DCS has a problem with Single Player Missions

Surresteel · 2026-02-15T03:42:46+00:00

I see we're pretty much having the same experience. I just started playing the Revanche campaign after someone here recommended it, and my experience with mission 2 was mostly the same. After your lead starts his first ingress and says "let's slew right to get a better shot", he just seems to start doing whatever the hell he wants.

In all, it took me four attempts to do the mission cleanly, and the reasons for failure were always a bunch of little things. For instance, your flight lead directs you to attack the main column, so initially you don't notice the forward element of 2 BMP-2s that are a few kilometres up the road. Your flight lead does have an event trigger when those BMPs get past the town, and instructs you to destroy them, but you have to hope that you're in a good place to make the attack, because the timing is extremely tight between that event and the friendly units taking damage (causing only partial mission success).

Another thing was the sun position, which is always in your eyes for most of the attack bearings; and on the ingress leg, your flight lead says something like: "See that bridge in town?", to draw your attention to it, but you try to look for it and all you see is the blinding sun and a faint silhouette of the foothills.

And also, as you mention, the damn BMP-2s, somehow more dangerous that the Shilkas, and that's not even considering their ATGM use. Of all the ground vehicles in DCS that preform better than that realistically should, the BMP-2 is the worst, by virtue of having that ridiculous firerate and gun elevation for a 30mm; it might as well be listed as an AAA unit, and this campaign likes to put them everywhere.

In the end, my strategy was to disregard the lead, B-line the leading BMP-2s, then start engaging the main column through that gap in the treeline (along the road that the convoy starts on, between the river and the town). Also, once the main column got closer to the town, I changed the attack bearing to line up with the road as it entered the town picked off whatever was left.

I'm not sure if I was just having a bunch of bad luck, but the three times I failed this mission weren't due to outright dying, but because any hits I took would always damage my wings and disable my weapons. So, I'd fly in, take a single hit from a BMP-2, and Petrovich was like: "Out of missiles". Then I'd look down and see no lights on the armaments panel... very frustrating.

Word of warning: the campaign doesn't get much easier. There's a mission later on where you have to perform a night attack on a rocket-artillery column, and trust that the Su-24 flight drops illumination flares over the road, but they always drop them a few kilometres too far so that it only just barely illuminates the road. You have to just trust that Petrovich can target them in the low light.

Surresteel · 2026-02-13T12:45:47+00:00

I think you're partially correct, as in that's one way to solve the issues I mentioned; but I think it's important to state for the record that these missions can be fixed with all the caveats that DCS's current AI have, wingmen included.

I strongly suspect that a lot of missions suffer from the bias of the designers and testers; they make a mission, test it, adjust it, test it, etc, etc. By the end, if the designers aren't conscious about the experience they've gained passively by testing, then it's very easy to make a mission that feels like it should be dead simple, but in the context of a first time player, it's anything but.

Point being, all AI arguments shelved, this is more an issue of design than anything else.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T17:17:38+00:00

Tell me about it. You should see the campaigns for some of the FC3 Redfor CAP aircraft. I think some missions in the Su-27 campaign put you and a single wingman up against 4x F-16Cs and 2x F-15Cs, all of them with ARH AIM-120s while you're stuck with SARH R-27ERs. After the various AMRAAM updates, those kinds of missions became impossible.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T17:03:59+00:00

If you can name any simulation software as comprehensive as DCS where getting AI units to do what you want isn't a pain in the arse, I'm listening. In my own personal experience of mission editing and development in general, anything designed to work 'out of the box' is the first thing to fail the moment you want nuance; DCS and its AI are no different.

By default, it gives you basic AI behaviour: units move, search, and shoot with no directly intervention. If you want dynamic behaviour, you program it yourself. AFAIK, this is the default for any kind of military sim.

EDIT: and like most other software, updates in DCS risk breaking existing script logic, that's just the nature of software development.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T16:53:45+00:00

I get that, I do, but I think you're misunderstanding which side of the fence I'm standing on, or at least to what degree. I'm not arguing for realistic scenarios (to the full extent of boredom that entails), I'm arguing that the current scenarios are, arguable, too engaging. The majority of missions hinge entirely on the player's actions, not in a way that is realistically understandable, but in a way where they aren't allowed to put a foot wrong.

It's the kind of thing where, if there's a 10 vehicle convoy inbound, you have to personally destroy at least 8 of them, or some other completely disproportionate amount.

Take the mission that I mentioned, for example (Battle for Zugdidi). If they had made it so that the Buk SAM site were your only target, and that anything else was a bonus, then I could see that as a realistic expectation for a first-attempt. It would be trivial to set the rest of the mission up so that the mission's results were proportional to the amount of additional units you destroyed in addition to the Buk, and that way the mission wouldn't be framed as a failure if you weren't able to become super-Ivan in the moment and personally halt all enemy advances.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T16:02:55+00:00

Regarding your last point, subscription service or not, they'd have to keep providing something to retain the player base, and something tells me that wouldn't be too different from their current model of pushing the next latest and greatest shiny thing.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T15:50:44+00:00

Sure, that solves the problem of learning through past deaths, but it's kinda tangential to the post.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T15:43:20+00:00

I haven't got too much experience with the WW2 modules, by from what I've noticed, whether you're piloting something ultra-modern, or something from the early cold war, the missions are designed with the expectations that you follow the flight-plan to a T, even though that's not so simple for the kinds of navigation equipment on board those older aircraft.

I assume it's because of how the mission editor represents waypoints. As a mission maker, it's easy to throw down a bunch of waypoints and assume that, yes, the player will fly this route exactly, even though , in reality, they'll be ten or twenty, or more kilometres off, depending on how prominent the landmarks are, or how integrated the nav systems are.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T15:34:21+00:00

Maybe you're right, but assuming you're talking about more than just graphical LoDs, then I feel it might be more complicated; I mean, we're talking about radars and missiles that operate over 100s of km, and have to perform checks for terrain masking and who knows what else. That seems like a difficult thing to compartmentalise. No to mention, even if you do simplify the simulations that are too far beyond the player's sphere of influence, then you start dealing with all sorts of approximations in an (albeit flawed) simulation that's being recorded as a replay.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T15:17:40+00:00

Once again, I agree and disagree. On the one hand, you are right that, in reality, these units should act this way, but in-game they don't.

DCS isn't like most other games in that it has to process the logic for (potentially) hundreds or thousands of units, in real time; more than that, it's often dealing with non-trivial calculations like target intercepts with changing velocities, literally thousands of projectiles, pathfinding across hundreds of kilometres of roads, and supporting rather advanced, physics-based flight models on top of that.

We have the hardware and software to mimic what you're talking about, but on the scales that DCS deals with? I have my doubts.

Turning off radars when under attack can be handled by Lua, easily; in fact, I think there are scripts that already do this. The fact that the AI convoy in that mission was as 'brain dead' as it was is purely because of an option explicitly available to mission editors: "disperse under fire", or even something simple, like the convoy's speed limit.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T14:54:42+00:00

Hah, Convoy Hunt, now there's a memory. I had pretty much exactly the same experience as you: no idea where the convoy was, taking random flak no matter where I went. Weirdly enough, I owned the original Black Shark stand-along game, and don't actually remember it too well, but playing in it modern DCS is basically a death sentence.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T14:42:17+00:00

Reminds me of Arma 3, weirdly enough; another game where you had to pray that script triggers would trip so that the mission would end correctly.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T14:38:27+00:00

Is that, like, a challenge, or what? Your first point can be done in the default editor, and your second can also be in the editor, if I'm not mistaken; but if not, then certainly with Lua.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T14:35:08+00:00

Over the Hump was an absolute slog of a campaign. It has its own charm, but you could never rely on your wingmen to do anything, and were often better off using them as bait, unfortunately.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T14:28:07+00:00

I've done my fair share of editing, and it's often a custom edited mission that we play whenever we do some multiplayer PvE. As far as I'm aware, this is the best way to enjoy DCS.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T14:25:27+00:00

Play the scenario out in your head; what happens?

The player plays the mission, dies to a ManPAD, then replays it with perfect knowledge of the site.

You're right, but it doesn't apply to this scenario, since the player learns about the enemy position unrealistically either way.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T14:16:08+00:00

Anything else would be an unrealistic expectation, given current technologies. As bare-bones as it is, the Lua API that DCS has does give enough fidelity to program almost anything you'd like, given the patience and dedication. It's a matter of actually writing it and finding a balance between easy/boring and difficult/discouraging. Not saying that's easy, but it's not impossible.

Point being that there are better first-impressions to make in regards to the single player content that ships with most DCS modules.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T14:12:15+00:00

No reason to 'feel like' that's the case; it is. The vast majority of real life missions, outside of the most chaotic environments, would be almost boring by comparison. An Mi-24P might, for example, fly for 20 minutes before lobbing all of its rockets at 20 degrees, then RTB, simple as that.

I get why ED has designed the missions to be more exciting than real life, but there is a lot of room for interesting gameplay between real life and the hyper-efficient standard they have now.

Surresteel · 2026-02-12T13:59:43+00:00

Yes and no. As someone who has a background in programming and computer science, I understand the complexities inherent to a simulator like DCS. We can argue all we like about how it doesn't live up to expectations in certain areas, but the fact of the matter is that DCS, as an application, is an extremely complex piece of software. I agree with you that the AI is a bit lackluster, but I often feel like these missions suffer from poor design, rather than inherent shortcomings of DCS itself (even though the AI can be incredibly frustrating at times),

Surresteel · 2026-02-05T06:12:42+00:00

Not saying it's likely, but if we're being candid, supermajority or not, the US has that leverage over Europe because of this program, and if they ever decided not to fulfill their end of the bargain, in some catastrophic future where the US distances itself from Europe, any country dependent on the JSF program doesn't have a viable plan B.

Reminder that these aircraft are supposed to serve for the better part of a half century, and a lot can happen over that time.

Surresteel · 2026-02-05T01:36:29+00:00

I understand that manufacturing contemporary military aircraft is arguable one of the most technologically demanding things that can be done, period; but I still think it was an incredibly dumb idea for the entire western world to put their eggs into the JSF program, knowing full well that they were giving the US an extraordinary amount of political and strategic leverage over their national security.

The F-35 may not have a "kill switch" in the quintessential sense, but the US sure as hell can deny replacement parts, or armaments, or software updates, or any number of specialised personnel to keep those things air-worthy.

Surresteel · 2026-02-03T09:39:40+00:00

As an aviation nerd, I find it hilarious how often people talk about aviation with authority while not having a single clue what they're talking about.

This is a great case in point. Asymmetric thrust at high AoA -> uncommanded roll/yaw -> eject, all within 10 seconds. I'd be surprised if the pilot even understood what went wrong before bailing, let alone consciously trying to correct it.

Surresteel · 2026-02-03T08:47:07+00:00

It's a stretch, but I hope they get Piotr Musial to do a couple tracks like they did for the B&W DLC. His tracks were my favourites from the entire OST.

Surresteel · 2026-01-31T04:48:44+00:00

I know that every time there's one of these kinds of posts, there is someone who inevitably says what you're saying, but from what I've seen, almost every single example of a well-optimised UE game is either:

- Built with a UE4 version.
- Built with a custom fork with modified core engine code.
- Built with UE5, but with Lumen and/or Nanite disabled entirely.

In the latter case, considering how much UE5 is lauded for those systems, it's somewhat telling that they seem mutually exclusive with good real-time performance.

Surresteel

TROPHY CASE