Campaign and Mission Planning

I enjoy a good dogfight or even a successful escort mission, but for me MiG comes alive in the campaign. Forget allowing the AI to determine targets and strategy, I like to take control!

MiG has five mini campaigns, so you can start in wherever you like. Like F4 this is an integrated air/ground war, which is near to heaven for some of us. It's well executed, although not as active or intense as the ground war in F4. But there is hoards of information offered, allowing you to make reasonable selections of target based on current enemy activity and status.

You can build the flights according to your own preference and even choose loadout. You want a P80 escort for the B29s instead of F86? If you have the aircraft, you can use 'em. You can transfer your squadron, and on any particular strike you can choose which element to fly and command. Briefings and debriefings are decent and include detailed damage reports on your target.

The planning interface is nicely done over all. There is the odd bug in the interface, however, and changing loadouts has taken some players to the Windows desktop.

My other disclaimer for MiG arrives in this section. Rating the campaign alone I give MiG a 10/10. Yep, I love this part. But there is no way to get vectors between waypoints from the planner screens, and once in flight there is no way to toggle waypoints in flight without exiting to the map screen. Perhaps this has changed for v1.2. The planner itself gets only 9/10.

Finally, printed documentation is not great. Like many developers Rowan is relying on online help, and with a campaign and planner this deep virtual pilots will have to dig to find the gold. The manual offers no instruction on using the planner features in the campaign, transferring squadrons or building missions.

Click to continue

Dossier

Squadrons

Intelligence

To their credit, Rowan does include a document by a British pilot created for the RAF Fighter Establishment entitled The F86 vs the Mig 15 based on RAF flights with the USAF to observe the MiG and NK tactics.

To view all our previous screen shots and read the earlier previews, visit Beta Preview, July Preview and the July Review. This totals about sixteen pages of coverage with hoards of screen shots and a couple of mission reports. See also Gunfight Over the Yalu and MiG Alley Campaign Planning.

SUMMARY: Updated September 10th

Many are asking me what to do? Is MiG worth the purchase?

Definitely, yes. My recommendation is that you should have a PII 266 minimum and 64 MB of RAM, and a PII 400 or better is ideal. The HERE.