the SM-2s/ESSMs (50nmi/30nmi), before finally hitting a literal wall of RAM. The whole thing can be summarized as "Burke 2 stronk (Tico not much better)". The effect is only exaggerated when they're in a group. Streams of your missiles keep re-targeting AShMs and preventing the number of leakers from building to a point where they overwhelm your close in defensive systems. It's just not fair.

I'll stop there. The fourth part I think will be the last.

*"Ban that sick filth", "No Nukes/No Bertha/No Akuma" etc etc etc.
 
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poaw said:
Being America is cheating*.
I'm completely serious, against a solo ship attempting a WVR range attack with gravity bombs (guided or not) is suicide. They identify you via FLIR as soon as you come over the horizon, and the missiles aren't far behind. Even an insufficiently long range AShM is a recipe for disaster because they ID you via FLIR/CCD camera at 100nmi (I'm not sure if that's right) and start firing very long ranged SM-6s (130nmi) from very deep magazines, after that are the SM-2s/ESSMs (50nmi/30nmi), before finally hitting a literal wall of RAM. The whole thing can be summarized as "Burke 2 stronk (Tico not much better)". The effect is only exaggerated when they're in a group. Streams of your missiles keep re-targeting AShMs and preventing the number of leakers from building to a point where they overwhelm your close in defensive systems. It's just not fair.

I'll stop there. The fourth part I think will be the last.

*"Ban that sick filth", "No Nukes/No Bertha/No Akuma" etc etc etc.
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Well, the USN goal with its surface ships was to survive a MMM no matter what. Though I'm surprised at the 100 nmi FLIR range. Seems quite huge for a reliable ID (though I'm an amateur and could be completely wrong here).

New question here: you've tested the European air defense systems, with their pros (missiles extremely effective) and cons (not enough tubes), the US one right here, but what about the Russian ones? Any opinion about them, their subtleties and specificities? Can they prevent a door-gunner from sinking their entire fleet?
 
Rufus Shinra said:
Well, the USN goal with its surface ships was to survive a MMM no matter what. Though I'm surprised at the 100 nmi FLIR range. Seems quite huge for a reliable ID (though I'm an amateur and could be completely wrong here).

New question here: you've tested the European air defense systems, with their pros (missiles extremely effective) and cons (not enough tubes), the US one right here, but what about the Russian ones? Any opinion about them, their subtleties and specificities? Can they prevent a door-gunner from sinking their entire fleet?
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I haven't built a Russian group yet because I can't find anything about the make up of their surface action groups. It was easy for the others because I could pull the shiptypes from their real life deployments, but finding that information for the Russian Navy has proven difficult (in relation to the amount of effort/resources I'm willing to expend). If anyone knows something solid, then I'd do it.

Speculation:
Not so hot. The Udaloy-class have rather anemic SAM capabilities (only SA-N-9), the Sovremenny-class is better, but still won't be ale to extract a cost for attacking or deter scouts from shadowing it (25nmi range of its SAMs), the Slava-class is decent. Most likely they get overwhelmed after a handful of shots once they run out of long-range missiles, especially if their task force composition is consistent with what the UK, France, and China field.
 
poaw said:
Speculation:
Not so hot. The Udaloy-class have rather anemic SAM capabilities (only SA-N-9), the Sovremenny-class is better, but still won't be ale to extract a cost for attacking or deter scouts from shadowing it (25nmi range of its SAMs), the Slava-class is decent. Most likely they get overwhelmed after a handful of shots once they run out of long-range missiles, especially if their task force composition is consistent with what the UK, France, and China field.
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Huh. I've always thought they had a damn huge anti-air defensive grid, but once again, I'm an amateur and I'm probably thinking on the Soviet ships of the Seventies/Eighties compared to what the West had back then. It'd be consistent with the economico-political situation of Russia to have its capability lagging compared to everyone else now.

Still... no strafing with a Super Étendard? :p
 
The big problem the Russians have is the lack of any kind of a dedicated AAW ship. The Sovs lack VLS and advanced sensors, and their SAMs are rather short-ranged as it is. The Udaloys have only point-defense missiles. The Kirovs and Slavas are the best, with S-300 missiles and associated electronics, but the system was designed in the 80s and was never comparable to modern systems like SAMPSON or AEGIS. Not to mention the Russians only have five of them.
 
Rufus Shinra said:
Huh. I've always thought they had a damn huge anti-air defensive grid, but once again, I'm an amateur and I'm probably thinking on the Soviet ships of the Seventies/Eighties compared to what the West had back then. It'd be consistent with the economico-political situation of Russia to have its capability lagging compared to everyone else now.

Still... no strafing with a Super Étendard? :p
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As Hornet said, the Russians never had particularly impressive SAM setups on their surface fleet - the Slavas and Kirovs were pretty beastly, but outside of the relatively small number of those ships their other late coldwar warships were decidedly sub-par, despite being fairly large combatants. Udaloys might as well just scuttle themselves in face of any serious air attack as their air defense ability was purely point defense - the Tor isn't much better than the RAM in terms of effective range, a pretty severe lack of defense for a 7000+ ton warship.

Sovremennies are basically giant Talwars when it comes to their loadout and we saw how aircraft schooled the Indian frigates in a previous mission. At least they can set up a local defense and keep F-18s from dropping gravity bombs from 30k, unlike the Udaloys which can't even manage that.
 
If the Russians were so weak in air defence, what was their game plan? Operate solely in range of land-based air support? Make a suicidal supersonic AShM attack on US CVBGs before sinking gloriously for the Motherland? Surely they could have done better, so what was the doctrine that justified such unbalanced ships?
 
kaikaun said:
If the Russians were so weak in air defence, what was their game plan? Operate solely in range of land-based air support? Make a suicidal supersonic AShM attack on US CVBGs before sinking gloriously for the Motherland? Surely they could have done better, so what was the doctrine that justified such unbalanced ships?
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Don't quote me directly because there are many people who know a lot more than I do (as you saw with Nuts! clarifying the Iran-Iraq War), but in the Cold War, the Soviets prioritized offensive missiles as opposed to the Americans prioritizing defensive missiles. For the latter, it's protecting the carriers, letting said carrier air wings be the main offensive "punch", and ensuring the sea control mission.

For the former, you have a lack of carriers and a sea denial mission. So you're not trying to control the sea lanes, just sinking or deterring the enemy. So the game plan was a coordinated anti-shipping missile attack, of which surface ships were only a part (one must not forget the submarines and land-based aircraft).
 
kaikaun said:
If the Russians were so weak in air defence, what was their game plan? Operate solely in range of land-based air support? Make a suicidal supersonic AShM attack on US CVBGs before sinking gloriously for the Motherland? Surely they could have done better, so what was the doctrine that justified such unbalanced ships?
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The Soviet Navy wasn't an expeditionary force the way the USN is. It's main tasks were

A) Provide ASW and air cover for SSBNs in bastion via ASW helicopters and fixed wing interceptor craft operating in concert with land-based aviation

B) Engage and destroy NATO SAGs and CBGs via long-range missile strikes from surface, air, and subsurface platforms

C) Most importantly, interdict USN MSC supply convoys from CONUS to the front line in Western Europe
 
Ok for part 4 in my 1 2 3 4 part series:

Things CMANO gets wrong, and what they're doing about it.* ** ***

This is more of a list than being filled with examples and calculations and wordy observation. CMANO is a simulation of modern air and naval operations, which means you're basically roleplaying an antenna and a multiple launch rocket system. The developers get so much of the experience "right" that the wrong parts stand out like ironic mustaches would on the figures in The Creation of Adam. I'll separate things I deem scenario problems from problems with the simulation itself.

1) Finding stuff and identifying it is too reliable at long ranges.
The lack of ambiguity interplays with issues in scenario design to give me an uncomfortable degree of certainty where there should be uncomfortable ambiguity. I have literally baited missiles attacks with >2nmi margin of error because my information is really accurate. Granted, I'm roleplaying a naval officer with huge balls and a metaphorical handlebar mustache but I should be made to work for it a bit more.

2) Defensive missiles are too accurate.
A ridiculous weight of AShM fire is basically required to attack a target as you are relying on completely swamping the system (firing from multiple platforms so the RoF of the defenders can't keep up and gradually fall behind until un-engaged AShMs start knocking ships OOA), exhausting missile inventories (through sheer numbers), using uninterceptable missiles (SAMs fired at ships); or when none of those will work, a Macross Missile Massacre (relying on the 5 - 15% leakers to do some sort of damage). AShMs are the easiest things to shoot down in the sky (supersonic or not, it doesn't matter).

3) Aircraft are playing a probability based game of chicken. And all they're the ones who brought the dice.
A plethora of factors favor aircraft survivability, almost all of them realistic. The one that isn't is that they don't lose energy when evading attacks in the form of altitude or airspeed. They just keep getting their agility bonus, over and over and over and over and over. Making some tactics quite a bit better than they would be in real life (baiting SAMs in order to deplete their magazines).

4) Soft kill measure are a lot less effective than in real life.
It's almost a weird inverse corollary to the defensive missiles. If you take the RL effectiveness of soft-kill measures you have something close to CMANOs defensive missiles, if you take the RL effectiveness of defensive missiles you have the effectiveness of CMANO's soft-kill systems. It's like the inversion completely balances itself out.

5) Mines are a headache for the wrong reasons.
This is more personal to me as I still have a scenario on the backburner using this mechanic. The most glaring issue is THE GAME DOESN'T TELL YOU WHEN YOUR SHIPS DETECT MINES! Mine sonar on, sail through a field of mines bobbing on the surface at high-noon. Lookout: "Should I tell the Admiral? Nah, he's got a lot on his plate, besides when he needs to know the shockwaves going through the hull of his flagship will let him know.". The anti-mine torpedoes don't work. Well they work against CAPTOR mines. Because those mines launch an ASW torpedo which will seek out and kill your USV. The diver doesn't work, or he works union hours.
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Scenarios issues
1) No enough neutral actors.
In most scenarios if I find something I'm certain about 90% of the time I'm allowed to shoot it. Designers (myself included) don't put in enough "NO-SHOOT" entities.

2) The one true path.
A lot of scenarios give the player extremely limited agency. I prefer to feel like I'm in control of what's happening instead of acting in the role of a junior member of an air operations cell who's been tasked with hammering out the details. As interesting as working out the details of a tanker plan, and deciding the ratio of BARCAP fighters to escort fighters are, I prefer to able to just say "fuck it, I'll just split up the strike/add more fighters/hope the B-52s handle enough of the targets instead". In other words stop telling me exactly how to build my sand castle.

3) Aircraft down for maintenance.
This is 100% realistic and just as annoying. Once again this is something I did in my scenarios because I thought it was expected. They never come out of maintenance, they just sit there in the hanger like they pay rent. I'd be more understanding if scenario designers were using them to eat up hanger space for a purpose (like if you were co-ordinating multiple CSGs and might need to divert/cross-deck aircraft for some reason) or if you could off-load them (or if it had some associated game play, like downing all your birds, to front load maintenance before conducting surge operations or vice versa and delaying a bunch of maintenance). At any rate, most of the time it's just neutral and other times its actively annoying.
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GREAT NEWS EVERYONE!****

The new patch addressing a bunch of these issues. I avoid beta builds and release candidates for the "Christmas effect" of checking for updates and getting a boatload of awesome all at once.

Anyway it will cover:
  • Improving the sensor model. Aircraft stores will effect RCS. Off-board Sonar performance adjusted.
  • Improved modeling of missile interception. A bunch of things will affect p​H, like the targets signature, it's speed, sea skimming, and others.
  • SPRINT AND FUCKING DRIFT OPTION FOR FORMATIONS!
  • Weapons that can only be fired against stationary targets (JDAM/TLAM) can now be fired on mobile targets that are stationary.
  • Prosecution Areas: Now in addition to defining a patrol's area you can also determine the area where they'll interrogate/engage targets.
  • Other stuff.
Most of those are pretty big changes, and a few addresses criticisms I've had. Basically, the best update ever since Riot stopped nerfing Irelia.

*In a layman's opinion (mine)
**As of the build I'm using (B504)
***Dimitrius please don't get mad.
****You are now reading this in Professor Farnsworth's voice.
 
You know one Scenario I'd like to see admiral poaw fight would be having one of the less used mnodern navies (India maybe? Or Italy?) fight through the kattengat in an alt WW2 timeline were you face most of thegerman high sea fleet (Bonus points for sinking the bismark) as well as the shore defences and land based aircraft as you need to fight you way into the baltic sea so you can nuke Berlin and save history. :p Mainly for the amusing cometary and to reinforce the admirals liberal use of nuclear weapons :p
 
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Catty Nebulart said:
You know one Scenario I'd like to see admiral poaw fight would be having one of the less used mnodern navies (India maybe? Or Italy?) fight through the kattengat in an alt WW2 timeline were you face most of thegerman high sea fleet (Bonus points for sinking the bismark) as well as the shore defences and land based aircraft as you need to fight you way into the baltic sea so you can nuke Berlin and save history. :p Mainly for the amusing cometary and to reinforce the admirals liberal use of nuclear weapons :p
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Gun duel between the Bismarck and one of his aircraft carriers?
 
I'd like to see him try the Australia vs France carrier battle scenario, especially after the latest round of posts. Just to see how it all interacted back then.

Edit: But, hey, it's poaw's choice.
 
The Last One said:
I'd like to see him try the Australia vs France carrier battle scenario, especially after the latest round of posts. Just to see how it all interacted back then.

Edit: But, hey, it's poaw's choice.
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Skyhawks VS Super Etendard and Crusaders? Could be interesting, but IIRC, the Clémenceau had Exocets back then for its planes (introduced in 1973, scenario in 1979), while the A-4 doesn't have similar weapons. From a quick look on Wiki, the A-4 AtG weapons are limited to 20 to 30 km, and they don't look like Fire and Forget types, while the Exocet has something around 50 to 70 km, is Fire and Forget and a sea-skimmer.

The big question, however, will be whether the Aussies' A-4 will have the AIM-9L or a previous version. With the L, they have the huge advantage of an all-aspect missile compared to the rear-aspect French Magic 1.
 
poaw said:
Dimitris please don't get mad.
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Mad? Moi...? :)



1) Finding stuff and identifying it is too reliable at long ranges.
The lack of ambiguity interplays with issues in scenario design to give me an uncomfortable degree of certainty where there should be uncomfortable ambiguity. I have literally baited missiles attacks with >2nmi margin of error because my information is really accurate. Granted, I'm roleplaying a naval officer with huge balls and a metaphorical handlebar mustache but I should be made to work for it a bit more.
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Yes, and no. Depends on the era to a large extent. After Desert Storm the embarrassing IFF experience prompted a surge in long-range optical & IIR systems to aid identification at useful engagement ranges. An additional incentive was the counter-VLO utility of these systems. So nowadays you get IIR arrays with ranges nearly matching those of medium-range radars. Go back to the 50s/60s and you're stuck with the Mk1 Eyeball and trying to find a patch of clear sky to spot that carrier wake or bomber contrail.

2) Defensive missiles are too accurate.
A ridiculous weight of AShM fire is basically required to attack a target as you are relying on completely swamping the system (firing from multiple platforms so the RoF of the defenders can't keep up and gradually fall behind until un-engaged AShMs start knocking ships OOA), exhausting missile inventories (through sheer numbers), using uninterceptable missiles (SAMs fired at ships); or when none of those will work, a Macross Missile Massacre (relying on the 5 - 15% leakers to do some sort of damage). AShMs are the easiest things to shoot down in the sky (supersonic or not, it doesn't matter).
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Guilty. We fixed this big time in the current public releases (GET THEM! More on this later). In fact it worked so well that we backported some of the logic to anti-aircraft engagements. Toys like e.g. the SS-N-19 are now truly fearsome.

3) Aircraft are playing a probability based game of chicken. And all they're the ones who brought the dice.
A plethora of factors favor aircraft survivability, almost all of them realistic. The one that isn't is that they don't lose energy when evading attacks in the form of altitude or airspeed. They just keep getting their agility bonus, over and over and over and over and over. Making some tactics quite a bit better than they would be in real life (baiting SAMs in order to deplete their magazines).
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Yes..... almost. The "unlimited evasion energy" is an issue but it's not the gamebreaker some folks think of it. We sometimes get a bug report to the tune of "I shot 12 AMRAAMs at this Su-30XYZ and it avoided them all, is this a bug?", while if you examine the AALog the story is usually most of these missiles were jammed, spoofed, decoyed etc. (and soon fried with laser) and only maybe 1 or 2 of them were actually kinematically defeated (outrun, outmanouvered). This becomes very obvious when you shoot those same missiles at e.g. a 60's MiG-21 (almost as agile as that Su-30 but crappy DECM/decoys/expendables or no at all) and it goes down faster than an intern in the Oval office.
That said, it's on our radar and we'll do something about it. It's just lower priority than some other things simply because of its low actual impact.

The most glaring issue is THE GAME DOESN'T TELL YOU WHEN YOUR SHIPS DETECT MINES! Mine sonar on, sail through a field of mines bobbing on the surface at high-noon. Lookout: "Should I tell the Admiral? Nah, he's got a lot on his plate, besides when he needs to know the shockwaves going through the hull of his flagship will let him know.".
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We've considered this. The problem with reporting mines is that once you flip the switch on that, you'll be flooded with reports on mines and miss almost every other message. Tough call. We may end up making this an optional setting (thankfully we already have the plumbing in place for that).
On the flip side, ships do manouver themselves around mines if they can (and sweepers/hunters manouver themselves to get close enough to detonate or kill them).

The anti-mine torpedoes don't work. Well they work against CAPTOR mines. Because those mines launch an ASW torpedo which will seek out and kill your USV. The diver doesn't work, or he works union hours.
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....we have anti-mine torpedoes in the game?o_O Maybe you refer to ROVs/UUVs. Give them a try with B538 and let us know if a specific system is giving you trouble. As I wrote before, there is always the chance we've missed the peculiarities of this or that.

The new patch addressing a bunch of these issues. I avoid beta builds and release candidates for the "Christmas effect" of checking for updates and getting a boatload of awesome all at once.
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Please pretty please everyone don't walk, RUN to the v1.04 Release Candidates thread and download the current public release (ATM this is v1.04 RC2 aka Build 538; we are currently hammering the next public release, on whose awesomeness I will comment on a separate future post).

Why I'm insisting on this:

Back in December when we were about to release v1.02, we practically begged players to download and try the public update builds and then finally the RC builds. The extra eyeballs (in addition to the existing internal beta team) and the feedback for tweaks were of course helpful, but what we really aimed to do was to find out in advance any gamebreaking issue and hopefully resolve it before the official release.

So eventually v1.02 gets released, it gets very well received, sales are very noticeably spiking.....

.... and then we begin to get reports of a consistent startup crash. First in drips and drops, and then the proverbial avalanche.

Yes, we had missed it. To be precise, it had been reported as an intermittent issue by a single member of the beta team. It didn't show up on our test rigs at all (physical and virtual). We had a million other things to worry about, and it was a one-time thing, and other problems were cropping up much more frequently and in our face and reported by everyone and his dog, and it got pushed back. Anyone who's taken part in non-trivial software development knows the drill.

And for a few days it became our #1 emergency item.

The absolutely frustrating part was that most of the reports came from people who were existing players, not new customers. Guys who we'd asked to try the public builds and RCs precisely in order to avoid this happening. Guys who would have seen the issue manifest on their machines (as indeed they did, a few days later), and would have alerted us early, and the problem would have been nipped in the bud. Guys who saw us punch out build after build and instead of participating, waited for the official release. Guys who could have helped us, and ultimately themselves, and didn't.

Long story short, we ended up spending Christmas and Boxing day frantically remoting to customer's PCs to diagnose the issue, understand what was going on and prepare a patch for it. It was an experience that, to put it mildly, we would rather avoid in the future.

So, not to put too fine a point to it:

 
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I've been a good Command beta bunny, downloading every new release as soon as it's been posted and dutifully reporting all my technical issues (in fact, I made the Sandbox and Shipwreck even more fearsome by pointing out that their internal DECM wasn't activating.)

Now for the scenario issues. These are more subjective, and I've been a scenario designer myself, so I'll try to comment, admitting that I'm guilty of a lot of this as well. :p

Scenarios issues
1) No enough neutral actors.
In most scenarios if I find something I'm certain about 90% of the time I'm allowed to shoot it. Designers (myself included) don't put in enough "NO-SHOOT" entities.
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Agreed. Although if I had to give reasons why I don't put enough in, the top two would be:
-Me just not wanting to put in the effort. (I'll be honest)
-The enemy AI being what it is. You can see that single skunk meandering along at the edge of the area at 9 knots with only a basic navigation radar and go "meh, probably just a freighter. Moving on". The AI, if it doesn't have advanced sensors, will either have to go and check it out, or if it has engage non-hostiles turned on, blow it up. (And since the editor currently only has unit destroyed triggers for events and not which side did it, you face the penalty.)

I could be gamey and turn the AI vision settings to Auto Side-ID.

2) The one true path.
A lot of scenarios give the player extremely limited agency. I prefer to feel like I'm in control of what's happening instead of acting in the role of a junior member of an air operations cell who's been tasked with hammering out the details. As interesting as working out the details of a tanker plan, and deciding the ratio of BARCAP fighters to escort fighters are, I prefer to able to just say "fuck it, I'll just split up the strike/add more fighters/hope the B-52s handle enough of the targets instead". In other words stop telling me exactly how to build my sand castle.
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I'm very sympathetic to that argument, but also well aware that it can lead to "if you give a mouse a carrier, he's going to want an escort group..." scenario bloat. One counter I've considered is making the scenario several hours longer than I'd normally intend to and having a variety of munitions but no current loadouts. So you have say, 8 F-16s (random example), and the question is not "How can I get my F-16s past the defenses to hit the target with (weapon A), but "Should I load them out with (weapon A), (weapon B), or a combination? That way you'd have limited units but still be able to be more flexible with them.

3) Aircraft down for maintenance.
This is 100% realistic and just as annoying. Once again this is something I did in my scenarios because I thought it was expected. They never come out of maintenance, they just sit there in the hanger like they pay rent. I'd be more understanding if scenario designers were using them to eat up hanger space for a purpose (like if you were co-ordinating multiple CSGs and might need to divert/cross-deck aircraft for some reason) or if you could off-load them (or if it had some associated game play, like downing all your birds, to front load maintenance before conducting surge operations or vice versa and delaying a bunch of maintenance). At any rate, most of the time it's just neutral and other times its actively annoying.
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I was guilty of that too in my first scenario, putting maintenance planes in my single-unit not to be attacked airfield for flavor. I actually hadn't thought of filling up hangar space, the way I've used maintenance is to add extra planes that only serve as targets (to either attack or defend).
 
Coiler said:
I've been a good Command beta bunny, downloading every new release as soon as it's been posted and dutifully reporting all my technical issues (in fact, I made the Sandbox and Shipwreck even more fearsome by pointing out that their internal DECM wasn't activating.)
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I regret that line, and I was not addressing anyone specifically. There are also valid reasons for not wanting to participate in the public release process and I/we respect that. Still, it's frustrating (not to mention demoralizing) when it leads to situations like the one I described. Thanks.
 
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Dimitris said:
I regret that line, and I was not addressing anyone specifically. There are also valid reasons for not wanting to participate in the public release process and I/we respect that. Still, it's frustrating (not to mention demoralizing) when it leads to situations like the one I described. Thanks.
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First, I want to make it clear that I wasn't criticizing poaw for not following a build-by-build beta update schedule, just pointing out my own experience.

As for the valid reasons for not participating, I can certainly see those as well. While the beta updates can bring changes and improved content, they can also have issues. One update made stealth aircraft non-stealthy until another build was (thankfully quickly) released. Another is that as of now in the beta builds, MiG-29Ks can't operate from carriers like they were designed to (DB error mixed with the carrier capable setting now being enforced). So I can definitely understand someone wanting a different pace and more stability.
 
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