Target distribution through mission planner

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All Forums >> [New Releases from Matrix Games] >> Command: Modern Operations series >> Tech Support >> Target distribution through mission planner

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Target distribution through mission planner - 3/26/2018 6:28:32 PM

TwarVG

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From: Britannia
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Hey guys, I hope this is the right place to ask this, if not just give me a shout and I'll shift it.

So I was playing the Hit Hard Hit Fast scenario in the Shifting Sands campaign and after about an hour and a half of careful mission planning with a pen and some paper and setting up missions for the airfield strikes, I launched my aircraft, marshalled them, and sent them on their way in waves about a minute apart. My aircraft armed with anti runway munitions went first and were each assigned to a land strike mission which only contained one target each which was either the runway or runway-grade taxiway so those worked fine and my aircraft hit their targets. Next I grouped together all of the revetments and tarmac space on each airfield and set up strike missions and assigned enough rocket armed aircraft so that each aircraft was attacking a single target as I was going to employ each aircraft's entire payload against its assigned target as per its WRA, and did the same with hangars and bomb armed aircraft which I repeated for every airfield I was attacking. Now what I hoped would happen is that the mission editor would see 16 revetments in my target list, and 16 aircraft all in individual groups of 1 aircraft each and automatically assign each aircraft a target to attack. However, what happened was all 16 aircraft focused on a single target until that target was destroyed and then they all focused on the next target until that one was destroyed and so on. So instead of 16 revetments each getting a full salvo of rockets which would easily destroy the parked aircraft inside but not the revetment itself, I ended up with a few destroyed revetments and the rest completely untouched because nobody attacked them.

I've got nearly 800 hours in this game so I get how most of the missions work, but I rarely use the land strike mission as I prefer to manually plot courses and assign weapons etc. But a strike of this size, well over 100 aircraft, is simply too large to do it manually when the land strike will handle all the ingress and egress automatically. So I was wondering is there some button, checkbox, or doctrine setting that I've completely missed that'll automatically distribute targets evenly amongst the assigned aircraft or will I have to manually do it? The only thing I can think of is using the land strike mission to automatically plot courses and simply unassign each aircraft from their mission once they're nearly there and plot the ingress, speed, altitude, weapons release, and egress manually but I'd much prefer if after nearly 2 hours of plotting and waiting I could put my feet up and watch the show unfold rather than babysit each aircraft and strike just so they actually hit their individual targets.

Thanks for taking the time to read guys, any help would be appreciated.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/26/2018 7:34:53 PM

thewood1

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I think WRA would take care of 90% of this wouldn't it? At least that is the easiest approach I would take. Its still up to the AI about assigning aircraft to individual targets, but it will spread the pain out and provide the AI some flexibility in attacking until destroyed.

After that, if it doesn't work the way you want, it becomes tinkering with targets in the mission planner.

(in reply to TwarVG)

Post #: 2

RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/26/2018 8:08:47 PM

TwarVG

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From: Britannia
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I've tried messing around with the WRA and nothing seems to change their behaviour, they all beeline for one target until it's totally destroyed before even bothering to think about the others. Unassigning them from their missions prior to ingress and manually plotting out the ingress, strike, and egress is the only way to get a result I'm happy with but it's very time consuming and tedious for large strikes. Hopefully a better strike planner comes in the near future.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/26/2018 8:50:42 PM

thewood1

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I have done this before and will look at how I did it.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/26/2018 11:54:56 PM

thewood1

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Here is the mission inbound. 8 Mirages with 2 500kg bombs per Mirage. I set a basic mission of 8 aircraft with the 8 revetments at Bir Al-Thamadah. I set WRA for land structure to 1 flight targeted to a target (the second column of choices). The first pic is the flight inbound. Note the targeting from each flight to a revetment.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/26/2018 11:56:51 PM

thewood1

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This is basically a BDA of the results. Note that all revetments were either destroyed or damaged. Is this what you were trying to do?

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 12:00:30 AM

thewood1

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Sorry about the sizing. I was doing it fast.

Here is a pic of the mission.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 12:06:51 AM

thewood1

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To me, the biggest issue is determining how many flights you want to assign to each target. I didn't try it, but I suspect you can maybe let the AI do it through the defense value.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 12:36:22 AM

TwarVG

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I've retried it about a dozen times on as many scenarios trying to get a different result as well as changing flight sizes and whatnot and yet nothing seems to work. All aircraft assigned to the strike will beeline for one of the listed targets, employ their weapons against it, and ignore the rest until the first target is destroyed irregardless of the shooters per salvo WRA setting for their given weapons.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 12:46:53 AM

thewood1

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Well...put a save up and let us look at what's going on. First rule of the tech forum.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 12:57:42 AM

TwarVG

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Unfortunately I don't have the save anymore, I finished up the scenario manually and moved on. Plus I'm quite new to the whole forum thing so I don't really know how to do much other than post and reply. Thank you very much for you time and help, but I'll try and figure something out on my own time rather than waste any more of yours.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 1:08:32 AM

thewood1

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Well that was kind of a waste of time.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 1:12:39 AM

thewood1

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Looking back at the original post, a strike size of 100 aircraft is pretty big. I don't think I have ever set up a strike of more than 25 aircraft. So anyone potentially looking at this, I would also suggest breaking up any large strike like that into 3-4 strikes tasked with separate targets and roles. Not doing it for this issue, but just to better control who is hitting what.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 1:18:26 AM

TwarVG

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I had a few missions per airbase (runway, taxiway, revetments, tarmac space, hangars) going for the 4 airbases in the Sinai and 2 near the canal. No single mission exceeded 16 aircraft. I tested out assigning 1 shooter per target then and with fresh scenarios and still nothing changed.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 1:19:55 AM

thewood1

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NOt sure what you're doing wrong. I got it working in about 10 minutes.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 1:23:00 AM

TwarVG

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Well all I assume I need to do is change the shooters per salvo to 1 unit for the weapon being used and the target it's being employed against. Both in the side doctrine and mission doctrine just to be sure.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 1:26:08 AM

thewood1

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Had you done that in the missions you had the problem with?

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 1:34:28 AM

TwarVG

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Of course, I tried it repeatedly in different circumstances, different scenarios, tried unassigning and reassigning the aircraft etc, nothing seemed to make a difference.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 1:39:55 AM

thewood1

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OK, I am confused. The post above made it sound like you hadn't tried it. This is why a save is important. Well, if you see it again, save it and post it. It will save everyone some time.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 1:54:28 AM

TwarVG

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I've copied your mission plan exactly, 8 Mirages going for 8 revetments on a basic strike mission with the mission doctrine set to 1 unit shooter per salvo and it still didn't work. I think I've managed to attach the save game.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 6:44:02 AM

Eggstor

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In addition to setting the Shooters Per Salvo to 1, you need to disable using the weapon (in your case, the 500 kg bomb) in self-defense.

I put together a small scenario that demonstrates this, both with unguided munitions that by default expend everything on a given target and with guided munitions that by default expend a set number of munitions.

The difference in strike behavior between groups with unguided munitions versus groups with guided munitions might be something to look at. Groups with unguided munitions attack only one target at a time, while groups with guided munitions can attack multiple targets at the same time.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 8:15:54 AM

thewood1

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That's odd because I had no issues with that in my run through.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 10:24:01 AM

TyphoonFr

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Eggstor

In addition to setting the Shooters Per Salvo to 1, you need to disable using the weapon (in your case, the 500 kg bomb) in self-defense.

I put together a small scenario that demonstrates this, both with unguided munitions that by default expend everything on a given target and with guided munitions that by default expend a set number of munitions.

The difference in strike behavior between groups with unguided munitions versus groups with guided munitions might be something to look at. Groups with unguided munitions attack only one target at a time, while groups with guided munitions can attack multiple targets at the same time.

In your scenario, the weapons transported by each aircraft are sufficient to destroy each target.
But what happens if it is not the case.

Do the test with a harder target:
# 1295 A / C Underground Aircraft Shelter (30x Medium Aircraft)

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 11:35:17 AM

Puciek

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I don't think that this scenario can be done without micromanagement as it is, and what you've described is only half of the issue - the other half is that for the pilots then there is no priority between confirmed occupied hangars and empty ones when bombing them, so unless you manually retarget them - they will eventually get to them, after the planes may already be in the air.

I really would like option to make AI smarter in both those issues, as with large scenarios like that it's a big pain.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 12:49:52 PM

TyphoonFr

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This is my point of view, I may be wrong.

I think the multi target strike mission works like this:
The planes of a flight remains grouped to attack, according to the doctrine a plane leaves the fight as soon as it has fired its weapons.
Targets are ranked by priority (A,B,C,D ...).

Whenever a target is attacked (that weapons are heading towards it) is no longer a priority, and it is the next target becomes priority and is attacked.
But the priorities are redefined each time the weapons have reached their targets and one destroys or not.

If for example, while the planes attacked the target D and the weapons fired on the target A, were not enough to destroy the target A, then the target A becomes again priority the planes attack it again before attacking D .

I think that depending on the flight time of the weapon (which depends on the range and the drop altitude), the power, the guidance of the weapon, the WRA, the distance between the targets, of the target type,the results will be different.

Airplanes armed with GBU12 SALH bombs can attack and damage, at the same time, as many targets as there are planes to illuminate the targets. And as the bombs need to be guided until impact, an airplane with SALH bombs, will not attack any other targets until the one he has already damaged is destroyed.
With SALH bombs, the WRA setting is important, if you allocate a bomb for example for a target that needs 10 to be destroyed, the guiding time of each bomb will expose your aircraft to danger near the target. Its flight time may not even allow it to drop all its bombs before reaching the bingo fuel.

With Stand-Off weapons, their flight time allows them to attack each target.

For the multi target,in some cases,micromanagement or 1 strike mission by target are the best solution.

One solution, try an ASuW patrol(ground),and assign several filght, the new settings "Number of a/c that engage hostile contact" allows to assign a flight by target and "Wingmen can investigate/engage separate contact within" set to 1nm allows the aircraft to leave the flight and attack separately.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/27/2018 3:41:35 PM

TwarVG

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I think you're right on the target prioritisation thing. Even when you only allow 1 aircraft to attack each target all it really changes is that only 1 aircraft will employ their weapons against the target at once instead of all of them while the rest hover around waiting for it to either be destroyed or damaged, where they'll re attack that target if it survived (which you don't really want for airfield strikes where destroying the parked aircraft is the priority and not the structure they're inside of) or move onto the next one. Either way they hover around getting shot at for too long so it still doesn't really fix it. The best way for me is to let the strike mission plot their course onto target and to unassign them all near the end and manually use F1 to give them each a target, seems to work the best even if it is a bit of a pain. Guided weapons are no problem to play with, but there's a certain charm about using aircraft armed with dumb bombs flying in at high speed and low level that GBUs just can't replicate.

I wonder how difficult it would be to add a feature or button where you can pair up an aircraft assigned to the mission and one or more targets from your target list through the mission editor window and let the game handle it all automatically.

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RE: Target distribution through mission planner - 3/28/2018 1:40:25 AM

Eggstor

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I created a second version of my test scenario above to test a few other aspects, such as what happens if the first pass doesn't destroy all the targets and a plane still has munitions, if multiple targets are in the DLZ of a short-range unguided-armed group, and if multiple missions are assigned to the same set of targets. That's not to say the first isn't still useful. What I've found between the two test scenarios:

- Every mission assigned to attack a particular set of targets sets the same order of priority of destruction based on distance from the base and BDA (the closest target not deemed heavily-damaged is the primary), regardless of the number of missions. I haven't tested whether assigning aircraft from different bases affects this.
- All aircraft will fly a path to attack the primary target.
- In the Weapons Release Authorization for the attacking weapon, if the number of weapons per salvo is set to "all" and the number of shooters per salvo is set to "fill the weapon quanitity requirement", or if the weapon is set to be used in "self-defense" regardless of other WRA settings, all the weapons of an attacking group will be fired on only the primary target.
- On a per-mission basis, if either the number of shooters or the number of weapons per salvo is limited and the weapon is not set to be used in "self-defense", once the primary target has the requisite number of weapons launched against it, while the other aircraft on that mission will not alter course from the primary (except for aircraft in that group to maintain stand-off distance if that is part of the mission doctrine), they will attack other targets that are within their weapons' DLZ.
- If a second mission's aircraft happens upon the scene before the target(s) launched upon by the first mission is destroyed, they will also launch on the same target(s).
- If, when adjusting course to a new primary target or to reattack the primary, an aircraft with appropriate weapons happens to have another target that is part of the mission enter its DLZ, it will attack that target rather than the primary target.
- In a mission with multiple groups, if no planes in a group have launched because all the targets in the DLZ have had the requested number of weapons were launched upon, that group will continue to bore in on the primary target even if the "maintain standoff to target" option in the mission doctrine is active.

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< Message edited by Eggstor -- 3/28/2018 1:59:28 AM >

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