Target misidentification question

[Doolan]

Hello everyone!

Longtime lurker and lifelong fan of Matrix Games checking in.

I got CMANO this weekend on the Steam sale after drooling over it for a while (I used to play the hell out of Mac Harpoon back when I was in school). I felt right at home, since the operating principles behind it are similar to Harpoon's, but as I was playing Uncle Mark's Tutorial #2 (English Jets over Uganda) I had a strange experience that I wanted to ask about.

I set up an AAW patrol mission with a flight of Lightnings and four Sparrow-armed Phantoms. Side doctrine / RoE was set to "Weapons Tight", as was the mission itself. With some fiddling, I managed to wipe out the Ugandan air forces without blowing up any neutral planes, sometimes manually marking bogeys as hostile to shoot them down before they got too close for comfort. That done, I sent a recon flight to Entebbe, and started bombing the now-identified key structures (got a nasty surprise from a WW2-era AAA gun, I think a ZU-23-2, which shot down one of my recon planes because I'm an idiot)

While I was at it, my AAW patrol took off again after refuelling, and shortly after I got a message stating I had engaged a neutral target. Then another, then another. Surprised, I checked the message log.

It turns out, my fighters had spotted three neutral planes, approached to investigate, positively ID'd them as "Civilian" unit types (via Eyeball Mk. I), then determined they were hostile for some reason, and gunned them down. [&:]

Now, obviously this was not a problem with my RoE, as the fighters did not engage any target not marked as hostile – the problem was they had wrongly marked as hostile three targets that obviously were not, without any input on my side.

Is this working as intended? What mission, side, or unit settings should I fiddle with to keep it from happening?

That tiny glitch aside, which is most likely my fault anyway, I am thoroughly in love with CMANO, and I just wish I had bought it earlier. Nowadays mostly every game I play is published by Matrix (all three Grigsby's major titles, various AGEOD titles, the DC series...) and I have to salute the CMANO team in particular for giving me that modern warfare itch again. Cheers! [:)]

[Excroat3]

Sometimes, when you mark an aircraft as hostile, you mark the entire side as hostile. If you previously marked a civilian aircraft as hostile by mistake, you might have inadvertently marked the entire side as hostile, and therefore, even though you might have marked that particular aircraft as neutral after realizing your mistake, the civilian side is still considered hostile overall. I think the only way to fix this is to go into editor mode, select postures, and re-mark the civilians as neutral.

[Doolan]

Man, you are a genius – in retrospect, I think this is what may have happened.

I suppose this will lead to my using the "unfriendly" tag much more often from now on – that is what it is for, anyway. There is also the fact that I should have cancelled the air superiority mission once the air threat had been neutralised, to minimise accidents, but frankly I was counting on the Lightnings and Phantoms covering the ground pounders without turning commercial airliners into Swiss cheese.

Still, marking the entire side as hostile after one single (and later corrected) unit misidentification... Is that not a bit harsh? I understand the logic behind such a feature, but the fact that it is not optional, or at least not possible to undo without resorting to the editor, is bound to cause trouble surely?

[stilesw]

I think Excroat3 is correct. Two other possible fixes. You could uncheck the "Collective Responsibility" option under the Add/Edit sides selection in the editor menu. This could of course completely mess up the author's intended set up. You could also likely use Lua to set side postures within the game to possibly account for this situation.

-Wayne

[Cik]

i've had the same thing and at no point did i engage neutrals.

i think some of them might be crashing due to bingo and it's assuming that you are responsible.

of the 5~ times i've played that mission it's happened every time and i only actually engaged civilians once.

[michaelm75au]

If you think that this might be the case (planes crashing due to bingo and switching posture), you should get a save prior to it happening, and log it in the Tech Support forum.

[Doolan]

Thanks everyone for your answers!

In my case, I am pretty sure it was my fighters attacking – I could even hear the cannon fire in the third instance – so no bingo issue on my side.

At any rate, what I wonder now is, can we positively say it is "working as intended"? Having your entire side turn against any and all civilians just because of a temporary manual misidentification (and with no way out that does not involve the editor) seems to me very inconvenient. Excroat3 says,

Sometimes, when you mark an aircraft as hostile, you mark the entire side as hostile.

If it is only sometimes, when does it happen and when does it not? Can I never mark a target as hostile, and then change mind once I have more information, without declaring open season for that side for the rest of the scenario?

Thanks again!

[Gunner98]

If it is only sometimes, when does it happen and when does it not? Can I never mark a target as hostile, and then change mind once I have more information, without declaring open season for that side for the rest of the scenario?

This will happen all the time as long as the side has 'Collective responsibility' checked in the scenario build. The only time I uncheck it is for biologics, marker sides, and sometimes for civilians. So generally its a 'one for all and all for one' situation. If your playing in editor mode you can go into the edit sides dialog and reset things but other wise once hostile always hostile - or at least that is my experience with it.

B