sniperton

Strange. I was pretty sure that killing yourself was a safe (and the only) way to make losses undone.

This is what I was talking about. These are missions in a static campaign, where each mission recreates a historic situation and therefore can be commented on in a historic way. Dynamic campaigns are made on a 'what if' base, starting from a historic OOB, but leaving to you and to fortune what should happen in the future.

Well, what you should and could know of the actual mission in advance is there: Mission type / Objective Date / time Weather / clouds / wind Home base and aircraft Active pilots Anything else would be either unrealistic to know of, or too generic. What you have in mind is better fitted to scripted or static campaigns, where each mission is 'hand-made'. DCG is too 'dynamic' to predict what should be in the briefing for mission #16. Of course, as Nephris said, the campaign designer is at liberties to provide background (aka intelligence) info for major events (reinforcements arriving, etc), but this rarely happens, probably because building and testing a campaign is a time-consuming process.

If everything goes south and you want to refly the mission, kill yourself, then exit, then Refly. If you don't kill yourself, squadron losses during the abandoned mission will be added when you refly the very same mission. DCG will only generate the next mission when you hit the green Apply button. If you're unsatisfied with the mission generated by DCG, exit from the briefing screen and the campaign mode, alt-tab from the game, start DCG, and manually generate another mission. Honestly, I don't remember whether it will generate a new mission with the same date or will transfer you to the next mission day. Paul, if you watch this thread, could you please jump in and enlighten us?

There are advanced tricks, e.g. defining individual squads via timetable commands. Say you have all Axis squads to have 4 planes per flight and all Allied squads to have 3. Now you define all bomber squads to have 3 flights instead of 2 and all flights flying with 3 planes each. The result is 8 Axis fighters attacking 9 Allied bombers escorted by 6 Allied fighters. Now you can send flight #2 to look for the Allied fighters while you go for the Allied bombers (or vice versa). DCG is simply great in recreating the past. Happy flying!

I try to avoid massed formations and furballs, they are too hectic, as you said, with frequent accidents, and they are even unrealistic for most theatres to have 16 fighters attacking 16 bombers escorted by 16 fighters. I prefer early war and small scale action, but with several simultaneous battles fought all over the map by AI chaps. Therefore I mostly use Heavy or Dense with only 2 flights per squadron.

A bit of stuttering on mission start is normal, it should be over after half a minute when all the planes are loaded. If the lag remains, you should consider reducing "squadron density" on the General Campaign Settings panel. Another approach is to reduce the Maximum Flights/Squadron setting. "Moderate" with "Four" means that half of the squads will be active with all of their planes, while "Full" with "Two" means all of the squads with half of their planes.

When you use stock DCG, added maps/planes/etc won't show up. Retextured/remade ones will do. If you run DCG on e.g. VPMOD/HSFX, stock maps/planes will be nicer. Added ones will not show up. Say, the stock game has the Norway map. Great. Norway map in VPMOD looks better. The stock game has the Bf-109-E4. Great. In VPMOD it looks much better. The stock game doesn't have early Messerschmidts or Spitfires, but modded games do have them. You won't have them via stock DCG, you need a 3rd party campaign (with modified data files) to have them for your game. Running DCG with modded games is never a milk run. Expect problems. Hence my advice to learn how it works, and once learnt, you're ready to expand towards new frontiers.

DCG is a versatile (1) application with some (2) content provided with it (campaigns shipped with DCG). (1) as an application DCG is fully compatible with both the stock game (currently 4.13.4) and the major mod packs (e.g. HSFX, VPMOD, CUP/BAT). You can safely use DCG with any of them, BUT (2) you'll only have access to stock game content (stock planes, ships, maps, vehicles) using the data files coming with DCG. If you want to have modded content as well, look for 3rd party campaigns specifically made for the respective mod packs. There exist several ones for HSFX and some for VPMOD and BAT too. Mission4today and SAS1946 are good sites to have a look around. But just to get the hang of DCG (and to learn how it works and how it can be customized, which is sometimes tricky for the first), I suggest you should start a stock DCG campaign in either the stock game or in VPMOD (or good old HSFX). BAT is quite resource-heavy, it doesn't make much sense to use it without the goodies you can only have with BAT-specific campaigns.

Yes, you can. It even works with taxi-to-takeoff. Just make sure that the last taxi section is in line with the takeoff path.

Yes, it was what I meant. Any squad can deploy on a carrier (if assigned so in the template file), but only FAA and USN squads will remain there, the rest will transfer to land bases upon the first mission. But probably it has nothing to do with the problem of Nephris.

Maybe I remember incorrectly, but some time ago I had to choose Fleet Air Arm (FAA) squads for the planes to correctly deploy on a Britsh carrier. The same might be true for USN vs USAAF.

Yes, but only if you're sure the plane is really playable in the game version you use.

SOS, Paul, http://members.shaw.ca/lowengrin/ doesn't work any more.

So far as I can judge, take off in pairs would not affect flight path calculations or any other part of the code. Planes get airborne a little bit faster, that's all. There would be two more benefits as well. If it can be implemented, take off in line (side by side) could also be implemented, which would come in handy on WWI type airfields where the runway is not a strip, but a wide (and short) field instead. (The Slovakia map has plenty of them, but scattered you find them on a couple of other maps, including modded BoF and BoB maps.) The second benefit would be, as demonstrated in my test file, that any runway section could be used, not just those with the take-off sign. The East-West runway on Herdla airfield is a case in point: those fighters could not take off from it the 'normal' way. Anyway, take your time, and thanks for considering.