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SDOE Mission Making Tutorial - Part 1
By Scott VergeStep 2
Now its time for some real fun! Time to add some flak to defend the town and a klaxon for sound effects. Zoom-in as close as you can to the town and place a Klaxon right on top of the town with the New Ground Unit button (the little tank) and then add a Flak Panzer to the Southwest on the little peninsula. Give it them each a name and be sure to set their side to Axis. Note: do not set these items as part of the mission objectives.
Save your new mission as simple2.mis. A couple of small points about mission names and saving:
- The saved mission name is the mission name as it appears in the game
- Always save your mission in the editor at a regular interval.
- If you wish to rename a mission, make sure you close the original in the editor prior after the save.
Take out that flak panzer!
During the live test, one Lancaster was destroyed before it dropped any bombs. The second one swooped in and took out the town, however. On the way back past the flak the other Lancaster was hit ending the mission for the Allied. With this information, you can now tune the flak and change the Lancaster waypoints after the drop in order to give them a chance to make it back to base. If you like, click HERE to download simple2.mis.
Step 3
A ground attack plane is needed that can carry a loadout of bombs and rockets. After trying a couple planes , I found the P-51 most suitable for the roll. The reasoning for picking a plane with a rocket and bomb loadout may not be apparent right away. Why do we do this? Well it's because the AI sucks with rockets so they have to bomb, but humans like to use rockets so to make this squad more fun to use we add rockets to the mix. This makes sure the AI can do the job but we humans can get our daily fix of low rocket attacks, we both win!
We are going to make the P-51's take out the flak to clear the way for the Lanc's and to provide CAP while the Lancasters take out the town. This will give us practice in the bombing and CAP rolls. We add these before the German defenders because it's harder to see what’s going wrong with all that confusion of the bandits attacking our bombers or getting in a dogfight with the P-51's.
We will take off from the same airfield using a heading of 138º because it gets them straight out over the channel on their way, and because that’s the runway combo that worked for me. Some of other strips with other headings don’t seem to work---don’t blame the messenger blame the game. So place two P-51D's with heavy bombs and rockets for loadout and 750 lbs. of fuel. Open their waypoints and start them at Eastbourne Air Base again with the aforementioned heading of 138º.
Give them a couple waypoints, I had them at 375 mph and 400 feet most of the way, I wanted to run them lower and see them skim 50 feet off the water but it seems the AI doesn’t like to fly lower then 400 feet unless he is attacking or landing. I figure that they're going to ground pound so why take them up just to come back down; the extra speed is to get them over the flak early.
