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marksdoran -> RE: Strike Tutorials - testing (8/2/2017 11:32:45 PM)
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I'm a little late to the party but since I'm returning to the fold after a long (LONG) hiatus, I thought looking for tutorials would be a good idea. I've played through mission #1 only so far (I just found this thread) and I have a few comments/suggestions.
First let me say that I tried the air tutorial mission that comes with the game. I'm with lots of other people: it's hard mostly for being under equipped with instructions and help and in that the weapons available make hitting much of anything tricky at best.
So... Gunner98, your approach is a huge improvement! I like the level of direction and help in the pop-up message log. I think having single ship assignments within the single scenario works out well. The cadence and timing of the whole thing flows nicely. Ability to have some near-certain hits is gratifying.
One thing seemed broken to me: all OK until 3rd flight takes off...text seems broken around "Weapon state: Pre-Planned"
7:47:00 AM - 7:47:00 AM - OK, now that Strike #3 is airborne, lets adjust our doctrine a little bit.
· Game Menu/Side Doctrine o Right column under Air Operations, most of the way down: A/G strafing (gun) change to yes
o Same menu half way down Weapon State. Pre-Planned:
o Here you can change up how your units engage with their weapons: Chose ·
Select Strike #3 · Hit F1 and drag select the two Tank troops marked target 3
You may have noticed that the tank units – you can tell that their tank units by the
little ‘Tank Track’ symbol if your using NTDS symbols, have the number ‘3’ next to
their upper left side. This represents the number of actual tanks that the unit contains.
When you fire a weapon at the unit a ‘1’ will appear in the lower left side to represent
the number of weapons that unit has allocated to it. By the way – infantry is represented
by a large ‘X’ depicting the crossed belts of a Napoleonic soldier and artillery is
represented by a dot to represent a cannon ball.
7:47:00 AM - 7:47:00 AM - Event: 'Strike 3 Target' has been fired.
[that's a straight cut-paste from the in-game text but I reformatted lines to match what I think was intended...when I pasted it into notepad++ it came out as one long line per timestamp]
In the above there doesn't appear to be a complete sentence after "...engage with their weapons: Chose ·" and it's not clear which option you should pick. Making a poor choice there can really fill up the log in a big hurry (I know from experience ;)).
Suggestions (some of which might apply instead or as well to other scenarios in the campaign set):
For all tasks that involve dumb bombs (at least) I think it would be good to add some discussion of release altitude versus likely miss distances. Seems like by default the AI chooses to plink from way, WAY up there and miss distances can be pretty epic. With the bonus missions after the more scripted ones I revisited some of the building targets and tried low and medium altitudes with much better hit rates [ok, granted an unopposed scenario allows this where actual air defenses might make medium alt bombing runs pretty nuts but I think new players would benefit from getting to know that release alt does make considerable difference. Hmm, question...can the AI do pop-up toss attacks if you select nap of the earth for a target approach...and if so, is that more or less accurate than level release from low or medium altitudes I wonder?? Didn't try that, might go back and try it]
Scoring is sort of all or nothing -- 100 points and triumph for destroying the bonus target. I'd spread that out with increments for each of the targets along the way (...and mention the "Score" item in the Game menu as a way to check progress in a scenario).
Speaking of that, the pop-ups seem to imply that you can consider the scenario done once the first half dozen evolutions are complete but then you only score points if the bonus targets are eliminated. That seems inconsistent in the directions. I'd suggest making the instructions more like: OK, now finish off any remaining targets with the aircraft you have left at your base.
...and with that in mind: for giggles I used a ASuW strike mission with the jet I assigned to the bonus buildings. You may tackle that in one of the upcoming scenarios (...that I haven't got to yet) perhaps but I would think setting up a mission and assigning a single jet (working around the flight size limitation etc.) might be worth doing in this initial unopposed scenario.
Lastly, I couldn't find it so apologies if I missed it but I think a companion text/doc that provides the same info as the pop-ups in the message log would be nice given the ephemeral nature of the pop-ups (and my ability to fumble fingers them away before I meant to...doh!). Something to print or alt-tab to as you play along would be nice for many people I think.
Let me know if this is useful to you -- if so, I can go through the other missions and provide thoughts for those as well. Regardless, I got a lot out of scenario #1 and I'm looking forward to playing through the remainder. Good stuff -- thank you for the hard work!
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