@fearlessfrog and I managed to do some damage around Sohar… I think we killed 12 or 14 armor units using Mavericks and LGBs. We even managed some buddy lasing and LSS modes. An effective JTAC was using a special red smoke firing targeting pod… 
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It was great fun - almost relaxing doing CAS with a JTAC drone like that. Was nice to have others do the CAP and keep the bad guys away. The Hornet is so full of toys, it never ceases to amaze me.
You should post a map of the operation area, otherwise people on google will think we are out to get Sohar (the real place) lol (we’re freeing them of oppression, plus maybe borrowing some of the oil) 
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So just to bring some other people into the conversation I’ll give you some of my post Turn 6 commentary that @fearlessfrog and I were discussing last night.
Basically we are in the test phase of how best to run this thing on the Mudspike Dedicated Server before we go “public” and get all you Mudspikers on for some big events. We are still getting familiar with everything but we are very impressed with what we have seen thus far. We are working with the “stable” release of Liberation and a newer version does offer some additional features and is a continuous work in progress. I think we pretty much have the workflow down to a pseudo-science as far as getting client slots in the mission and getting it running on the server. Performance has been very good, at least on the small-ish map/campaign we are running.
This is what I typed up yesterday before and after our mission:
PRE-FLIGHT
I went ahead and made all of the CVN missions air starts to maybe avoid the carrier deck problems. It looks like by doing so it moves all of the package spawn times back by 6 or 8 minutes to account for the lack of cold start, taxi, and launch. I signed us up for another CAS mission on Sohar - intel says there are only 11 ground units left there. I’m not sure what happens when you capture a “node” - hopefully we get some winnings we can spend.
I also went ahead and sold an E-2C off the carrier - we had 4 of them, which was probably too many. They are expensive…like $50M or something. I used those funds to repair the second Patriot site near Fujairah…a lot of money, but whatever we can shoot down helps I think.
Money is the key to winning some of these campaigns probably (welcome to the Mudspike Military Industrial Complex) so we may want to consider robbing some banks… We can earn $40M with five well placed LGBs:
Of course…you have to weigh earnings against risk…get a plane shot down and you lose that $25M asset…so I’d say we only strike targets of opportunity that aren’t too risky.
This afternoon, after the CAS mission…we might want to branch out and do an OCA strike either on the runways at one of their bases, or some sort of cluster cruise missile against their ramp areas (I wonder how effective that would be?)… We need to earn enough money to buy a B-1 Lancer 
This utility definitely is a ton of fun…it really is very Falcon 4-ish in a lot of ways…
Anyway - have a look at the Turn and let me know what you want to try to do…things to change…sell/buy.
POST-FLIGHT
So I let the server run for about 1+45 and it looks like quite a bit of action…
It looks like we did OK in the air war portion - but something is wonky with the statistics since we know we killed four T-72s, a few T-60s or whatever. A look at the Sohar intel box shows a more accurate picture though…with ANACONDA and GRIZZLY defenses destroyed…and only a few vehicles remaining in the other sections…
It does look to me like we lost ground on the northern front with the FEBA being pushed back to the east a bit. I guess we might need to spend some money on Fujairah ground forces…but we don’t have much money to spend (only $19M). I can’t tell if the auto-populate/purchase thing is working every turn and spending all that money right at the start of the turn…and only leaving us a little bit to work with (?). Maybe I should turn that off for the next turn to see how much money it leaves us with. One way or the other…we will have to earn more money if we want to keep pushing forward.
We did put a dent in their RED air…but we are suffering attrition too…again…we need more money to replenish. We saw some Hornets get taken out by the SA-11 site near Al Ain…so that site needs to go. Maybe another HARM mission assuming the push for Sohar has its own momentum?
I’ll add that I think my assessment of bombing point Dolphin is maybe not the correct interpretation of how Liberation works. That complex of oil facilities I’m not sure represents money credited to our account if we bomb it, or simply deducted from revenue that RED earns each turn (and leaving it intact and capturing it may flip it to earning revenue for BLUE) - I’m still unsure of the campaign mechanics of that.
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It’s great to see this making it’s way into servers! I’ve been playing Liberation almost exclusively and love it so far, even though it needs a lot of babysitting (particularly AI).
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ED has “wowed” me with graphics and systems. All good. Waiting for the day the AI “Wow” me. Remaining an optimist for another year.
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Liberation is rapidly becoming my favorite thing to do. I has an RTS / Dungeon Master feel to it that I’m probably over-thinking, but it is fun to be a tin-pot General. Here is our pow-wow briefing for getting ready for Turn 7:
OK - ready for the briefing?
Spent an hour looking at the upcoming Turn 7 - which will be a night flight (maybe we should just all diver to Furairah!).
MUDSPIKE-TURN07-PREFLIGHT-02.zip (59.7 KB)
There were a ton of BARCAP flights generated from both the CVN and the LHA and I didn’t see the point of having that many. I kept some to ensure overlapping coverage, but deleted a bunch so as not to risk losing those aircraft on carrier/landing mishaps. I also changed all flights to air-starts except for our 3x Hornet client mission.
I created two specific missions to do BAI against the remaining forces at Sohar - BAI Goose and BAI Ragdoll (Hornets and Harriers):
I sold one Patriot site…so that leaves us with two, which is probably adequate. I also sold the S-3s that must have been auto-bought by Liberation that were placed at Fujairah and replaced them with 4x A-10Cs that I left untasked for Turn 7 since we are in a mostly defensive BARCAP posture for this turn.
I deleted all deep strike stuff for the Harriers but left them with that COBRA strike because it was against a fairly isolated site up north that has Zeus and SA-9, but all the SA-9 launchers are already dead, so hopefully they can strike the only two remaining targets without getting shot down. Also…hopefully they don’t go all “targets of opportunity” on the way home over the front lines.
With regards to Fujairah - I kept the posture toward Al Minhad as DEFENSIVE and bumped up Sohar to BREAKTHROUGH since we are so close down there. I used the money from the sale of one E-2C (we have two left) and the dismantled Patriot site to build up the armor/support units for the ground forces:
For our client slots…since it is a night mission I didn’t want to get all funky and just figured we could take out that further southwest SA-11 site. I’ll probably take a couple HARMs and maybe some LGBs to further damage it. It may be enough for the turn to just knock it out though and not have it be an ultra complex mission. If you guys want to take other custom loadouts to experiment with something you can certainly do that (or skip the flight altogether if you can’t be there). I might try to fly it around 3:30PM Eastern if anyone is around, then another flight (daylight one) later in the evening.
Anyway - so our 3x Hornet flight is a cold start at +45…but getting off the boat early shouldn’t matter…
My hope is by flying an abbreviated Turn 7 we can avoid losing any ground in the ground war since a blank turn apparently causes you to lose ground (but not assets)…
Let me know of any tweaks you’d recommend…!
I wonder if I should assign a CAP flight to that Harrier flight that is going up to the north though… 
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Yes…we are tossing around ideas as we learn about it. There can be varying mission lengths (when I say “mission” I really mean “turns” with multiple missions…maybe even a couple dozen) that we can set with X clients spots each. So we could theoretically publish an ATO (Air Tasking Order) with the schedule of the missions, fire up the server and let it run the turn for three or four hours allowing multiple timezones to pick and chose the times and missions that they’d like to participate in.
The AI does require some hand-holding for sure. DCS AI is gonna do DCA-AI things and sometimes they just don’t make sense. We’ve found we are losing airframes because of bad AI decisions, so we are trying to tweak the flights to make them less catastrophic. To be fair though…the enemy AI makes bad decisions too…so it sort of is self-balancing…
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We are also running an older version…there is a more current version and the developers are really doing awesome things with adding capabilities to it. I think we will see FARPs, helicopters, logistics stuff, squadron management…all kind of things coming. I think the version we are using also has the capability of using the C-130 mod…so it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that we could have slots for logistics and combat and helicopters hopefully…!
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IIRC those objectives generate revenue for the side they belong to. IIRC again, they switch side once the front line moves, an enemy fuel depot ending up “behind” the front line (from the enemy perspective) will become yours (either that or you’ll have to have ground units in the vicinity, can’t remember exactly how it works). So you can bomb them to negate the revenue to the enemy but then they wont generate any revenue once they are yours.
From what I remember, cruise missile (fired from a ship) are really effective. I used them a lot against airbases. You’ll need quite a lot of them to overwhelm the air defences tho.
Really enjoyed the reading, looking forward to more
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Economic warfare…!!! The enemy is making too much money per turn…
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How much damage will an on-fire Hornet slamming into the ramp cause? Asking for a friend…
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Yep, the development branch for version 3 has all sorts of convoy and resupply set-up for transfers. One nice thing they just updated is that you can use the C-130 mod to make a supply mission, as that carries so much more than a helo (they use UH-1 for supplies etc).
I can definitely picture in the future being able to do a few turns where people can meet when the timezones work. One thing about DCS and mulitplayer PvE has been just to get us together at the same time. Liberation on a server allows us to do stuff like:
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Upload a game save, like you did with the .zip file above.
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Anyone interested can download it and just do a File / Open in the Liberation app and inspect everything that is going on, units, money, the active fronts etc.
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Arm-chair generaling
can now proceed, as there are literally thousands of ways to AGM-154A a cat. We could do some polls and votes on what people want to do ‘for the war’. -
Put up the server turn with the client slots. People in Europe (@schurem @Victork2 @tempusmurphy @Sryan @Cib) could play a mission that moves the war forward, using whatever mission / assets we chatted about in (3). They could even do it on their own server for better latency if they want, rather than connect to yours @BeachAV8R, as long as we save the file at the end.
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North America wakes up and does a mission in the same turn or the next one (depending on same server or not).
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The campaign plays out, gosub (1). We give as much freedom as the local populace can handle with our aircraft.
Anyway, it might be a nice way to have a longer running AAR sort of thing, where we all share the same war, get to chat about strategy and mission tactics plus then don’t all need to be around at the same time. Cool stuff.
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Totally up for this. When it gets too hard or we need more people we can schedule a once a week ISH to suit with everyone. A repository or a cloud based store for easy access/ upload
Has the server an http upload facility @fearlessfrog
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It doesn’t. I’ve been thinking about adding a web front-end on it (just read only), but the couple of people that work on it a lot are in the middle of converting their map stuff to a new version, so it’s not a good time to do it. They recommend something like VNC/rd on the server for now.
The good news is that it is a very small ‘game state’ file, so even people that don’t want to play DCS can download the client the once from here and then just file/open this. So even the forum is ok for us to share that. The client app seems pretty self-contained, I just throw it in a download folder and hit the main ‘liberation_main.exe’ and I’m off to the races.
What @BeachAV8R does so far is that he keeps the ‘master’ version (we could pin a topic, and just update the latest turn in the first post etc) and then we download a copy to look at and review; then bark random orders at him and he makes the updates. It’s actually part of the fun. Alternatively someone else can plan out the ATO and then it becomes the master version. Because it’s turn based it’s pretty easy to keep where you are.
One thing I would stress is that it allows groups to fly whatever they want in the ‘story’. If you want to use older school bombing from a F-5 then just set up a mission for that. As long as the inventory holds some, and they are part of the ‘faction’ (or can be added to it easily enough) then it means we can incorporate all sorts of play styles.
The important thing is really just everyone feeling they can contribute and enjoy it, regardless of memorizing hornet buttons. Just reviewing the ATO and recommending strategies would be welcome too - a sort of ‘good luck gents, I’ll be in the bar waiting…’
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I don’t know about the lines to beach’s house but the server that Wes is running is absolutely fine. I love the idea of this. When the talks started about a mudspike dedicated I was hoping something that fitted nicely between the two hollo pointe servers we already have. The only real concern I have for running a dedicated is how fast this would become tedious for Chris to update. How long can you leave the server running for?
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Forever. LOL. I ran a test mission (just an open conflict one) for 6 days last week. It is a dedicate server with no graphics card and it seems to be fine. The only real issue we ever have is occasionally the internet going out because we live deep in the woods and sometimes a tree will take out the cable line (they are strung on poles out here)…
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Nice job with the terrifying night mission fellas…!
MUDSPIKE-TURN-07-POSTFLIGHT.zip (61.9 KB)
So the three Hornets destroyed would be me + the two Hornets I saw shot down over Al Ain - so it appears your divert landing did not impact inventory…!
Check it out…we took Sohar and now the front is moving west out of there! As a bonus, when we took that node I think it automatically gave us a Patriot site there maybe. We only earned about $92M for the next turn, but that is OK - glad we flew the night mission since we didn’t go backwards on our lines and we actually did some damage…!
The northeastern SA-11 (MAGPIE) site that shot me down…
…and FISH that was our primary target came out unscathed…
Intel has us:
But that is the first time I’ve seen us have the advantage in at least one category…so that’s good. Looks like we are winning the ground war anyway…
So we gain the resources of Sohar, which I think will now give us $20M per turn. And we now have two nodes from which to push the ground war (the Sohar node/posture from Fujairah has now disappeared…so we have posture selections between Fujairah-Al Minhad and Sohar-Al Ain). Maybe the Abrams will roll across those SA-11s in time…
Unit composition at Sohar looks like:
So that axis of advance might require some beefing up if we go AGGRESSIVE with it. Not sure what we should do with the Fujairah-Al Minhad advance…it has been on defensive for a bit and seems to be doing OK.
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So I think we’ve got to finish off MAGPIE and FISH SA-11 sites, as our Southern SOHAR front is going really well.
Does this mean MAGPIE is still operational?
We’ve got a good force ready to go, but can’t decide if we should hold them DEFENSIVE until we get air superiority?
The big prize, assets-wise would be Al Ain International - as we’d have a forward airfield plus good revenue generation. The Base Defenses don’t look that strong - maybe a few too many T-72s…
They have a lot of aircraft in hangars and on deck (in the DCS mission they are parked or in hangars, even if not on active flights). After the SA-11 FISH and MAGPIE are neutered then we could OCA it? Or maybe just take out the runway and then we repair it ourselves?
We also have 8 Harriers on the LHA-2 Saipan, but not sure what to do with them until the SA-11’s are out? Ideas?
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You might want to buy some artillery for the boys in green if you want them to go all aggro on the reds.
I’m really loving what you guys are cooking up here. Not sure if I can be on a lot, but I sure will try!
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Yeah, it’s been great so far, just exploring it and playing around - this was just meant to be a quick test run to figure some things out.
One thing I am excited about is that this might be a good way for us all to have something semi-tactical to chat about, and then we don’t all have to be around together to be able to do it - due to us being all spread out around the world it might be a good way to do this. If people can’t make it, or life gets busy etc, then we can just hold a turn and talk about what to do - it gives us a lot of flexibility that just a plain MP campaign wouldn’t.
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