One of the main complaints with the DCS series is the fact that there was no dynamic campaign, just canned missions.
Eagle went completely crazy with their efforts to correct this. Now, they’ve come out with Combined Arms. It essentially allows you to take control of any vehicle on the battleground, command your forces from JTAC, or command forces while flying any of the DCS vehicles:
It looks amazing, and if you pre-purchase Combined Arms you can get the beta now.
Checking this out as soon as I get my desk set up in my new place.
Holy crap. That is… jaw droppingly awesome. I’m stuck modding in Distant Worlds, so please give us an update on how it works. Maybe some pretty screenshots too?
So did the rest of you buy the DCS series on Steam? If so I’ll be bummed as this might be incredible to do some mp with. I purchased them all straight from Eagle Dynamics (or can we still do mp if we bought from different places)?
Yeah tempted here too but I was too burned by A-10C to jump right in. They would need to show rather a lot of improvement on the performance/ai side of things before I bought in.
Hang on now. From what I’m reading it’s not a dynamic campaign—you get a lot of features, but there’s no Falcon 4-esque month/multi-month dynamic ground war. It’s just regular DCS missions that happen to have support for playing tanks and spotters and such.
This has been out for a while in beta form, and last I tried it, it was quite limited. It actually is a module for DCS: World, which is now a unifying platform for this, A-10C, Black Shark 2, the more recent P-51 module, and the upcoming Flaming Cliffs 3.0 update.
While I cannot really recommend the way it was when I tried it (not sure if it got updated), especially if you are not interested in the multiplayer aspect of these games, it is an interesting addition to the DCS collection. It is kind of expensive for what it is though, in my opinion at least.
If you own the steam version of A-10, you get DCS: World from here, then install the modules for the games you own here. You also get the SU-25T from Flaming Cliffs for free in DCS: World, though it was kind of hard to go back to its non-clickable cockpit. By the way, if you have A-10 (or BS2) installed, don’t uninstall until the DCS: World and the relevant modules are installed.
Thus me putting “dynamic” in quotes. You have two forces fighting each other, and you take command of one side and order them where to go. It’s a lot more interesting than the canned missions, and could potentially be more engaging than even a regular dynamic campaign… especially if you can play a huge battle and save the game when quitting. Not sure if you can do that until I try it.
From memory of reading the banana forums, the new IL-2 game is also going to do something similar in letting you control tanks/arty. And also probably similar reach-beyond-graspness :)
IMO, it’s silly for flight sims to let you jump into Arty or trucks or whatever. When you get shot down and other humans are in the air, all you want is to be back in the air, not slogging it around just to be strafed. Even jumping in to a gunner position on a bomber isn’t all that fun, really, although at least in RoF the action is closer.
WarThunder seems like they have some World War mode planned (on top of their ‘dynamic campaign’ mode… NDA and all that, but … haha.) Dunno what that will entail, but I’m still not interested in controlling tanks much when you can be flying.
I think the best thing any game can provide is essentially AI elements that can independently keep the fight going smartly, while you do your bit. There’s nothing more crap than having the AI units just sit around once their waypoint is hit when they could keep fighting and adjusting. And there’s something immersion destroying if you’re in a plane, dropping waypoints for little robot tanks to go that way around a hill to keep the fireworks going.
So far nothing has come close to Arma2 for just plopping things down, hitting go, and feeling like your next 20 minutes will be an awesome bit of randomness. BoB2:WoV was great in terms of feeling like being part of an overall strategic campaign that could go any which way. RoF is great for your individual flight, but I guess until you see little infantry dudes smoking in trenches and getting trucked from one front to the other, it will never feel that connected to the greater scheme of things. Never played Falcon4 :(
I’ll ask this here instead of starting a new thread (although we could maybe use a discussion thread for DCS in general): is my abysmal performance with Black Shark 2 normal? Starting paused in the free flight instant action mission, I only get about 30 fps in the cockpit with an i5 2500k and an HD 6970, and I feel like I ought to be doing better than that.
The engine they use has never performed well for me since … Flanker 1.2. That was the last one that ran smoothly. If I literally have just the one or two planes in A-10C it’s pretty good, but as soon as I add significant units - especially more distinct brains - it is not great. I get the impression this is not that unusual given that user missions with more than, I dunno, 6-10 planes/whatever at a time seem to be very rare.
I wouldn’t mind so much if it was AI that could fly straight and level or do the simplest BFM without fucking it up.
