First, I may be over-generalizing the screen names, so forgive me as I am not in front of my home computer.

 

When a unit is first detected, but not classified, the icon appears in yellow on the main screen. Once detected and classified, it appears in red as a solitary icon representing any number of actual ships/aircraft/subs. In this case, lets talk surface ships. In the Pakistan Blockade scenario, the Indian group was first three, then seven, and finally eight platforms represented by the single ship icon as they were classified. Do enemy units that have been detected and classified appear individually in the more detailed upper left-hand screen? It does show individual friendly ships? And if so, is there a way to target a specific, High Value Target like a capital ship amongst the escorts?

 

Also, when strikers get within range of the closest enemy ship, usually a picket of some sort, the player is prompted if it wants to engage. If the intended capital ship is not yet within range, by declining to attack the escort, how do you press home the attack all the way to the capital ship, should that be your intent?

 

Thanks

If you decline to attack the escort on your ingress, the strike group goes to "Unassigned" and loiters.

 

What I do is just order it to cruise speed and it continues on the last vector it had before the Staff Assistant appears. (Of course, I have to activate the "Ignore No Movement Orders" option.) It closes for the centre of the formation and I just check a few times with the Attack command until I am able to attack the HVUs.

If you decline to attack the escort on your ingress, the strike group goes to "Unassigned" and loiters.

 

That's unfortunately what I thought.

 

...(Of course, I have to activate the "Ignore No Movement Orders" option)...

Where does one find such option?

 

Thanks Herman.

If you decline to attack the escort on your ingress, the strike group goes to "Unassigned" and loiters.

 

That's unfortunately what I thought.

It could be worse. In previous versions, when you hit the 'cancel' order, the air group still had the mission in the memory. Therefore, when you continued your Ingress, the darned Staff Assistant kept popping up asking if you wanted to attack, over and over, again...

 

Don't know which way is better, but this is a new experience for me, too.

 

...(Of course, I have to activate the "Ignore No Movement Orders" option)...

Where does one find such option?

 

Thanks Herman.

You can find this option under Ctrl+M, IIRC.

If you want to attack a capital ship, just keep moving the attackers towards the group, and then once you are in range, manually allocate your weapons onto the main target.

 

It was much easier in the older days, when you could zoom into the group window till it showed a "unit" type display, but where you could still order your planes around. No you have to do it on the main group window, and guess if you are flying around AA batteries or if you are getting in between the gap between 2 AA escorts. Much more fiddly, and much more likely to cause losses.

 

It's easily my least favourite "feature" and the reasons given for it's removal are daft in this day and age of multi-core processors. I used to be able to make pin-point attacks even with short range LGB's simply because I was able to move planes in the "true" location in the zoomed in group/unit window, and able to avoid ships and weapon systems that were a threat. Now I have to guess if I'm moving between defences and hope I've not strayed into a SAM envelope.

It was much easier in the older days, when you could zoom into the group window till it showed a "unit" type display, but where you could still order your planes around.

 

I respectfully disagree with your opinion. I know that I had lots of frustration in trying to get my planes flying at the right angle when I zoomed in far enough to change the Group display to a Unit display. Every click was way the heck off and I had to continuously zoom back out to get the new plotted path in the right general direction. Most times when I zoomed in that far, it was a total nightmare for control.

Seems this is a matter of personal methodology. I've never had a problem with it.

Seems this is a matter of personal methodology. I've never had a problem with it.

 

I fired up an old old version....

 

and yes it was cool.

 

Maybee something we could get back?

 

 

Regards René

I much prefer a bit of fiddling about with a waypoint, as I would only ever use one waypoint when in "close attack" mode in the high zoom, usually took a few tries to get the right direction. I found a work around was to simply click the end waypoint much further than you want, because the further away the click was, the more accurate the direction would be. This is, to me better than what I have to do now which is put the unit square over the group window, and then guess where I should put the waypoints to avoid certain defences or to be in range of certain units.

 

Once I had the right direction, I used 1:1 time until weapon release, allocated weapons and then deleted the waypoint and turned the planes around or moved them to the next target. This was basically essential for me when doing very short range bomb missions, especially against ships or bases with active short range sam or AA defense, as I needed to overfly them accurately, often on afterburner and attack without needing to re-attack and expose the planes to more fire than necessary.

 

The zoom was also useful in making sure I launched aerial torpedoes within close proximity to a contact, instead of relying on the AI to attack which often lead to a launch from near maximum range.

 

I guess I see it as a pointless removal for the sake of a coders idea of "neatness". If neatness means I can't actually interact with my units whilst being able to see exactly where each actual single ship, plane or submarine is AND to be able to order my own subs/ships/planes directly onto where I want it, I don't want neatness.

 

I guess I'm hoping enough people request it that it gets put back in as a hidden toggle or something. Push a ctrl-key and the unit view zooms in with full ordering control. If people don't want to use it, they never have to. It's not a zero sum game to me at least.