First operation
The tutorial is out of date for DCS Liberation 3.0. See the other sections of the manual for help. If you want to help us update the tutorial, join the #doc-maintenance channel in our discord.
Now that you're on turn 1, you should see some messages about reinforcements and mission planning in the info panel at the bottom of the screen:
The goal of the campaign is to capture all the enemy control points. To do so, you will need to:
- Help your ground units progress to the enemy bases.
- Destroy enemy aircraft.
- Destroy enemy buildings (they provide the enemy with income).
- Destroy enemy air defenses.
On the map, you can see that the frontline between Gudauta and Sochi Adler is active.
Ground units purchased at Gudauta will be positioned along this front line. By default your ground units will adopt a defensive stance and wait for the enemy. To push toward Sochi, set their stance in the Ground Forces HQ (discussed in the previous tutorial)
See the Front line stances guide for a description of each stance.
Planning your own missions is covered in the next tutorial, but you still need to choose a flight to play as. This is done by adding "client slots" to a flight.
To add a client slot, choose a package in the Air Tasking Order (ATO) panel on the left, and then double click the group you want to fly. In this example I've selected a BARCAP flight protecting Gudauta.
Click the up arrow next to the client slot count to add a slot for a player.
After closing this window, the UI will update to account for the player slot. Because players cannot start most aircraft in under a minute like the AI does, adding cold start client slots may cause the flight's mission start time to change, possibly to a time before the start of the game, as seen below.
You can either automatically resolve this when launching the mission, or double click the package in the panel above the flight and adjust the package's time-over-target (TOT). This is discussed further in the next tutorial. For now, just click the "ASAP" button so we can take off as soon as possible.
Click on take off to start the mission:
It may take some time to generate the mission. When complete, a window will appear with more instructions:
Do not close this Window until your mission is complete. Generated missions are only valid for as long as this window is open. If you need to make changes to your plan, close the window, make your changes, and then press take off again. You will need to load the newly generated mission.
If the window does not appear, check the command prompt window that opened with Liberation and look for error messages in the log. You will likely need to file a bug.
Launch DCS World, open the mission editor, and open the mission liberation_nextturn that should have been generated in the default mission folder.
Start the mission.
The mission briefing will contain information about your flight.
If you are prompted to choose a slot, pick the one you setup for you. If there is only one slot available (and no Combined Arms mission commander) it will be chosen automatically.
Play the mission. Most of the information you will need to complete your mission is present in the kneeboard (right shift K by default, use [] and ] to change pages).
This was a BARCAP mission, so follow your flight plan to the mission location and then orbit between the two race track points (waypoints 1 and 2 in this case) until the departure time (17:51:53 local). Once complete, RTB and close the mission.
Note: This section was written for an older version of DCS Liberation. The text is accurate, but the screenshots are out of date.
Once you exit the mission in DCS World, in DCS Liberation a mission result window will appear, click on Accept results and then OK to proceed to next turn. If Liberation hasn't detected that the mission has ended, click on the Manually Submit button, then select the state.json file (it should be within the Liberation folder by default).
Then click on Okay
Depending on your results, the frontline will progress in your favor or not. Here since we destroyed way more units than the enemy while on the offensive, we made progress toward Sochi!
Now repeat until the end of the war! Have fun playing DCS Liberation!