WOE:BC Update 16

Back from holiday and spending my last week at home I have plenty of time to cruise above the sky's of Europe. the RF-4C Phantom courtesy of the Mirage Factory has become my trusted workhorse to fly over the different hotspots.

For now I have just checked a single area around Altenburg to figure out how the game engine selects the units in the different target areas. I had hoped to create mixed target areas with SA-9's, SA-13 and SA-7 working together to create a dense sam umbrella. Unfortunetaly the engine does some things that I can't control, such as selecting SAM's and AAA.

If you take the area around Altenburg: according to the germanyce_target.ini file there should be one SAM_RADAR, 6 SAM_LAUNCHERS and 14 AAA emplacements. When I launched a simple recon mission over the area I got these units to show up:

• Straight Flush Radar
• SA-6 Sam's (linked with the Fansong Radar)
• S-60 Anti-Aircraft Guns
• 2S6 Anti-Aircraft Guns
• SA-7 Shoulder launched missiles

I can easily understand why the engine picked the Fansong and SA-6's but the choice for the S-60, 2S6 and SA-7 remains a mystery. It seems that the engine treats them like AAA but I can't figure out how the engine decides which quantity of each unit it should use. And if i can't understand it, I can't manipulate it.

I downloaded several groundunit addon's (for a complete list see bottom of this post) and discovered several things about them:

• the game engine only selects the units which match the campaignperiod
• the game engine (it seems) can only use one type of unit for a particular role. ie initially the campaign displayed the KS-30 towed AA gun, only when I set its serviceendyear prior to 1990, did the S-60 show up in the campaign.

Below is a list of all Anti Aircraft groundobjects that I kept in the campaign.

• SA-13L
• SA-7L
• SA-6L
• Straight Flush Radar
• S-60
• Flat Face EW Radar
• ZSU-23
• Tor
• 2S6

Next step will consist of viewing each target area and adding objects to it to spice it up. I also wrote a short AAR on my first overflight over Altenburg at SimHQ.

For those interested, these are the groundunit addon's I downloaded:

• Pasko's SAM and Vehicle pack to reskin several groundunits to european green
• '70's to now pack: tanks and us marines units
• Infantry pack
• Soviets sams: adds the Tor and Tunguska
• ZSU-23 green: the stock ZSU-23 has a desert camouflage, which make it stick out on the european battlefield, with this new skin it's painted green.

I added also some images from the different ground units that will appear in the campaign.

Happy Flying