SimHQ.com - Air Combat Zone - Review: Falcon 4.0: Allied Force

Once you enter the challenge rating you are then asked to further tailor your campaign by the next three selection screens. You can either manually adjust the settings for the following three menus, or you can leave them the way they are and allow "Headquarters" to manage the war for you. The first is the PRIORITIES menu which sets the focus of the air campaign. Do you want to go after enemy airfields and air defenses first or would you rather rely on heavy attrition in the air? Do you want to starve the enemy and run them out of fuel or go after their civilian centers of government? By manipulating this slider you set the course of your campaign but be aware that concentrating too much on one segment can leave you vulnerable in other areas, so choose wisely!

The next tab is the MISSION TYPE selection menu. Here you can manually skew the ATO (Air Tasking Order) so that the campaign generates missions that you would like to fly. If you want to attack SAM and AAA sites, slide the Sam Suppression slider all the way to the right and move the other sliders to the left. Once again, you can choose to be too specific and the enemy will take advantage of weaknesses in other areas. Again, you can choose to leave these sliders alone and let HQ manage the war for you.

The last menu is the PRIORITIES menu. From here, you can select the geographic region you wish to specifically attack. If you want to soften up a particular region you can highlight it and set the activity bar from low to high while backing off the pressure in other regions. This can be useful when the enemy makes a concentrated offensive or when you wish to breakthrough a particularly troublesome area. If you would rather just be a fighter pilot and not manage the war, you can choose to let HQ manage the PAK selections for you. All three of these settings can be changed at anytime during the course of a campaign, so there is no need to worry if you change your mind later.

The new Balkan area map is certainly a big change from Korea. Ethnic lines and country borders are much more intermingled than the simple conflict of North Korea vs. South Korea. I won't go into extreme detail since you will all be enjoying this sim by the time you read this anyway, but generally this is a NATO vs. Serbia scenario in which NATO is trying to contain the Serbs and prevent them from expanding into their neighboring countries. The bulk of the NATO missions will be flown from airbases in Italy although there are some limited operations from Albania located on the southern flank of Serbia.

It would be worth your time to open up the Order of Battle menu from the bottom selection buttons and peruse the equipment and bases you will be aligned with and fighting against. I can sympathize now with the dilemma that faces all international peace-keepers when they are thrown into the midst of what amounts to a regional civil war. Determining friend from foe and keeping the sides straight is a battle unto itself. Practice will breed familiarity though and soon you will be recognizing the equipment and flags and associating them with the proper allegiances.

Now all you have to do is choose a base to fly out of and the war kicks off. You may change bases at any time during the campaign to join another squadron (as long as they are flying F-16s!) so don't fret over becoming stuck at any single place. As soon as the war starts, the campaign engine begins generating the blueprint for how the air war will be conducted. This blueprint is known as the "frag" or more technically, the "Air Tasking Order" (ATO). The ATO lists every allied air unit plan and movement in the theater. To give you an idea of how vast the ATO is in F4:AF, within minutes of the war kicking off, the campaign engine generated 63 missions for the first 2 hours of the war. You can examine the total ATO at any time and here I've selected all 63 missions to be displayed on the theater map to give you an idea of the amount of activity that will be over the battlefield (NATO only!).

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