Simviation Forums

Are there any settings by which to adjust the difficulty of the campaign in CFS3?

In campaign mode my pilot has a fatigue and health status shown but they never seem to change much. Fatigue is consistently "0" and health never dips by more than a point or two. I also notice that there is always a 3-5 day period between sorties, so it's not surprising my pilot doesn't get tired!

I have looked in "settings" etc. but I can't find anything to adjust. Having all that time pass between missions whilst the enemy remains active just doesn't seem plausible. If anyone has any ideas about this I would welcome hearing about them.

I haven't been able to find a way of making the campaign harder within the game but most of the details are editable.

Make back-ups of all the files you plan to alter and then play with the figures.  Open the .xml/.xdp files with word pad and you can make whatever changes you want.

For example, if you feel that your Tempest is too powerful open the tempest_mkv.xdp file in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Combat Flight Simulator 3\aircraft and it will look something like this :

     
     
     
           
           
     

with a whole lot of other information besides.

The name of the gun is in type="" and in this case is a 20mm cannon.

All of the available guns are in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Combat Flight Simulator 3\guns file.  Swap the name of a less powerful gun into the tempest and there you have it.

If you find the campaign too hard you can alter various values to make things easier.  The pilotconstants.xml gives you access to the skill points available as your pilot increases in level.  Change these and your pilot gets tougher faster.

Everything within CFS3 is editable in this way, just make sure that you back up first.  I recently changed the tempest and made it have 37mm cannon instead of the default 20mm.  I then altered the 37mm ammo and made it the same as a 40lb bomb.  The tempest was then armed with 560 40lb bombs that were highly accurate LOL.  It was too easy though so I changed it back.....

Will

[quote]I recently changed the tempest and made it have 37mm cannon instead of the default 20mm.

No mate, I'm a campaign purest.  The Tempest was binned after one mission and I reset to the previous save point!  I did the campaign by concentrating on what I was good at, ie dropping 2x1000 bombs on things.  As soon as I dropped out of warp I would hit "A" four times and the squadron would attack anything that moved whilst I was busy killing the primary target.  My favourite target is artillery as they line up in a nice straight line.  You drop your bombs on the first pass and then line up with the guns for a straffe.  If you wobble the rudder as you pass down the line you can kill six howitzers in one pass

Will

Okay I was wrong.

Thanks for the advice, Smoke2much. I will have a look to see what I can tweak.

Dave

Thanks DoubleStop.

It's sounds enticing, but I am afraid that I would muck up the installation and have to start over. It was hard enough the first time. I think I'll wait and see if MS decides to correct the campaign model in a future patch. (Wishful thinking?)

It would be great if they had a GUI to allow the user to set the campaign difficulty level in an options screen...i.e. Very Easy, Easy, Standard, Difficult, Very Difficult or Random. This would be my first wishlist CFS3 update. (More wishful thinking?)

Anyway, thanks for helping us newbies out and I do appreciate the information.

Take care.

Watch yer six.

Nikoman.