Miscellaneous Questions about CFS3 Mods

[TheRealStoogie]

I've had CFS3 ever since I was young (the two CD version), and I recently renewed my interests in the game. First, I got past the issues with it not booting on Windows 10, but thanks to this forum, I got it to run.

Now, once I began playing, I noticed several areas that need to be better polished to improve playability, primarily in the area of how smoothly the campaign progresses, the AI behavior in particular circumstances, and weird spawning behavior in the game. I can't really think of a coherent way to address all of these, so I'll list them below.

• Warp mode glitches occasionally and causes you to leave warp at speeds in excess of 600 mph (looking for a fix)
• You have to manually de-warp on escort missions or else you will fly right past the objective and fail the mission (looking for a fix)
• Recon missions in the campaign make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Do you fly over the objective area for a while? Do you need to find particular units? The game never gives a proper answer how to complete these missions. (looking for a fix/answer)
• Bombers always warp at 25,000 feet or something. This is perfectly fine for production center attacks and such, but they don't make any sense for anti-ship missions and close air support missions on the front line. (Specifically, is there a mod I can use to manually set warp altitude?)
• Random ship spawning is also bugged. If I'm playing as Germany, American ships, and American ships alone spawn, but often they spawn ships in places that don't make sense, like LCI's in the middle of the ocean. If I'm playing as the Allies, I only see the German heavy cruiser, the destroyer, and the cargo ship, and never any other type of vessel. I can only see the other types of vessels when they are part of an invasion fleet. (looking for a fix)
• Sending your wingmen on attack runs against enemy ground targets can also be bugged. On strafing runs, your wingmen will sometimes shoot each other down in friendly fire, and torpedo runs often result in your allies crashing into the water miles from the target you told them to hit. (looking for a fix)
• Campaign mode missions don't make much sense, either. There are little asterisks next to the mission, which can be in different numbers based on the sector. For instance, recon missions have 1 asterisk while anti-ship missions may have 3. Escort missions can have 1 or 2, while production site missions (if available) have anywhere from 1 to 3. I've long suspected they were related to how much of an effect these missions will have, but I'm rather unclear on it. (looking for an answer)
• Whenever I switch to another seat on bomber planes, the plane goes into a weird evasive maneuver flight pattern, where it slowly reduces altitude and flies in circles. (looking for a way to disable this/enhance this)
• Some buildings just never appear in the game, like the flak tower. Why not, or where are they? (looking for an answer)
• Campaigns almost always follow this pattern: start campaign --> wait a month or two for first allied offensive --> allies always attack Calais --> allies invade Calais, just for the invasion to get pushed back into the sea --> repeat until Germans push an offensive near enough to England to invade --> wait one month for game to end with German victory (looking for a fix)

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Sorry to just dump all these questions here, but does anyone have an answer for these? I've seen expansions here like ETO or MAW which look promising to solving some of these issues, but I'm going to hold off on installing them until I have an answer to at least some of these questions.

[Daiwilletti]

I've had CFS3 ever since I was young (the two CD version), and I recently renewed my interests in the game. First, I got past the issues with it not booting on Windows 10, but thanks to this forum, I got it to run. Sorry to just dump all these questions here, but does anyone have an answer for these? I've seen expansions here like ETO or MAW which look promising to solving some of these issues, but I'm going to hold off on installing them until I have an answer to at least some of these questions.

hi RealStoogie,, I will add my tuppence worth to your questions -

Now, once I began playing, I noticed several areas that need to be better polished to improve playability, primarily in the area of how smoothly the campaign progresses, the AI behavior in particular circumstances, and weird spawning behavior in the game. I can't really think of a coherent way to address all of these, so I'll list them below.

• Warp mode glitches occasionally and causes you to leave warp at speeds in excess of 600 mph (looking for a fix) never had this problem, ever! Try going into straight and level flight, then going into ctrl+shift+A to get into autopilot mode, wait until the aircraft flies straight and level, before pressing Warp.
• You have to manually de-warp on escort missions or else you will fly right past the objective and fail the mission (looking for a fix) Yes, I find that, too. Its never been too much of a bug for me, I simply make sure I drop out of warp in time. Perhaps if you spot the purple target indicator on the TAC that will be a signal to drop out of warp.
• Recon missions in the campaign make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Do you fly over the objective area for a while? Do you need to find particular units? The game never gives a proper answer how to complete these missions. (looking for a fix/answer) IIRC, there is a typo with the stock recon spawns. I am not on my CFS3 computer so will need to look it up and get back to you. I never fly recon anyway, they only affect the accuracy of info about the status of areas of the frontline; the missions do not advance your frontline.
• Bombers always warp at 25,000 feet or something. This is perfectly fine for production center attacks and such, but they don't make any sense for anti-ship missions and close air support missions on the front line. (Specifically, is there a mod I can use to manually set warp altitude?) The bomber's cruising altitude can be modified in the .cfg file IIRC. Trouble is, if you lower the altitude too much, when you are bombing large facilities you will attract a lot of flak when you come out of warp. I've only occasionally changed the cruising altitude. It helps my immersion to drop out of warp 10 miles early and get to my preferred attack altitude. fighters all seem to warp at 5000 feet (? is that the correct unit?)
• Random ship spawning is also bugged. If I'm playing as Germany, American ships, and American ships alone spawn, but often they spawn ships in places that don't make sense, like LCI's in the middle of the ocean. If I'm playing as the Allies, I only see the German heavy cruiser, the destroyer, and the cargo ship, and never any other type of vessel. I can only see the other types of vessels when they are part of an invasion fleet. (looking for a fix) Sounds like things are working as originally intended. The relevant spawn files are ship.spawns and all the xml files that are called for (in stock there are six ship xml files, destroy_ships, Destroy_ships1, Destroy_ships2, etc). The stock spawns call for auxiliary vessels, destroyers, and cruisers so it looks like your spawns are working. You can change the type for mtbs from "patrol" to "auxiliary" if you want them to spawn. Some vessels like barges and tugs are set to spawn=n IIRC, because you don't want them spawning way out to sea. You can change the LST, LCVP types to spawn=n in the ship's xdp file. If you are confident that all your ships work properly you can change some of the Destroy_ships xml entries from "auxiliary" or "destroyer" to "#ships". However if one of your ships is not working properly for some reason, using the wildcard #ships entry causes to the ship spawning to fail sometimes on anti_ship missions. I have uploaded a coastal shipping package here at SOH, intended to create more small ship spawns close to shore. This approach can be broadened to include military_invasion_defences which would make the smaller ships spawn more often. However these ships will never be a campaign mission target.
• Sending your wingmen on attack runs against enemy ground targets can also be bugged. On strafing runs, your wingmen will sometimes shoot each other down in friendly fire, and torpedo runs often result in your allies crashing into the water miles from the target you told them to hit. (looking for a fix) The crashing on torpedo runs is a really annoying bug. I've never satisfactorily fixed it, although the minalt setting in xdp/cfg files should help but don't seem to. Other suggestions were made in a thread on this subject but I don't recall the suggestions. I tend to use alternative loadouts unless I'm reasonably confident in the type of aircraft. Fw190s are a definite no-no for torpedo runs, even stable planes like the Ju-88 are problematic. One partial fix is to array the whole flght correctly behind you at some distance from and facing perpendicular to the direction of travel of the ship formation. I.e. you are about 6 miles out, flying at about three hundred feet, and are facing the formation broadside. Then direct your wingmen to attack. Some may attack straight off with very little in the way of manoeuvers required, others will fly low and straight over the ships, only to turn 3 miles past and then commence their attack run. On that later turn the dratted aircraft are likely to crash but you will have a better success rate. To minimise friendly fire on strafing runs, there are a few tricks to wingmen management. One thing to know is that if you are close to the mission goal, when you press "A" without assigning targets, the wingmen will select individual targets and attack them. However the aircraft will also attack targets shown in red on your TAC display, as well as the mission goals shown in purple. When attacking ships this is less of a problem as you can get clear of non-goal enemy shipping on the TAC before pressing A. If there are seven ships in the formation, pressing "A" four times will dispatch all your wingmen if you have seven wingmen, as they go off in pairs. (if the ships are not bracketed with the target indicator, the wingmen will still attack individual ships. However if you use the brackets to indicate a tqarget, a pair of aircraft will attack the same target). When there are a plethora of ground targets, eg. when your mission goal is an ammo depot on a frontline, A couple of strategies can be tried to minimise wingmen shooting each other. Firstly, if loaded with 500lb or 1000lb bombe, you need only to bracket the ammo depot and press attack once and a couple of wingmen will achieve the mission goal all by themselves. then you can send off other wingmen to attack other targets, therefby minimising self-inflicted casualties. Remember you can just press "A" without a target being indicated, so long as the enemy is clearly in sight. If the wingmen cannot see the target, they will rejoin you after you have sent them off by pressing "A". If they can see a target, they will attack separately and avoid friendly firre.
• Campaign mode missions don't make much sense, either. There are little asterisks next to the mission, which can be in different numbers based on the sector. For instance, recon missions have 1 asterisk while anti-ship missions may have 3. Escort missions can have 1 or 2, while production site missions (if available) have anywhere from 1 to 3. I've long suspected they were related to how much of an effect these missions will have, but I'm rather unclear on it. (looking for an answer) yes 3asterisks denotes a high value target. The values are set in the relevant campaign.xml in the missioneffects section or offensiveeffects section. There is a campaign sdk uploaded here at SOH to explain how this works. if you are flying a campaign which does not involve a lot of shipping attcks you can devalue anti shipping missions. Eg. in BoB campaigns, you would make cap and strike missions have higher value.
• Whenever I switch to another seat on bomber planes, the plane goes into a weird evasive maneuver flight pattern, where it slowly reduces altitude and flies in circles. (looking for a way to disable this/enhance this) the aircraft is flown by AI pilot when you witch from the pilot seat. It will respond violently if other aircraft are close. A bit of a quirk. The subsequent AI behaviour depends on the cirumstances when you switch seats.
• Some buildings just never appear in the game, like the flak tower. Why not, or where are they? (looking for an answer) IIRC you would need to change the flak tower to armor_aa_static in their xdp file found in the Vehicles folder. Also IIRC there may be typos in the original m3d or xdp file. I think I have fixed this in some installs, however it looks a bit odd to have flak towers beside all airfields, so generally spawn=n is set, and the towers are only used in missions. An exception is some of the addon wooden towers.
• Campaigns almost always follow this pattern: start campaign --> wait a month or two for first allied offensive --> allies always attack Calais --> allies invade Calais, just for the invasion to get pushed back into the sea --> repeat until Germans push an offensive near enough to England to invade --> wait one month for game to end with German victory (looking for a fix) there is a ton of flexibility explained in the campaign sdk. You can adjust whether allied or axis attacks first, the length of an attack, and other parameters. If you take care to achieve campaign mission goals, and attack high value 3 asterisk goals, you have a fair chance of winning a stock campaign. Also spreading your wingmen over multiple targets to achieve more damage seems to help advance the frontline.

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Generally, the joy of CFS3 is that xml files, xdp files and cfg files can all be easily edited using Notepad. Campaigns, AI skill, scenery density, landclass variety and density and all sorts can be modified greatly. I have made a post in the Knowledgebase sticky about campaign play, for example.

HTH,