I mentioned this before, but this is one thing many scenario creators get wrong: a carrier battle group would ALWAYS have a combat air patrol AND an AWACS plane up in the air at all times. Having to launch them at the beginning of the mission (while the enemy has got their AEW up and running) is bad scenario design IMHO.
also the b-52 squadron is made badly... at least in the intel he should have put something like: we have a squadron of b-52 returning from a mission... take caution
Scenario was never supposed to be a realistic one. You are attacking a Soviet Naval base in Havana, Cuba the US would not let that even happen in real life. This mission is supposed to be difficult, the player can launch whatever plane he chooses. You can easily get an E-2 up in the air very quick. As for the B-52s they are mainly meant as decoys and are marked as Neutral so they will not attack you.
@@cent348 oh, because the US has never attacked Cuba before? :-))) And there has never been a Cuban crisis involving a Soviet base? Come on, you know what "politial fiction" or a "political thriller" is. All these games are based on this genre, pioneered by people like Tom Clancy. It's about faithfully representing the technological side while coming up with possible (even if unlikely) political scenarios. According to what you're saying it would be all right for these ships to be equipped with Galactic Blasters and to teleport around the map because "this was never supposed to be realistic"? If you want unrealistic gameplay, try World of Warships. These "simulation" games are supposed to recreate actual weapons platforms and tactic, which the creators put a lot of emphasis on.
@@johnnyenglish583 I always love a good political thriller, who doesn't? :D I could add an E-2 or CAP to make it more realistic, but I think the mission is just fine as it is. It may be very hard, but that is fine. I want to leave carrier ops to the player; the player will have to do flight ops themselves. I could even make it more realistic by adding an armada of fighters and bombers for some shock and awe, but I don't think anyone would like to play at 5 fps. As for the ships and galactic blasters, you should take a look at the workshop and enjoy the truly cursed and overpowered ships/things that are being posted there. There is a Kirov-class with the Iowas Mk7 guns on it, that is very realistic. What I meant by "this was never supposed to be realistic" is the tactics and actual way this scenario would be carried out are not realistic and not the actual ships. I wanted to make a hard scenario using Enterprise and Long Beach since they were just recently added when I made this. The weapons used are realistic if the devs made them 1:1. Which I doubt because some stuff might be classified, but anyway. As far as the actual tactics used in this mission I did not do any research on US Navy tactics in this time period because that would just be unnecessary and take too long. The devs did and are continuing to do an amazing job with Sea Power but when you subscribe to a user-created mission on the steam workshop you should not expect the mission creator to fully understand naval tactics and expect that everything is realistic. I also believe that some of the missions that come pre-installed are not realistic and will not pass the johnnyenglish583 realism test.
This scenario is an exercise in deconflicting and identification. That's a crazy amount of friendly fire. Those B-52s were "friendlies" that were not under your control. Your EA-6b was killed when an AIM-54 from one of your advanced interceptors was fired at a hostile group that had gotten past your screening interceptors. It was fired back in the direction of your fleet and when the missile missed its intended target it picked up the next available thing which was your Prowler. I assume that the same thing happened to Wichita-2 and 3 as well. Once a Fox-3 goes pitbull it ceases to be a friendly missile and everything is a target.
last week someone said he needed to have his jamming planes in front of the carrier group so he could avoid flashing his ships radar... jeez people make up your mind
6:31 Hey, In real life, the Tomcats could fire up to 6x Phoenix Fox 3’s at a time using a TWS (track while scan) function. The problem with TWS is it can’t scan the whole sky at the one time. It works best when all the targets are at the same altitude, sparing the radar having to search such a large part of the sky whilst maintaining a weapons grade lock. Though not for the Fox 1’s (Sparrows). Cheers on the good work! David,
I’d suggest downloading the US carriers full capability and NTU full capability carrier mods. It removes the aircraft models on the deck, makes all lifts work, and can launch and land aircraft simultaneously. It makes carrier ops much quicker and streamlined
I'm sure someone has already mentioned this, but you can use the TLAMs as decoys that help overwhelm the enemy defenses and drain their SAM resources. Helps to crack open the door for the dangerous ones.
I don't think that the AI will fall for that. I beleive that Stealth did a scenario with VLS equipped Iowa's where he fired a bunch of TLAMs along with his TASMs and if memory serves the AI ignored the TLAMs
Love the sea power content Stealth, keep them coming. I am sure you are aware in the menu there is a toggle to make weapons free just for air targets. Works for my scenarios so far.
Quick suggestion: in case you have them, you can use mouse buttons to switch between ships/planes members of a formations rapidly, without the need to click on them on the map.
The F-14 was built around the Phoenix missile. She could carry six and could engage 6 targets at once at a range of 100 miles. It was made to defeat the Soviet swarm tactics that they planed on using with their bombers. Still one of the sexiest aircraft to ever fly.
No it wasn't strange, they were meant to be a neutral "friendly" force. Unfortunately for them Stealth's shoot first and look later style is a poor way to conduct combat ops. Deconflicting and Identification are just as important as shooting down enemy assets. He didn't even make the attempt to radio call them... he saw several aircraft in a formation and automatically assumed that they were enemy.
The air AI needs work. It's a shame you can't even tell someone to engage a track until eliminated or something. Having to micro every missile every time one misses. Really taking out the enjoyment for me for complex air attacks like this mission.
Im callin BS. If the TU-95 surface search radar was active, your fleet would have easily detected it. When you started the mission, there was no radar bearing lines indicating where the Bear is in relation to the fleet. The radar would be detected at many hundreds of miles and long before it could detect the fleet.
@@ryanpayne7707 but it would happen if it was fired at distance at a hostile target that it missed. Which is how Magic 2 got killed. I assume that Witchita-2 also got killed by an advanced interceptor that was shooting at hostiles that were between it and other friendlies.
This missions was either mad very poorly...or the devs need to work on ID better. Because that airliner shouldve ID'd itself...along with the B-52s. Very dumb😂
You do not know why the airliner did not respond. It may have been hijacked, the pilots may be asleep, they might have a radio failure or might have by accident set the receiver wrong (i.e. not to the guard frequency), ...
@advorak8529 then it would be mentioned at the start of the mission "hey we have reports of a hijacked plane" and even worse this game takes place in the 60-80s, meaning the F-14s wouldn't have been given a shoot down order. The hijack orders back then were "go where they say" That's how 9/11 happened 20 years in the future from were the game takes place. It's just bad mission design
@cent348 the airliner I can somewhat forgive. Dumb people is dumb. But American b-52s not responding to Americans F-14s? Is this how the US bomber command works?
The AI didn't do any of that... it was Stealth's poor management of assets and abject failure to even attempt to identify and deconflict unknown contacts... Right from the start he was marking things as hostile, in some cases (as with the B-52 flight) without even making a basic attempt to identify them.
AIM 54 Phoenix has active radar homing. So it is basically "fire and forget" missile. F14 is capable of firing all it's loadout of Phoenixes practically simultaneously. Just one interesting thing - if Tomcat carry six Phoenixes, it has to drop at least one before landing. Otherwise it can't land due to overweight.
Depends, if it was the Mk1 Phoenix, it would go “stupid” if the TomCat lost lock before it independently turned on its own onboard radar. Mk3’s much better, but far from fire and forget if the range is too great. They only get their range from going to about 80,000 feet then dropping on the enemies head. Unless its close target within parameters.
@@daviddoyle982 You are right. On long range, Pheonix was receiving an position update from F14. But you can still launch all 6 of them at once (more or less).
@@frantisekslipka9651 Yeah but real-world tests at the time surmised that you'd only get around a 60% hit rate, which is why a 2 or 4 missile loadout was used much more than the 6 missile loadout, and even then the AIM-54 were usually launched in pairs to improve the theoretical hit rate
I feel like maintaining EMCOM is still important in this mission. While the Tu-95s probably can detect you from the moment the scenario starts, they sure as hell haven't identified you yet since they're only getting radar returns (they can only know that ship is ____ size and going at ____ speed). If you were up against a player, this would be a problem because they can put two-and-two together when they see a very distinctive formation, going at the same speed and heading, rather quick, with aircraft seemingly coming from them, etc, etc. A lot of red flags. However, since the AI doesn't have critical thinking skills, you can get away with this and proceed to defeat the AI piecemeal.
well he was on the emcon for some time but when he turn the radar on, the missiles were already coming for him soo i dont really se the reason to maintain emcon when they know that you are hostile
@@mashinenbratwurstgewehr-42 If you compare his first try on this scenario, he instantly got a Barrage of missiles coming for him all at once when he turned all of his ships radars but in this video you can clearly see that the missiles arrived in small waves, so they were easily defeated.
@mashinenbratwurstgewehr-42 Nah, I'm pretty sure the moment he turned his radars on, the Nanuckas he targeted with Harpoons started to counter fire with their SS-N-9 Sirens just before they were destroyed. Which in turn meant every other Red thing did the same since they all get the same information.
The AI in this game is semi-omnipotent. It will make the same assumption as a human player if it detects multiple ships traveling in the same direction at the same speed. But even that only works when you have knowledge of what forces to expect. In this scenario Stealth shot down a while flight of friendly B-52's because he saw a formation and automatically assumed that they were hostile. A simple radio call or VID would have revealed them to be "friendly"
Long Beach has 8 Harpoons too, and I would swap the formation around with the ASW ships in the rear ((the Knox class in CGN9s spot the plane guard spot EDIT LB actually lost her TACAN antenna doing plane guard in Vietnam got taken out by a planes tailhook!))and the Moose could be either side she's useless fro AAW), Adams class DDG and the OHP FFG swap sides and the 2 CGNs out in front where the 2 asw ships had been giving much better AAW coverage over the fwd and Port attack arcs... Long Beach should be able to swat attacks at really long range too...and she has 120 SM2ERs....lol
Another great video, unfortunately I'm 62 and poor as church mouse so cannot be a member. But can give you some of my experiences, 2025 will be a tough financial year, recession. Hopefully Trump can pull a rabbit out of the hat ... but .. ? X
I mentioned this before, but this is one thing many scenario creators get wrong: a carrier battle group would ALWAYS have a combat air patrol AND an AWACS plane up in the air at all times. Having to launch them at the beginning of the mission (while the enemy has got their AEW up and running) is bad scenario design IMHO.
100% agree. You will never see a carrier without at lesst a sentry and 2-4 fighters orbiting somewhere.
also the b-52 squadron is made badly... at least in the intel he should have put something like: we have a squadron of b-52 returning from a mission... take caution
Scenario was never supposed to be a realistic one. You are attacking a Soviet Naval base in Havana, Cuba the US would not let that even happen in real life. This mission is supposed to be difficult, the player can launch whatever plane he chooses. You can easily get an E-2 up in the air very quick. As for the B-52s they are mainly meant as decoys and are marked as Neutral so they will not attack you.
@@cent348 oh, because the US has never attacked Cuba before? :-))) And there has never been a Cuban crisis involving a Soviet base?
Come on, you know what "politial fiction" or a "political thriller" is. All these games are based on this genre, pioneered by people like Tom Clancy. It's about faithfully representing the technological side while coming up with possible (even if unlikely) political scenarios.
According to what you're saying it would be all right for these ships to be equipped with Galactic Blasters and to teleport around the map because "this was never supposed to be realistic"?
If you want unrealistic gameplay, try World of Warships. These "simulation" games are supposed to recreate actual weapons platforms and tactic, which the creators put a lot of emphasis on.
@@johnnyenglish583 I always love a good political thriller, who doesn't? :D
I could add an E-2 or CAP to make it more realistic, but I think the mission is just fine as it is. It may be very hard, but that is fine. I want to leave carrier ops to the player; the player will have to do flight ops themselves. I could even make it more realistic by adding an armada of fighters and bombers for some shock and awe, but I don't think anyone would like to play at 5 fps.
As for the ships and galactic blasters, you should take a look at the workshop and enjoy the truly cursed and overpowered ships/things that are being posted there. There is a Kirov-class with the Iowas Mk7 guns on it, that is very realistic. What I meant by "this was never supposed to be realistic" is the tactics and actual way this scenario would be carried out are not realistic and not the actual ships. I wanted to make a hard scenario using Enterprise and Long Beach since they were just recently added when I made this.
The weapons used are realistic if the devs made them 1:1. Which I doubt because some stuff might be classified, but anyway. As far as the actual tactics used in this mission I did not do any research on US Navy tactics in this time period because that would just be unnecessary and take too long. The devs did and are continuing to do an amazing job with Sea Power but when you subscribe to a user-created mission on the steam workshop you should not expect the mission creator to fully understand naval tactics and expect that everything is realistic. I also believe that some of the missions that come pre-installed are not realistic and will not pass the johnnyenglish583 realism test.
This scenario is an exercise in deconflicting and identification. That's a crazy amount of friendly fire. Those B-52s were "friendlies" that were not under your control. Your EA-6b was killed when an AIM-54 from one of your advanced interceptors was fired at a hostile group that had gotten past your screening interceptors. It was fired back in the direction of your fleet and when the missile missed its intended target it picked up the next available thing which was your Prowler. I assume that the same thing happened to Wichita-2 and 3 as well. Once a Fox-3 goes pitbull it ceases to be a friendly missile and everything is a target.
11:35 Looks like a Cuban IL-62. 200 people on board. Either way, not one of ours, never apologise and blame the Soviets for it.
Apparently primarily an airliner. The only military use I can see was for transporting VIPs.
@@JohnDoe-rw5um yeah, they transported some VIPs straight into that phoenix.🤣
@@JohnDoe-rw5um well the f-14s had a secret mission like those p-38s to shoot down Yamamoto
American moment
As for why one suffers friendly fire, if you keep flinging missiles into airspace with friendly aircraft, that will happen.
Agreed, even jammers don’t need to be sitting atop the threat axis…
20:12 always have your jamming planes behind your carrier group so you flash the jamming into the missiles radar, and not into its engine 😂
last week someone said he needed to have his jamming planes in front of the carrier group so he could avoid flashing his ships radar... jeez people make up your mind
6:31 Hey,
In real life, the Tomcats could fire up to 6x Phoenix Fox 3’s at a time using a TWS (track while scan) function.
The problem with TWS is it can’t scan the whole sky at the one time. It works best when all the targets are at the same altitude, sparing the radar having to search such a large part of the sky whilst maintaining a weapons grade lock.
Though not for the Fox 1’s (Sparrows).
Cheers on the good work!
David,
They can in the game also, you just have to not have them in formation. Putting them in formation breaks that ability.
B-52 pilots are very mad :D (They are marked neutral, "decoys")
They call it “The Magic Hour,” for a reason Stealth. It truly is beautiful!
I’d suggest downloading the US carriers full capability and NTU full capability carrier mods. It removes the aircraft models on the deck, makes all lifts work, and can launch and land aircraft simultaneously. It makes carrier ops much quicker and streamlined
I believe it’s a menu setting as far as how weapons free works. I’ve seen a few players adjust that setting at the start of the mission
11:35 Yeah..! That was a civilian airliner.
I'm sure someone has already mentioned this, but you can use the TLAMs as decoys that help overwhelm the enemy defenses and drain their SAM resources. Helps to crack open the door for the dangerous ones.
I don't think that the AI will fall for that. I beleive that Stealth did a scenario with VLS equipped Iowa's where he fired a bunch of TLAMs along with his TASMs and if memory serves the AI ignored the TLAMs
Love the sea power content Stealth, keep them coming. I am sure you are aware in the menu there is a toggle to make weapons free just for air targets. Works for my scenarios so far.
I am completely and mentally stable. Oh, hey, look, a civilian airliner
11:30 "Please be hostile."
I don't think so, pal.
Cuban IL-62 are probably technically hostile in this scenario even if they have 200 civilians on board.
@@bigpoppa1234 Kamikaze tactics
Editing the formation first thing with more screen ships up front helped too as you get attacked heavy at first
The a setting that stops firing at surface targets under weapons free.
Quick suggestion: in case you have them, you can use mouse buttons to switch between ships/planes members of a formations rapidly, without the need to click on them on the map.
The F-14 was built around the Phoenix missile. She could carry six and could engage 6 targets at once at a range of 100 miles. It was made to defeat the Soviet swarm tactics that they planed on using with their bombers. Still one of the sexiest aircraft to ever fly.
It can do that in the game also.
Go to the esc menu. Near the bottom there’s an option to go weapons free on incoming air threats
Great video, strange thing about the B-52s
No it wasn't strange, they were meant to be a neutral "friendly" force. Unfortunately for them Stealth's shoot first and look later style is a poor way to conduct combat ops. Deconflicting and Identification are just as important as shooting down enemy assets. He didn't even make the attempt to radio call them... he saw several aircraft in a formation and automatically assumed that they were enemy.
11:30 OOF.. I don't know about that one chief
Taskforce name is PEAK.
Those no "game" reason to do it, but I would love to see Enterprise in her post-1979 configuration.
The air AI needs work. It's a shame you can't even tell someone to engage a track until eliminated or something. Having to micro every missile every time one misses. Really taking out the enjoyment for me for complex air attacks like this mission.
Im callin BS. If the TU-95 surface search radar was active, your fleet would have easily detected it. When you started the mission, there was no radar bearing lines indicating where the Bear is in relation to the fleet. The radar would be detected at many hundreds of miles and long before it could detect the fleet.
Are you sure the B-52s weren’t an air asset of yours?
They were supposed to be friendlies that were not under player control.
you can change the way of weapon free in option :)
They should have both weapons buttons next to each other there on the bottom right
at 25min mark AIM54 targets f14 this is possible if the missile has gone pitbull and activated its own radar...happens in DCS too
Which wouldn't happen if it just left the plane five seconds ago with an STT.
@@ryanpayne7707 but it would happen if it was fired at distance at a hostile target that it missed. Which is how Magic 2 got killed. I assume that Witchita-2 also got killed by an advanced interceptor that was shooting at hostiles that were between it and other friendlies.
This missions was either mad very poorly...or the devs need to work on ID better. Because that airliner shouldve ID'd itself...along with the B-52s. Very dumb😂
You do not know why the airliner did not respond. It may have been hijacked, the pilots may be asleep, they might have a radio failure or might have by accident set the receiver wrong (i.e. not to the guard frequency), ...
@advorak8529 then it would be mentioned at the start of the mission "hey we have reports of a hijacked plane" and even worse this game takes place in the 60-80s, meaning the F-14s wouldn't have been given a shoot down order. The hijack orders back then were "go where they say"
That's how 9/11 happened 20 years in the future from were the game takes place. It's just bad mission design
@@donnym3415 The Airliner and B-52s not ID:ing itself is game. The B-52s are there as decoys for the player to waste missiles on
@cent348 the airliner I can somewhat forgive. Dumb people is dumb. But American b-52s not responding to Americans F-14s? Is this how the US bomber command works?
@@donnym3415 That is still the game, nothing i can do about that
My F-14s shots down more of each other than the enemy planes in this mission
AI is priceless ! getting blue on blue like clockwork
The AI didn't do any of that... it was Stealth's poor management of assets and abject failure to even attempt to identify and deconflict unknown contacts... Right from the start he was marking things as hostile, in some cases (as with the B-52 flight) without even making a basic attempt to identify them.
I for the life of me cannot get this scenario to load. All of cent's other scenarios do, but this one freezes.
you should fine tune the weapons free behaviour in the settings menu
The Secret Soviet wing of B52s 😂
might need to turn airsearch radar on Bainbridge at 18min mark.....
I've decided not to play this bloody game until they fix it. Shame too
AIM 54 Phoenix has active radar homing. So it is basically "fire and forget" missile. F14 is capable of firing all it's loadout of Phoenixes practically simultaneously. Just one interesting thing - if Tomcat carry six Phoenixes, it has to drop at least one before landing. Otherwise it can't land due to overweight.
Depends, if it was the Mk1 Phoenix, it would go “stupid” if the TomCat lost lock before it independently turned on its own onboard radar.
Mk3’s much better, but far from fire and forget if the range is too great. They only get their range from going to about 80,000 feet then dropping on the enemies head.
Unless its close target within parameters.
@@daviddoyle982 You are right. On long range, Pheonix was receiving an position update from F14. But you can still launch all 6 of them at once (more or less).
@@frantisekslipka9651 Yeah but real-world tests at the time surmised that you'd only get around a 60% hit rate, which is why a 2 or 4 missile loadout was used much more than the 6 missile loadout, and even then the AIM-54 were usually launched in pairs to improve the theoretical hit rate
Nebulous fleet comand is 3d space fleet battle game that might do well its being regularly updated still too
I feel like maintaining EMCOM is still important in this mission. While the Tu-95s probably can detect you from the moment the scenario starts, they sure as hell haven't identified you yet since they're only getting radar returns (they can only know that ship is ____ size and going at ____ speed).
If you were up against a player, this would be a problem because they can put two-and-two together when they see a very distinctive formation, going at the same speed and heading, rather quick, with aircraft seemingly coming from them, etc, etc. A lot of red flags.
However, since the AI doesn't have critical thinking skills, you can get away with this and proceed to defeat the AI piecemeal.
well he was on the emcon for some time but when he turn the radar on, the missiles were already coming for him soo i dont really se the reason to maintain emcon when they know that you are hostile
@@mashinenbratwurstgewehr-42 If you compare his first try on this scenario, he instantly got a Barrage of missiles coming for him all at once when he turned all of his ships radars but in this video you can clearly see that the missiles arrived in small waves, so they were easily defeated.
@mashinenbratwurstgewehr-42 Nah, I'm pretty sure the moment he turned his radars on, the Nanuckas he targeted with Harpoons started to counter fire with their SS-N-9 Sirens just before they were destroyed. Which in turn meant every other Red thing did the same since they all get the same information.
The AI in this game is semi-omnipotent. It will make the same assumption as a human player if it detects multiple ships traveling in the same direction at the same speed. But even that only works when you have knowledge of what forces to expect. In this scenario Stealth shot down a while flight of friendly B-52's because he saw a formation and automatically assumed that they were hostile. A simple radio call or VID would have revealed them to be "friendly"
Long Beach has 8 Harpoons too, and I would swap the formation around with the ASW ships in the rear ((the Knox class in CGN9s spot the plane guard spot EDIT LB actually lost her TACAN antenna doing plane guard in Vietnam got taken out by a planes tailhook!))and the Moose could be either side she's useless fro AAW), Adams class DDG and the OHP FFG swap sides and the 2 CGNs out in front where the 2 asw ships had been giving much better AAW coverage over the fwd and Port attack arcs...
Long Beach should be able to swat attacks at really long range too...and she has 120 SM2ERs....lol
This is a poorly written Op.
In what way?
Another great video, unfortunately I'm 62 and poor as church mouse so cannot be a member. But can give you some of my experiences, 2025 will be a tough financial year, recession. Hopefully Trump can pull a rabbit out of the hat ... but .. ? X
Ok, does the formation editor allow for you to have cap in set areas, like pickets? That might help with mission building... 🤷🫣