Air Defense and the Air War

Air defense and the air war

414Ret reworks how a Retribution campaign plans its air war so it behaves like a campaign rather than a queue of isolated sorties. The auto-planner holds interceptors in reserve, lays overlapping and threat-weighted fighter coverage, anchors its support orbits on the front, refuses to send bombers through a live SAM belt, and keeps mobile short-range defences off your datalink so you plan SEAD against the sites that matter. This page explains each piece and how it changes what you see when you build packages.

For the per-task fragging detail (SEAD vs DEAD, BARCAP timing, escorts), see Mission-planning.

QRA intercept reserve

Squadrons can hold aircraft back in a QRA (quick-reaction alert) intercept reserve for runtime base defence, instead of having every airframe fragged into the ATO.

• The reserve is per squadron (intercept_reserve), clamped by owned aircraft and available untasked pilots. Aircraft in the reserve are not auto-fragged — they wait on alert.
• At runtime, raids that close on a defended base scramble interceptors via a Moose AI_A2A_DISPATCHER. Many alert bases each put up a small response (a 1-ship / 2-ship mix), so a raid draws interceptors from several directions rather than one base launching a big formation.
• Defaults are a base-defence posture: QRA scrambles only when a raid closes within a set radius and interceptors chase a limited distance, so QRA does not screen forward over the FLOT. Both are live Campaign Doctrine settings (qra_gci_max_radius_nm, qra_engagement_range_nm), so you can re-tune them per campaign.

The reserve is edited in the air-wing / squadron dialogs; see Air-Wing-Configuration. The old ramp-scramble system is retired — QRA is the only live reactive-A2A path.

Reworked BARCAP coverage

Defensive fighter coverage was reworked so contested sectors get more and the whole line gets useful forward coverage, while quiet flanks keep baseline behaviour:

• Overlapping, jittered waves. Land-CP BARCAP is scheduled as overlapping waves with a jittered first wave, instead of front-loaded back-to-back waves that all arrive at mission start (which let attackers simply wait the CAP out). The barcap_overlap_time doctrine setting controls the overlap; 0 reproduces the legacy schedule.
• Forward CAP line. Coverage now also defends any friendly CP that anchors an active front line, so raids inbound to rear income points are screened — not just bases close to an enemy airfield.
• Threat-weighted volume and placement. How many BARCAP waves a defended CP receives, and how far forward the orbit sits, both scale with the air threat to that CP (proximity and number of A2A-capable enemy aircraft within range, plus a floor for active fronts). This is additive only — a contested sector earns up to roughly double the waves and a forward orbit; a zero-threat CP gets exactly the legacy coverage. Coverage never regresses below the baseline.
• Red forward-middle BARCAP layer (large maps). On a big map, a red front CP whose nearest blue field is off-axis would otherwise fling its screen far from the FLOT. 414Ret adds one extra BARCAP, placed roughly halfway from the rear CP to the FLOT and parallel to the front, in addition to the unchanged rear/base BARCAP. It is map-scaled (only fires when the rear orbit can't already cover the front), front-relative (no hardcoded distances), and red-side only.

The result: when you fly into a hot sector, expect layered, overlapping red CAP that commits on you sooner; quiet flanks stay thin.

Front-anchored support orbits

AWACS and tanker racetracks are anchored on the active front line and stand off into friendly airspace, rather than being computed from a single control point's bearing (which swung off-axis as the front moved, and could pin a tanker onto its own home runway).

• Support orbits centre on the FLOT nearest the supported area, then push back into friendly airspace along the stable enemy→friendly axis until they clear the enemy threat zone by the configured buffer.
• The player coalition holds forward (closer behind the FLOT, for coverage); the AI coalition holds deeper, so red tankers and AWACS don't loiter near the front.

Theater tanker placed on receiver demand

A shared theatre tanker is repositioned after the ATO is built, onto the count-weighted centre of the flights that actually need fuel (honouring boom vs probe compatibility), instead of orbiting wherever the planning anchor happened to land. Same-package buddy tankers are not moved; if there is no compatible demand the tanker keeps its front anchor. So the tanker tends to sit where your thirsty flights converge.

DEAD reachability gate

The planner no longer sends strikers through a SAM belt it only intends to clear. When a strike is shielded behind a radar SAM, the planner schedules a DEAD against that SAM — but it only treats the SAM as removed (and releases the dependent strike) if the DEAD's actual routed flight plan can reach the site without crossing another live radar-SAM ring.

• If the DEAD can't range past the belt, the SAM stays modelled as alive, and the strike that depends on it stays deferred until real battle-damage confirms the kill on a later turn — rather than bombers being tasked into defences that are still up and then turned around by threat-reaction ROE without dropping anything.
• A close SAM whose DEAD route is clear is still cleared the same turn, so legitimate same-turn SEAD-escort-then-strike sequences are unaffected.

Practically: deep strikes wait for the belt to be genuinely peeled, layer by layer, instead of flying optimistically into live rings.

Mobile SAMs hidden from the MFD

Mobile short-range defences are kept off player datalinks so the SEAD/DEAD picture shows the sites worth a deliberate package:

• SHORAD, AAA, and MANPAD units are hidden from the datalink — including short-range escorts generated inside an armour or missile-site group, which would otherwise leak onto the link.
• Standalone radar SAM sites (mobile MERAD/LORAD — SA-6/11, SA-2/3/5/10 and similar) stay visible and targetable, so you can still plan SEAD/DEAD against them.

When you frag suppression, you're aiming at the radar threats that warrant it, not chasing every ZSU on the link. Pair this with the Approximate target area mode and DEAD/SEAD flights get a single fuzzed target-area waypoint per mobile SAM rather than a precise steerpoint per launcher — visual acquisition matters. See Mission-planning for the SEAD/DEAD task detail.

Reactive, loitering SEAD

The fork's AI SEAD can loiter near the target, react to emitters, and break off on a computed timeline, instead of making a single inflexible pass and leaving. Combined with reactive radar shutdown from the IADS engine (below), this means SEAD is best planned as genuine suppression that holds the radar down while DEAD closes the kill — not as a reliable emitter-killer on its own.

Auto-planner unpredictability (doctrine knob)

A campaign reads as "scripted" when the enemy hits the same targets in the same order every turn. An opt-in, per-side doctrine knob varies which opportunistic offensive targets the enemy services first:

• ownfor_planner_unpredictability and opfor_planner_unpredictability (0–100, default 0). At 0 the planner is exactly the deterministic strict-priority planner; as the value rises, lower-priority opportunistic targets become progressively more likely to be picked first, while the top target stays the most likely pick.
• It applies only to opportunistic offensive tasking (strike, anti-ship, OCA, BAI, and the non-threatening DEAD tiers). Reactive threat response stays strictly deterministic — BARCAP scheduling, escort sizing, the QRA dispatcher, and SAMs actually threatening a planned target are never randomised. Variety never delays a real defensive reaction.

Raise the opfor value if red's offensive target choice feels too repetitive; its air defences stay just as sharp.

IADS engine

The runtime integrated air-defence system is what makes enemy SAMs network, hand off tracks, and shut their radars down reactively — and it's why a HARM is less likely to score an emitter kill than against a dumb SAM, and why DEAD's bomb/ATGM kill is often the only reliable way to remove a networked site.

MANTIS is the default engine for new campaigns, with Skynet still selectable; existing saves keep whichever engine they were created with (a save-state pin). The engine, how the two differ, and the advanced comms/power/command-center degradation graph have their own page:

→ IADS Engines: MANTIS and Skynet for what the engine does, MANTIS vs Skynet, advanced IADS, and how to choose.

See also

• Mission-planning — packages, TOT timing, and the full per-task detail (SEAD/DEAD decision guide, BARCAP, escorts).
• Air-Wing-Configuration — squadron setup and the QRA reserve.
• IADS Engines: MANTIS and Skynet — the runtime engine behind enemy air defenses.
• Electronic Warfare and ISR — the C-130J jammer/ELINT platform.
• Fog-of-War-and-Reconnaissance — recon fog and the overview reveal toggle that shows true threat rings.
• Getting-Started — first-campaign walkthrough.