Ethiopia, African Horn (1977-1990)

[+Menrva 3,990]

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Ethiopia, African Horn (1977-1990)

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Ethiopia, African Horn (1977-1990) Terrain
December 13th, 2021 (1st Release)
by Menrva

>For Strike Fighters 2, Recommended Full-5 Merged
I am proud to present a brand new terrain made from scratch! Initially proposed in private by tiopilotos, I later decided to create it in order to offer an accurate playground for different conflicts never recreated in Strike Fighters.
The terrain completely covers Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, and a great portion of Somalia and Yemen. The tileset, based on JSF_Aggie's Desert repaint and Centurion-1's Desert 4 add-on, has been greatly expanded with necessary transition tiles. Expect long and very accurate river courses and all major lakes, the reddish deserts of the Horn of Africa and the green highlands of Ethiopia. Numerous target areas, such as civilian airports and airstrips, have been added in order to expand playability, targets of opportunity and year range.

This terrain features a fresh new 250m resolution heightmap (instead of the stock 500m resolution), allowing for greater details and precision in elevation changes; overall it provides the whole terrain with a better look.

The terrain spans from July 13, 1977 (the beginning of the Ogaden War) to May 21, 1990 (the day before the unification of Yemen). This terrain is adapt for historical scenarios such as the Ogaden War and the Second Yemenite War of 1979 between North Yemen and South Yemen.
Targets reflect Real World events as accurately as possible. Off Map Airbases have been added and long range AI flights can be generated from them. Having SF2NA is a must, as I have enabled naval ops; if your mod folder contains American, British and French aircraft carriers, sometimes you'll see fleets being generated in single missions.

Ground Objects are not included. You can obtain the most needed ones from Wrench's old Eritrea/Ethiopia terrain release.

>Credits (in no particular order):
-Wrench, for working on Wingwiner's original Eritrea terrain, producing new target area layouts.
-swambast, who provided me with invaluable help in tracking and fixing common and uncommon bugs.
-gerwin, whose TFDtool has proved to be essential in today's terrain making. If the terrain is pretty accurate to RL it's also because of him. I included his very nice Airfield 7+8 Addon Pack, too.
-mue, for the improved shaders he made, which I have included and reworked for the terrain, and for the tools he made for SF2 modding.
-luk1978, for the waternormal bitmap he shared at the SF2 screenshots thread. Your mods are very interesting!
-JSF_Aggie, for his great Hi-Res Runway Textures v2.0 which I included, and for the hi-res desert tileset.
-Centurion-1, for expanding JSF_Aggie's tileset with more variety for the Desert4 terrain by Piecemeal.
-tiopilotos, for his continuous support in all my terrain modding efforts. Thank you very much!
-Stary, for old .TOD files which add trees and buildings on some tiles of this terrain.
-Gepard, for his great tutorials about terrain making, in the SF1 Knowledge Base at CombatACE. It's a gold mine!
-krfrge, who has produced a tutorial for recreating SF2-like planning maps, which prompted me to work on templates and my own high quality planning maps. Thank you very much!
-comrpnt, for his Approach and Airfield Lighting Pack mod packages for SF1 series, which I reworked and included.

Although scratch-made, the terrain makes use of most objects and target layouts from Wrench's Eritrea terrain; because of this, I included the ReadMe file from that package, to the end of giving proper credit to everyone involved directly or not.

>Disclaimer:
This is a freeware; yet it can be redistributed ONLY in other CombatACE mods/mod packages.
Any changes to the terrain package's files and/or any copy-and-paste attempts of their contents are NOT authorized if you plan to release them in other mods. But permission might be granted to those who request it to me at CombatACE.
This terrain may NOT in any way, shape or form be used in any payware additions.

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• Submitter
  Menrva
• Submitted
  12/13/2021
• Category
  Full Terrains

 

[jeanba 1,915]

That's a great map

Anyway, I have a small problem :

In my nations.ini file, I do not have ethiopian airforce, can someone point me to one with the correct nations ?

 

Thnak you in advance

[+yakarov79 10,503]

 

[Gatling20 748]

Beautiful terrain, thanks mate 

[jeanba 1,915]

A small modification :

During this period of time, the French (both Mirages and Crusaders) tangled quite often against Somali Migs, so I exchanged Ethiopia (Blue) and Somalia (Red) to reflect this

 

blue_ethiopia.zip

[+Menrva 3,990]

3 hours ago, jeanba said:

During this period of time, the French (both Mirages and Crusaders) tangled quite often against Somali Migs, so I exchanged Ethiopia (Blue) and Somalia (Red) to reflect this

Just FYI, it was a long-thought choice for me to decide which country had to be Red, which had to be Blue. I'll keep things as they are in the release package, because Ethiopia back then was ruled by the Derg and it was a huge ally of the Soviet Union. During the Ogaden War, Ethiopia was supported even by East Germany, Cuba and South Yemen, while Somalia had some kind of support from the US and South Africa.

Of course, reality is never black and white, it's all shades of grey, but we cannot have properly neutral or third-side countries in the game, so such choices had to be made. Of course, for personal use you're free to make your own tweaks, no problem with that. Just know that it wasn't a random, arbitrary decision on my part, it's actually the result of much research into the history of these countries.

Little trivia: ThirdWire got alliances wrong in their default global nation.ini file. IIRC South Yemen was made Blue side, while North Yemen was Red. This is historically wrong, and the terrain reflects the correct alliances, with South Yemen actually being Soviet-aligned.

Edited April 24, 2022 by Menrva

[jeanba 1,915]

No problem, indeed, I had the same long thoughts about it.

My criteria was different : I simply checked which of side (Somalia or Ethipia) was most hostile to Westren Powers instead of friendly to Eastern powers as I felt this would give more logical "single missions setup"

Most of the time, the result would be equivalent, but not here :)