Victory in Australia

At 0900 Toronto time this morning, the Australian edition of Virtual No.401 Squadron's Finest Hour Battle of Britain 75th Anniversary Commemorative Campaign concluded with victory for the RAF and Great Britain.

All throughout today, the six various timezones will conclude their 70 day, one-to-one simulation of the Battle of Britain.

VBoB day! First, thanks for doing this Wolverine, truly outstanding and incredibly fun campaign to fly. At risk of asking 'to early', have you given any thought to what comes next? If I may say, I would love a do-over of this, but have the NE timezone run ONLY Friday and Saturday, giving fewer chances for repairs, or even slow repair rates down so the LW can make some progress and get a go at all the targets eventually. Its just a thought for the sake of conversation, all I know is that if there is anything going on on fridays/saturdays, and I'm able to make it, I will look forward to it!

Thanks and ~S~ to 401 and 450 sqdns!

S! Freya,

I'm not sure what will come next. There are some adjustments that would probably need to be made to the Finest Hour mission in order to make it more competitive based on the number of players we had and their dispersal amongst the two teams, however those changes would be based entirely on actual play data for the past 70 days and may or may not unbalance the game if those player counts shift again.

Fully active player based bomber groups had a very easy time destroying the RAF. The timezones where only AI were used as the main bombing force had a much more difficult time getting results. The design of the mission was intended to give player based bomber groups a chance to shine, and I feel that this has been accomplished. The Luftwaffe's AI bomber groups are meant to act as more of a smoke screen and allow player flown bombers a higher chance of reaching a target while flying in historical manner (in formation at height). The will occasionally do moderate to heavy damage to targets, but conditions for this must be exactly correct (wind, direction of wind, etc.). The AI does not make adjustments, unfortunately.

As it stands, at the end of the day I will be uploading the entire set of campaign files for free download by anyone who wants them. The nice thing about this campaign is that you don't need to install anything or have SQL experience to make it work. It's plug and play with perhaps a bit of attention needed paid to the file folder names. It handles auto-resetting the mission when someone wins the battle as well. It will also run just fine as a locally hosted mission, no dedicated server required. If a group of friends want to play this mission on their own and don't have a dedicated server, they can do it.

I'm quite proud of this mission. It's a culmination of a lot of skills that I've picked up over the course of the last three to four years. I'd hoped we might get a few more people to play it during the commemorative campaign, but it is what it is. Perhaps by releasing it publicly, more people will get a chance to see it and play it and enjoy it. Even better, maybe some people will dig into the .cs file and learn a few things to help them with their own missions.

More than anything, though, building this mission and hosting this campaign has been meant as a tribute and honour to all the pilots, ground crew, radar operators, observers, and all others who fought and won the Battle of Britain 75 years ago. No one, absolutely no one, should be under any illusion that if the RAF hadn't stood up to the Luftwaffe as effectively as they did, Europe would not look like it does today. A day hasn't gone by since we started where I haven't checked in to see if anyone was flying on the server. If I was home and available I made sure that I was ready to jump in and defend our virtual England. In my tiny simulated way, I hope I gained a little bit of insight into the constant readiness that everyone must have had to experience during the battle.

But in short, I don't know what we're going to do next. The server has been good to us, but it's hard to justify the cost of the server, the teamspeak, the forum, the ftp, etc. for a few hours a week. We'll have to see what happens.