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No.401_Wolverine
Dec-21-2013, 16:09
6 to 12 BLUE COORDINATED Pilots Requested for Campaign Mission Sortie!
TIME: 9:30pm EST (Toronto, ON, Canada Time) TONIGHT (Dec 21)
DURATION: About 2 hours

No.401 Squadron has recently acquired the use of a 100mb down/100mb up server so we are looking to start testing the possibility of opening up our Co-Op campaigns to more people than before and including VS play as well!

As part of that, we would be happy to host a few BLUE pilots tonight (we already have enough RED for the test) to fly a sortie as part of the campaign. See the rules and briefing below!

RULES

1. NO RE-FLY IF NOT SAFELY RETURNED TO BASE - If you fly and return home, landing safely, you can get into another aircraft and fly again. If you are shot down, or crash land, or in any other way do not return safely to a BLUE airfield, you cannot re-fly.

2. THE MISSION ENDS WHEN THE LAST RED PLAYER RETURNS HOME OR IS LOST - As it is a co-op campaign for 401 currently, when the last RED player is finished flying, the mission end will be announced and the server will be stopped

3. IF YOUR SPAWN POINT IS BAD, GET ANOTHER ONE - I haven't been able to clear all the BLUE spawns at French airfields yet, so some may be bad. Just grab a fresh aircraft.

4. YOU MUST FLY AS A GROUP - This is very important. If you intend to attend, please organize yourself with the other BLUE pilots. I recommend that you pick a comm channel on ATAG TeamSpeak server and use that to coordinate yourselves. I realize some people may not do this, but I'm hoping if you read this you do.

5. FOLLOW YOUR BRIEFING! - The briefing below is the operation you will be undertaking. Follow it. It is not intended to tell you exactly what to do, but to give you an idea of where and when things could happen. Your courses and altitudes are up to you. There will be friendly AI fighters in the mix to assist and defend airfields. It is possible that, depending on how you choose to fly the mission, you will not come into contact with enemy fighters. It's possible you'll come across an entire enemy wing of 24 Spitfires! Exercise judgement and know when to fight and when to run.

6. HAVE FUN AND LEAVE FEEDBACK - This is a test to see what our server can handle. I'm hoping it performs well. If it does, we'll start designing things a little more specifically for PvP play, but for now it's just a 'let's see what happens'.

SERVER: No.401 Squadron Campaign Server
PASSWORD: test

BRIEFING

October 21, 1941. Early Afternoon. Moderate cloud at 900m, good visibility above to 10km

SITUATION: With the shift of forces away from the coastlines near England, the enemy has begun to take advantage of their air superiority and are sending fighters on sweeps over France with increasing regularity. We must protect our coastal airfields and other assets within their striking radius.

OPERATION: Patrol the coastal airfields and cities from Boulogne in the SW to Oostend in the NE. Enemy fighter sweeps are typically being sighted at altitudes of 5km and above.

DURATION: Attempt to provide coverage over the patrol area for approximately 2 hours.

ATAG_Freya
Dec-21-2013, 23:54
Thanks Wolverine and 401! I jumped on and flew, even though I couldn't use TS fully -mic off- as per. (not that it mattered) Things ran well, though I'm sure you'd prefer more participants to stress test the server, only a couple of small stutters, one of which being when a large formation of do-17's (?) came into draw distance. I flew the specified patrol route from Bolougne to Oostend and back and forth (~6000m). Burned a whole tank o gas, boy is the fuhrer going to be mad because I never shot anything down. Then again he always seems a little pissed off, doesn't he? It wasn't till the last 15 min of fuel remaining that I finally spotted my first contacts, AI 109's that I damn near killed, then the big formation, and some AI spits. The AI had some scraps, that I could only watch from a distance, I then followed the bombers for a short while, and then RTB... Looks like this could be great fun if (like the briefing says) a coordinated group of blues got on. The blues were on chat only, from what I could tell, and we used it a bit, (thx Hans and Vogler) so a TS plan in future flights will be nice. Would be willing to fly some more in the new year if you'll be hosting more.... :salute:

No.401_Wolverine
Dec-22-2013, 13:02
Thanks for coming Freya!

Yes, things performed fairly well on our end.

The campaign missions are designed for squadron play, hence the request of groups. From our end, 401 squadron took off from Biggin Hill, went to Manston to refuel, then climbed to 20k ft over Deal to rendezvous with 609 squadron. We went east towards Ostend and halfway there, encountered a large formation of 109s sweeping the channel. We engaged but the 109s promptly dove right into the water (I NEED 4.01 patch to fix this.... The game is Multiplayer combat only at this point). We regrouped and continued our sweep down past Dunkirk. We shot up Calais Marck and Caffiers airfields, claiming about 13 destroyed on the ground, caught 2 109s in the air returning home, and then made our way back to England. We lost one aircraft to ground fire over Caffiers and he put down in a field. The rest of us returned to Biggin Hill, some refueling at Lympne en route.

I should note that the 109s encounter mid-channel were dynamically spawned. The encounter was entirely random and unplanned. As was the encounter with the 2 109s returning home. None of the AI aircraft in the mission were planned to be there except for the 609 squadron spitfires.

Overall, the mission took 2.5 hours give or take from start to finish.

My end goal is to remove many of the AI flights and just leave action up to the squadrons involved. Being 1941, the Red side would have to plan sweeps and ground attack missions, etc. The Blue side would have to put up sweeps and patrols. I'm working on a way to give BLUE their own version of Radar (shorter distance than REDs, but effective over the entire coastline and inland areas.

I'd like it to provide a virtual battlefield unlike the current set of missions we see running on servers where there are 'game' like objectives to complete in order to 'roll the map'. There would be no rolling of the map. Just tallies claimed and accumulated over time. Some end goal could be established for the performance of both sides at the end of the 'campaign' or whatever it is called (I have some ideas for this).

I'll put up the next brief a little earlier next time and hopefully we can get more BLUEs to fly.

9./JG52 Hans Gruber
Dec-22-2013, 13:43
Vogler and I, later Lopp joined, flew back & forth between Bolougne & Dunkirk for awhile before spotting a large groups of Do 17's that we escorted to London and back without encountering an enemy. Flew more than 2 hours on a single tank and never fired my guns. There was never any indication that airfields in France were under attack so some kind of ground observer or early warning system for blue would be great. It would be neat to see this evolve but you might consider hosting at different teams as I think it will be difficult for many to attend.

RAF74_Buzzsaw
Dec-22-2013, 16:28
Thanks for contributing to the community. :thumbsup:

No.401_Wolverine
Dec-23-2013, 20:37
Vogler and I, later Lopp joined, flew back & forth between Bolougne & Dunkirk for awhile before spotting a large groups of Do 17's that we escorted to London and back without encountering an enemy. Flew more than 2 hours on a single tank and never fired my guns. There was never any indication that airfields in France were under attack so some kind of ground observer or early warning system for blue would be great. It would be neat to see this evolve but you might consider hosting at different teams as I think it will be difficult for many to attend.

That's why in the briefing, I said specifically to hold to your briefing, being to patrol that area of the map (Boulogne to Ostend).

The campaign map has a lot of other things going on that are independent of the mission for the day. That is intentional to provide a full battlefield environment. Think of GTA games where tons of little things are going on that are not part of what you're doing at any given time. You can choose to involve yourself, or you can keep doing the story mission. By choosing to involve yourself with the Do17s that headed across, you abandoned the mission and a flight of spitfires had an easy time over France shooting up airfields.

Even if you'd have had an indication of the attack in France, you'd have been too far to do anything about it. We even saw you guys on your way home as we were landing at Lympne to refuel before heading home to Biggin Hill.

Similarly, we encountered that random channel sweep of AI 109s. Now, if the AI was working properly, we would have had a tough engagement there for a while and you might have come across us in the midst of it. We would have had to scratch our mission and RTB. As it happened, the 109s all lawn darted into the water and we were able to carry on.

Now, in the future, what I would like to do is have a couple of RED squadrons and BLUE squadrons able to take on different missions during any one time. Perhaps while we were doing our sweep and ground attack, another RED squadron would have been on stand-by watching for enemy coming across. They would have intercepted that bomber group and you'd have had a fight.

Similarly, perhaps another BLUE squadron would have been specifically detailed to escort a bomber group or something.

Technically, those bombers should be removed from this version of the map as daylight bombing of England would probably not have been going on at that time.

Anyway, lots of ideas. I hope we can hold another event soon and get even more participants. I'm working on a Freya system for BLUE to have some way of detecting contacts close to France.

9./JG52 Hans Gruber
Dec-23-2013, 20:51
That's why in the briefing, I said specifically to hold to your briefing, being to patrol that area of the map (Boulogne to Ostend).

The campaign map has a lot of other things going on that are independent of the mission for the day. That is intentional to provide a full battlefield environment. Think of GTA games where tons of little things are going on that are not part of what you're doing at any given time. You can choose to involve yourself, or you can keep doing the story mission. By choosing to involve yourself with the Do17s that headed across, you abandoned the mission and a flight of spitfires had an easy time over France shooting up airfields.

Even if you'd have had an indication of the attack in France, you'd have been too far to do anything about it. We even saw you guys on your way home as we were landing at Lympne to refuel before heading home to Biggin Hill.

Perspective I guess. While you were shooting up planes on the ground in France, London was bombed. We patrolled the coastline for more than an hour without any indication of enemy aircraft until some AI Spitfires were spotted over Boulogne which led us to the Do 17's. With no other information to go on, as we were flying to the briefing, we assumed this quite large force of Do 17's was the main event. We saw you landing at Lympne and at that point were too low on fuel to engage so we went back to France, with all bombers surviving. :P

I'm not complaining, just stating how the mission played out from our perspective.