Game Moments #11: Falcon 4.0 (Again)
"One Pass, then Haul ..." Well, you know what to haul.

That's the advice given to combat pilots. What that means is you make your strike with the advantage of surprise, drop your ordinance, and then get out of there and be halfway home before your bombs ever hit your target. The BDA guys (Bomb Damage Assessment) will figure out if you hit your target or not.

Being a macho flight sim game player not in fear for my life, I ignored this advice in every other flight sim I'd ever played. For one thing, the "advantage of surprise" rarely ever really applied - the AI was the same either way. And particularly with scripted missions, you had to fight your way through the worst defenses just to get to your target. By the time you dropped your bombs on your target, the worst was over. You may as well just make sure you've emptied everything off your wings and shot every round out of your cannon before going home, because THAT was how you earned the promotions in the game.

Then came Falcon 4.0. With the most complex, dynamic campaigns in history. And also one of the buggiest. But I digress...

In Falcon 4.0, you really could catch the enemy by surprise. And once they woke up, they'd get REALLY nasty. But on one particular mission, I was supposed to attack an airfield, and I did a DANG good job. It's defenses were shattered, and there were only a couple of planes defending the area. I was dominating. And I still had a couple of bombs. And there were a couple of planes on the ground I could straff. Oh, the mission report was going to look awesome!

So I loitered. I carefully dropped every one of my bombs, had my wingmen do the same, and we pretty much made sure the airfield was NOT going to be very usable for a while. There was nothing left on the ground when we were done (at least nothing that could shoot back at us, except for a couple of infantrymen with their rifles), and we'd already wiped out everything in the air for miles around. My wingmen almost all reported back that they were "winchester" (meaning they were down to nothing but guns). Satisfied, I decided it was time to bring us all home.

Now, with a scripted mission, if the enemy forces were going to route some planes to take us down, our length of time over the target would probably have meant that we were on a totally different time table, and the planes that were supposed to "accidentally" run into us on our way back would have already passed us by. I know this, because I had used this trick in other games (like one of my all-time favorites, Jane's ATF Gold). The scripted missions tend to break down pretty badly when the player does things he's not really supposed to. Not as in "buggy," but they usually end up being harder if the player plays "by the book." Just because it's so hard to script up all the possible exceptions and deviations the player may come up with.

Those deviations aren't necessarily bad in and of themselves. Except when they are absolutely stupid when the AI is actually "thinking" and reacting to the dynamic situation rather than just following a script that had been designed inside a game studio a year or two before. In this particular case, there were MANY MANY airfields full of enemy fighters all over Northern Korea. And there were several flights with plenty of fuel left that could be vectored towards the attack when our surprise came.

And they did.

Now, normally, if you are playing "by the book," these guys would be WAY too late to shut down the party. By the time they'd arrived on the scene, my wingmen and I would have been on final approach, getting ready to celebrate their victories at the officer's mess or whatever the little simulated fighter pilots do in the imaginary Falcon world. But instead, we were still making multiple passes over the demolished airfield, unwilling to quit until we'd pretty much stopped anything from moving.

We detected the incoming MiGs at long range, coming fast. NO BIG DEAL. I'd been waiting for this to happen. I gathered the flight together and we turned and ran back for the friendly part of town. We had a defensive screen of fighters and our own anti-aircraft missiles on our side, and our pursuers would not want to touch that. We were still doing fine on fuel, so I goosed the afterburners to get us up to speed and and heading for home. We'd never even get within their missile range (though I could hear the audible drawl of their radar constantly painting us).

Then we saw four more MiGS coming from the left. Okay. THAT could get things interesting. They'd been vectored from somewhere to the east to come cut us off. We couldn't afford to mix it up with them, because while we were fighting, the four MiGs behind us would catch us, and then it'd be pretty much history.

I vectored our flight a little bit to my right (the west). It would take us a little further to cross the boarder, and we'd be flying over terrain that had not yet been cleared of enemy anti-aircraft weaponry. But we'd have to take that chance. By angling our escape, we'd also let the first four MiGs catch up with us enough to fire their missiles at extreme range, but with a very low probability of success. Another risk, but acceptable.

But my little overkill on the airbase didn't seem like such a good idea now. I was starting to sweat.

THEN came the flight of two MiG-21s from the right and ahead of us. Sent to cut off our escape. NOW things were really starting to suck. Fortunately, the MiG-21's generally had fairly limited, shorter-range missiles. So if we were lucky, we could shoot at them at extreme range, causing them to break off their attack, and meanwhile we plow right through at full afterburners for safety. We'd be running on fumes by the time we got to base, but we could NOT afford to tangle with these guys AT ALL. Doing so would allow the eight planes behind us to catch up and blow us to pieces.

So I ordered the attack, and hoped my wingmen AI would be smart enough to just fire and stay in formation.

It wasn't a great plan. But it was the only option we had left.

It didn't work.

The enemy planes got their shots off. I think we managed to kill one of them. But I had a missile launched at me, and I had to evade it. By breaking formation to dodge the missile, the rest of the flight fell into disarray. One of my wingmen was destroyed within seconds. I dove to treetop level and ordered the rest of the flight to rejoin formation - follow me and we were going to race for home while the MiGs were making their turn. That didn't happen.

My two remaining wingmen were engaged, and the other fighters had caught up to us. Calls of missiles inbound were constant. I stuck with the plan, making a cowardly beeline for home and requesting that my wingmen do the same. This was gonna look TERRIBLE on the report.

The other two jets in my flight were destroyed. I think we'd taken out one of the enemy. I was down in the weeds, a really horrible place to be for speed. Up above and behind me, the enemy raced to catch up.

About thirty miles from the friendly border, I was destroyed by multiple missiles. I wasn't even able to eject.

On the mission report, it stated that the target had been moderately damaged, but that all four aircraft had been destroyed, and the pilots MIA / KIA.

Right. Next time... ONE PASS! THEN HAUL....

Labels: Flight Sims, Game Moments, retro

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