Been trying and failing at the third A-10A campaign mission. There appear to be two variants, and I've failed at both.
One of the variants has you take out a trio of artillery behind enemy lines. Turns out that the trio of vehicles near the actual waypoint are in fact trucks, not artillery. The target artillery is way off to the side, I discovered as I wasted all my mavericks on a handful of trucks. While trying to get closer to use bombs, I took a SAM and exploded.
Next up was a mission to take out a trio of tanks. Hey, I can do this! Except that the tanks are hidden in clutter and nowhere near the orange smoke they send up, and extremely spread out. There was also a flight of F/A-18s that I was hoping would be doing some SEAD, but no such luck. I was dodging medium range SAMs the whole time, and ended up dying to some MANPADs.
Then, back to the artillery mission. I turned on labels this time, because frustration...and I still fell prey to the three trucks closer to the waypoint than the artillery. Those are three dead trucks, though. Died to a SAM while trying to get closer.
Whoever they have determining the threat level of these missions should be fired. There's not "moderate AAA and short-range IR SAMs." There's heavy SAM coverage, both short-range IR and long-range radar. The low zoom level of the Mavericks means I can't really distinguish targets from afar the way I could in the Su-25T, and the penalty for picking the wrong target is much higher since I only have 6 Mavericks vs. 16 Vikhrs + a handful of Kh-25ML/-29Ls. Getting in close for guns or bombs seems to be suicide, as far as I can tell.
Kind of at a loss as to how this is supposed to work. Going to give it one more go (the artillery version), with labels on, now that I'm very aware of the stupid trucks, and we'll see if I can even manage it then.
---------- Post added at 02:23 ---------- Previous post was at 01:45 ----------
Ended up finishing it this time around, and tagged a couple Mi-24s while I was at it. Yay. Having the labels on really helps with targeting the Mavericks, since I get more detail out of the little red dots on the terrain than I do out of the Maverick's IR view... Feels like cheating, though, and while I was getting pretty confident with the Su-25T towards the end, I'm not really sure how I would be able to pull this off without labels on the A-10A, short of running the mission multiple times to find the exact target locations...
Forgot to mention it in my first post, but this mission also had a really hefty crosswind, to the point where the velocity vector was off the HUD when landing...
Nice! Thanks!
