Matrix Games Forums

I've now been playing Command for couple of evenings. Few questions and problems came to my mind.

1) Is there any way to see the amount of ordnance in a group? For example if I have a flight of 4 Hornets on a AAW Patrol, how can I see how many missiles they have remaining?

2) The side doctrine EMCON settings seem to change every now and then by itself. I usually go all passive and then manually activate radars on certain units. Every now and then all units go radar active and when I check the side doctrine EMCON settings it is radar active even when I have not changed it. Any reason for this? Could there be some hotkey which I accidentally press?

3) Any way to change RTB status of a plane/group of planes? For example if I accidentally hit RTB for a group of planes, I have not found a way to cancel the RTB and get it back on a mission. Also I usually RTB planes on AAW mission if they run low on missiles, but a situation can develop where even a single missile would be useful. Now when a plane is RTB status I cannot get it back to fight, it just reports something like "I was RTB! I hope you know what you are doing?" in the message log and keeps on flying home.

4) When a plane is RTB it seems that manual override on throttle settings does not work. Many times I have planes attacking something and then they go RTB with enemy fighters in pursuit. The planes have plenty of fuel so i try to command manually to go to flank/full afterburner, but it seems that the planes ignore the command and keep on cruise speed.

5) Can you restrict automatic SAM fire from your surface units so that they do not fire on bypassing enemy planes and would fire only on incoming missiles and/or planes attacking the unit? This situation is common in the Operation Bass Drum, where the Zumwalt SAG fires very actively missiles on enemy fighters which are no threat to the SAG. I usually have friendly fighters on CAP which could take care of the enemy fighters, but the SAG always fires automatically. This is a problem because the SAG runs out of missiles quite fast.

6) When you manually set sensors status of a group, why do you have to always confirm that the command is against the side doctrine EMCON settings? Needless clicks.

7) ASW patrol setup. Currently you have to setup ASW helicopter patrols of surface groups through the mission system and by using relative referece points. The mission system could really use some kind of filter system, because when you have a lot of air units available and many surface groups, it is really hard to find the helicopters which belong to the surface group which ASW patrols you are setting up.

Now in the mission editor you see units unassigned grouped together by their type, so you see maybe 25x MH-60R Seahawks, 9x Some other types, 2x other types and then from those you have to find the units which are stationed on your ships by looking at the name at the end of the helicopter unit description. And when you have multiple surface groups, there can be a lot of ships with pretty similar names like LCS 11 Sioux City, LCS 6 Jackson etc.

8) If you create a big land attack air mission against an airbase for example, can you task individual targets for planes/plane groups in the mission? Or do you have to create separate mission for each target in the airbase? This again is quite a lot of work when there is something like 20x hardened shelters in a base.

9) Fighter groups vs single enemy fighters. Yesterday I witnessed a quite hilarious situation. I had 6x F-35's as a group attacking some enemy targets and enemy fighters intercepted my planes. The F-35s fired their AMRAAMs and got couple of kills but a single Mig-29 evaded the missiles, moves behind my group and closes in. The mig fires a heat seeker which one of the F-35s evades by breaking away from the formation. Next what happens is that my F-35 group status is engaged defensive with a single Mig-29 closing in for guns only attack. The whole F-35 group (minus the one which broke away to evade missile earlier) flies together in parade formation and not a single plane diverts from the formation to get behind the enemy Mig even when the situation was 5 vs 1. This ended so that the enemy fired couple of times, luckily missed and then disengaged after a while when more enemies joined the fight with missiles. The end result was 80% losses for the F-35s

So there is definitely some work to do with the fighter combat AI to get at least semi-realistic results.

1) Is there any way to see the amount of ordnance in a group? For example if I have a flight of 4 Hornets on a AAW Patrol, how can I see how many missiles they have remaining?

Not at present, but the developers have indicated this is something they plan to address.

2) The side doctrine EMCON settings seem to change every now and then by itself. I usually go all passive and then manually activate radars on certain units. Every now and then all units go radar active and when I check the side doctrine EMCON settings it is radar active even when I have not changed it. Any reason for this? Could there be some hotkey which I accidentally press?

Are they in the process if defending themselves against an attack ? There is an option in ROE to disable automatic defense.

3) Any way to change RTB status of a plane/group of planes? For example if I accidentally hit RTB for a group of planes, I have not found a way to cancel the RTB and get it back on a mission. Also I usually RTB planes on AAW mission if they run low on missiles, but a situation can develop where even a single missile would be useful. Now when a plane is RTB status I cannot get it back to fight, it just reports something like "I was RTB! I hope you know what you are doing?" in the message log and keeps on flying home.

Not as far as I am aware. I think this is something the developers are looking at.

4) When a plane is RTB it seems that manual override on throttle settings does not work. Many times I have planes attacking something and then they go RTB with enemy fighters in pursuit. The planes have plenty of fuel so i try to command manually to go to flank/full afterburner, but it seems that the planes ignore the command and keep on cruise speed.

Not had any experience of this, so cannot answer this point.

5) Can you restrict automatic SAM fire from your surface units so that they do not fire on bypassing enemy planes and would fire only on incoming missiles and/or planes attacking the unit? This situation is common in the Operation Bass Drum, where the Zumwalt SAG fires very actively missiles on enemy fighters which are no threat to the SAG. I usually have friendly fighters on CAP which could take care of the enemy fighters, but the SAG always fires automatically. This is a problem because the SAG runs out of missiles quite fast.

You can disable AI weapons launches for a group. Can be be found by right clicking on the group. Keep in mind you will then have to ensure any threats are dealt with yourself.

6) When you manually set sensors status of a group, why do you have to always confirm that the command is against the side doctrine EMCON settings? Needless clicks.

As far as I am aware, yes.

7) ASW patrol setup. Currently you have to setup ASW helicopter patrols of surface groups through the mission system and by using relative referece points. The mission system could really use some kind of filter system, because when you have a lot of air units available and many surface groups, it is really hard to find the helicopters which belong to the surface group which ASW patrols you are setting up.

Now in the mission editor you see units unassigned grouped together by their type, so you see maybe 25x MH-60R Seahawks, 9x Some other types, 2x other types and then from those you have to find the units which are stationed on your ships by looking at the name at the end of the helicopter unit description. And when you have multiple surface groups, there can be a lot of ships with pretty similar names like LCS 11 Sioux City, LCS 6 Jackson etc.

The developers will need to address this one.

8) If you create a big land attack air mission against an airbase for example, can you task individual targets for planes/plane groups in the mission? Or do you have to create separate mission for each target in the airbase? This again is quite a lot of work when there is something like 20x hardened shelters in a base.

You cannot task individual aircraft to attack a specific target when setting up a mission, although a much better mission planner will be developed. However the current mission editor is pretty good at assigning targets, and it always possible to breakdown a large mission into several smaller missions.

9) Fighter groups vs single enemy fighters. Yesterday I witnessed a quite hilarious situation. I had 6x F-35's as a group attacking some enemy targets and enemy fighters intercepted my planes. The F-35s fired their AMRAAMs and got couple of kills but a single Mig-29 evaded the missiles, moves behind my group and closes in. The mig fires a heat seeker which one of the F-35s evades by breaking away from the formation. Next what happens is that my F-35 group status is engaged defensive with a single Mig-29 closing in for guns only attack. The whole F-35 group (minus the one which broke away to evade missile earlier) flies together in parade formation and not a single plane diverts from the formation to get behind the enemy Mig even when the situation was 5 vs 1. This ended so that the enemy fired couple of times, luckily missed and then disengaged after a while when more enemies joined the fight with missiles. The end result was 80% losses for the F-35s

Again, I have never experienced this so I cannot provide an answer.

ORIGINAL: mattpenfold

4) When a plane is RTB it seems that manual override on throttle settings does not work. Many times I have planes attacking something and then they go RTB with enemy fighters in pursuit. The planes have plenty of fuel so i try to command manually to go to flank/full afterburner, but it seems that the planes ignore the command and keep on cruise speed.

Not had any experience of this, so cannot answer this point.

The only option to prevent this right now seems to be deactivating the "RTB when winchester" ROE. Leaving it on can seriously screw up your plans even when you try to perfectly micromanage your flights.

Yesterday I had a squadron of German Navy Tornados attacking a Soviet surface group in the Baltic. I had them ingress at 520 knots and 200 ft, and they penetrated several enemy SAM range rings without being detected. Once they had fired their Kormoran missiles, they went RTB and reverted back to the default behavior of flying at 40.000 feet and 480 knots. A lot of them got shot down before I managed to force them back under manual control.

I see this point as part of the larger issue of the mission AI using tactically stupid behavior whithout any regard to actual enemy threats, which in my opinion is the biggest problem in CMANO right now.

re the Tornados - Thats not good

Thanks, I've added this to the bug tracking system.

ORIGINAL: Der Zeitgeist

The only option to prevent this right now seems to be deactivating the "RTB when winchester" ROE. Leaving it on can seriously screw up your plans even when you try to perfectly micromanage your flights.

Yesterday I had a squadron of German Navy Tornados attacking a Soviet surface group in the Baltic. I had them ingress at 520 knots and 200 ft, and they penetrated several enemy SAM range rings without being detected. Once they had fired their Kormoran missiles, they went RTB and reverted back to the default behavior of flying at 40.000 feet and 480 knots. A lot of them got shot down before I managed to force them back under manual control.

I see this point as part of the larger issue of the mission AI using tactically stupid behavior whithout any regard to actual enemy threats, which in my opinion is the biggest problem in CMANO right now.

ORIGINAL: Jakob Wedman

Thanks, I've added this to the bug tracking system.

Thanks for picking that up!

It's not a bug however, it's just the default AI behavior as it is implemented now for jet planes. It works well in low threat environments where there aren't any SAMs, and it keeps fuel consumption low and ranges high, but it's just suicide when you have an enemy shooting at you.

As I see it, there's two things that may help with that.

1. Allowing us to set precise waypoint commands with speeds and altitudes for AI missions, that "overrule" the default mission AI.

2. Implementing the flight profiles that are already stored in the DB view with each loadout, but are not actually used by the AI right now. With that, a Tornado that is equipped with, for example, a JP.233, which describes a lo-lo-lo profile in the DB viewer, would not fly at 40.000 ft but would use the flight profile stored with its loadout in the database. In that case, it would fly at 200ft, increase speed before reaching the target, and fly back with the same low altitude.

ORIGINAL: Der Zeitgeist
1. Allowing us to set precise waypoint commands with speeds and altitudes for AI missions, that "overrule" the default mission AI.

+1[:D]

ORIGINAL: Have
3) Any way to change RTB status of a plane/group of planes? For example if I accidentally hit RTB for a group of planes, I have not found a way to cancel the RTB and get it back on a mission. Also I usually RTB planes on AAW mission if they run low on missiles, but a situation can develop where even a single missile would be useful. Now when a plane is RTB status I cannot get it back to fight, it just reports something like "I was RTB! I hope you know what you are doing?" in the message log and keeps on flying home.

Yes, try U - "Unassign selected units from mission"[;)]

ORIGINAL: Der Zeitgeist

ORIGINAL: mattpenfold

4) When a plane is RTB it seems that manual override on throttle settings does not work. Many times I have planes attacking something and then they go RTB with enemy fighters in pursuit. The planes have plenty of fuel so i try to command manually to go to flank/full afterburner, but it seems that the planes ignore the command and keep on cruise speed.

Not had any experience of this, so cannot answer this point.

The only option to prevent this right now seems to be deactivating the "RTB when winchester" ROE. Leaving it on can seriously screw up your plans even when you try to perfectly micromanage your flights.

Yesterday I had a squadron of German Navy Tornados attacking a Soviet surface group in the Baltic. I had them ingress at 520 knots and 200 ft, and they penetrated several enemy SAM range rings without being detected. Once they had fired their Kormoran missiles, they went RTB and reverted back to the default behavior of flying at 40.000 feet and 480 knots. A lot of them got shot down before I managed to force them back under manual control.

I see this point as part of the larger issue of the mission AI using tactically stupid behavior whithout any regard to actual enemy threats, which in my opinion is the biggest problem in CMANO right now.

This has been resolved by the auto-planner functionality in v1.05.

;

ORIGINAL: Have
9) Fighter groups vs single enemy fighters. Yesterday I witnessed a quite hilarious situation. I had 6x F-35's as a group attacking some enemy targets and enemy fighters intercepted my planes. The F-35s fired their AMRAAMs and got couple of kills but a single Mig-29 evaded the missiles, moves behind my group and closes in. The mig fires a heat seeker which one of the F-35s evades by breaking away from the formation. Next what happens is that my F-35 group status is engaged defensive with a single Mig-29 closing in for guns only attack. The whole F-35 group (minus the one which broke away to evade missile earlier) flies together in parade formation and not a single plane diverts from the formation to get behind the enemy Mig even when the situation was 5 vs 1. This ended so that the enemy fired couple of times, luckily missed and then disengaged after a while when more enemies joined the fight with missiles. The end result was 80% losses for the F-35s

Save? We cannot debug anecdotal stories.

ORIGINAL: Have
5) Can you restrict automatic SAM fire from your surface units so that they do not fire on bypassing enemy planes and would fire only on incoming missiles and/or planes attacking the unit? This situation is common in the Operation Bass Drum, where the Zumwalt SAG fires very actively missiles on enemy fighters which are no threat to the SAG. I usually have friendly fighters on CAP which could take care of the enemy fighters, but the SAG always fires automatically. This is a problem because the SAG runs out of missiles quite fast.

v1.07 has a big fix for this.