Northern Invasion – BETA
Northern Invasion is an online, PVE dynamic campaign adapted from Hoggit Georgia At War (GAW), where players start with a small foothold in Russian territory near Ukraine and must fight to increase their territory/bases and roll REDFOR back. In the first, players start with BLUFOR operating out of Anapa and making a large push to capture the airbase at Maykop to push REDFOR south and expand BLUFOR’s area of operations. Once Maykop has been cleared and is under BLUFOR control, Phase two kicks off and BLUFOR switches gears and pushes for Sukhumi Airport (as well as several larger strategic objectives). Players must clear and capture territory to create forward bases to keep the pressure up on the enemy and to keep their airfields supplied. You are pitted against an AI commander who will react to your actions, he’ll counter-attack territory you’ve captured, capture territory you aren’t guarding, and in general do his best to foil your efforts to extend your front line southeast.
Key Concepts
The F10 Menu
The F10 Menu is an integral part of Northern Invasion. It can be accessed via the communication menu (when on the ground, the “\” key by default…once airborne, it may be different depending on the module) by pressing F10 on your keyboard or selecting “OTHER” with the mouse. Under the F10 menu, you will find options for:
- Mission/Objective/SAM-threat Status
- Currently available taskings (such as SEAD, Strike, BAI, etc)
- The locations of the various objectives (in either Lat/Long or MGRS, making it easy to quickly setup custom waypoints in your airframe of choice)
- CTLD options for helo logistics operations
Capturing Territory
There are 2 ways to capture an airfield or FARP. The first step is always to clear out any REDFOR forces in the vicinity, even a single piece of AAA left behind can easily shred one of our transport aircraft/helos. It’s important to remember that, since the mission is dynamic, the threat might be aircraft, it might be SAMs, etc. Now that the area is secured, there are two ways to capture it:
- Utilize the F10 menu and send a transport (C-130 or UH-60) to the airfield or FARP.
- A player flown helo can load up troops/vehicles via the F10 CTLD scripting and deliver them to the location, which will capture the area.
Completing Missions
The REDFOR commander is in a fairly advantageous tactical position, and has a diverse collection of battlefield assets to make your life difficult. While it might be possible with a large, coordinated package to plan/execute a strike directly against Maykop from the onset of hostilities, BLUFOR will most likely need to strike at some of these assets and open up a corridor for strikes directly on Maykop. To see a list of all the available missions, use the F10 menu and select “Get Current Missions”. Missions are categorized by type:
SEAD
SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) and DEAD (Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses) missions are one of the most important mission types (especially at the beginning of the conflict). SEAD missions are crucial to opening up the corridor for aircraft to begin striking at Maykop, and they do so by seeking out and destroying strategic enemy air defenses (such as SA-10, SA-11, and SA-6 batteries). Su-25T SEAD Guide
Air Interdiction
BAI (Battlefield Air Interdiction) missions primarily will have you search out and destroy enemy armor, artillery, or otherwise mechanized units. As these units can pose a serious threat to BLUFOR FARPs and airfields as well as low flying vehicles like the logistics/support helos, it is important to find and destroy them ASAP.
Strike
There are a number of known targets in Russia (power plants, ammo dumps, etc) that have been deemed important enough to destroy. Strikes are important because a successful strike mission can degrade the AI REDFOR commander’s ability to make decisions and make him less effective overall.
Intercepts
These are air-to-air missions to destroy enemy airborne high-value assets like tankers and AWACS to deny the enemy use of those resources. Destroying the REDFOR AWACS platform greatly reduces their fighters ability to find/attack BLUFOR air assets.
CAP
CAP (Combat Air Patrol) is not a mission type you can select from the F10 menu, but it is one of the most important missions in Northern Invasion. Without constant/coordinated CAP, the REDFOR fighters will tear through BLUFOR strike aircraft and support helos. There’s AI BLUFOR AWACS up (unless they’ve been shot down or damaged by enemy interceptors) that will assist you with finding the REDFOR fighters. Also, there are frequently human controllers that perform GCI/AWACS services and orchestrate the air battle. It is important to be on SRS, because human controllers are much more efficient when handling a complicated battlespace than the AWACS AI.
Logistics
Northern Invasion utilizes CTLD to allow players in helicopters to ferry troops to airfields/FARPs to capture them, and to deploy units like SAMs/EW/TOW-equipped-HMMWV’s to fortify and defend the front line.
The helicopters capable of using CTLD in this fashion are the Huey and the Mi-8. These helicopters are available from the start at the Maykop area FARPs, and become available at new FARPS and airfields as they are captured. As you can imagine, this means that capturing new territory is incredibly important as it allows you to quickly build fortifications on your front line to defend from enemy counter attacks, and gives both CAP and strike aircraft cushions to operate in free from harassment from enemy aircraft.
Anywhere that you see green smoke is a “logistics zone.” In these ares, you’re able to pick up troops, or spawn crates to build SAMs and other-units. These are always relatively close to the airfield where the spawn is located. As you capture airfields, you’ll also unlock new logistics zones close to the airfields in question. The specifics of using CTLD are outside of the scope of this document, however it all uses the F10 menu under the “CTLD” section, and it is very self explanatory.
while we still use the base of GAW, for logistics is still the same as gaw used, for more info about Northern Invasion Logistic, check out GAW Logistics there.
Friendly Assets
Northern Invasion features a number of AI support units that will help you complete the mission. These units are not invincible, and the AI commander will occasionally call in strikes/sweeps to attempt to destroy them! If they are killed, it will be some time before these assets respawn and arrive on-station again. The different units that you may encounter are:
- E-3: AWACS provides airborne radar coverage, and is available on 133.000 to provide you with information about the current air-picture.
- CVN-74: The Stennis is deployed to the Black Sea to support ongoing operations. It is available to all players utilizing a carrier-capable aircraft. Additionally, there are a handful of public spawns for the F/A-18C and F-14 . Please note, that while the weapons stockpiles at the various airbases are very limited, the Stennis does carry a substantially larger amount of firepower. Taking off from Anapa and immediately heading to the carrier to pick up a full loadout is a common tactic on the server. You will also occasionally see players flying out to the carrier, loading up, and then flying back to Anapa (or other bases) to resupply the stocks of high-in-demand weaponry.
- LHA-1: The Tarawa is operating out near CVN-74 as well, to support helo and Harrier operations. It operates exactly as the Stennis.
Please note, there are forward observer slots available so players can provide human AWACS/ATC.
Server Schedule and State Saving
The state of the mission is saved every 10 minutes. In terms of objectives, you’ll never lose more than 10 minutes worth of progress in the event of a crash.
The server is restarted every 6 hours, the state is saved, and is reloaded on restart. (this is still Beta maybe will be change in the future)
Territory that is not captured is considered “reinforced” at this time, when the mission reloads all territory held by either blue or red will be fully reinforced with new defense units. It’s critical to complete any territorial capture within the three hour window! Even if you destroy every single enemy unit at an airfield, if you don’t capture before a restart the commander will reinforce it with a new complement of defenders!
Players will be given warnings at 30, 20, and 5 minutes before server restart. The server currently cycles between Afternoon, Evening, and Morning missions. While weather is set by METAR of Anapa area when the current miz files were generated.
We will try to schedule updates for the mission and code during one of the three hour restarts. If we are making updates sometimes it will take a mission a little longer to come back up while we apply updates. In some extreme cases (e.g. the mission is bugged or the game executable is struggling) sometimes we might have to restart the mission outside of the three hour normal restarts. in this case we will make every effort to preserve the state and reload it, but it’s not guaranteed.
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