I’ve always wanted to try out the “Mercenary” role in Strike Fighters 2 - so I’m going to give it a whirl. You start with the F-100D and $10,000 in the bank. The campaign premise is a Middle East proxy war (that never happens!) with Paran backed by the Soviet Union with the United Nations defending the Kingdom of Dhimar. While the UN mobilizes, the Kingdom mobilizes a mercenary air force: the 1st Special Ops Wing.
I’ll be starting with a fresh pilot. While I might like to play this campaign in Dead Is Dead mode, I’m pretty out of practice with SF2, so I might need to pick a less brutal option.
Our first mission will be to provide a combat air patrol over Mosak…
For this first mission, I choose one of my more experienced wingmen, 1st LT Lin already has three air to air kills - so he will be watching my six…
The mercenary campaigns use money and inventory (I don’t really know how it works yet) to outfit your air force…
For this mission, I arm our flight with 4 AIM-9B Sidewinders each. I was hoping for droptanks to be available too, but I didn’t see them in the arming menu. I don’t know if they will come available later (?)…
Off we go - our F-100D paint scheme is the cool Desert Aggressors by ValAstur…
I try to be judicious with the user of the afterburner, but the F-100D is a real sled at low speeds and does require a lot of power to get “on the step” so to speak…
Keeping an eye on the fuel gauge…
Terrain is a combination of Centurion and Piecemeal’s Desert 4 add-ons…
Toothy looking Super Sabre…
We hit the coast and head southeast…
AWACS calls out a threat coming up north from Paran so we put our noses down and accelerate toward them…
The enemy is flying the Hawker Hunter (I think?)…thankfully not sporting any missiles that I can see…
The F-100 is pretty fast, but if you pull too hard you’ll end up snowplowing very quickly as I found after my first merge. I was never able to recover enough energy to get around on the Hunter and we stayed in a circling stand-off for a couple minutes while I sucked gas like no tomorrow. I tried to get my wingman to drop down and engage but he got mixed up with two other fighters near the coast.
Lots of close passes. I did find I could pretty much accelerate away from him at will but without my Track IR hooked up, I was having a hard time keeping a bead on him (I wasn’t using any HUD cheats)…
When I tried to conserve some fuel…he ended up getting some angles on me and did line up for a snap shot that missed…
Watching the fuel drain quickly…
After a couple of minutes, I was dangerously low on fuel and as I accelerated away the Hunter also broke off and headed south. I don’t know what the AI logic is when they start running low on fuel…but we called it a draw and both lived to fight another day. Unfortunately, I was so critically low on fuel that I had to land at a nearby base. A ground refuel option in SF2 would be a nice feature…
Honestly - a draw is a win for me when it comes to dogfighting…so I’ll take it…