A few questions

[Arcas]

Hi, I'm trying to host a SEOW campaign and i have a few questions.

1. What attributes I can use in the Commanding column in the pilotdata table from the database?

2. Commanders can upgrade units using the interface or the only option to upgrade a unit is to ask the admin to use the reinforcements feature?

3. After you upgrade a unit I guess you can't build the new upgraded unit using the factories if you have the "Only production materiel in template" option selected in DCS. But i guess you can build it if you have the "Only producing active materiel" option selected. If this is right, let's say you had 10 BF-109G-2 and you lost them all, after that you played one more mission without having any BF-109G-2, can you still build BF-109G-2's after that by having the "Only producing active materiel" option selected?

I'm sure I have more questions, but i don't remember them now. Thank you in advance and sorry for my English.

[IV/JG7_4Shades]

Welcome Arcas! (your English is excellent)

Here are some answers:

1. What attributes I can use in the Commanding column in the pilotdata table from the database?

You should either leave this field blank or use "READONLY". It is sometimes more convenient to use the "Commanders" tool in the "Manage Campaign" page to manage the user accounts, than to do manual editing of the PilotData table. It was originally intended to (optionally) limit commanders to commanding specific units by entering the relevant unit names in the Commanding field, but this has not yet been done.

2. Commanders can upgrade units using the interface or the only option to upgrade a unit is to ask the admin to use the reinforcements feature?

SEOW tries to be as literal as possible. Upgrading in WW2 usually involved withdrawing a unit from service, then recommissioning it with a new model (plane, tank, ship etc) and bringing it back into service. That's what a commander has to do in SEOW too. All new/replacement materiel is managed via the reinforcement pool which is established either by admin intervention or through factory production.

3. After you upgrade a unit I guess you can't build the new upgraded unit using the factories if you have the "Only production materiel in template" option selected in DCS. But i guess you can build it if you have the "Only producing active materiel" option selected. If this is right, let's say you had 10 BF-109G-2 and you lost them all, after that you played one more mission without having any BF-109G-2, can you still build BF-109G-2's after that by having the "Only producing active materiel" option selected?

Correct. Having the "template" production scheme enabled will limit you to the types that appear in your template. If you have the "active" production setting enabled and you lose all objects of a specific type you will still be able to produce that type of object as long as you don't "dissolve all destroyed units". The reason for this is that the destroyed units stay in the list of units on the map mission by mission, and it is this list that determines the "active" types for production. Dissolving destroyed units removes them from the list.

Now, here is a handy tip. If you use "unrestricted" or "historical" production settings you will get the kind of production flexibility you like, but will probably end up with hundreds of production types which are not suited to you scenario. What we do at SEOW HQ is disable all the types we don't want by editing the Object_Specifications table and setting the
Nationality field to "z" (only "r", "g" and "n" are recognized settings). Anything with "z" will be ignored by SEOW. Of course, if you only want a few production types, simply change all to "z" by a SQL query and then manually redefine the ones you want.

Cheers,
4Shades

[Arcas]

Thank you for the answers. One more question.

After I built some planes using the factories, I got them in the reinforcements pool, I tried to get them on the map, but after I made missions (to send them from the supply points to airfields) for a few planes, I got out of squadrons. Can you create new squadrons for the new planes? Or can you make many empty squadrons when you start the campaign?

[IV/JG7_4Shades]

Hi Arcas,

Just edit the Airforce_Units table and set the "Campaign_Sector" for some new Regiments (on both sides probably) to the sector that you are using. Then refresh your MP page.

Cheers,
4Shades

[Arcas]

Thank you for the answer.

A few more questions:

1. How can you transport the off-map fuel reserves? With the cars I guess you just send them to a supply point and the next mission you can load fuel into them, but with the transport planes? You must withdraw them?

2. What happens if i make a flight with 4 planes that must land on some airfield and 3 of them land on that airfield and the 4th lands on some other airfield? I ask this because I saw if you send in a mission only 2 planes from a group of 4 you can set their landing waypoint only on the airfield from that they took off. (edit: I tested this, I made waypoints for a group with 3 planes to take off from an airfield and land on other airfield, I took the 3rd plane and I landed on the same airfield from which I took off, while the other 2 planes landed on the other airfield, after DCS analyzed the mission, in MP all 3 planes where on the airfield on which the landing waypoint was. This is a limitation of IL-2?)

3. Related to the last question, commanders can split a group of planes? For example, in my test campaign, I made a flight with 2 recon planes in the template and now in MP they are grouped and in missions I can send only one (it's saying that you can't send a flight with more than 1 recon plane) and I would also like to send them to different locations, it's possible to split that group? Preferably from the MP, without accessing the database.

4. Engineers can repair factories too? In my test campaign it seems they did, but on the wiki it's saying that they can repair only bridges.

5. Can we change the airfields fuel capacity?

Sorry for the basic questions, but my testing time is kinda limited and I couldn't find the answers on the wiki or on this forum.

[IV/JG7_4Shades]

Hi Arcas,

If you don't ask questions you never learn!

1. How can you transport the off-map fuel reserves? With the cars I guess you just send them to a supply point and the next mission you can load fuel into them, but with the transport planes? You must withdraw them?

For vehicles, trains and ships, just move them close to a resupply point. Then load up fuel as freight and drive off again. For aircraft, either withdraw them (to an Air Withdraw Point) or simply send them to an Off Map base (Air Supply Point). If you withdraw them, you will have to recommission them and then load up fuel. If you transfer them to an Off Map base, they will maintain their unit affiliation and you will be able to load fuel as freight and fly them back into the map.

2. What happens if i make a flight with 4 planes that must land on some airfield and 3 of them land on that airfield and the 4th lands on some other airfield? I ask this because I saw if you send in a mission only 2 planes from a group of 4 you can set their landing waypoint only on the airfield from that they took off. (edit: I tested this, I made waypoints for a group with 3 planes to take off from an airfield and land on other airfield, I took the 3rd plane and I landed on the same airfield from which I took off, while the other 2 planes landed on the other airfield, after DCS analyzed the mission, in MP all 3 planes where on the airfield on which the landing waypoint was. This is a limitation of IL-2?)

This is a limitation of SEOW, not of IL-2. Basically, for reasons of simplicity, SEOW automatically gives all undestroyed aircraft an automatic teleport to the intended destination after the mission. If you think about it, tracking individual aircraft landing locations, and performing the re-assembly of flights etc, whilst maintaining detailed flight affiliations, would rapdily become a nightmare, plus there would be lots of simple transfer/reforming flights required that many pilots would not want to fly. So, in the interests of playability, we ignore this aspect.

3. Related to the last question, commanders can split a group of planes? For example, in my test campaign, I made a flight with 2 recon planes in the template and now in MP they are grouped and in missions I can send only one (it's saying that you can't send a flight with more than 1 recon plane) and I would also like to send them to different locations, it's possible to split that group? Preferably from the MP, without accessing the database.

The only way to split a flight is to withdraw it and recommission the relavant aircraft in separate flights. Basically it is wise to define specialist recon and transport aircraft in single-strength flights.

4. Engineers can repair factories too? In my test campaign it seems they did, but on the wiki it's saying that they can repair only bridges.

Factories are automatically repaired by the unseen civilian workforce - factory work is how they get money and food. There is a campaign setting governing the rate at which factories are repaired. The presence of engineers close by will not affect repair of factories.

5. Can we change the airfields fuel capacity?

Each airbase type has a fuel storage capacity defined in its layout. In the Airbase_Layouts table, each layout type has several "Airbase_Object" values that look like "AB_Fuel1_30". Here the "1" references the storage, and "30" is the capacity of that storage in kilolitres. At any time during the campaign any airbase may have less fuel than its potential capacity, due to supply usage etc. The amount of fuel is tracked for each airbase by the "Fuel_Holding" field in the Airbases table. If you want to change the capacity of an Airbase type, you need to change the appropriate layout "AB_Fuel" entries. If you want to change the amount of fuel actually held at a particular airbase, you need to change the Fuel_Holding value for that airbase in the Airbases table.

Cheers,
4Shades

[Arcas]

Thank you for the answers again.

I started a campaign with a few friends and we played a few missions, but I wanted to have the "Calculate Point Gains/Losses" feature on, can I turn it on at this point? And if I can, can I make it to calculate the points for the missions that we already played too?

In DCS I get this message "It is not possible to change the production and statistics settings at this time.", but this feature is very important for our campaign, because we want to use a procent from the gained points to buy new units and it will be very hard to manualy calculate the points for each mission. If you have a solution for this I would like to know it. Thank you.

[IV/JG7_4Shades]

Hi Arcas,

Open the "Campaign_Settings" database table and change the value of the "Use_Costs" field from 0 to 1. That will enable the statistics points values. The Statistics pages will automatically register this change and display updated statistics analyses.

You may also want to changle the "Pilot_Loss_Penalty_Allied" and "Pilot_Loss_Penalty_Axis" fields to suit your scenario.

Cheers,
4Shades

[Arcas]

Hi, thank you for the answer, it worked perfectly.

I think I found a bug/limitation.
I did this as you suggested:

Now, here is a handy tip. If you use "unrestricted" or "historical" production settings you will get the kind of production flexibility you like, but will probably end up with hundreds of production types which are not suited to you scenario. What we do at SEOW HQ is disable all the types we don't want by editing the Object_Specifications table and setting the
Nationality field to "z" (only "r", "g" and "n" are recognized settings). Anything with "z" will be ignored by SEOW. Of course, if you only want a few production types, simply change all to "z" by a SQL query and then manually redefine the ones you want.

I edited the database for one map, to have only the units I want and I discovered that the Costs page is generated only when you log in with a user. The problem is that if you play on more maps and let's say a user log in on the Ardennes map and he is planing missions or he is looking at the map situation or something else and in this time other user log in on the Sardegna map, the user from the Ardennes map will see the units from the Sardegna map on the Costs page if he accessed it after the other user logged in on the Sardegna map.

I don't know if that makes sense with my English so to make it simple:
-user 1 log in on the Ardennes map
-user 2 log in on the Sardegna map
-user 1 access the Costs page from the Ardennes map but he will get the Costs page from the Sardegna map

[IV/JG7_4Shades]

Hi Arcas,

That should never be a problem. You should always use *different* databases for different campaigns, and tell the MP to use them accordingly.

For example, if you are using MySQL, create:

SEDB32_Ardennes to use with your Ardennes campaign
SEDB32_Sardegna to use with your Sardegna campaign

Same for MSAccess, create different databases.

Then use the MP Databases tool to associate SEDB32_Ardennes with the MP Ardennes sector, and SEDB32_Sardegna with the MP Sardegna sector.

Then you can customize each campaign database as you like, completely independently.

Cheers,
4Shades

[Arcas]

EDIT: Sorry, the problem seems to be from the firefox cache or something, I tried with 2 different browsers and it worked fine.

Yep, that's what I did, I'm using MySQL and I have one database selected as default, and I changed the database for the current campaign from default to MySQL and I selected a new database. And as you suggested i changed the nationality to z for all the units in the new database and started to manually select the units that I want for the new campaign, while doing this I wanted to see the default Costs page to help me choosing the units for my campaign so I logged in on a random map that was using the default database, I looked at the Costs page on that map, I saw what i wanted to say, I edited the database of the new campaign (I changed the nationality of a few units from z to n, g or r) and when I refreshed the Costs page of the new campaign to see the results, I got the default list with all the units. To solve this I had to log out from that campaign and log in again. As I said the Costs page seems to be generated only when a user log in on a map and all the users that are already logged in on other maps will get the Costs page with the data from the database of the map on which the last user logged in.

This is not a problem for me since I'm using SEOW for only one campaign at a time, but might be a problem for people that are using it for more campaigns in the same time.

[IV/JG7_4Shades]

Hi Arcas,

Yes, there must be a problem with your browser caching or something. The Costs page is built on the fly using SQL calls to the sector database every time you load the page - well that is what happens on the server side anyway.

Cheers,
4Shades