Troops In Contact

Troops In Contact

Troops In Contact (TIC) replaces vanilla DCS ground AI at the front line with prolonged, formation-aware firefights. Instead of letting stock ground AI instantly erase a frontline engagement, TIC keeps maneuver units in formation, has them trade theatrical suppressive fire, and moves them according to each side's combat stance — so the ground battle is something you can actually fly close air support over for the length of a sortie.

TIC is a plugin, default ON. You can toggle it per campaign on the LUA Plugins Options page ("Troops In Contact").

What TIC changes at the front

• Prolonged firefights. Frontline tank/IFV/APC/ATGM groups become formation-keeping TIC combatants that hold a fighting line and exchange fire over a battle arc sized to roughly 1.5–2 hours, rather than annihilating each other in seconds.

• Ambient suppressive fire. The 414th extension adds area "suppression" fire: a combatant with no line-of-sight target has a chance each firing cycle to lob a salvo near the closest enemy formation within about 6 km — tracers arc over line-of-sight blockers, but the fire is not aimed for lethality. It makes the line look and sound alive without turning into a mass-casualty event.

• Per-stance movement. Each formation moves according to its combat stance, so the two sides don't run the same script and collide as a symmetric wall:

  Stance	Behavior
  Aggressive	Standoff fighting distance, light slide-and-press assault
  Breakthrough	Straight thrust, deeper penetration, faster cadence
  Elimination	Repeated slide/press cycles to hunt line-of-sight
  Defensive	Dig in at standoff range, occasional low-chance counterattack
  Ambush	Most rearward hold, never counterattacks
  Retreat	A single fallback leg

• Distributed FLOT formations. Frontline groups are spread along the line rather than piled onto one patch of terrain, so the front reads as a line of contact instead of a single blob.

• Staggered cadence. Movement is staggered per group so the line ripples forward instead of lurching all at once.

How it changes CAS / BAI gameplay

Because TIC keeps the battle alive, the front becomes a persistent CAS and BAI environment. The scripted fire produces only sparse near-miss kills by design — the real attrition source is you. The campaign front moves on player kills, not on TIC's own fire, so flying CAS over a contested sector genuinely matters to how the ground war develops.

Known limitation: StormTrooper AI

With TIC's StormTrooper AI on (the default), TIC cloaks its managed units from DCS AI sensors. That means AI CAS flights and the AI JTAC cannot detect the enemy frontline — only human CAS works against it. If you want AI ground combat visible to AI air, turn StormTrooper off in the plugin options; you trade some of the scripted-battle polish for real-AI detectability.

See also

• Frontline-Stances-and-Movement