[Dead spotters calling in fire missions - Engine bug or mission design?]

4 hours ago, Artkin said:

Actually I didnt see you say you reloaded your save. How far into the game did you kill the observer?

It was turn 60 when the first air attack happened. Then on the very next turn, I killed the spotters. So it wasn't a setup phase fire mission. Around turn 75 was when they called in the second fire mission over a KM away from the initial fire mission.

 

 

6 hours ago, IanL said:

No, they should not be able to. The way things are designed there are a couple of things that can happen: There could be pre-planned missions, they do not require a living FO or Air Controller because the details have already been worked out. That may not be entirely realistic but I'm pretty sure it will work that way. Another thing that can happen is the call was made and then the FO or AC died. In reality that probably would not work but in the game currently it will. The Air attacks don't require spotting so once they are called they will arrive. For the artillery the mission goes ahead after a long spotting interval even if the spotting does not get corrected. This does not reflect reality, of course, but its how the game works.

An AI script planned air or artillery attack or target of opportunity that doesn't have a caller is an interesting issue. I had not thought of that and I'm not sure how that should work.

I think you might have hit the nail on the head here. The past few times I've attempted this mission, Russian air support always comes at turn 60 so I believe it is a pre-scripted fire mission. It's just not in the same place every time. If the Russians have visual on any of my units, the fire mission gets called on them, but if they have no visual on my units, it seems to always default to my deployment zone. The thing that is still weird though is the fact that if this was a pre-planned mission with the details manually worked out by the scenario designer, why would the fire mission jump around from different locations as if it was a live non-scripted fire mission? Is it possible to script fire missions that target spotted units, but also default to a specific location if no units are spotted? Because that would explain everything there.

Also it might be the second case you described where I might have killed them on the very turn they called the mission, but then that would mean their air support takes over 15 minutes to arrive which seems too long. Then again, I've never played as Russia yet so I don't know if 15 mins for air support to arrive is normal on Iron difficulty. I would assume the average is like 10 minutes.

Ultimately though, I think its safe to say its not a game issue, but just how this particular mission is put together. I've also never experienced this issue on any other mission so I'm thinking the designer has some funky things going on with the Russian air assets. I've never really messed around too much in the editor so I don't really know what it's fully capable of doing, especially with fire missions, but your response definitely is pushing me in the right direction. One of these days, I need to find a way to open this mission in the editor to see what exactly is going on.

[Dead spotters calling in fire missions - Engine bug or mission design?]

While playing the final mission in the Shield of Kiev campaign, I noticed a really weird issue. In this mission, Russia has a lot of air support. After losing 3 BTRs that were hidden in the forest to Russian air, I suspected something was not right so I ceased fire in order to use the AAR to discover the location of the Air Traffic Controllers that called in the fire mission. I then reloaded my save and killed the observers to test whether or not the air support would stop. It did stop momentarily, but exactly 16 minutes/turns later, I lose a BTR on the other side of the map to another air attack. Again, I ceased fire to see who called in that fire mission and surely enough, the observers that I killed 16 turns before gained another BTR kill. Does anyone know how this would be possible? Can dead units call in fire missions or is this just a bug in the mission design? I'm not sure if you can force a unit in the editor to call fire missions at a certain time, and whether or not their death would conflict with those orders. Maybe that's what's happening here?