schatten_124

Now I'll have the themesong from the movie stuck in my head for the rest of the night...so I'll have to throw the DVD on or something. What's really kooky is I just started re-reading (for about the 5th time) the Firefox books too.

Yeah, I can't wait for the Super Mystere either. I saw the preview pics of it on Check Six and very much liked what I saw. Polak's new desert tiles work very well with the Israel2 terrain. I've been using those tiles with the terrain since the new tiles were released and the only issue I had was doing a straight overwrite of the old tiles instead of deleting them first and then dropping the new ones in, so the Suez Canal tiles were from the old set. Two minutes of tinkering and renaming and all was well and if you delete your old tiles completely before dropping his new ones in it shouldn't be any issue at all.

Now that's what I call sweet. Can't wait for it.

One of the problems with an English version or comeplely new full bore Macross/Robotech game is the byzantine licensing rights of the various parts of the franchise(s). Harmony Gold has sued people before (FASA and Battletech immediately comes to mind) and would probably do it again if someone came out with a Macross game without their getting their cut. They make the Tolkein estate look like downright pushovers when it comes to intellectial property rights too... Not that that would or should stop any mods for games, that's all fine, but I highly doubt we'll ever see an English language dedicated Veritech sim or anything anytime soon. And yes, now I do feel very geeky.

SAMs with the new patch and weapons pack can be a bit on the tricksy side, the way I've come to deal with them is by combining a few things which seperately can work fairly well, but used in combination usually works very well. First off on the ingress to the target area I ignore the waypoints that the briefing fellows set up for me as soon as I cross the front line. They seem to think it's amusing to have you fly as close as possible to as many enemy air bases as possible, and since those are usually armed to the teeth with AAA and SAM batteries I figure that adding a few miles to the trip is better than having my whole package turned into confetti. So I fly as far away from them as possible so long as I'm not going way too far out of my way. This works for every mission type pretty much except for escort, there I usually have to "more or less" follow the waypoints as plotted but I still try to keep as much distance as possible, especially if two enemy bases are right next to one another. The whole while I try to stay as low as possible since there usually aren't any enemy aircraft on to me yet, but not so low as to make it impossible to have much energy if some MiGs do show up suddenly, the height depends on the threat level of the area really. The second thing I do on the way into the target area is as soon as one of the AI wingmen do their "SAM launch!" schtick I do a few jukes. Usually the missile isn't specifically aimed at me, but better safe than sorry and since you're not in a furball yet a few turns won't do you any harm. The added bonus to this is since you haven't told the AI to go off and wreak havoc on the enemy they're still in formation so when you juke some, they juke some, this usually means they survive better as well. Once I get to the target area things change, if it's an attack or strike mission I keep hugging the deck like it's going out of style, do my attack and then get out of Dodge as quickly as possible. If there are enemy fighters right over the target I try to get them to chase me away from it before I climb up to deal with them since most places worth bombing usually have fairly good air defense nets around them and a furball right above a SAM battery usually isn't a swell situation to have yourself in. If it's a sweep or a CAP over an enemy base I go high, draw them as far away as possible from the base and juke a LOT more then try to merge my formation in with the enemy formation as tightly as possible. The SAMs will still fire at you but in a mixup like that the accuracy isn't all that great and the enemy battery commanders should think twice at lobbing SAMs willy-nilly into a mixed airspace...the AI being the AI and not real human battery commanders they do it anyhow, but the thought they may not helps keep me relaxed or something... On the egress I act the same way as on the way in, but now it doesn't matter what sort of mission type you were on, all you have to do is get home, so I really take my time avoiding airbases and known SAM hubs. As long as the fuel state is fine you really have nothing at all to lose by taking your time to get home. If fuel is a consideration no one will shoot you if you land at the first available friendly base, so as long as you have enough gas to get to any friendly base you can take all the time you need. Again I stay as low as possible here unless gas is really an issue. By combining those I rarely get shot down by SAMs unless I get impatient or greedy, and it usually helps to keep more of my flight alive too since they're following my lead the whole time. I've specifically been flying the Israel2 terrain with the Six Days War and Yom Kippur War campaigns so it could vary with other situations but in general it seems to work. I especially had to work on my SAM avoidance skills since a Mirage IIICJ doesn't come with any countermeasures at all, not even a RWR, so you have to be especially sneaky to not get smoked without much (or any at all) in the way of ECM. Also on that map in those secanrios, Yom Kippur especially, you do not want to take any chances at all anywhere near the Suez Canal, my first few missions when I first loaded the mod up were in that area so I had to work on SAM evasion very quicklike. After I stopped being lazy and used the tactics that I knew I should have been using without thinking about them my loss rate to SAMs dropped by a big margin. Well that and removing nasty (and out of time period) things like SA-9s and the like which the Desert Object pack put into the game and the campaign was deciding since it said SAM in it it was fair game to park a bunch of them around Port Said. The first time I saw in my debrief log that it was SA-8s and -9s that took out half my flight I realised that something was slightly amiss there. Most of how I do it is pretty obvious, but if you really concentrate on trying to minimize your exposure to SAMs it become instinctual and they progressively become less (but never completely zero) of a threat. Flying planes without any ECM at all while you're working on SAM evasion also seems to help, when I transferred from a Mirage squadron to a Phantom squadron for my next go around at Yom Kippur I didn't lose any plane myself and only 1 or 2 over the course of the whole campaign of my AI wingmen. Like I told my one friend whose dad flew actually Phantoms,"Going from a Mirage to a Phantom almost felt a little unfair." And when I went from a Phantom to an F-15 for a little Peace in Galilee deal I whipped up on a whim it felt like downright cheating. But hey, getting into a fair fight is pretty silly anyhow ya know. ;) Sorry that was so long, and probably just a bunch of obvious points, but I can say that those tactics really do work once it becomes second nature.