I'm still trying to grasp all the scenario design in's and out's.
from Tomcat84
Two things I noticed about enemy behavior: RTB when Winchester makes them stupid and go home, and a semi easy target if his friends are a bit too far out.
-Fun little editor scenario, NK vs. JASDF over the Sea of Japan.
-F-15J fires all its missiles. Battle is still going strong.
-F-15J goes to RTB Winchester, which in practice means it flies back to base slowly. MiG-21 catches up to F-15J and splashes it.
_ _ _
More plausibly/if under manual control, no RTB Winchester.
F-15J fires all its missiles. Battle is still going strong.
F-15J leaves the battle area at high speed, and only slows down when near the safety of its own base. MiG-21 can't catch up to it, and it would be harder even with a more capable enemy.
In addition to that (which is more of an example when you are using it on your own side):
In the h hour case, I have initially like 4 sidewinder armed f16s facing a wall of something like 12 Alamo armed flankers and additional fulcrums to follow. Of they don't RTB, I have no idea which one exactly has fired all it's missiles and isn't a big threat anymore and it remains scary looking. If they RTB then I see them peel off one by one making it easier to assess who I still need to deal with and who I can safely ignore, also cause they completely ignore me at that point. And in that particular scenario, since I only have old aim-9s myself, the archers are still a very potent weapon so why carry them home.
Make sense?
In the red storm scenario, it was also revealing to me after a while (since there it was easier to pinpoint who fired a missile) that flankers were carrying only 2 alamos rather than the expected six.
Thanks for pointing this out, guys. Tweaked the non-bingo RTB behavior for aircraft in Build 481 so that they return at full rather than cruise throttle.
(Fun fact: This was actually the default behavior during much of the pre-v1 beta period, but we found out that a lot of aircraft were running out of fuel and ditching, so we changed it to cruise. Now that our bingo calcs are both more robust and more conservative let's hope this problem will not re-manifest itself. One of the few things more annoying than being nicked by pot-shooters on the way home is to run out of fuel while doing so. So be on the lookout!)
Tomcat
I see your point in the H-Hr scenario, I'll play with it a bit (its 16 Flankers BTW [;)]). Perhaps some with and some without the setting.
Sunburn,
With RTB when Winchester OFF, will they just RTB when Bingo, even if they are down to guns only, or even guns expended? A scaleable RTB setting might be useful: RTB when Long range msls are gone (current), RTB when all msls are gone (I think this is the way it was a short time ago), RTB when all Ammo expended, RTB when Bingo.
Not sure if that is feasible but it would give the scenario designer a bit more control over the AI.
Changing the RTB speed as you mention would help with fast movers, both ftr and bmbrs but it may shorted the station time for the larger support A/C, not sure if its an issue though
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