Hi all.

Does anyone know definitively how CFS2 handles the relationship between the "wingmen_lost=" field in a campaign <pilot name>.log file, the number of wingmen lost on the latest mission, and having CFS2 retire your pilot?

Some background: Last year (2020) I started to fly some CFS2 campaigns after a break of many years. On one long campaign I was about half-way through the campaign and had lost 13 wingmen. During this campaign the wingmen had shown a marked tendency to collide with each other - and with me on one occasion - for no known reason. At the end of one mission all 7 wingmen had survived, but all flew into the ground and were destroyed short of the runway for no apparent reason. The game then promptly told me I had lost too many wingmen and retired my pilot. I wanted to complete the campaign so I edited the <pilot name>.log file and reset the wingmen_lost= from 20 to 15 (plus the other relevant fields to resurrect the pilot, can't remember exactly which ones right now).

Later in the campaign, the number of wingmen lost had crept up to 20 again, once again the game retired my pilot and again I reset the appropriate fields and kept going. So I thought the maximum number of wingmen you could lose was 20, or maybe it is 20 at campaign setting difficulty of medium.

I've since done a little research, it seems others have run into this issue as well e.g.

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforum...t=wingmen+lost

where SOH member RWILLS found the limit to be 12.

In light of that I've done some testing and I have 3 pilot files, one with campaign difficulty set to easy and wingmen lost set to 31, one pilot with campaign difficulty set to medium and lost wingmen set to 21, and one with difficulty hard and wingmen lost 13. I've set the skill level of every wingman to rookie.

In each case CFS2 lets me fly, despite my pilot already exceeding what I had guessed the limit to be. I'm trying to get my wingmen shot down on every mission, but of course they now seem to have charmed lives! I've realised it might take me forever to establish how this works with the limited time I have each week to look at CFS2 ... so I thought someone at SOH probably already knows the answer ... does anyone know how CFS2 handles this?

I've been putting together a little utility to help manage wingmen on a campaign ('cause I couldn't get the original AI_Promoter to work on Windows 10) and having the answer to this would be a big help.

Cheers,

SW