by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson
WARGEN and Mission Planning
DiD decided that because WARGEN placed waypoints poorly, they would give us the ability to edit WARGEN set waypoints. As one is setting waypoints and altitude of the flight, a fuel guage keeps track of fuel requirements. You do not need to enter the planner to modify waypoints. So if that is all you want to do, go for it!
The Mission Planner allows the pilot to decide on his home base, his and group targets, waypoints, takeoff time, and type of aircraft in his force. It allows loadout choice and whether or not one will refuel. The pilot also decides on size and type of escort, and whether or not there will be a wild weasel mission. For example, one may decide to fly a Strike force of 4 EF2s, with an escort of F22s and a WW of four Tornados! Be warned that this process can run afoul of WARGEN, since in order to do this there must be 12 aircraft available at the chosen base. Due to the contingencies of war and the fluidity of the virtual battlefield, you may not always have so many unassigned aircraft to choose from. However, you can enter the planner if there are as few as ONE EF2 to fly. If you are the lone ranger type, this will please you.
Strike missions include airfields, EWR sites, AWACS and Refueler kills, POL sites, SAM sites, ships and more. The new interface shows these sites very nicely, and can display the terrain features and EWR and SA ranges overlaid. As a result, you can plan your ingress and egress for the highest chance of success. Intercept missions include AWACS and Refueler kills. Escort flights include ferrying aircraft to forward locations as well as flying CAP for tankers and AWACS. Now on to the planner!
One enters the planner by clicking on the Options menu in the Campaign Map screen. If there are enough free EFAs, one is booted into the MP interface. The pilot now has two menus to work with, the one seen on the left, and the one at the bottom of the map.
The map interface itself is customizable, with four maps to select from. The bright map that shows nation boundaries is nice to work with for a broad overview or an intercept mission, but if you fly a strike mission and stealth is an issue you will
work more with the topographic map. The dark map is nice to get a clearer tactical picture of SAM and EWR placement.
Each of these features can be turned on or off to declutter your workspace. When you are placing waypoints and finely adjusting placement you may not want to have all those other icons on all the time.
The Edit Button in the far right of the lower menu is a toggle between ZOOM and EDIT. When you are placing or adjusting waypoints the button must be in EDIT mode. I wish that DiD had left the FLAGS option default to off, since they don't add any useful information to the display unless you have forged an alliance. But its a small annoyance.
The layout of the planner menu in the upper left is almost intuitive. You begin on the left and work your way to the right. First you choose the Strike Type. Say you choose EWR for a radar kill as in my screen shot above. You then use the map of your choice in edit mode to click on your target. Next you click on Base. You need a base with at least 10 free EFAs for a good strike mission package. The map displays the number of free EFAs at a given base with a small red icon over the base.
When you click on Base, you will then have to assign the elements of your strike package. In the case above I assigned four aircraft for my strike package, 2 for Wild Weasel, and four for escort. I then clicked on Aircraft Type (its another button you will see in a secondary menu when you are assigning aircraft), and chose EFAs for the strike, F15s for the Weasel, and F18As for escort.
Once this is done, its time to assign targets. The interface for this is impressive, since you are shown each target, just as in the rotating target view in the original EF2000. You assign each of your wingmen a target individually,
and then click on the WP button to move to the next stage. You only choose targets for the strike package, targets for your weasel and escort missions are taken care of by WARGEN AI.
The screen shot above shows the next step, where you determine your flight plan, and decide the altitude to each waypoint. The set height screen in the lower left has a zoom toggle so you can set your alt in 100s of feet when below 1000 feet. The fuel bar above the alt planner gives you an estimate of your consumption to your target and home again. At this point, however, you have to guess at a percentage of fuel use against the total capacity of your aircraft. Perhaps in F22: ADF this will be enhanced to estimate actual kg of fuel....Anyway, you are ready to fly and click on ATC to choose your takeoff window, usually about eight time slots with forecast weather given for each time....
Difficulty, Detail, and the Player Rating
The first thing you will notice when you load the upgrade is new levels of difficulty: kind of a sliding scale arrangement with ten levels from Rookie to Top Gun. After so many complaints that individual efforts made little difference to campaign progress (realistic after all, since the fate of one aircraft will rarely affect a war...), DiD decided to give us the power to change this.
One selects an option when first generating the campaign: "Players Performance Affects Campaign:Yes/No.." Here's how this works....
Default is ON, so one must choose NOT to have their performance affect the campaign if preferred. If you leave the default setting alone, you will start out with a rating of 50%. Every mission flown will be rated, usually altering your rating by around 10% up or down. Every mission you fly affects the entire campaign based on your rating at the close of your mission, and if you use the 8 hour time advance feature you will be surprised to note that you take an automatic 10% cut in rating!!
As noted, every mission flown will be rated. If one takes out a designated target and makes it home, one is usually rated at 50%. For every 10% above or below 37%, your player rating will be affected. If the pilot takes out the designated target
and an additional target, rating may be 60%. If one takes these out PLUS an enemy aircraft, rating could be 75% and so on. The performance of the entire strike package seems to modify the rating of LEAD, but I'm not sure how this algorithm works.
The overall effect can be quite dramatic, especially in Top Gun level 10 difficulty. For example, I flew two missions in this mode, was killed after taking out one bandit on my second mission after breaking even on the first flight, (Final Rating 37%) and promptly lost the war!!
On my next campaign I flew the first mission at 50% and gained a Russian base as a result. On my second flight I took out some extra targets and was rated at 75%. Two more Russian bases fell as a result and the Russians lost a great many aircraft. The campaign progresses dramatically based on LEADs performance if your success is high. Difficulty levels are saved between missions and also if you exit the game, but must be re-selected with a new campaign.
In the final patched EF2000 there were three levels of difficulty integrated with three variations of campaign layout. If one generated a new campaign and found oneself against the wall, one could simply generate a new campaign. It no longer works
this way.
This represents a major change from the campaign AI of 2.02. In 2.02 there were three levels of difficulty intersecting with three variations of campaign layout. If one generated a new campaign and found oneself up against the wall, one could
simply exit and regenerate a campaign, and this time one might find that the Russians were only in possession of half of Norway.
It no longer works this way and choosing Level 10 (Top Gun) when you first generate a campaign means that not only will you fly against a more deadly enemy, you will also find NATO backed into a small toe-hold in Norway! You wanted challenge, you got it! Most pilots will probably fly around level seven or eight. This usually gives one three bases to start off rather than only one (on level 10).
Go to Part III
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Last Updated August 30th, 1997