flying circus Flashy's groups for AA and Flying Circus

[JollyJack]

Here is something quite interesting from the old flying circus forum:

https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/92774-released-aa-group-for-the-entire-western-front-map/

Edited June 8 by JollyJack

[JollyJack]

And here's a tester mission for FC 1+2+3+4 with a Fokker D8 flying low over the GB Flashy AA men.

Flashy's Flak Trip_v2.zip

Them AA gunners could use some training and the checkzone & Force Complete system seems to work fine, got no staggers with it,

There should be more activity on the ground, please add them your self if you like.

F12 for some AA view points added, alas them trenches still look awful. 

 

[Catch]

6 hours ago, JollyJack said:

alas them trenches still look awful. 

I try to laugh them off as a feature but I'm crying inside. Hideous.

[Flashy]

16 hours ago, JollyJack said:

And here's a tester mission for FC 1+2+3+4 with a Fokker D8 flying low over the GB Flashy AA men.

Flashy's Flak Trip_v2.zip 2.69 MB · 1 download

Them AA gunners could use some training and the checkzone & Force Complete system seems to work fine, got no staggers with it,

There should be more activity on the ground, please add them your self if you like.

F12 for some AA view points added, alas them trenches still look awful. 

 

Glad you are getting some use of it @JollyJack! Adding more ground activity can be done quite easily, but obviously there is a trade off between number of ground units and mission performance.. especially if you import this group into an already very-busy mission... I can maybe look at making "heavy AA versions" of the groups though. How many guns (machine guns and AA guns) do you think should be in each zone (+-1500m)?

9 hours ago, Catch said:

I try to laugh them off as a feature but I'm crying inside. Hideous.

Same bro.. same. When they first showed them in the preview of the new FC western front map, I was convinced they were a place-holder. Imagine my disappointment when I realised they were final.. maybe one day we will get proper 3d trenches with automatic gunfire and AA over the lines.. and I wont have to spend months making logic in the ME to try breathe some life into the front line🫠

[JollyJack]

As how many i would not know, but i can imagine that any Limey infantry soldier would try to hit a low fly-by Kraut with anything, even his grand ma's suspenders as catapult. Could Stonehouse's AAA modding add some juice to the lot? Or some added infantry from a mod?

Some blocks with crates or sandbags added around the machinegun shooters would enhance the scenery a lot as seen from ground-view. 

As for those "trenches", i'd rather see them removed than like this LoL. 

Edited June 10 by JollyJack

[Flashy]

13 hours ago, JollyJack said:

As how many i would not know, but i can imagine that any Limey infantry soldier would try to hit a low fly-by Kraut with anything, even his grand ma's suspenders as catapult. Could Stonehouse's AAA modding add some juice to the lot? Or some added infantry from a mod?

Some blocks with crates or sandbags added around the machinegun shooters would enhance the scenery a lot as seen from ground-view. 

As for those "trenches", i'd rather see them removed that like this LoL. 

Using a AA mod would definitely be something to try, yes! The default AI of the gunners is pretty bad when it comes to "waking up" and firing at the aircraft. by the time they finally start firing, the plane is already half way through the area, so if there is a mod which can reduce that time, it would help a lot... Interestingly, when I was first building these groups, I used the infantry squads (with the American squad standing in for Germans - because we dont have German infantry in a game about WW2 and WW1! 🤨)  and they do kinda work.. they fire at the planes etc, but I felt the damage they were doing was just not high enough, so I switched them to the machine gunners.  I didnt want more than 5 or 6 AI units per group because of the potential impact on the mission if lots of groups were active at a time, so I decided the machine gunners were the better "bang for my buck" in terms of volume of ground fire.

 

Placing crates etc could be done, but I am not sure I am up to it! Placing and rotating  thousands of objects along the whole front is a pretty daunting task - but if someone else wants to do it, they are more than welcome to! 😅 The basic idea I was going for was that the fire was just coming "from the trenches somewhere" so I didnt want to highlight the gunners position too much. You cant really even see them when you fly over, and they are placed pretty randomly, so they are meant to represent more just general fire from the ground rather than actual machine gun emplacements with sandbags etc

[JollyJack]

I installed Stonehouse's AAA mod and did not see more activity so far.

Seems some AAA gunners are not in the mod like qf13pdr6cwt and hotchkissmle14, no soldier appearing maybe.

CORRECTION, they are in \data\luascripts\worldobjects\vehicles

Edited June 11 by JollyJack

[kraut1]

On 6/9/2026 at 8:09 PM, JollyJack said:

As how many i would not know, but i can imagine that any Limey infantry soldier would try to hit a low fly-by Kraut with anything, even his grand ma's suspenders as catapult. Could Stonehouse's AAA modding add some juice to the lot? Or some added infantry from a mod?

Some blocks with crates or sandbags added around the machinegun shooters would enhance the scenery a lot as seen from ground-view. 

As for those "trenches", i'd rather see them removed than like this LoL. 

Hi @Flashy and @JollyJack,

small demo video of the romanian front 1917.
some experiments with marching columns (as EMG tank columns) and other things. Maybe it bit strange but it works...

I was the low flying Kraut at the end of the  video and I was wounded by the marching infantry column's rifle fire 😁

Concerning the late open fire by AAA it is possible to modify the bots...

@MajorMagee has created very interesting additional french (and romanian) ground units with blue uniforms and modified Adrian helmet + some austrian/german gry ones with grey uniforms...  
https://forum.il2-series.com/topic/1158-potential-re-use-of-great-battles-maps-for-flying-circus/page/2/#findComment-5956

https://forum.il2-series.com/topic/1158-potential-re-use-of-great-battles-maps-for-flying-circus/page/2/#findComment-5944

 

Edited June 10 by kraut1

[JollyJack]

On 6/10/2026 at 9:04 PM, kraut1 said:

I was the low flying Kraut at the end of the  video and I was wounded by the marching infantry column's rifle fire 😁

Concerning the late open fire by AAA it is possible to modify the bots...

Sorry to hear that .... but you survived 😜 LoL, good for us and IL2.  .... Bots editing, i'll have a look some day maybe. 

Edited June 12 by JollyJack

[Flashy]

17 hours ago, JollyJack said:

I installed Stonehouse's AAA mod and did not see more activity so far.

Seems some AAA gunners are not in the mod like qf13pdr6cwt and hotchkissmle14, no soldier appearing maybe.

I thought maybe that might be the case.. I was playing around with the logic last night for the gunners.. even if you just create a mission with a machine gunner active, and an enemy vehicle right in front of him.. they literally just sit there for like 10 seconds before doing anything.. even giving them a force complete low didnt help..  I suspect this might be some kind of built-in logic to help increase game performance in the beginning of the mission when everything is loading.. so I guess we have to just live with gunners which are half-asleep on the job 😅 

I will try play around with a few more things tonight again and see if I can figure out what is going on... 

[kraut1]

6 hours ago, Flashy said:

I thought maybe that might be the case.. I was playing around with the logic last night for the gunners.. even if you just create a mission with a machine gunner active, and an enemy vehicle right in front of him.. they literally just sit there for like 10 seconds before doing anything.. even giving them a force complete low didnt help..  I suspect this might be some kind of built-in logic to help increase game performance in the beginning of the mission when everything is loading.. so I guess we have to just live with gunners which are half-asleep on the job 😅 

I will try play around with a few more things tonight again and see if I can figure out what is going on... 

Here a default file.

There is a target recognition delay, I don't know if it is effective if you reduce it to a shorter time.

I had reduced all values to 10s but I have never checked it.

To increase the danger distance and the targeting distance is effective.

If I increase the targeting distance by a factor of e.g.: 2 I do the same with the Air/LAndTargetMaxErrors.

[Stonehouse]

Danger distance is linked to the priority for the unit. Particularly for non-aircraft units it seems critical to get believable behaviour. I found I needed to increase this substantially for ships and AAA or else the unit would ignore chance enemies when the unit was at low or medium priority (where they should be able to defend themselves) until the enemy was within danger distance. I'd suggest making it match the targeting distance. When creating the Additional warships mod I found that at low and medium priority, destroyers would ignore enemy ships until the enemy entered danger distance. 

Note that the targeting distance is independent of actual weapon range, it is the range at which the AI will begin to target the enemy but is still limited to the weapon range for firing. I suggest making this a bit larger than the weapon range so the AI will at least react to the enemy and bring the gun to bear on the target so they are ready to fire. So for MGs you might make it 1500m for example.

Target recognition delay is as mentioned and is the delay in secs between the target entering targeting distance and the AI "recognising" it is enemy and beginning to target it. I reduce this for my AAA mod and tweak it for Additional warships AI.

I am still of the opinion that the game engine calculates the perfect shot in 3D space for each round or burst fired and then adds errors and dispersion (either AI or weapon) to it to arrive at the eventual aim point in game.

Edited June 11 by Stonehouse

[JollyJack]

Hi all, .. in Kraut1's example it says "targetingDistance = 1.000.0f"  ... dumb question: should that be 1.500.0f or 1.500.0m?

Further down bottom line there is mention of "1000m range", metric it seems, no dot. 

Now i wonder also which flak gunner units benefit from changes in Flashy's setup ....

Edited June 12 by JollyJack

[kraut1]

2 hours ago, JollyJack said:

Hi all, .. in Kraut1's example it says "targetingDistance = 1.000.0f"  ... dumb question: should that be 1.500.0f or 1.500.0m?

Further down bottom line there is mention of "1000m range", metric it seems, no dot. 

Now i wonder also which flak gunner units benefit from changes in Flashy's setup ....

because you have mentioned the passive machine gunners my example was for the machine gunner bot, that is used for light AAA and I suppose for medium AAA too.

For heavy AAA the "vehicleturretaiantiairflak.txt" is used

z-default-bots.zip

[JollyJack]

👍

now i wonder what this does when set to active (and how?):

//Priority for Targeting
//                     HI MEDIUM LOW

Edited June 12 by JollyJack

[Flashy]

This is somewhat unrelated to the AA gunner AI problem, but I thought of something last night (which I really should have though of before). I can also use the same logic as my AA checkzone groups to create an actual "frontline" (complete with tanks, anti-tank gunners, machine guns etc) along the entire front of any GB map.. so, if you are in a tank for example,  no matter where you try to cross the line (as defined on the mission map), you will be attacked by enemy forces, and this could be done for hundreds of kilometers of front (i.e. you cant "go round it".. it extends for the entire map).. and it should also have very little performance impact because units are only spawned where someone tries to cross the line... seems like a cool idea for tank missions, so I might play with it this weekend.. 

[Stonehouse]

2 hours ago, JollyJack said:

Hi all, .. in Kraut1's example it says "targetingDistance = 1.000.0f"  ... dumb question: should that be 1.500.0f or 1.500.0m?

Further down bottom line there is mention of "1000m range", metric it seems, no dot. 

Now i wonder also which flak gunner units benefit from changes in Flashy's setup ....

 

17 minutes ago, Flashy said:

This is somewhat unrelated to the AA gunner AI problem, but I thought of something last night (which I really should have though of before). I can also use the same logic as my AA checkzone groups to create an actual "frontline" (complete with tanks, anti-tank gunners, machine guns etc) along the entire front of any GB map.. so, if you are in a tank for example,  no matter where you try to cross the line (as defined on the mission map), you will be attacked by enemy forces, and this could be done for hundreds of kilometers of front (i.e. you cant "go round it".. it extends for the entire map).. and it should also have very little performance impact because units are only spawned where someone tries to cross the line... seems like a cool idea for tank missions, so I might play with it this weekend.. 

Just to point out that some bots are shared by both vehicle and AAA eg vehicleturretaimachinegun.txt and even ships eg BotGunnerTankCannon.txt

Choosing the values requires you to be aware of the weapons using the bot. There is quite a bit of reuse within this part of IL2 so limiting the impact of your changes takes care. If you've ever wondered why I created so many custom bot files in my mods now you know.

I'd make things with an f continue to have an f. All values are metric in general.

Forgot to say that FYI the AAA mod and AI Gunnery mod do cover WW1 in case you were not aware

Edited June 12 by Stonehouse

[JollyJack]

Thnx, I will not start experimenting with this complicated stuff and leave it to the experts for now.