malibu43

Yep! I know how I'll spend my lunch breaks this week!

Sounds good. I'll work on that tonight. *edit* - I just took a look at the differences, and there are more than I thought there would be. MissionChance entries have been changed, squadron naming convention is different in some cases, etc... So this won't be nearly as quick as I thought it would. I will plug away at it if I have time, but may take a while. If someone else is going to work on additional NF4+ campaign updates, it may not make sense to work on both of these in parallel, and instead just focus on the final update.

Yeah, I think that was the issue. It's always supposed to have worked that way, but for some reason I was able to get it to work without connecting to Hanoi and Saigon with the previous patches. Some sort of lucky work around that must have exploited a bug. But yeah, I got them working again by connecting all the nodes to Hanoi and Saigon (directly or indirectly).

Dave, As soon as TK releases the hot fix, I was going to take a stab at merging the new campaign entries in with NF4+ (I already started a little). I could share those as a "NF4+ quick fix" sort of thing just so people can continue using NF4+ with the new exp pack. I'd leave the major update up to the NF4+ team. Or if you prefer I can just wait for the NF4+ team to do something official.

OK. That didn't take nearly as long as I thought. It's working again. I looked more closely at the nodes for RollingThunder and finally understood how the nodes actually work. I don't know how I got away without knowing that before! It will take some time to adjust the supply levels so Hanoi/Saigon aren't captured too quickly and the campaign doesn't end. My time to sit and play through an entire campaign is pretty much non-existent, though. Boostjunky (or anyone else that wants to test this) - can you try this new campaign_data.ini file (delete the .txt suffix after you download it)? Back up your existing EasterOffensive_data.ini first. EasterOffensive_DATA.INI.txt If you can play through a campaign and take note of how often enemy and friendly ground offensives take place and just let me know how the campaign plays out that would be helpful. Once I know I have the right fix, I'll make the same changes to Steel Tiger and release an update. Thanks for pointing this issue out! -Gregg

After some quick testing, it looks like the game does not like the strategic nodes I had in there. I copied the strategic nodes from the stock Rolling Thunder campaign and placed them in Easter Offensive and changed the location of some of the ground units to match those nodes. When I started the campaign the ground war was working. So I need to mess around with the nodes a little and see what I need to change. I set the nodes up really weird to get a "Static" ground war, so weird in fact, it never really made sense why it worked. I'll probably have to change that up now. The good thing is that since the Steel Tiger and Easter Offensive campaigns are separate from the stock 3 (originally I was incorporating the ground war into the stock campaign), we don't really need the static frontline any more. I can set the campaigns up so they play out somewhat fictitiously where the NVA can overtack S. Vietnam if the player doesn't do a good job, and it won't impact the historical RT, LBI, and LBII campaigns. This may take a while though...

Boostjunky, I'll take a look at this. I haven't noticed anything, but I haven't been playing a whole lot either.

Well, I'm ready to click "buy" right now, but I want to wait and see if I can buy a .exe that includes the hotfixes... Or if I redownload later on with my same link, do I get the updated version?

Oh. Well in that case, maybe I'll grab it later today!

Definitely going to grab this after I get a bigger hard drive (hopefully for xmas)... and after some of these bugs get sorted out!!! *edit* - so does this thing really take an additional 6GB of space?

I'll give it a try, assuming I have enough space on my HD.

I build/fly RC as well as fly real planes.

Click the "save" button at the debrief screen.

Got it!

Sorry. You guys misunderstood my question. I know how to copy .exe's and make multiple installs. It was just the part about needing to move the .exe up one folder before renaming it and moving it back down. I just copy and past the .exe back into the same folder right away (it'll be named "Copy of StrikeFighters2.exe") and then rename that .exe to whatever I want.

Huh? I had no idea about this. I've created "separate" installs successfully so far without doing this... Not disagreeing that it needs to be done, just wondering why I haven't had to do that...

Just fired up Janes F/A-18 last night and played through a campaign mission. However, I spent too much time looking down in the cockpit trying to remember how to work things and got my @$$ handed to me by a MiG-31!

Jeez... After all this, I started a Rolling Thunder campaign flying F-8C's with FM on Normal and AI skill set at Normal. Well, I got 4 MiG-17's on the first mission! In all my testing, I didn't account for the "experience" entry in the campaign_data.ini file. The MiG's in this first mission were kind of flying around aimlessly, like one would expect MiG's to do early in the Vietnam conflict. They were nothing like the MiG's I encountered in single missions. So all this discussion was kind of pointless. I was doing all my testing with single missions, but the entries in the campaign file gave me the result I was looking for. I set the FM back to Hard. Time to move on!

Very true. I'll have to play with it for a while and see how it goes. Thanks all for your help!

OK. So here's what I've decided. FM on Normal. The AI get to use the Normal FM, then so do I. No reason to handicap myself. AI Skill on Normal. For reasons explained by Gr. Viper. Hopefully this will be the right combination of challenging rewarding...

Even if "Easy" is the enemy AI difficulty? It seems like that shouldn't affect my wingman's aggressiveness. Totally agree.

No way! I just bought moved from Free-Track to TrackIR 4! This would have been interesting to try out.

Thanks for the input. At this point, I think I'm still going to try my Hard FM settings with enemy skill at Easy. If the enemy ends up being just rediculously easy at those settings, I'll go the Normal/Normal route and give that a try. I'm curious to see what some of the CA veterans (Dave, Wrech, FC, etc...) have to say about this, given that they've been around the series so long and have participated in the FM development of so many 3rd party AC.

For the most part, I totally agree with you here, as this has always been my approach in the past. Lately, however, time to fly on my laptop is very limited, so I'm trying to find a way to get rewarded a little more often without totally sacrificing my integrity!

That's a good point. I figured the F-8 probably had the best chances of beating a MiG-17 out of all the A/A fighters in SF2V, so that's what I chose. After browsing the internet a little more, I keep seeing that the reason US aircraft had such high kill ratios during the Korea/Vietnam time period was a result of pilot skill and training, and not so much aircraft design (at least when it came to dog fighting). I think this reinforces the last thing I said I was going to try, which is leave the FM on whatever gives me the most realistic flying experience (be it Normal or Hard) and lower the skill of the enemy (Easy). I'm going to give that a try. I think it will work well up until the early '70's, but, again, I'm not sure how it will work when I start using the later models of the Aim-9 and Aim-7. Hopefully things don't become a joke. That's something I'm considering as well. Unfortunately, it's hard to remember which FM you're supposed to use for each aircraft. Some are meant for Normal, some are meant for Hard. I'll probably stick with hard until a problem shows up. Another good point!