General

One thing that has puzzled me for a long time is the following situation regarding detection - and then loss of detection - of AI groups: Many times (maybe all times?) if the player has any sort of AEW/EW resources - or even other air groups - aloft (even if they are well beyond their radar ranges), the Staff Assistant will advise that the launch of such-and-such AI air group has been detected by such-and-such (player's) air group. However, said AI air group often is not seen again until it moves well within the radar range of some player's air or surface group. My question is two-part: First, how is it possible for the player's air groups to detect these launch…

I have a question and am not sure if is a defect or not. I'm playing the IOPG2003 scenario 10. After start-up, I use the Formation editor to set-up my air patrols for all my units. With the carriers, I usually set up my range circles so that the outer 2 rings are AEW, EW, ASW, and fighter patrol's. After my aircraft get to their formation zones, I'll set my air and surface radars to mixed. I then turn on only the ASW and Picket rings and keep the AAW and Main radars off. I have noticed that after several minutes of game time, the ASW and Pickets radars will turn themselves either off or to intermittent. I'd like to know if this is supposed to happen, or if there is…

I downloaded and updated my game engine to the 2008.0047 release and noticed something interesting... Flankers are impervious to missiles! 6 Flankers coming out of Norway (NACV Battleset) were confronted by 12 Phamtom's and 4 Tornado's with a total of 64 LR Air-to-air Missiles... and within 15 nm of the targets and all I was able to get for 64 launches was one kill! So when did we change vendors for the Skyflash/Sparrow Missiles?..

Can I play HCE with the 64 bit version of Vista? I'm a real noob when it comes to dealing with OS's.

TACTICS 101: NAVAL FORMATIONS - PART 2: ASSEMBLING A FORMATION IN HCE Part 2 of this discussion on Naval Formations will focus on building or assembling a naval formation in HCE using the game's formation editor. We will use the Scenario Editor (SE) here, but the principles are equally applicable to use of the formation editor within the Game Engine (GE). To illustrate naval formations in general, let's build one of the more popular formations - a US Navy carrier strike group (CSG). As was discussed in Part 1, the components of a naval formation comprise the main body and the screen. Within HCE's formation editor, the screen is further broken down into the …

For bases that have large center formation zones (60 miles across is common), the aircraft assigned to the center zone will almost always cluster at the northern edge of the zone. So unless there are patrols set in the formation's southern zones, the best approach to attack the base is from dead straight south. Typically, I fire a pretty large volley of ARM missile at the base and the SAMs around it, and I try to NEVER fire at the planes in the formation around the base. Firing the ARMs will draw the missile fire of the defending fighters as well as the SAMs, and if the volley is big enough and/or the number of defenders is small enough, you might entirely clean the…

Hi All, I've managed to get my hands on an original Harpoon Classic disc dated 1994. After much toing and froing I've managed to get it to play on my (was just about to throw out) Win XP doorwedge netbook. Possibly a bone question, Can I update this edition with files from harp gamer? It's fully working on my netbook, but I have absolutely no idea about going into the nuts and bolts of programs. Can someone point me in the right direction?

As I tinker with window positioning to help people not lose windows, please ponder and answer the poll.

Hello, I have a hard time keeping my fighters and strike aircraft alive against opposition. This happens in the PacWest battleset with Japan vs South Korea and to a lesser extent North Korea. What is my best response with an air group against an incoming air to air missile group? Just turn around and run? I tried this with full afterburner on very low, but this exposes the planes to the risk of crashing. And at times the air to air missiles still hit. Often this leads to a situation where both parties are completely annihilated by the missiles. Any advice is welcome

Must a helicopter equipped with Dipping Sonar hover in order to effectively utilize this piece of gear? Must it be a Low Altitude or VLow? Thanks,

Hi, I haven't used the HCE PE in several months. Always before it has come up directly into the editor. This time it seems to be coming up into some sort of debugger. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thx, Gene Smith

When I play Blue (U.S.) forces I get a bunch of Kingfish missles in the face. When I play red, F-14 Pheonix down all my planes? What can I do? I'm usually playing a GUIK scenario (in Harpoon Ultimate Commanders Edition I think) that tends to have U.S. carriers. I recently played a scenario (don't have the name with me) that gives me 2 U.S. Carriers steaming east towards the Kola Pennisula. Auto formation air patrols are decent but not great. I usually take half the number of AAW airplanes I have and put them on patrol via the formation editor. Am I correct in doing this? ie does this mean that there will be continous coverage? Half the aircraft in the air a…

View File ExportDLL - GoogleEarth Viewer GoogleEarth.dll interface version 5, for GE 2009.042+ Runs a tiny webserver that serves a kml file to GoogleEarth on port 8183 to the local machine (and elsewhere if you do port forwarding). Installation: Extract ZIP with directories intact to your HC directory, the HCGoogleEarth.dll will end up in an ExportDLLs directory and a GoogleEarth directory will be created with each unit icon separated into its own file. See the Word document in the ZIP file for further instructions. History: 01: 2007/09/28 Initial release that is HCE compatible. 02: 2009/02/10 Updated to be compatible w…

I am currently in the middle of playtesting a rather large and intense scenario in the Med, and the Staff Assistant is making me Very Grumpy. About every ten seconds real time he pops up to tell me that there are enemy aircraft in SAM range, and I really should light up my radars. This can go on for half an hour at a time, and makes playing the game somewhat ... painful ... Even worse, on the rare occasions when I do light up, he doesn't seem to realize it, and keeps popping up to tell me to light up radars that are ALREADY ON! This, I can really live without, because it happens while I am trying to deal with inbound SSMs. Is there any way to make him just STFU, o…

This probably is two separate questions, but they are sort of opposite sides of the same coin, so: I've noticed from time to time that when I have a strike group attacking a base or surface target that consists of multiple units, if one of the units gets destroyed, the attacking group will "lose" its target and go to loiter - instead of continuing to attack other surface/ground units in the target group. I must then re-initiate the attack. Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong? A recent example of this was that I wanted to pick off the helos in an AI carrier group - to prevent it from detecting and destroying my nearby SAG. So, I launched several separate…

Not working for me, not doing anything.

Hello, I mean ... it is the same since several years. While the game engine, thanks to a great group of Harpoon lovers, was REALLY IMPROVED over the years, the scenario editor remained the same. I like to see some new useful things added to it ... for example: 1) the possibility to save a group of ships and to load it in a new scenario ... think to a carrier group ... now you need to add all the ships, the Air Wings, the helos, to define the formation of the group, etc ... every time you build a scenario you have to start all the process again! 2) when a base is added, because many of them are know as home of an Air group, the base should have all the aircraft…

File Name: HCE Clear Game Options Registry Settings File Submitter: TonyE File Submitted: 22 Nov 2007 File Category: Tools/Docs Tested on 2007.000 Clears HKCR\Software\Matrix Games\HCE\SE\Options HKCU\Software\Matrix Games\HCE\Options Click here to download this file

Ive had alot of trouble detecting sams, and if i cant detect them i cant use SEAD strikes on them. Also i rarely see a plane avoid a missile, is there some tactics for using some ECM equipment? Or maybe the sams are inside bases or something?

Hi All, Thanks to Tony, Don and Eric for working on the next update. Lots of enthusiastic chat on Discord. Question - any insight on how weather affects the performance of aircraft and weapons? I'm working on a planning tool and trying to figure out if I should degrade estimates for hit percentage or range. Thanks much! Geo