Feature Request

[KlubMarcus]

Could AGI please put in a feature where CAP aircraft transit to their to their patrol area at cruise speed unless told otherwise by the player? I notice that my aircraft go to full power or afterburners shortly after take-off even though the targets are very far away. They run out of fuel or cannot stay on patrol for very long.

[hermanhum]

Truly excellent observation!  [8D]

[Dimitris]

IIRC if they are on a patrol mission with no assigned targets for interception they will use cruise speed anyway. Fully dry throttle or afterburner are used only when they are explicitly tasked to intercept a given target and cannot overtake it on cruise. 

[hermanhum]

Just built a test scen file and this does appear to be correct. The AAW Area Patrol mission launches and proceeds to their Reference points at cruise speed.

I also tried it Formation Air Patrols and found the same result; the planes launched and moved out at cruise speed.

Do you have a specific saved game file showing a different behaviour?

Files can be posted to Xtreme-Gamer forums to aid in the problem resolution.

[Anonymous]

[Deleted by Admins]

[KlubMarcus]

ORIGINAL: VCDH It is indeed a good observation.

Air Patrol Missions (we're currently looking at mission preformance in depth) are supposed to fly at cruise speed, but will jack up speed to intercept new contacts for identification. Intercept missions, are just that. It's when the klaxon rings and you run like hell to get in the plane and fire it up because the bad guys need smoking.

That's exactly the situation that I was posting about. The weird thing is that the newly launched CAP planes will speed up to get within ID/firing range even though there are other aircraft closer to the new/existing contact that do not need to burn a lot of fuel to get into ID/firing range first. So I end up manually changing the course of aircraft closer to the target and they intercept the contact, and the newly launched CAP aircraft just burned a lot of gas for no good reason because they wouldn't slow down.

Then there's the multiplayer aspect, too. If the game automatically jacks up the speed of CAP aircraft then it's a clue to the other player that an intercept attempt is underway. But if your planes are just moving along at cruising speed (or civilian traffic speed), then other player doesn't know for sure if they have been ID'ed.