Needing help on a scenario I'm (very) stuck on please. I've Attached a Save File (Attack on H-3)

[Easy301]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to CMO but it's quickly become of my favorite simulations of all times. I've spending the past few days watching videos, reading various literature and playing through all the tutorials I can get my hands on. I'm not new to hardcore military sims but I am new to a simulation of this depth and scale aside from a little Harpoon back in the day.

Anyway, I've done most of the tutorials and I've been having fun playing through both the stock and the community pack scenarios that have a lower difficulty and complexity. I've struggled a bit but found I've learned a ton from doing these scenarios and generally have been able to complete them after some trial and error, and then there came this scenario.

This scenario is a community scenario called Attack on H-3. Details: https://command.matrixgames.com/?p=2254

For anyone starting this scenario from scratch: I found this scenario requires tuning out of the box before you're ready to go. The already present CAP missions need "Investigate contacts in Weapons Range" turned off otherwise before you even get the strike mission underway, you'll have a hot scenario. I also had to adjust a few of the general doctrine settings when it comes to refueling and RTB states, otherwise aircraft on CAP will fly into enemy airspace to head towards a refuel point or strike aircraft will turn around\head toward the tanker at inopportune times.

General situation overview of my save file: I've currently got two refueling points set-up North and West. I've successfully snuck my entire groups of strike aircraft (3 Groups of F4s) into the area without alerting the Iraqi's. This was accomplished by using minimum altitude and terrain following and making extensive use of AAR while skirting the border between Turkey/Iraq and Syria/Iraq borders, following roughly the same general route that the real life strike package took. (Both West and North Refueling aircraft are at minimum altitude and conduct the refueling at around 400ft as they did in real life during the raid.) I'm still very new to the game, I know I could have made more efficient groupings, missions, etc but this has worked OK for me so far.

Where I'm stuck: My three groups of F4s are currently orbiting the West refuel point.

Flight 5774 has 3x Recon F4s (RF-4E)

Flight 5755 has 3x F-4E carrying 24x M117 750lb GPBs

Flight 5754 has 3x F-4E carrying a total of 8x AGM-78D [ARM]

All I'm trying to do is take these three groups and use them to conduct a strike on the 3 H-3 facilities close to the west, and boy am I struggling. The main issue is the SAMS defending the targets. I've tried almost everything I can think of with no luck at all. I've sent the ARM F4s in at the lowest altitudes, firing their ARM missiles at max range at the one known SAM site. I've climbed up a bit to activate all the FCRs in the area and THEN engaged them with the ARM missiles, some hit, some don't, but there's still way too many SAMS to bring in my main package carrying the GPBs for the strike.

I've tried various ways of using the Recon Phantom to pin-point some of the SAM/FCR locations with no luck, I get a few hits with zones of uncertainty, but nothing actually confirmed unless I fly right over the field which causes the loss of my Recon phantoms. I've tried sending the strike and ARM aircraft in at once, I've tried coming from other directions, I've tried going low, I've tried going fast, I've tried going high. I've been trying for hours and I just can't make a good strike on these H-3 targets due to the SAMS.

I have a nice save file I put together with all three of the aircraft groups sitting next to the refuel point near the H-3 targets, orbiting, undetected and ready to go on their strike once orders are given, I was wondering if anyone could try their hand at this and maybe give me some hints or tell me what I'm missing? I set up the save file where setting up and seeing the results of the strike should only take a few minutes.

I can get everyone home with the AAR logistics I have in place and the route I used for ingress, it's just the actual strike part I'm having trouble with. Would anyone please be kind enough to see if they can get a successful strike set-up and executed with the three groups of aircraft that are only a few miles away from the H-3 target? I'm pulling my hair out here but feel like I'd learn a lot if I can see how to conduct a successful strike using the assets, I have close by.

Thank you very much, and sorry about the long post. I did not want to ask someone to take the time to help me out without me first putting in the time to explain in-depth that I'm having trouble with and getting a save file that's the least frustrating and provides a "Ready-to-go" experience for the experts out there to hopefully give me a hand.

Thanks a ton,
Easy.

TLDR: Unable to use the three groups of phantoms in my Save file to conduct a successful strike on the H3 targets due to the SAMS. Hoping someone could give my save file a look.

I've attached the file to this post in a zip, if you'd like me to upload it another way please don't hesitate to ask.

[Schr75]

Hi Easy

Welcome to the game and the forum.
I just gave your save file a try and managed to bomb the target without losses.

The first thing that I did was to re-fuel the planes as they where quite low on fuel.
I then send the ARM shooters in at high altitude as there´s no point in hiding them, and the bombers in at minimal altitude.

The point here is not to shoot your ARM´s at maximum range as they will then be almost out of energy when they arrive at the targets, making them easy targets themselves. Hold your fire until the SA-2 battery opens up, then fire two missiles at the SA-6´s closest to the target and one each at the farthest ones. I would have preferred a few more ARM´s but you can´t always have what you want

I managed to hit four of the five SA-6 batteries and make the last one fire of half of it´s missiles.
I then send the bombers in at minimum altitude and afterburner popping them up to 305m just before the targets so they could drop their bombs, and then descending to minimum altitude again.

They got shot at several times but fast low altitude targets are hard to hit and they got out without losses.
I did disable automatic evasion as they would otherwise have begun turning around at the target instead of just pressing on.

That´s how I did it.

A few pointers.
You have an extra tanker ready. Launch it and top of your strike planes before they ingress. They will need all the fuel they can get.
Never fire at max range as the weapon will arrive at the target out of energy. This goes for both air to air and air to ground missiles. The more energy (speed) the missile have at intercept, the higher probability of a hit you get.
In this case it doesn´t matter much because the enemy is radiating, but in general, never emit with all your radars. It´s a dead give away to the enemy, only emit when you have to.

Hope this helped.

Søren

[Easy301]

Søren,

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to try out my save and give me some pointers. I'm really appreciative and grateful for all the help and advice.

I was finally able to get a "triumph" victory on this scenario after taking into account some of your advice and what you did to successfully conduct the strike. I sent my ARM carrying F4's in at high altitude and had them engage once the SA-2s started firing upon them which was around 30 miles or so. I must have killed or badly damaged most of the SAMs as I was then able to send in my recon RF-4Es in at min altitude and afterburner right behind them flying right over all the H-3 complexes to ascertain which bunkers/parking spot were holding the Russian aircraft. I sent in my main strike force behind them at minimum altitude, brought them up to about 1000ft per the weapons release profile of the GPBS they were carrying, manually allocated most of my ordinance to the hangers holding the target aircraft and had a max score by time the flight came off target. I brought all the aircraft home successfully including the tanker aircraft and went ahead and ended the scenario.

This was probably the first mostly "manual" scenario I've done. During much of the other scenarios I've made extensive use of missions, using the doctrine settings and pre-planned states to get the aircraft to do what I want when I want, but this scenario required an extensive amount of handholding when it came to air assets which I'm completely fine with, it was just a different way of handling scenarios than I'm used to, and I learned a lot. I'm sure this is due to the complexity of the strike and the way the battlespace was laid out with an emphasis on remaining undetected the entire time. I found that leaving doctrine settings as default or allowing RTB/UNREP, or even forgetting to change them back and forth throughout the mission could cause an aircraft I'm not paying attention to, to do something unwanted and ruin the mission. A lot of saving and reloading was done during this scenario due to things like me forgetting to alternate the doctrine or pre-planned states at certain phases of the flights or just having to rectify the aircraft automatically doing something I was not expecting.

I learned a ton about doctrine settings and pre-planned states during this scenario and how they can affect even aircraft that are left under manual control the entire time. It was frustrating at times but I'm glad I got to learn more about the logic behind these systems, how to manipulate them to get the actions I want and really learn a lot about micro-managing multiple units/groups at the same time that were under and needed precise manual control.

With that said I did have a few questions that popped up during this scenario that I thought I'd ask, hopefully yourself or someone else who is not too busy would-be kind enough to answer them for me. I've done my best to search before asking but it's been hard to nail down the search terms I'm looking for and to know which information may still be applicable or not as CM(AN)O has went through a ton of evolutions and changes over the years.

- Is there any way to set a doctrine where aircraft will not head to a refuel point unless manually asked? As it stands now turning UNREP to no will stop aircraft from automatically breaking their flight path and heading to the tanker, but if you right click and select "Refuel if possible>Manual>Tanker X" this command will be completely ignored until you turn UNREP back in. So, if you're managing a strike package and trying to remain undetected like I was, you're constantly having to juggle this setting. Turning it on, manually sending them to the tanker, and then turning it off for every group again once they are done so they don't break out of the route you are using to have them remain undetected.

-Is there a rule of thumb on when it's a good idea to turn on "Ignore plotted course while attacking" when conducting A-G operations? It seems like having this on for things like AGM or stand-off weapons is usually not a problem, aircraft can hit spread out targets from a single launch point and it's not much of an issue. It's more of an issue when I'm using dumb-bombs or ordinance with a smaller launch window and have a few targets spread out across an airfield, I've tried just drawing a course line through the airfield, but the aircraft will stick to that line and only drop some of the bombs and not at all. Do most of the veterans turn this off when conducting an A-G attack with a single group and spread-out ground targets?

Finally, how do I go about setting up a strike where the aircraft is following its route at say ground-level, and will automatically pop-up to the right height to drop its weapons and then come back down as soon as they are released? There is an air-strike tutorial where this is suppose to happen, following the instructions they provide does not seem to replicate the results but I was able to get it to happen once on accident. The harrier was following a path through the mountains, it automatically raised to the minimum altitude needed to release its weapons, released them, and then dropped back down to ground level and followed whatever restrictions I had set on the route.

Thank again for all the wonderful help and taking the time to welcome me to the community. I'm excited to keep going and learn more.

Regards,
Easy.

[Schr75]

Hi Easy

Great to hear that you succeeded.
The key to a succesfull ARM strike is not necessarrily to destroy the SAM site out right, just kill the FCR preventing the site from shooting at you. The Standard ARM have a big warhead so a single hit is enough to mission kill an SA-6 as it only have one FCR.

Regarding refueling the best I can give you is that you can adjust the refueling settings.
Set the plane to seek refueling at 30% instead of the 60% default setting. You can also set the doctrine to only seek tankers between plane and target. This should prevent the planes from turning around before the target to refuel unless there´s not a tanker in front of them.
There´s one more option but it´s dangerous and requires you to keep an eye on the plane all the time.
Set doctrine to ignore fuel RTB and refueling not allowed. The plane will now ignore all fuel warnings and just fly until it runs out.
I sometimes use this method to force the plane to reach a target that´s at the edge of it´s fuel range. Once the weapons are launched, fuel consumption drops considerably and normal RTB and refueling settings can be set.

That being said, I rarely use missions for anything but support aircraft like AEW and tankers, and ASW patrols.
I´m a heavy micromanager, so I can´t really help you with your other more mission specific questions, but I´m sure someone else on this forum can help you.

Søren