I have collected all of my blog entries about the various Sky Crawler missions here. For each of them I give a description of the basic mission, any useful hint’s I have found on weapons and tactics, and a brief discussion of how the kildren story gets advanced.
| Mission 1: Rudakai | Mission 8: Rudakai | Mission 15: Ubasama |
Mission 1 is as close to a training mission as you get. You have flown from your base in the Czech Republic to an area off the coast of Italy – Vieste, on Cape Gargano. SCIA calls it Rudakai, which I can’t find a translation for. For what it’s worth, the center kanji symbol in the name seems to transliterate as wa, not da. It’s a simple mission: shoot down three enemy jammers. The time limit is 20 minutes. Originally, there are eight escorts, but more will arrive on scene if you dally.
The difficulty difference between Easy and Hard seems to be the visibility (you are in scattered cumulus in both, but the Hard version includes a lot more haze), and the willingness of the escort to attack you. This is where you first learn that any Lautern fighter can outrun any aircraft you are flying, regardless of specs. The shoot down part is easy at all degrees of hardness. Everybody flies straight and level as you drive up behind the first jammer and shoot it down. Then there’s a bunch of yelling, and the escorts break formation. The jammers continue on course. You can easily continue straight ahead and shoot down the other two targets, but that ends the mission early and keeps you from racking up additional points by killing some Lautern fighters. The jammers are unarmed, and make no attempt to evade.
In the Easy mode, no-one will attack you until you have shot down at least one jammer. Even then, the attacks are half-hearted, and the escorts stay mainly with the remaining jammers. What this means is, you can shoot down one (which shuts up your flight lead complaining about your lack of productivity), and then go off for fifteen minutes of familiarization training — low flying, rolls, MCM practice, and such. Then you pop back, nail the two jammers, and get some more points towards that new paint job. Just be sure you stay within the combat box. If you wander outside it, you get an off-course warning and are given a short countdown to get back. If you don’t, the mission ends, a failure.
This mission is where I did all the test flying for the for Sky Crawlers aircraft performance table. There are plenty of landmarks to use when turning a 360 or checking for heading changes during MCMs. Drop down until you are pulling a rooster tail and you can measure your sea level speed. For fun, try some low-level runs over the land, or put on a rocket pack and shoot up the town of Vieste (nice explosions, no damage).
When you play it the way the game wants you to, it’s a dull mission, but that’s what a training mission should be.
This is a 30 minute fighter sweep over a major city in the vicinity of the real world Weimar, Germany. In SCIA the city is Ubasama, which as far as I can tell might mean honored grandmother (but the last two kanji on the title page seem to be “mawa” and “toi”). The sweep is in advance of the arrival of a group of new pilots, who turn out to be the kildren that the story revolves around. Ubasama also features in Mission 15, and both missions take place in the winter, at dusk.
This is a straightforward, shoot down as many as you can, mission. As with all the missions, you get extra points for using the TCM to get the kill, but it’s more fun to do it on your own. The distinguishing feature of this mission is that in addition to being plugged in to your own comms, and the Lautern comms, you also get a blow-by-blow from an excited radio announcer on the ground.
Mission 3 is a 30 minute mission to intercept a group of enemy transports who are trying to make an airdrop at the Lautern base at Maimahara (the last kanji in the name implies farmland) in the vicinity of real-world Nurenberg, Germany. This is the first combat mission for the new kildren, and there’s lots of chatter to that effect.
The transports look like C-130′s, without the wing tanks. The first two are easy shootdowns out over the open farmland. The second two always seem to get in closer, and will drag you over the flak around the base if they can. Kill those two, and there are two more, at altitude and away from the base. After you get them all, you still have to kill a number of Lautern fighters, specifically the ones designated as “targets” by way of a red pointer. As usual, the number of enemy fighters is much higher than indicated on the premission data screen.
You fail the mission by letting them do their drop onto the base (but you never see any parachutes), or by the usual running out of time, or into a hill, or getting shot down.
This is the first place you are likely to run into the run into problem. It is possible to collide with the big enemy targets, ending the mission in failure. I have never collided with an enemy fighter, even though I’ve flown through the fireball numerous times, so it may only apply to transports and bombers.
The highlight of the mission is Oroshina chattering to herself during the combat, flying off into the sun, giggling, when it’s over. She likes to fly combat.
This is the first ground attack (GA) mission in the game. The industrial center at Kiriki (on what is probably the Elbe River, near real-world Magdeberg, Germany) is held by Lautern forces, and your attack is part of the effort to drive them out. It’s a pretty straightforward thirty minutes: sweep in and kill some of the ground units on the periphery, then go after the flak around the plant, and wrap it up by killing three gunboats in the river before they can take off the survivors. There’s some resistance from Lautern air, but (at least in the easy version) they don’t attack if you are concentrating on GA.
The best aircraft for this mission is probably the Seiei. For some reason it makes me think of a prop-driven F-105. It’s a pretty tough aircraft, and since you spend a lot of time tooling around at low altitude, getting shot at by flak and light AAA, you want something that can take punishment. Your secondary armament should be GA optimized, keeping in mind that some of the GA weapons have a very few shots available.
Almost everything requires delivery at low altitude. Since you can’t see down and in front of you, your choices are climb and dive on the target, make a low altitude level drop, or make a shallow approach with a forward firing weapon. The trouble is, the target marker tends to drift back off the bottom of the screen as your dive steepens, so you don’t have much flexibility in finding and aligning on the target. Bombs can be delivered in level flight, and some of the weapons (napalm and CBU, sorry, flame bomb and powder bomb) are best delivered that way.
The story advances with you getting a demonstration of how cold-blooded the kildren are about death. Having a buddy shot down merely means that he wasn’t good enough, and so what?
This is one of the missions where you have the opportunity to fly under a bridge. I did it on a subsequent Kiriki mission, but this one has you chasing gunboats on the Elbe, so you have plenty of excuses to do so. I mean, if you’ve just strafed a gunboat, you might as well head straight ahead, wings level, at low altitude, until you get beyond the pool of burning oil, then Immelmann up and out. If you have to fly under a bridge to do this, well, that’s just tactics.
Mission 5 is a fighter sweep over Yaura, an old samurai castle on the Rhine, near Darmstadt. The initial briefing is a little odd. Rostok is responding to “a large number of enemy fighters are airborne over Yaura,” as if they’d still be there an hour later, after you’ve briefed, preflighted, formed up, and flown a couple hundred Ks. A better way to describe it is that “we are making a major show of force, hoping they will come up to challenge us.”
In any event, it’s 20min of air to air, followed by the tragic shootdown of the flight lead, followed by 20min of furball in a rainstorm, with tragic rainstorm music. Your first mission is to shoot down about 17 Lautern fighters. Of course, there are more. You have twenty minutes, but you can do it in five. When you kill the last one you flip to a cutscene in which unexpected (and evidently illegal) Lautern reinforcements arrive, and the Captain gets shot down, crashing into the castle. It starts to rain, and various flight members broadcast their angst to all the worlds monitoring stations. Another mass of enemy fighters comes in, and you have to fight them off — you have another twenty minutes.
The story advances by learning more about the kildren — in a strictly secret discussion held on guard channel — and killing off the Captain so that you can be promoted flight lead.
What’s fun about this mission is that it’s pure air to air, and you can spend as much time as you want in the first segment, dogfighting and flying MCM. As time gets short you should shift over to TCM and clean up the stragglers before the clock runs out. In the second half, you are usually low on secondary ammo (I started one run with 29 rounds in the gunpods), and possibly damaged, so you don’t want to fool around. What’s not fun is that the enemy fighters start using the teleportation tactic again — even when you’re not particularly close. It’s as though they are telling you you won’t get anything done unless you go to TCM. If you are flying this mission for fun, just to get the air to air thrills, I’d recommend flying at the Easy setting. It’s not that the enemy is all that much easier to kill, it’s that they cheat less — you are less likely to be flying along at 550kph and finding some slowcoach Vice flying up your backside at 450kph.
As usual, if you get killed during the mission you can restart. If you get killed on the second half of the mission, you can restart from that point, but you only get credit for the kills made during the second half. You lose all the first half points and will have to work harder to get that new paint job.
I flew one Mission 5 episode in a high maneuverability Shougu, with the multibarrel gunpods, running the clock down to the three minute mark. Then, just for fun, I flew it again, in a fat old twin tailed Senryu. Surprisingly, the Senryu did as well or better than the Shougu. As a slower platform, the head to head closure rates were lower and I could often hit aircraft I couldn’t when flying a faster bird. The Senryu couldn’t turn fast, but could still MCM. Total kills for the Shougu was 32, for the Senryu, 27. And the replay was hilarious.
By all accounts, Mission 6 is the hardest mission of them all; it certainly was the most difficult so far for me. This is not because of the intrinsic difficulty of the mission, but because of the artificial obstacles the developers place in your way. For me, clearing Mission 6 took over two weeks, the first with limited play during finals, the next with almost daily play over the spring break. I guess I put in over ten, and perhaps as many as fifteen hours playing this mission (which, given that the five mini-scenarios each take 3-5min max represents an awful lot of restarts). In this antepenultimate essay on SCIA, I will go over what I learned from M6.
The Mission
On the face of it we have a simple recon mission. Your unit flies four of the fat old Senryu recon birds into the Baruka Mountains (or, as they are called on the briefing map, Switzerland) to take low oblique pix of four hydroelectric dams (I think they’re hydroelectric, but there’s no power lines leading from them). This takes about five minutes. Hint; don’t follow the navigation arrows directly to the targets, because you’ll come in at an angle and have to circle around. Instead, fly straight ahead at the start, then turn right so that you come in at right angles to the dam face. You can give yourself some time by levelling the Wii controller and intermittently deploying the speed brakes to keep below 400Kts (but remember that the Senryu stalls below 350). Fly close, click the shutter, forward on the joystick, and let the (A) button take you up the face of the dam on an Immelmann. If you climb straight ahead while waiting through the MCM timeout you can do a second Immelmann, climb over the top of the dam, and you are headed directly for the second target. You do a single Immelmann off the second target, and turn left at the first gap in the mountains, pick up a narrow mountain road, and follow it to a high bridge. Turn left off the bridge and you are headed right at the dam. To get to the final target you again follow the road left off the bridge, then go straight ahead at the first ridgeline. Turn left there, and you’re golden. Five minutes, tops, and then everyone heads for the Line of Safety and a well-deserved round of hot chocolate and schnapps. None of the preceeding counts as spoiler. It’s what a well thought out mission brief would sound like. If I had more time I’d give you times to each turn point. Now come the spoilers.
The FurBall
The photo mission is just something to give the scenario an excuse to have you jumped by a cloud of enemy fighters while flying a lumbering target. Your job at this point is to ‘save’ all three of your mission buddies by shooting down the fighters who are attacking them — which means shooting down two or three of them for each of your wingmen. Once you get one of them cleaned off (“you saved my life, Captain”), the next one yells that they are surrounded by enemy fighters. The first one you save has the ominous callsign “Mayfly”. While you are chasing after him (and his hit and burning plane still outmaneuvers yours), the other two mill around just this side of the safe line. In fact they are usually closer to the safe line than they are to you, and could save themselves just by ambling east a few miles. Save Mayfly, and Breakshot suddenly finds he’s in trouble, and then it’s spunky Kylie’s turn. After you have shot down the required number of foes, a golden line appears on the ground and a large blue sign appears in the sky, saying “Goal”. There’s no singing by a heavenly choir, but then, it’s a low budget game.
My Advice
The goal for this mission is not just to shoot down enemy aircraft, it’s to shoot down specifically those aircraft involved in attacks on your wingmen. This means you have to keep track of where your wingman is at all times. Usually, the best approach is to fly directly at him (or her, sorry Kylie) and target any enemy in his vicinity. The key fighters appear to be all of the type Tulip, which look like clip winged Hawker Hurricanes. There are a lot of Fissions around also (the turboprop P38′s), but they are just distractions. They will actually fly through your gun target line to try to draw your fire. The only time you should be concerned with a Fission is when one tries to swing your wingline to get into firing position — the Senryu can absorb a lot of punishment, but it’s not a superhero, and you do have three mini-scenarios to get through (four, if you count getting your own bird across the line). I found that if you do a split-s, and then Immelmann back when the MCM lets you, you can cause any fighter on your tail to overshoot (and maybe get a snap shot at him as he passes by). Otherwise, ignore them. When you snap back, immediately hit the map, to see where your current wingman got to. Or, you can target a Tulip before you do your MCMs. This will let you see where he is on your radar, and since the Tulips are targeting your wingman, that’s where you want to be. Once you get the “you saved me” call, immediately hit the map button to see where your new wingman is, MCM onto that heading, and get there as fast as you can.
The Cheaters
There’s a certain amount of cheating going on by the system. When you are in a turning fight with an enemy plane you will suddenly find that yours can’t bank more than ten degrees, until he pulls away, and then you go back to the fifteen or seventeen you usually get. On occasion, you will have had an enemy plane on radar, sitting on your wingline and on the same heading as your plane. You would think that turning into him would bring your plane around so it’s pointing right at him. Not so. I have done a complete 360 with an enemy remaining on my wingline and never caught him. Evidently they can fly backwards. The solution is to turn away from him until he’s behind you, then MCM back.
TCM maneuvers present their own problems. When you are targeting a Tulip, it usually doesn’t matter how close to your wingman you are, or what your heading is, the TCM will almost always have you two ridgelines away, pointing in the wrong direction when you are done. Since it is almost impossible to pick up a Tulip as a target unless you have a visual sighting (whereas your lockon will automatically click to the next Fission like a RDF to a thunderstorm), you usually have to pop into map mode to see what’s happened.
Finally, some of the enemy appear to speed up their angle rate as you get close to them, like one of those VBScript “click this button” pranks. This is most noticable (and least objectionable) when you are having fun chasing Kylie around in the mock battles of Mission 7 while testing out the new Sanka II (the name is Japanese for ‘calamity’, or maybe ‘mountain nomad’, unless it means ‘obstetrics’ — I’m not making this stuff up, go look up さんか!!), but it is really irritating in a frustrating battle like M6.
Mission 7 is a reward for finishing Mission 6. Its location is Lake Naburu (which translates as something like teaser), in the general location of the Cheimsee on the German/Austrian border area. It’s a bit of a giggle, best described as a wet towel fight between you and Oroshina.
You are testing two prototype Sanka II fighters by flying mock combat using paintball guns. You start out with Oroshina chasing you for two minutes, then you chase her for two minutes, and you both finish up, hot and glowing, with a three minute free-for-all. Lots of fun, lots of good Bavarian scenery. You can do a certain amount of hand-flying here, but to really do well you need to do a lot of MCM/TCM.
When your seven minutes of fun run out, the bad guys show up to spoil the show. It’s the usual Lautern mixed bag of Tulips and Fissions and Vices, and you have fifteen minutes to shoot down eighteen or so of them. Oroshina is really pissed at missing out on more fun with her Captain, and takes the whole thing personally. She gets really mad when Mosume tells her the test run is canceled, even though you’ve shot down all the enemy.
The story continues here, with Oroshina realizing (after the second test fight) what fun it is to fly and fight and proclaiming that now she knows what it’s all about. She doesn’t actually sing “Sweet Mystery of Life,” but you get the impression she wants to.
The low-res video chip in the Wii shows up here. When you have a Sanka II flying straight at you, the twin tails wink in and out and give the impression of propellors turning.
You know, in all of this, and what follows, nobody ever says what kind of plane the Sanka I was, why they moved on to the Sanka II, or why you don’t see any Sanka Is in active service.
Mission Description
Mission 8 sees us back off the coast of Italy, at the town of Rudakai. A Lautern naval squadron is in the harbor – a frigate and two destroyers at anchor. Your job is to sink them. The weapon of choice is the Seiei, carrying homing torpedos, AKA “underwater missiles”. The Se carries 28 of these, which should be enough, if you don’t get all extravagant. If you need more, the Senryu carries 40 of them, but it’s an embarrassing aircraft to fly.
The twenty minute mission opens with your flight sweeping in at low altitude from the landward side. A cloud of Lautern fighters appears as you clear the last ridge, giving you a few seconds to get in a head-shot kill before you switch over to the AS weapons. The three ships at anchor are clearly there for target practice, so that you can improve your torpedo skills.
After you have left the three ships burning you have a few minutes to swat some fighters. There’s a fourth ship, a low-point gunboat, that gives you some practice against a moving target. If you go after him, be wary of having a fighter crawl up your backside while you are doing it.
You get to play with the fighters for a bit, until Orishina discovers the Lautern main fleet off to the SE. You have a mix of destroyers, frigates, and cruisers steaming in two parallel columns. As usual, you have to do all the work of killing them, while your flightmates keep the fighters, mostly, off your back. Sink them all, and kill a couple more fighters for dessert, and you are all done.
There’s not much story-advancement here. Ukumori proposes a bet on who gets the highest number of kills, and Oroshina gets all grumpy because she evidently had some equipment problems that kept her from doing much at all. Ukumori talks about killing enemy pilots, even if they’re running away.
Weapons and Tactics
The homing torpedo (I refuse to call it an underwater missile) is an interesting weapon. It has a wedge-shaped target acquisition zone, and if the target is anywhere inside it, it will come away with a hit. You don’t have to be in level flight for it to work, but that’s best. After you have dropped, there’s a few second rearming delay before you can drop another one. Your recovery options are to overfly the target, then pull the throttle back to high speed and drive out of gun range as fast as you can. When the second range ring pops up on your radar, Immelmann back and push forward on the throttle. Alternatively, you can Immelmann away immediately after your drop, then Immelmann back when the second range ring shows up. In either case you’ll be almost on top of the ship you just fired at. Generally about the time you are ready to turn, you get your weapons back (and you find out if you missed, got a hit, or destroyed the target). If you need to take a second shot, you’ve got about a second to make the decision. If you like, you can drive a little further out before turning, but that puts you in gun range longer. When you are attacking the main fleet, you have another, more risky, option. You can overfly the target, then cut back on your speed while you head for the parallel column. If things go right you will get your weapons back just in time to drop on a second target.
One weapon alternative I tried was dive bombing with conventional iron bombs. As I mentioned in an earlier post on the topic Sky Crawlers doesn’t like dive bombing. Even if you are attacking a moored target, and have the pipper set right on the desired mean point of impact (DMPI), it still wants you to press well below 500m before it will award a kill — you get lots of hits, though. If you are in ‘rear view’ mode (where your POV is above and behind your aircraft), your aircraft blocks the view of the pipper. If you are in ‘full screen’ mode — particularly if you are over a hazy ocean — you have no idea what your attitude is, so you spend most of your time watching the artificial horizon, and it doesn’t help your accuracy. In either event, you have to be prepared to Immelmann out the instant you release, or you will follow the bomb into the target.
Also, it can’t handle steep dives. Anything much more than 45d and the pipper disappears. And if you slow down, the whole target circle drifts down and back, i.e. off the bottom of the screen. This is the kind of behavior you’d expect. The pipper shows when you should drop to hit the target. If you are flying straight and level with and iron bomb, it will hit the target directly underneath your aircraft. For a given altitude, the faster you are going, the further out in front the drop point will be.
Finally, the enemy fighters, swarm you at the top of your climb, and treat you like a stationary target during the dive, instead of having to chase you down the chute the way they would in real life.
I used up all but three of the 38 bombs the Suiga carries, and had two targets left, when I ran out of time. It did make for some really neat replay video though — steep dives with the town in the background and an Immelmann for a pullout.
Of course, you can always use a forward-firing weapon, like the tried and true wing guns, but there you have to press very close, at very low altitude (or in a shallow dive), and it’s easy to get target fixation and fly into the water, or hit the ship superstructure on the way out.
Finally, a word on targeting. All the ships have a single point of vulnerability, plus a couple of secondary targets, like anti-aircraft guns. If your ‘underwater missile’ hits the gun you won’t sink the ship, so be sure of what you are aiming at.
Mission 9 has you flying top cover for the Torrent, a downed flying boat on the Rhine, near Darmstadt. This is the same place the Captain was killed back in Mission 5, and the collapsed tower of the castle is there to remind you.
It’s twenty minutes of back and forth — “The gunboats are coming from the south…oh noes, now the fighters are coming from the north…more gunboats!!” You fly in from the north, and immediately have to fend off the southern gunboats. There’s four of them, and they don’t maneuver, so it’s not really hard. The best weapon is probably the downward firing gun on the Sanka II and the Shougu, but even the 410 rounds carried by the Sank is not enough to let you kill all twelve attackers (4×3 waves), so you are going to end up doing some strafe with your wing guns. Try not to bounce off the water. Once you have killed the first wave of gunboats, the first wave of fighters sweeps down from the north, and so on.
The air to air part isn’t much, except that they want to draw you as far north as possible, so you have trouble getting back down south when more boats appear. After the first set of boats, I set up a racetrack pattern up and down the river. I’d slowly cruise north, watching the red X on the periphery of my radar — it would sit there without getting bigger — until I was about 3 range rings from the Torrent. Then I’d do a quick Immelmann, apply the throttle, and head back south at high speed. When I reached the Torrent, I’d do another Immelmann, slow way down, and idle back towards the north. I had to do this three times before they decided I wouldn’t be sucked in, and threw in the next wave of fighters. The problem with this is that the goal is to protect the Torrent until repairs are complete, while the mission fails if you also run out the clock. I finished with less than 30sec to spare. You might want to head a little further north, knowing that you’ll have to scurry back to kill the gunboats. And while you are in your holding pattern, you might want to make a low pass by the Torrent. It’s pretty impressive.
The story advances with Ukumori once again showing that he considers anyone who gets themselves shot down to be a loser, unworthy of consideration. Meanwhile, Oroshina gets all aroused by the combat and challenges you to “fight me, Captain.” At least, I think that was an ‘f’. This is turning into The Great Waldo Pepper, as the only foe that Oroshina deems worthy of her skill is you.
Mission Description
This is the Dam Busters mission. Sort of. We’re back at Baruka, AKA Switzerland, attacking the dams we reconned in Mission 6. Actually, we’re not attacking the dams, we’re attacking the powerplant gadgets attached to their base. The basic concept is simple – you have three and a half minutes to fly in at low altitude and blast the powerplants and you’re done. No secondary mission, no swarms of Lautern fighters, no having to fight your way out. What makes it harder is the fact that we are required to hit all the targets simultaneously — being defined as within ten seconds of the clock running out. The powerplants have armor attachments that are impervious to everything, but when those are not deployed the powerplants are vulnerable to anything, including wing guns.
The flying part of the mission is relatively easy. You are running up a steep-walled valley, and as long as you don’t climb above the ridgeline you won’t violate the 1000m altitude restrictions on the mission. There’s no side-valley’s here, so you can’t get lost. You will encounter several gunboats on the river. If you want to shoot them up, go ahead. It adds points, but it also throws off your timing. The impression I get is that you can complete the mission as briefed if you hold to precisely 450km/hr. That’s hard to do if you slow down to strafe. It’s also hard to do when you are beset by headwinds and crosswinds. In fact, the big difference between the difficulty levels appears to be the strength of the winds. My recommendation is to cut across the shoulders of the right-hand turns (the river valley appears wider for those), and to swing a little wide and cut as close as you dare to the steeper walls on the left hand turns.
Weapons and Tactics
The end-game is simple. You come in under the rail bridge you used as a guide on Mission 6, line up on the target as it comes out of the mist, pull the trigger, and Bob’s your Uncle. Of course, you have to release your weapon at exactly the right time, or all is for naught. My recommendation here is that you use a forward-firing weapon with a high rate of fire and as long a range as you can get. For example, the EPB ‘explosive bullets’ gun on the Suiga has a range of 680m (compared with 650m on the wing guns), with a rate of fire of about two rounds per second. This lets you run a little bit behind on the clock, and still be able to reach out to the target when the time comes. Note that everything is dependent on you. If you are on time, then so are the others. If you are early, your hits don’t count. If you are late, their hits don’t count. Unlike real life, where you can have one or more strikes fail to hit the target, but still get one or more on the target set. Note also that if you are outside the bridge when Oroshina starts her countdown you are way too slow and should go full throttle at that point.
Comments
This is another place where the graphics decisions take away from the game. Judging from the credits, the game makers leased real satellite imagery from various government and civilian sources. Most of the time that works great — it really does look like you are flying over central Europe. Here, and in Mission 6, it doesn’t work out so well. Mapping imagery works best when taken at right angles to the terrain – you fly straight overhead and shoot straight down. Here, the pictures were taken looking straight down, but the terrain is tilted, and you are flying next to it. The result is that you are too close to the scenery, and the imagery is being draped over a very-nearly vertical terrain mass. The visual effect is over-magnification and smearing. In addition, the whole ‘mountains and valleys’ thing looks artificial, like it was made from papier mâché for a not-very-inspired science project.
The story advances through a private discussion (over Guard channel) between you and Kaida, which serves to set up the Shikibo event.
MISSION 11
Mission Description
This is the closest thing so far to a bunker-buster mission. It’s a 15 minute strike on a buried Lautern fortress on the slopes of Mount Etna (AKA Shikibo Yama), Sicily, complete with a play-by-play from another radio announcer. She’s not as excitable as the first one, but neither is she an Edward R. Murrow “This… is London” style reporter. As usual, Intelligence lied about the status of the big gun you’re trying to kill, and Operations lied about when the second wave will show up. The cannon, the Amoebic Dysentigrator or something, shoots shells the size of Volkswagons, and just its wake turbulence can bring a plane down. Too bad for Lautern that it takes so long to reload. Or maybe that’s good. I doubt their munitions budget could support a rapid fire ‘bic.
As a result of the support failures, two of the most experienced pilots are killed — does no-one have an ejection seat, or at least a parachute? — and Kaida goes all emo on Musume.
Weapons and Tactics
Meanwhile, you’re out there, trying to do a job. The best tactic is to fly nap-of-the-earth (NOE) so that you are below the line of fire of the AAA, until you get around the shoulder of the volcano. Then you can pop up and attack them from behind. You have to be really quick, because you clear the ridge only a second before you overfly the target. Drop your weapon, turn to follow the curve of the volcano, and go back NOE as soon as you clear the fortification walls. Run out two range rings, Immelmann back, drop the altitude you picked up, and come in over the other shoulder. On one iteration I tried flying all the way around the volcano, and got a smarmy “One of the Rostok fighters appears to be fleeing the area” from the radio announcer.
Pretty much any weapon will do. I prefer napalm or CBUs (AKA flame and powder bombs) because they give you a little leeway in timing your release. Regular bombs are too pinpoint, and guns, even the downward pointing kind, just encourage you to fly into things.
Your first couple of passes will be pretty meaningless, because there’s all that plot and dialog and emoting going on, and you have to wade through that before the game is ready to let you continue. I suppose that if you wanted to you could try just flying around out of sight of the Amoebic until the soap opera finishes. Once everybody settles down, the ‘bic is easy to kill. Just be sure you don’t come through so low that you hit the barrel of one of the flak guns on your way out.
Aftermath
At that point, Ukumore and the gang show up, and he starts dissing the guys that died, ’cause they were weak. This sets Kaida off, and we roll into a cutscene where he tries to shoot down Ukumore. When we get back to live action the clock resets to 15 minutes, and you find out it’s your job to shoot down Kaida. Oroshina wants to help, but Musume waves her off. Neither one of them exhibits much knowledge of air-to-air tactics during this discussion (“I can outflank him”). Once again you find yourself killing some time, staying alive with TCM maneuvers while Kaida has his say. If you manage to get close to him, his plane does one of those teleport moves, and he keeps talking. When the real fighting begins, you find that his aircraft can still outmaneuver yours, fly faster, fly backwards, etc. The fight takes place in a hellish triangle, with the volcano on one side, the glaring sun on the second, and what I assume is the horizonless, sunlit, gas cloud from the volcano on the third. You will find yourself wearing out the (A) button with all your TCMs, most of which don’t bring you very close to your target. In the end, you set Kaida’s plane on fire, and he crashes. No, first you have some funereal music and a last minute speech. It’s worse than Verdi.
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MISSION 12
Mission 12, Tokatsu* is billed as a 25 minute, deep penetration raid against a number of Lautern supply bases in the Savoy/Val d’Aosta region of the Alps. It turns out to be a strike on a secret lab, one that’s well protected by AAA.
Mission Description
The first part of the mission sets the routine. You have a flat spot in the mountains with a tower or two, barracks, a communications node, and some trip-A for protection. You fly in, shoot them up, and fly out. You do this four times, with no problems, but the fifth time opens up the hornet’s nest. More light AAA around the lab, a ring of heavy AAA in concrete positions on the ridgeline surrounding the base, and a half-dozen Lautern fighters stunting about.
The thing you rapidly find out is that the poor lighting conditions (it’s dusk), the weather (solid overcast, with lightning in the distance) and the mountainous terrain (tilted) make it hard to tell your true attitude and altitude. While your wingies appear to be able to fly dive bomb deliveries out of loops that keep them inside the perimeter fence, I’ve never been able to pull that off, so it’s back to the forward firing weapons.
I started flying a Seiei with a heavy gun, but died too many times — the HVG has the same range as the wing guns, with no noticeable increase in hitting power, but a lower firing rate. Then I switched to the Suiga with the EPB exploding bullets gun. It has a longer range, but fewer rounds available. Most of the time, I just used the wing guns.
Tactics are pretty much as usual for GA — make a pass, lining up as many targets as possible so you can get multiple kills; then up your speed and fly out until the target marker is approaching the second range ring, and Immelmann back for your next pass. Cut back on the throttle immediately after the turn, so you have time to line up. Try not to run into any towers (including what look like power towers marching over the ridgelines). On the fifth target, you can usually get two shots per pass — stuff around the lab, then one of the flak bunkers on your way out. The flak bunkers need a fairly precise hit and even the EPB gun wasn’t much of a help. It turned out I was better off spraying the bunker with the wing guns and hoping one round would hit the magic spot. Next time, I’ll probably go with the gun pods, start firing short of the target and let my flight path walk the bullet stream up across it. I’d ignore the fighters, unless one flies in front of me. Killing them doesn’t count towards mission accomplishment, and they don’t seem to be very aggressive, possibly because they don’t want to fly down into all that flak.
The story advances by one of the newbies asking about the female pilot the heard was in the unit, and being told that she’d “gone off on her own”. This is when you find out that Oroshina has defected to Lautern.
*My dictionaries show no entries for this word. For what it’s worth, it’s one letter short of tonkatsu, the word for fried pork cutlet.
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MISSION 13: Nabaru
Mission 13, Nabaru, is set in the same Austrian lake district setting as the Mission 7 wet-towel fight with Oroshina. This time you have 15 minutes to fly the chief engineer from your base in south-central Czechoslovakia to some place in Bavaria, so he can work on a new weapon they are building in Westphalia. Go figure.
Mission Description
You have no choice of aircraft or weapons. You are flying a midnight-black Senryu (which stands out really well against the green, sunlit hillsides), with only its wing guns for comfort. That’s OK, since this isn’t a shoot-em-up mission anyway.
Essentially, your job is to fly straight ahead as fast as you can, while various Lautern fighters make passes at you. Your job is made more complex by head and crosswinds, plus the inane comments of your passenger.
Tactics
What worked best for me was to climb as high as possible, before the Lauternians turn up, then go into a shallow dive to maintain the highest possible airspeed all the while fighting with gusts that can cut 150kph off your speed,. Then it’s pretty much a straight shot to the finish line. If a fighter makes a pass, you can Immelmann into him, then turn right back. If he’s directly behind you, you can sometimes TCM to get him in your sights and then Immelmann back, but your wing gun has a very slow firing rate, the enemy fighters usually teleport out of the way, and any time you spend not heading West is time lost.
About two-thirds of the way to your goal, Oroshina shows up and chews out the assembled multitudes over Guard, about them not being able to shoot down one slow recon plane. After you cross the line, the game switches over to a cutscene where she tells them that the pilot they faced was out of their league and they should all just go home.
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MISSION 14: Kiriki
Mission 14 is hard. At least, it’s hard at the Hard level. It’s not hard in the same way Mission 6 is hard, it’s hard because, well, it’s hard.
Mission Description
The industrial center at Kiriki (on what is probably the Elbe River, near real-world Magdeberg, Germany) is in trouble again. Kiriki was where we had to chase out a bunch of Lautern ground forces back in Mission 4. Now, we’ve chosen this same location — close to enemy ground forces, on a disputed river — as the best place to build our top secret weapon, the armoured dirigible Wolfram. The Lautern forces have caught wind of our clever plan and are sending a combined tank/heavy bomber attack. One of the things that makes this such a hard mission is that you have to switch from AA to AG and back.
The 30 minute mission starts with Our Gang sweeping into a cloud of Lautern fighters. The first ten seconds are exciting, as the two forces clash head-on, and explosions fill the sky. After a bit, an Arc Light cell of three enemy bombers comes in from the north, along with some escorts. Shoot them down, and another cell shows up. Shoot them down, and suddenly four columns of Lautern tanks appear on the east side of the river, protected by smoke. They stay in the smoke until they get to the bridge to the west side (where Wolfram is), when the smoke is cleared by wind gusts. The four columns cross two bridges (rather than lining up along the east side of the river and staying in the smoke), set up north and south of the Wolfram and proceed to fire at point blank range. Kill them off, and you are not yet done. A final cell of three bombers comes down from the north, and you have to kill them before you get your Mission Accomplished banner. I note that the Lauternians would have a lot harder time of it if we had bothered to put in some AAA and anti-tank defenses of our own, but maybe we thought that would give away the fact that we were building a secret weapon the size of the Astrodome there.
Weapons
The bombers are very hard to kill on the hard setting. As with Mission 12, you have to get a precise hit, and even the Suiga EPB gun doesn’t work any better than the wing guns; and the shotgun has proven once again to be useless. Besides, you have to have something for the tanks. If you use the wing guns, or any forward firing weapon, you keep flying into the ground. What I found works best is napalm or CBUs (flame/powder).
Tactics
On the hard setting, you find yourself swarmed with enemy fighters every time you line up on a target. The only way to keep this from happening is to kill as many of them as you can at the start, before the bombers arrive, and to pick off the bomber escort as you get a chance. You’ll be doing a lot of TCM here. When the bombers show up — B-24 configuration, no guns (also no indications of bombs dropping or hits on Wolfram, it’s a low budget game) — you find that they are incredibly slow, which makes them incredibly hard to hit. You’ll be hanging on a stall the whole way, unless…well, wait for the comments. You also have to worry about running into them, just as you did the transports back in Mission 3. The tactic I used was to approach head-on at a slightly higher altitude, and shoot the lead bomber in the face. You will be out of position for the second bomber, but you should be able to line up on the third one as you fly through the formation. When you get to the end, Immelmann around and drive back through what’s left of the formation from rear to front. If they get away from you, you’ll have to cut across their left turn off of the target, because you still have to kill them, even though they’ve dropped.
For the tanks, I’ve found that if you wait until they clear the smoke, it’s usually too late — they can do lots of damage while you are trying to hunt them down. That’s why an area weapon works best. You fly out to the east, turn back, and line up on the road they are on. When your pipper comes up on the smoke cloud you drop blind, and let the CBUs or napalm take out a whole line of tanks.
Comment
The requirements are so diverse that it’s hard to pick the best aircraft for this mission. You have to carry some good GA ordnance, yet be able to take on the bombers. You know what worked for me? The Senryu. Yep, the fat, slow, heavily armored recon bird. Most of the time when you are tangling with enemy fighters, you will be using TCM and MCM tactics. There’s just too many to chase down on your own. Senryu does TCM/MCM as well as anybody. On the other hand, it’s slow. That’s just what you need to hang on a bomber’s tail and run your wing guns ’till they overheat. There are other aircraft with lower stall speeds, but the Sen is just naturally slow. Finally, it has the best defensive stats of any of the fighters. You are going to get jumped while your attention is concentrated on a bomber, and the Sen can just sit there and take it, shedding parts and skin patches. Of course, you risk dying of embarassment.
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MISSION 15: Ubasama
With the tolling of bells and somber, funereal, music we find ourselves back over Ubasama, City of Eternal Winter Twilight. This time we are chasing Ukumori, Ishitobi, and Watari as they try to defect to Lautern, but we don’t have the radio color commentator we had on Mission 2.
Mission Description
It’s twenty minutes of air-to-air against the three defectors and their Lauternite friends, followed by twenty minutes of air-to-air against Ukumuri. Your job is to shoot them down. Their job is to run out the clock. Their job is easier.
Tactics
As usual, there’s always a bunch of Lautern second stringers hanging around, hoping to pull a Roy Brown on you. Whenever you engage one of the primary targets you will find one of these urchins trying to swing your wingline. If the opportunity arises to shoot one down, do so. It will make your life easier as the fight continues, and it’s easy to do. A level-one TCM puts them right in your sights. If you are going after one of the primary targets, you will be lucky if a level-one TCM leaves them on the same screen. The other way to use the second string targets is as get out of trouble cards. You will often find one of the defectors coming up fast behind you. You could MCM out of trouble, or you could hit the (+) button a couple of times and see if a TCM opportunity pops up. If it does, take it. They can’t shoot you down while you are showing off your stunt pilot maneuvers.
Usually, the first defector you shoot down is Watari, if only to shut him up. After a while, it’s just you against Ukumori and Ishitobi. For the first time we see actual teamwork in an air engagement. If you attack them, they run away, much faster than your plane can go (so, why don’t they just keep going, to the O-Club at Altengrabow-Leubars or wherever?). When you turn back, they spin on a dime and are on you before you can say knife. When you target one of them, the other maneuvers to get on your tail. A most impressive performance.
The best way to counter this is to turn their tactics against them. If they run away, you turn back into the clearer air over the city at high speed, so they have to chase you. When they get within one range ring of your plane (which they do very quickly), then MCM back at them and slow down. If, when you lock on to one of them, they turn away, immediately switch lock to the other, because he’ll be trying to get set up for an attack. Use TCM whenever possible — you don’t stand much of a chance otherwise.
After a while, it’s just you and Ukumori and, depending on how successful you were earlier, you get a quick cutscene where he’s telling his Lautern wingies to head home, he’ll take it from here, or he realizes he’s on his own and proclaims his intention to shoot you down. You then start another 20min sequence where it’s just you and him. The usual occurs — his plane turns on a dime, yours turns to a pig; his plane can fly after chunks the size of a 747 wing have come off, yours turns yellow if you fly through his cartridge cases. This is where you find that your radar doesn’t work in cloud. Who knew?
Weapons
It is useful to have upgraded whatever aircraft you use. Go into the hangar and you’ll see that by getting to Mission 15 you will have scored enough points to acquire some improved air-to-air targeting, better engine, and armor. I’d sacrifice speed for all of these, because you aren’t going to outrun Ukumori’s Itsuha, even if you had an upgunned D-558. The key thing (at the Hard level) is to have a high rate of fire. The more rounds you can put out in half a second, the better your chances of hitting their tiny vulnerables.
In some cases, when you switch to the second half of the mission, your aircraft reloads. So it’s OK to expend most of your strap-on rounds getting through the first half. In others, you are left with just your wing guns. Not sure why that happens, but in the no-reload scenario I had let Watari escape.
When you finally win, your reward is to be ordered to head up to Kiriki, where Mosume is activating his fiendish plan.
This mission is all about the story, and the defectors, and the reasons behind their defections, and their philosophy of warfare, and their belief that they can shoot you down and on and on and on. Killings too good for them.
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MISSION 17
Mission 17 is another fighter sweep, this one prearranged, far from the Cougar base and over medieval Mont St Michele, the famous French island abbey with the high tides – here called Togakuten(which might have something to do with musical grammar). The mission turns out to be a three parter. It’s tough enough that I haven’t finished Part 3 yet, but I thought I’d put up my experiences so far.
Part 1 (furball)
In Part 1 you fight against a cloud of Lauterns. There’s so many that you have to rely pretty much entirely on TCM for your kills. Once you have shot down enough enemy, the others run away, and you are left facing their super-ace, Oroshina, in a Sanka 2
Part 2 (with spoilers)
A couple of passes against Oroshina and the fight drifts over the abbey, which turns out to house a flak trap — large and medium guns mounted mostly atop the high (800m, e.g. 175 stories, about the height of Burj Dubai*) medieval towers. Your job in Part 2 is to shoot up as many of the guns as possible. Unfortunately, if you get very high up you become vulnerable to the guns. If you stay below 500m or so you are sortof safe because they can’t shoot down at you. Equally unfortunately, you can’t see them to kill them from below, and no, just blowing the top off the tower with a rocket pack doesn’t work. What you have to do is fly out at least two rings on your radar, Immelmann back and pop up to 900m or so, then bore in at high speed, kill the target, and immediately go nap of the earth on the other side. Since most of your weapons have a distinct reload time, you only get one shot, so the secret is to press really close before you fire. Kill enough guns and Oroshina suggests you move elsewhere and continue the fight at low altitude and why couldn’t she have thought of that earlier?
Part 3 (with whines)
This is a straightforward, 10 minute, air to air, one on one, mano a ….kildren dogfight. When you pop into this mode, Oroshina is in your gunsights, and you have to be ready to pour a lot of firepower into her from the beginning. If you were in ‘bombs’ mode from the last episode, too bad, she’s out of there before you can select ‘guns’. This is your only chance for a clean shot at her, so be ready.
The trouble with this phase of the combat is, the game cheats. Continuously. First is the problem of the invulnerable enemy. Previously, if you put enough of a burst into an enemy plane to make pieces fly off, you could switch to another target while the first one went into a spin and exploded. Not here. On my first try, I got lucky with an early lockon, and put so many rounds into Oroshina’s airplane that my wing guns overheated. Smoke, explosions, flashes, lots of big chunks, excitement. Didn’t faze her in the least (“Oh, you hit me”). That was early on, of course, and they might have had some sort of oratory planned for later. But it didn’t seem to matter how far into the scenario we were, or how many parts-fall-off bursts I hit her with, she never slowed down. This is using both wing guns and the rapid fire pods. Second problem was the radar, which had a tendency to go blank, even when I could see her airplane, or to go to its standard 5km ring display, even when she was within 1km of me, which kept me from seeing how she was maneuvering. Finally was the teleportation cheat, where the enemy fighter suddenly translates 100m to the side and rotates 180degrees. I encountered some kind of teleportation effect whenever she was anywhere near my gunline. This also impacted TCM play. I almost never got more than a quarter-second lock above TCM-1. If I didn’t hit (A) the instant the bar went to one, I lost the chance.
After all that, it’s hardly worth mentioning that her Sanka 2 was outmaneuvering me right and left, despite the fact that my Itsuha had a good 5 dgrees/sec turn rate on her. She’d fly past, blasting me well before I was in gun range, then spin, and curve around to make a side pass before I could get a MCM to work. I managed to capture an example of this on the replay. Her plane came from head-on, curved around behind me, and then outran mine. Talk about flying rings around me.
Comments (and countercheats)
I still haven’t cleared this level yet, but it looks like you need to hit Oroshina with some big ordnance in order to do any good – when I selected the gunpods, it told me they weren’t suitable for the antiaircraft mission. It didn’t mind the rapid fire gun, however. Oroshina gets better and better (i.e. cheats more) as the mission goes on, so you have to get your hits early.
Since it’s likely you will get shot down, or run out of time in Part 3, there’s some things you can do to improve your chances on the restart. One is to change your plane/weapons pack. I found that the strafing gun worked well on the flak towers (although the CBU might work as well). When the time came to restart, I switched to the rapid fire gun. Note that the restart (or maybe restart with plane change) will zero out all damage, and you start with a fresh plane.
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*OK, so the towers start halfway up the island, which means that from the base of the wall to the top of the tower is only 400meters – about the height of the former World Trade Center in NY. I note that the biggest Nazi flak tower in Berlin was only 54meters tall.
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