How to achieve successful campaign missions?

[vonOben]

Hi

I need some advice regarding successful campaign missions.

My last campaign mission was a strike against an ammunition depot and I selected the purple TAC dot as a target and padlocked and shot
against it so it blow up and I also commanded my flight to attack.

But the mission was considered as a failure anyway...

What did I do wrong and how do I get success in campaign missions?

Cheers

[vonOben]

Hi

My latest campaign mission was to escort a flight of JU87.

The mission started in the air, not at the runway as it usually do. Is that the way it usually is when it's a escort mission?

I followed them to the target and stayed there protecting them for about half an hour.
They were attacked twice and the enemies were shot down or disappeared.
Then I couldn't wait any longer because I was running out of fuel so I returned to base.

Another failure....

What did I do wrong this time?

Cheers

[Daiwilletti]

Hi von Oben,

What ordinance did you use for the ammodepot? Sometimes MG fire is not enough. I do not select a campaign mission unless I have the bombs or rockets to do the damage. for example, I would never attack a factory with a fighter without having at least 500lb bombs.

You need to have labels on to see the amount of the goal you have achieved ("damage percent =80 means you are 4/5 of the way to sufficiently damaging the target). Another way to tell is to press M after attacking the mission onjective. Scrolling down the pop up screen, you will be told whether the objective has been achieved, and what objectives are remaining.

For escort work, yes you spawn over the airfield where the group of aircraft you are escorting are taking off. After circling the goal/target for a bit you will see the bombers/fighter bombers you are excorting will be attacking various targets of opportunity. It shouldn't take 30 mins for the escorted a/c to start heading for home. Try warping to see if the purple indicated aircraft form up with you.

If your spawns are working properly, it is too dangerous to linger over the frontline for long with escort missions! (not to mention all the flak.....)
HTH,
David

[Led Zeppelin]

did you came back to base?

when you blew up the target, did you get a purple message like "Mission goal achiechieved, one mission goal remaining"? If no, this means thet you hit the target but youy didn't inflicted it too much damages.

[vonOben]

Hi guys

Thanks for the tips David! Much appreciated!

I didn't select any ordinance for the strike against the ammo depot, there haven't been anything to select earlier since it's 1940. But I'll check next time when it's that kind of mission.
I'll also keep an eye on those messages!

What is default M?
I have remapped some keys and I have M for map.

"did you came back to base?"

I landed at the same base that I was spawned over. I couldn't see any symbols on the map showing the location of my own airfield in that mission.
Should I be able to locate it myself or what am I supposed to do?

Cheers

[Daiwilletti]

What is default M?
I have remapped some keys and I have M for map.

Hi von Oben,
In the campaign when I press "M" I get a map with the mission waypoints on it, and my aircraft location is shown. It is possible to zoom in and out to change the scale of the map. But there is also all the text for the mission objective, briefing, and progress. The interesting thing is that it updates as to progress. If you've ever looked at the _cmpmission under the Application Data pathway, you will see the latest campaign mission there. The actual mission target/objective is almost always generated by a spawn file.

Hence when flying the campaign mission, once the intercept.spawn, bunker.spawn, ammodepot.spawn or whatever has actually materialised, the mission objectives are updated when you press M. It tells you for example the name of the lead aircraft/ship in a formation. So for a destroy_ships mission, once the ship.spawns file has successfully activated, the mission objective is updated to "destroy g_destroyer formation" or whatever. Once the target is sufficiently damaged, pressing M during the campaign mission will tell you that the objective was successfully met (I cannot remember the exact terminology).

Hence M is a useful key. I will take a look once I get to my CFS computer, to see what the key assignments are.

NB for your 1940 install perhaps you should modify your campaign spawns such as bunker, ammo depot etc, so that you don't have to cause much damage to meet the mission goal. If you are only flying with MGs not bombs it is difficult to cause sufficient damage to the stock facilities. I've played around with getting airbases to spawn as campaign targets, for use in a BoB campaign. The trouble is, when you attack the airbase, it is not possible to do sufficient damage to meet the mission objective. This was while seeking a work-around to the problem of there being no strike_airbase as a campaign mission objective, which is very pertinent for the German side during BoB.

Oh, and another trick is to select vehicles rather than the purple target when attacking a facility with MGs. Sometimes you can cause sufficient damage in that way. I do the opposite when bombing a campaign target. I direct my wingmen to attack the purple triangle which is inevitably a building when attacking a spawned facility like an ammodepot or bunker. The reason for that is that if you direct the wingmen to bomb vehicles at the target, once the targetted vehicles are destroyed, the remaining wingmen form up without bombing. Hence by targeting the building, all wingmen will drop their bombs.

[Led Zeppelin]

I landed at the same base that I was spawned over. I couldn't see any symbols on the map showing the location of my own airfield in that mission.
Should I be able to locate it myself or what am I supposed to do?

You were not flying in the appropriate era, there is always an airfield to take off and land.

[vonOben]

Oh, and another trick is to select vehicles rather than the purple target when attacking a facility with MGs. Sometimes you can cause sufficient damage in that way. I do the opposite when bombing a campaign target. I direct my wingmen to attack the purple triangle which is inevitably a building when attacking a spawned facility like an ammodepot or bunker. The reason for that is that if you direct the wingmen to bomb vehicles at the target, once the targetted vehicles are destroyed, the remaining wingmen form up without bombing. Hence by targeting the building, all wingmen will drop their bombs.

Not sure if I understand this correctly....
For example the strike against the ammunition depot:
If you not have any bombs you select the purple target and order your flight to attack it, but you attack vehicles instead?

[vonOben]

You were not flying in the appropriate era, there is always an airfield to take off and land.

Now I'm confused! I'm quite sure I was in the right era and the missions have always started from our home base except this time when it was an escort mission.

David wrote earlier:
For escort work, yes you spawn over the airfield where the group of aircraft you are escorting are taking off.

So you shouldn't spawn in the air if it's a escort mission???

In my mission it was like David wrote:

The mission started in the air over an airfield where the JU87 showed up and the flight path on the map was starting from that airfield, not from our home base. I couldn't locate which airfield that was our home base since it was not marked on the map in any special way.
There were off course the usual airfield symbols but then I must check them to find my home base?
Anyway I landed at the same airbase as the mission started.

[Daiwilletti]

Not sure if I understand this correctly....
For example the strike against the ammunition depot:
If you not have any bombs you select the purple target and order your flight to attack it, but you attack vehicles instead?

Hi von Oben,
probably the ammodepot is not a good example because there are only a couple of vehicles associated with the ammodepot. Where the campaign mission target is a larger facility, once you have the target showing on the tactical display, cycle through the different fields of the tactical display. From memory, it goes ALL, aircraft, Vehicles, Buildings, Ships, Airbase (not necessarily in that order). When you can see the target facility, you will see that the purple triangle which is the target/objective for the mission shows up as a Building (so you will see the purple triangle in the ALL view and the Buildings View on the tactical display). In addition to the purple triangle, there is a cluster of red triangles at the goal facility. These triangles are vehicles usually.

So to answer your question, I am suggesting that something like a Spitfire can attack the vehicles associated with the facility, rather than the purple triangle. Sometimes this works to achieve the 100% of the requisite damage required to meet the goal. To be strictly accurate, for facilities, I suspect the purple triangle is not a building, but a nebulous area in the centre of the facility (check out the artillery facility as a target, for example). The way I view the target is to cycle through the F4 views once I've selected the target and it is bracketed.

For an ammodepot, there are one or two vehicles in the facility, from memory. So in the Vehicles view of the tactical display, you should be able to select each vehicle at the ammodepot, and instruct your wingman to attack it (remembering that if there are two free unassigned wingmen, when you press A both wingmen will attack the vehicle). I've modified the stock ammodepot so there is an AA gun at the facility too. ETO probably has done something similar. The AA gun at the ammodepot is selectable under the Vehicles view of the Tactical display.

But overall, I think it would be easier as I said before, for a 1940 era installation of CFS3, to modify the campaign spawns so that the damage required to the ammodepot is down as low as, say, 2%. Then your spitfires or other planes with MGs only and no other offensive loadouts, can attack the target and achieve the goal using MG fire only.

[Daiwilletti]

David wrote earlier:
For escort work, yes you spawn over the airfield where the group of aircraft you are escorting are taking off.

So you shouldn't spawn in the air if it's a escort mission???

Hi von Oben,
I spawn over the airbase of the aircraft I'm escorting. The mission ends over the airbase of the aricraft I'm escorting. If I have achieved all the mission objectives (including returning to the airbase I started above) I get the screen popping up telling me the mission was successful and I have the option of two buttons, one which returns me to the home campaign screen, the other which allows me to ignore the message and continue on to land the aircraft.

I only rarely land the aircraft on an escort mission. On thinking about it, you can work it out on the opening screen where you select the escort mission to start with. When you select the escort mission, you can see that the airbase you start above (where the bomber squadron you are escorting comes from) can be quite a long way from your home airbase - over 100km in some cases. So that is the reason why I don't land:
a) because the mission objective is met by returning to the bomber's airbase
b) because the home airbase for my fighter escort is often bl**dy miles away
c) and my fuel is often too little to then fly home in real time so there is a bit of "make believe" involved in escort missions due to the random way they are compiled

I hope all this makes sense?? Again I am not near my CFS3 computer to check the details

[vonOben]

Hi David

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation!

Now I have lots of ideas to test!

Cheers

[Daiwilletti]

Hi guys

"did you came back to base?"

I landed at the same base that I was spawned over. I couldn't see any symbols on the map showing the location of my own airfield in that mission.
Should I be able to locate it myself or what am I supposed to do?

Cheers

Hi von Oben,

I put you wrong on the ending of the Escort campaign missions. Thats the trouble with not being on the CFS computer and posting from memory.

When you return from the target, your bombers peel off near the end of the return journey, and you finish the mission (get the mission resolved message) above your own airbase. So I was way off beam! Sorry if I put you wrong, thought I'd better post this for posterity .

So I think that at the start of the campaign Escort mission, you spawn over the bomber's airfield, but you finish the mission over your own airbase.

Incidentally I tried one of the excellent Dragoon missions in Era 4 ETO recently. The target was an airbase. It illustrated perfectly the approach of using the Tactical Display target selector, and selecting vehicles at the airbase, to achieve the mission goal. The purple triangle at the centre of the airbase, if selected, got the wingman to bomb the runway - pretty useless. However selecting the red triangles at the airbase (on the Vehicles screen of the tactical display) and directing the wingmen to attack them, achieved the necessary damage.
NB have you noticed how the stationary AA are deemed "vehicles"? A pair of Hellcats to each AA battery at the airbase soon sorted them out

[vonOben]

Thanks for the clarification!

It might be that we changed airfield before the escort mission, which made me slightly confused.