Falkland DLC how do you beat Death Valley slaughtery ?

[ElGlobo]

Hi,

I didn't found after action posts about this one. Personnaly I didn't managed to pass the campaign at this point.

Some scenarios are relatively easy, some seems unbeatable (for me) as DEATH VALLEY. I even have rewatched the real documentaries available about this action and for me it's quite impossible to achieve the same results as the real argentinian pilots did, with the inner mechanics of the game (and certainly my mastering of it).

The argentinian forces simply get slaughtered every times ! I edited the scenario and beside my performances I feel that the scoring is quite unbalanced for the argentinian. Considering the difficulty, positive points for shooting british aircrafts and sunking ships should be much more than their counterpart for argentinian shot aircrafts !

I tried low / high profile attacks, but the scenario duration, initial location of aircrafts, local weather and blind spots of the stationed ships in the shore valley gave me hell.

From just a player perspective, without historical setup :
1) Mirage E3 at rivadavia are at the worst location. As they can't air refuel, I would have relocated them at San Juan or Rio Grande with their stock of ammos BEFORE the missions, it would have allowed them more time on station. They have the best air range for argentinian missiles.

The scenario duration is too short for me to try to lure Harriers west of the isles, to engage them with the mirages. I did that and killed two of them, I guess we can kill another paire, but times runs out before you can clear enough british reinforcements...

If you try to make very low run attacks like in reality you loose dozen of aircrafts. Even if you score hits, your losses penalties plunder the needed score.

In reality ship defences were quite less effective against low attacks as they are in the game.

High attacks suffer less losse but are quite blind, because of unguided weapons and low cloud cover.

Simultenaous mass attacks vs lone groups of 4 got better chance to overrun air CAP and saturate missiles defence but were very costly !

From memory my best result was :

Organizing ALL my planes into a TASK with packages.
Coordinating a same time on target with all aircrafts, at low altitude. The two air refuellers weren't enough to fill everybody, even with the 2 buddy skyhawks... but with the kamikaze one way trip that wasn't a problem anymore !

I got dozens of losses on several tries, and on some tests I managed to sunk several british, but the global score was still negative due to my losses.

I tested area ASW patrol vs strike missions, manual management vs planned ones.....

The island based propelled planes were shot down each time. I figured first that I could had some use of them to hunt land based manpads and missiles, but bad results.

Nothing to do !

Just for joke, beeing aware of the overextended distance, military assets of each side, as a argentinian commander I would simply not have started this war, unless with a full load of super etendards and exocets...

I guess I would have regrouped my ships and subs west of the islands, trying to attract british ships and aircrafts to a shorter distance, but with only iron unguided bombs, there are no miracle !

In reality argentinian scored very good results in general considering their disadvantages ! Their pilots had ironballs !

[fitzpatv]

I've given this one a go and managed to score a Minor Victory (+80) at the first attempt.

Your 'best results approach' looks broadly right, but could be fine-tuned. I prefer to fly planes individually and manually, as this gives me better control. Every bombing run was carefully aimed at a particular target and re-assigned as needed if the original target was sunk or survived another attack.

I played the sharp end of the raid at 1x speed, which also helped control.

It really pays to set Doctrine so that attack planes ignore plotted course when attacking and do NOT Auto Evade.

All attack planes CAN get home without tanker support ONCE THEY HAVE DROPPED THEIR BOMBS, so Unassign any RTBs before bombing and tell them to get in there.

Always attack at low altitude (2k' AGL, or 1k' AGL for retarded munitions) as it greatly improves accuracy and the SAMs will get you regardless.

Despite the inevitable heavy losses, the VP Schedule will allow you to win, given reasonable luck.

Regarding the Mirages, you only need them to distract the Harriers long enough for the strike to go in. I used all 12 at once and scored two kills for two losses before withdrawing, which left me ahead.

See my full AAR for more detail.