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

We're about to add another to the pile, an SA-5 site. Nasty boogers. We do that, but somewhere in the process I double click the gun unit. That pops up a line and a circle icon which means if I want them to drive somewhere, I drag that icon off, the line follows, that they will traverse the route. That's not what I want, but I can't make these rascals go away. I decide they're not hurting anything and leave them. I later decide to add some additional air defenses, more guns and an SA-2 site. Things are getting tougher in Marlboro Country.

Now we have our basic structure for the mission to follow, and if you wanted to save this work at this point, you could. Just hit save on the left menu button row, and give it a name like "OCA basic setup", or whatever. If things go wrong for whatever reason from here on, you can always go back to this setup and start from that point, plus you can do successive saves as you progress. I recommend this approach highly, it can save you some aggravation when things get a little complicated and you can't figure out where it all went wrong. I find it easier than deleting this flight or that ground unit, round and round.

It's time to get some aircraft primed for flight. I click the team button so it's blue, and hit the Add Package button. Over the Maribor AB, I click the mouse button and the Add Package window comes up. Here's where you actually pick the type of aircraft, quantity, their assignments, etc. I click New and add 2 F-16's from my favorite field, the 584th FS, give them an OCA Strike assignment plus the target, Maribor air field.

Then we click New again, add a second flight of Vipers, also OCA Strike. One flight, Cowboy1, will do the runway strike while the other, Falcon1, will hit the radar and whatever else they can get their bombs on. See, I told you there were cowboys in this drama! We decide we want bombs on target at 0930 and lock the TOT (time over target). Remember that TOT, it's important. We click OK, and the flight path with calculated waypoints that we can adjust appears. We probably will adjust the waypoints around the target to suit our advantage.

Alright, how are we going to prosecute this naked act of aggression? Good question, and one we need an answer to. I go back over to the target and take a good look at the surrounding countryside. I'm looking for mountains, valleys, bodies of water, any geographic features that will help me complete my mission. In a runway strike situation, I always want to have my IP pretty much situated along the target runway line so that when I make my run, the concrete penetrating Durandal bombs stitch holes right down it's length. Makes repairs just a little tougher. Looking at the base, I see I either need a North/South or South/North run. I take a look around and settle on North to South. Putting the mouse cursor over the area North of the target, I right click and pick "Recon". And here we are, looking generally in the direction of my attack.

As you can see I've already positioned my IP in a line North of the length of the runway. In the recon picture you see the base at the left and can just barely make out the mountains in the distance and the outlines of a city. I had a little frustration here, because it seemed like no matter where I decided to look from I couldn't get the far distance view that I really wanted. Perhaps I just didn't zoom in enough or maybe the valley haze was bad that morning. No matter, we have made the decision. We also decide on the egress from the target and pick a sharp turn to the East.

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