414Ret - 414th Joint Fighter Group's DCS Retribution Fork

This repository is the 414th Joint Fighter Group's customized build of DCS Retribution - a turn-based dynamic campaign generator for DCS World.

It is a squadron-focused build of upstream Retribution (dev branch), combining the 414th's campaign, mission, and quality-of-life work with selected newer upstream fixes and backports. The unmodified upstream project README is preserved as README.upstream.md.

For AI assistants / other Claude sessions: read CLAUDE.md first. It is the engineering handoff doc - architecture, where each feature lives, the branch layout, and what is still in flight.

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What's different from upstream

414Ret is not a collection of reskins or a single extra aircraft pack. It changes how a Retribution campaign is planned, understood, and flown by a multiplayer squadron. The current build starts from upstream dev at dce851ea, then adds the 414th feature set and selected later upstream fixes.

Intelligence is incomplete — and recon has a purpose

• Enemy sites can be known without their exact composition, strength, damage state, or threat rings being known. Attacking or scouting a site reveals it; confirmed battle damage can require a surviving recon pass.
• Enemy field forces you haven't scouted don't even show an exact position: a mobile SAM site, a deployed vehicle group, or a missile site appears only as a dashed amber "suspected activity" circle offset from the truth ("in here somewhere") until recon or an attack localizes it — amber, so it can't be mistaken for the dashed red ROE off-limits circle — so the Weasel hunt and the SCUD hunt are real hunts. Fixed infrastructure stays exact (airfields, buildings, the big strategic SAM sites, EWRs, ships), the circle is clickable so you can still plan recon or a strike against the suspected area, and the whole behaviour is a Difficulty & Realism toggle (on by default for new campaigns).
• And once you get there, mobile missile sites shoot and scoot: SCUD/SSM launchers drive to a new position every few minutes during the mission (holding fire while they move), so the launcher is never quite where the last recon photo froze it. The site stays within a few km of its campaign position, kills count normally, and the radar SAM network never moves. On by default (Mission Generation → "Mobile missile sites relocate"); a naval campaign can also opt its coastal anti-ship batteries (Silkworms) into the scoot ("Coastal anti-ship sites relocate too", off by default), so the coastal-missile hunt is a hunt too.
• The roads have traffic now — and your convoys might get ambushed. Every turn, a few real supply columns run each side's road network (a randomized number, sometimes sharing a road, sometimes spread out): the enemy's are ordinary Armed Recon/BAI prey, and yours are yours to worry about. Because sometimes — it's a chance, never a certainty — hidden enemy ambush teams dig in along a friendly convoy's route: one contact, or a gauntlet of five or six down the same road. Nothing is telegraphed: the convoy looks like any other friendly convoy, no objective or escort package shows in the UI, and the first sign of trouble is the TROOPS IN CONTACT call when an ambush springs mid-mission. Fly to the column's aid and clear the ambushers, or let it fight through alone — your call. Both the convoys and the ambushers are real, tracked units — losing a column costs you real reinforcements, and the debrief counts both sides' losses. Both behaviours are on by default for new campaigns (Mission Generation → "Ambient supply convoys" / "Friendly convoy ambushes") on any campaign whose map has roads between friendly bases.
• The enemy's IADS jams your radios — once it knows your channels. By default the enemy learns your comms plan the hard way: off a captured pilot. Lose the Combat SAR race and within minutes your briefed channels take sporadic bursts of barrage static — transmitted from a real enemy comms mast or command bunker with real power falloff (worst deep over the C2 belt), and SRS hears it too (SRS tunes off your cockpit radios). While a POW is held, the next missions launch already compromised — until you free them (retake the holding field) or the comms plan is rotated. GUARD, ATC and a briefed JAM BACKUP channel (printed on the kneeboard Mission Info page, next to the code words) always stay clean, and the noise comes in duty-cycled bursts, never a wall — hop channels, push to the backup, or kill the node: one strike on the C2 site silences the jamming and degrades the IADS. So SAR matters twice over, and the squadron learns to rotate compromised channels. Opt-in (Mission Generation → "Enemy comms jamming"; the captured-pilot intel gate is on by default, or disable it for ambient jamming) and preseeded on in Red Tide, where the radio isn't clean either.
• Bombing the enemy HQ actually matters now. Destroy a side's IADS command posts and its auto-planner gets sloppier — the more of its command network you knock out, the more unpredictable and less effective its offensive target selection becomes turn to turn, so decapitating the enemy's command-and-control is a real strategic play instead of a strike checkbox. Its reactive defenses are never affected (a headless enemy still defends itself), and your kneeboard SITREP reports the enemy's command status so you can see the strike land. Opt-in (Air Doctrine → "Command-center kills degrade enemy planning"); a campaign with no command posts is unaffected.
• Bomb the enemy's fuel, factories, and supply lines and watch their war effort wither. With the War economy on (Campaign Management), each base runs a real materiel supply chain — factories produce it, it flows over the roads to the front, and it's spent holding the line. Interdict it — strike the factories, cut the routes — and a starved enemy front stops recovering, fields fewer units, and gives ground, with the kneeboard SITREP showing you why. Bomb an airfield's fuel depots and it flies fewer sorties next turn. And with Munitions availability on (Mission Generation → Loadouts), airfields hold a stock of the scarce precision munitions — run a field dry of JDAMs (or knock out its ammo dumps) and its jets fall back to dumb bombs, greyed out in the loadout screen. A Supply status map layer colours each of your fronts by how well-supplied it is (with the producers feeding it), and each base card reads out its front supply and munitions on hand. All symmetric — protect your own supply too — and off by default.
• The enemy commander plays with intent — and remembers the war. With Red Intent on (Air Doctrine), the AI reads the war each turn — the ground balance, its air strength, how the last turn went — and, crucially, the trend across turns: it notices when you've been dismantling its SAM belt, when its resolve is cracking, when it's bleeding bases. It adopts a posture that carries across turns instead of planning the same way every time: it surges when it holds the advantage (pressing to take ground, committing its reserves, striking with focus), consolidates when it's under pressure (defending, husbanding), or grinds it out in between — and it reacts to the shape of your campaign, so a winning enemy that watches its air defenses come apart will dig in even while it still outnumbers you, and one that catches your fighters spent will lunge through the gap. It even presses harder the further ahead it is and turtles harder the deeper the trouble. A colour-coded "ENEMY" chip on the map ribbon (and your kneeboard SITREP) names the enemy's posture and why ("Surging (all-in)", "Consolidating — IADS falling") so you can read its mood — and with the war economy on, bomb its supply and a winning enemy digs in. On a multi-front war it now holds a separate posture per front — pressing on the front it's winning while it digs in on the one it's losing — and a single boldness dial lets you tune its whole temperament from cautious to reckless (plus how sticky its posture is and how far back it reads the war's trend). Opt-in and enemy-only (your side's "intent" is the campaign phase), and it never touches the enemy's reactive defenses. Germany — Red Tide ships with it on.
• Bomb the enemy's motor pool before its armor reaches the front. A base's not-yet-deployed armor reserve now shows up as a strikeable depot on the map — hit the parked vehicles at the motor pool and the owner has to repurchase them next turn, so you can attrit the reserve directly instead of only meeting it at the front line. Depot strikes don't move the front (they're tracked separately from front-line casualties), and the parked reserves hold fire. On by default; Germany — Red Tide stages one at Haina by the Fulda Gap (its parked tanks fill in as the Soviets buy armor), and any campaign can place its own. (Adopted from upstream Retribution PR #859.)
• TARPS is a real player task — flown by F-14s, and by the Vietnam-era photo-recon birds (RF-101B Voodoo, RA-5C Vigilante) in period campaigns — supported by the TARS film-and-debrief system. What the aircraft photographs is carried back into the campaign as confirmed intelligence.
• When you need the ground truth anyway — debugging a campaign, planning the opposing side, or just checking the real laydown — tick Reveal fog of war (overview) in the map's layer panel (top-right, with the other enemy-intel toggles). It turns the fog off and shows the true picture: full enemy composition, threat rings, and otherwise-hidden command posts. It is a view toggle only — it never changes the campaign and is never saved.
• The map layer panel is a single grouped, collapsible control (dark-themed to match the app) with one-click preset views — Default, SEAD, Recon, Clean — and it remembers your layer choices between sessions.
• The map explains itself: a collapsible Legend button (bottom-right) decodes the overlay colours — friendly/enemy/front line, the amber "suspected activity" vs red "ROE off-limits" dashed circles, weapons-free pockets, supply health — and the things you can right-click to plan a mission (front lines, enemy supply routes, target markers, suspected-activity circles) show a pointer cursor plus a hover hint naming the action, so fragging a package straight off the map is discoverable instead of a hidden gesture.
• The campaign map can use a chart of the DCS terrain itself as its base map instead of real-world satellite imagery (which doesn't match what you'll see in the sim): slice any Web-Mercator GeoTIFF — e.g. Flappie's community "accurate DCS Caucasus map" — with tools/tile_geotiff.py into Saved Games\Retribution\MapTiles\, and a button for it appears in the layer panel's base-map row. Purely local: nothing is bundled, and machines without tiles see no change.
• An optional Approximate target area mode removes perfect player coordinates and offsets steerpoints, making visual acquisition, talk-ons, and reconnaissance matter. Against mobile SAMs, DEAD and SEAD flights get a single fuzzed target-area waypoint instead of a precise steerpoint per launcher/radar; Strike keeps exact per-target points since buildings don't move. DEAD kneeboards always trade exact coordinates for a rough bullseye cue (bearing and range to ~1 NM) while still listing each target's steerpoint number.
• Mobile short-range defenses are kept off player datalinks while larger SAM sites remain available for deliberate SEAD/DEAD planning.

Missions are built for squadron play

• SCAR is now the RESCAP "Sandy" escort of the combat-SAR package — fly an A-10 or Apache to bring a downed pilot home: hold near the FLOT with the King (C-130) and Jolly Green (the rescue helo), protect the survivor, suppress the threats around them, and walk the helo in. The enemy may send a snatch party to grab the downed pilot — kill it in time or the pilot is captured and held as a POW at an enemy airfield. A captured pilot is pulled from the flying roster (they show as POW in the squadron and can't be fragged while captive), named on your kneeboard SITREP each turn with where they're held, and recapturing that field brings them back. Every turn they're held saps your side's political will. On a political-will (Vietnam) campaign the hold is indefinite — the drain is a real running sore Hanoi holds over Washington — and a negotiated victory brings your POWs home (a defeat writes them off); on other campaigns they're lost for good after a few turns. If you fly with invulnerable player pilots on, your own captured pilots are returned rather than killed. The capture is the consequence for losing the rescue fight — there is no separate raid mission to plan. (The old armor-hunt SCAR is retired — SCAR is a rescue role now.)
• Combat SAR makes a downed pilot worth flying for. A CH-47 orbits near the front as the rescuer while a C-130 holds overhead as the HC-130 "King" — on-scene command with an air-tracking TACAN the helo homes on (an AI King lights it automatically; a player King sets it from the planned channel in-cockpit) and an F10 survivor-locator readout. When a human pilot ejects, they spawn with a beacon; recover them and deliver them to any friendly field and the campaign spares the aviator (you still lose the jet, but the experienced pilot returns to the squadron instead of being lost). Rescue is a normal, standing task: the AI plans the package (King + rescue helo + a Sandy escort) automatically by default — turn Automatic Combat SAR off to fly rescues manually only — and any human can fly any seat. AI ejections count too: an AI-flown helo rescue spares the pilot the same way. If the enemy reaches the downed pilot first they are captured — held as a POW (see SCAR above). The snatch race runs even when nobody can come for them — turning auto-CSAR off or flying without a rescue helo doesn't make your pilots un-capturable; it makes them more exposed. And a pilot who is neither rescued nor captured by mission end is not lost — they go MIA and keep evading: they show on the SITREP and roster, re-appear at their last known position next mission (red smoke, a fresh enemy snatch race), and can still be rescued. Each turn they're out, a pilot near the front usually keeps evading while one deep behind the lines almost certainly gets found and becomes a POW — so think twice before pressing deep with no rescue plan. There's no timer: they evade until rescued, recovered, or caught (Downed pilots persist setting, on by default).
• JAMMING turns the C-130J into an EC-130H/RC-130H-style EW and ISR platform with standoff jamming and ELINT gameplay. This is the only 414th scripted EW model; the old generic fighter-pod "EW Jammer Script" is retired.
• Strike and DEAD packages can receive auto-planned TARPS follow-up, while BAI remains the normal planner task for conventional anti-armor work.
• The fork also carries newer suppression behavior: AI SEAD can loiter near the target, react to emitters, and break off on a computed timeline instead of making a single inflexible pass.
• The auto-planner no longer sends strikers through a SAM belt it only intends to clear: if a planned DEAD can't actually reach a SAM shielded behind another live radar threat, the strike that depends on it is held back until the belt is genuinely down, instead of bombers being tasked into defenses that are still alive.

The air war behaves like a campaign, not a queue of isolated sorties

• Squadrons can hold aircraft in a QRA intercept reserve for runtime base defense — and you can man part of it yourself: set how many of the reserve are player-flown and a cold-start, home-field alert BARCAP is fragged for you each mission, ready to scramble. You get a "raid inbound — scramble" radio call when bandits close on the field, and decide when to launch. Crew it for co-op (every alert jet a client slot) or fly lead with AI wingmen.
• BARCAP coverage uses overlapping, jittered, threat-weighted waves and a more useful forward defensive line. Quiet sectors retain baseline coverage; contested sectors gain more.
• Transit routes treat the active ground battle as a hazard, reducing the tendency for unrelated AI flights to loiter over the FLOT.
• AWACS and tanker racetracks are anchored on the front line and stand off into friendly airspace, so support orbits sit centered behind the fighting at a sane distance instead of being flung far off-axis or pinned onto a home airfield.
• Support orbits are drawn on the F10 map. Every friendly tanker and AWACS gets a cyan racetrack + a label (callsign, type, radio freq, TACAN) painted right onto the in-cockpit F10 map, so you can find your gas and your controller in flight instead of guessing — no DTC, no cartridge, just an object on the map.
• Flight plans budget real time at the tanker: a flight with a refuel stop launches and pushes early enough to cycle the whole flight through the boom and still make its join and TOT, and the package tanker is on station for ingress-side (pre-vul) refuels instead of only arriving for the trip home.
• Flights add fuel tanks when the route is long. On far-AO campaigns — like the COIN carrier parked ~800 km off the beach — a jet whose planned route needs more gas than it can carry internally gets extra drop tanks added to its empty stations at mission start (so a Hornet strike flies out with its third bag). It never swaps out a targeting pod, ECM, or ordnance to do it, and it does nothing on short-range routes or to loadouts you've customized.
• The planner frags a pre- or post-strike tanker when a sortie can't make it home. If the route burns more than the jet can carry, it's sent to a tanker on the way in (or out) instead of launching short — and this now works for mod jets that ship no measured fuel data (e.g. the F-4E), which used to fly the whole leg untanked while the kneeboard warned "short of getting home." No tanker in the campaign? Then the RTB-margin warning stands and you plan a divert.
• An optional auto-planner unpredictability doctrine knob (per side, off by default) varies which offensive targets the enemy services first, so red stops striking the same targets in the same order every turn. Its reactive air defenses stay just as sharp.
• Doctrine controls expose patrol-altitude floors and scatter, and the aircraft task priorities have received a conservative role-based rebalance.
• Soviet/Russian air defenses use improved legacy SAM layouts and radar composition. Campaign-map SAM rings, emitters, routes, and IADS links are easier to inspect and read.
• Off-mission engagements are weighted, not coin flips. The AI-vs-AI fights resolved while you fast-forward now account for aircraft capability and numbers (a modern fighter beats an obsolete one more often than not, but a pair can still overwhelm a lone jet), and SEAD/SEAD-capable flights are credited for surviving SAMs — so the campaign state you inherit between sorties reads believably instead of randomly.
• "Player at IP" fast-forward now actually puts you at your IP. An AI skirmish elsewhere no longer stops the fast-forward short and spawns you back on the ramp; only a fight your own flight is in still pauses so you can fly it.
• The campaign runs on one continuous clock. Instead of each turn teleporting to a random hour and re-rolling the weather from scratch, the mission clock now marches forward a few hours per turn from the campaign's start date, the date rolls over at midnight, and the weather evolves from the turn before — fronts roll in and clear over several turns instead of a thunderstorm one sortie and clear skies the next. It's on by default (with day-and-night missions); turn it off in Campaign Management → Campaign clock & weather for the old per-turn behaviour.

The generated mission feels occupied

• Troops In Contact (TIC) produces prolonged, formation-aware frontline firefights with ambient suppressive fire instead of letting vanilla ground AI instantly erase the battle.
• Frontline forces deploy as mixed combat clusters — an armor wedge with embedded air defense, an anti-tank standoff pair, and leading recon — spread evenly along the line rather than piled onto one patch of terrain. You can also set a default front-line stance (HQ Automation) for your sectors when you're managing stances yourself.
• Civilian regional traffic adds light rear-area activity, while the 414th-tuned Splash Damage 3 build improves weapon effects without returning to the plugin's harsher stock values.
• Nation-specific voiceovers per squadron — each squadron's aircraft fly under their own country, so a mixed-nation coalition hears each unit's real national radio voice instead of one shared faction voice. Single-nation factions are unaffected. Pilot rosters match the nation, too — a Greek squadron fills with Greek names, an Iranian one with Persian names, and so on, instead of everyone sharing one set of names.

Planning and debriefing expose the information crews need

• Ground targets have an intel panel showing known strength, mission suitability, ranges, IADS membership, visibility, and capture/purchase state.
• Package and flight dialogs show task, TOT, player slots, departure bases, squadron fit, available aircraft, and target distance without making planners hunt across windows.
• The map provides clearer SAM, route, emitter, and IADS interaction; waypoint altitude editing supports practical bulk changes.
• The Payload tab can save your aircraft settings as a per-airframe default — set the internal fuel, aircraft condition, wear & tear, and spawn type the way you like, click Save as default, and every new flight of that airframe opens pre-configured instead of resetting to stock each package (Clear default forgets it). The loadout has always had its own Save Payload and the player laser code has a campaign setting; this covers the rest of that box. Applies to your side only.
• Debriefing begins with mission impact — territorial changes, runway damage, and losses — before the full event detail.
• Every flight's kneeboard leads with a one-page Brief Sheet — a single scannable, colour-coded brief modelled on the squadron's printed brief sheet: header, mission, the full route with steerpoint numbers and times (HOLD 1 12:32 → TKR 2 12:38 → JOIN 3 12:49 → TGT 5-8 13:01 → LAND 10 — every waypoint listed; multiple strike points collapse to one range), bingo/joker/divert, air + SAM threats, game plan, comms, code words, bullseye, fields (RWY/ATC/TCN), weather (departure-field QNH/QFE + surface wind), loadout, laser codes, and Combat SAR — all filled in from the mission. Colour does the work: blue for nav and freqs, amber for threats and fuel, green for the success word, red for abort, so you find what you need at a glance. Empty fields keep a ______ fill-in blank, like a real brief sheet, so you can write the rest in. The standard pages (Game Plan with the full steerpoint table, Support Info, the threat cards) follow it. (The former experimental "compact deck" folding was retired — the deck is the classic multi-page layout again, fronted by the pieces that earned their keep.)
• Every flight's kneeboard opens on a cover page: the operation name, turn, and date up top; a "last turn" SITREP (both sides' losses — the enemy's as claimed — bases captured or lost, and downed pilots recovered); and, when several flights share an airframe (DCS stacks them into one kneeboard), a flight index — each callsign, task, and start page — so you flip straight to your own deck. The SITREP appears from your second mission on and hides after a quiet turn (Campaign SITREP band, Kneeboards page, on by default).
• Kneeboards are restyled to use the page: clean headings with underline rules and spacing (no wasted bottom-half), and the Friendly Packages list flows into two columns when long.
• Custom kneeboards can be imported from the Kneeboards toolbar button — add an image once and it's injected into every flight's kneeboard (or scoped to one airframe), stored in the campaign save, instead of hand-editing each mission.
• An optional Threat Intel Brief kneeboard page is the enemy air-defense dossier, one card per system — guidance, engagement ceiling, MEZ, HARM code, bullseye cues, live/dead counts, and a how-to-defeat note — like a campaign intelligence briefing. It respects recon fog: sites you haven't identified show only their threat tier ("Unidentified MERAD") until you fly a TARPS overflight. On by default.
• Optional mission code words (Red Flag style) — the whole side shares one randomised, themed table: a push word per task (STRIKE / SEAD / OCA / CAS / …) plus SUCCESS / ABORT, so one call ("Red Kite") tells everyone SEAD is pushing. Planners see the full table before generating the mission — a persistent panel in the package list, a tooltip, and a PUSH <word> tag on the join waypoint — to build a briefing. A Comms & Brevity kneeboard page carries the table (your task marked) plus a brevity crib filtered to your task. Fresh words every turn, stable while you plan. Off by default.
• The fuel ladder rides in the flight plan: the Mission Info steerpoint table has a Fuel column — planned fuel remaining at each steerpoint — with the RTB margin (how much you have to spare over what you need to get home — negative means tank or divert) called out once under the table. No separate page, no toggle. Works for every flyable airframe: aircraft without hand-measured fuel data (the C-130J "King", the helicopters, warbirds, ...) get a rough estimate derived from their fuel capacity.
• Plugin settings explain what each system does and use squadron-readable labels and units.
• When Restrict weapons by campaign date is on, era-defining cockpit options are now gated alongside the weapons: a pre-2003 campaign no longer offers (or quietly spawns) a JHMCS helmet-mounted sight, falling back to the period-correct visor. NVG and other era-appropriate options stay available.
• The same toggle now also makes the support trucks at airbase and FARP ground-starts period-correct: a Vietnam-era mission parks GAZ-66 / Ural-375 logistics trucks on the ramp instead of modern HEMTTs, falling back to the oldest available vehicle when nothing earlier exists in DCS.

Additional 414th content and integrations

• The CurrentHill Iran integration adds Shahed-136 and IRGCN FAC assets plus a dedicated [CH] Iran 2020 faction behind a new-game mod toggle.
• High Digit SAMs support now targets the actively-maintained Ultimate Compilation (v1.4.3+) instead of the abandoned original — same new-game toggle, plus its new content: S-400 and S-300V4 batteries, the S-300PT, Pantsir-SM point defense, the French SAMP/T Aster battery, SA-7/SA-7b manpads for the 70s–80s red factions, new early-warning radars (the period P-37 Bar Lock gives Cold-War red factions a real EWR net for the IADS), and insurgent ZU-23 Toyota technicals.
• The settings screen was audited end-to-end: dead and duplicate options were removed, the two AI-radio toggles were merged into a single AI wingman radio behavior choice (Normal / Suppress contact reports / Radio silence), the four redundant ground-start truck toggles were folded into two (supply trucks / ground-power trucks, each covering both airbases and roadbases), and many labels were clarified. Existing campaigns migrate automatically on load.
• The settings pages were reorganized so options are easy to find: the two giant catch-all lists are gone, replaced by six focused pages (Difficulty & Realism, Air Doctrine, Campaign Management, Mission Generation, Kneeboards, Performance). New one-click difficulty presets — Casual / Normal / Veteran / Ace — sit atop the Difficulty & Realism page and set AI skill, economy, player aids, and realism/restrictions together as a starting point; you can still fine-tune any individual setting afterward, and Normal restores the stock defaults.
• Campaign phases: every campaign now knows what phase of the air war it is in — Air Superiority (roll back the SAM belt, blunt the MiGs), Interdiction (choke reinforcement and logistics), then the Offensive (take ground) — inferred each turn from the live IADS, enemy air, and front movement, with no campaign authoring required. A slim status ribbon over the map (also showing campaign, turn, and date — previously nowhere in the web UI) and a band on the kneeboard cover page always show the phase and why ("Interdiction — enemy IADS 22% · air threat low · front static"), and the campaign announces each transition. The auto-planner leans its offensive tasking to match the phase — SEAD/OCA first while rolling back, BAI/Armed Recon in Interdiction, CAS and base capture on the push — while your defenses stay untouched. On by default; a single Campaign Management toggle turns it off. On the Vietnam campaigns the ribbon also carries the political-will meters. Click the phase chip and the arc expander now reads like a war plan: every phase shows an objectives checklist with live ticks (measurable goals — "break the SAM belt below 40%" — check themselves off as the campaign state moves; guidance lines stay plain bullets) and spells out when and why the next phase arrives — the schedule and the acceleration ("Escalates early if will falls below 65 (now 100)"), for inferred arcs just as much as the authored Vietnam ones. Hover the WILL/RESOLVE meters (or read the SITREP band) for the new attribution ledger — exactly which feeds moved the number last turn ("heavy bombers ×1 down −6.0 · POWs held ×3 −1.5"), so the will economy stops being a mystery meter. And when you plan a package onto an ROE-restricted target, the package dialog now warns you before you fly — the strike is never blocked, but the political-will bill is a knowing choice at planning instead of a surprise at debrief.
• A new Vietnam Ops settings page holds opt-in period mechanics for the Vietnam-era campaigns (off by default; the Vietnam campaigns turn the relevant ones on). The first is Arc Light: fly a Strike with a heavy bomber (B-52) and instead of a single aimpoint it walks a carpet of bombs across the target on the run-in, the way Operation Niagara saturated the hills around Khe Sanh — tactical strikers are unaffected. The second is an AAA flak gauntlet: fly within range and below the ceiling of an enemy AAA gun and you draw barrage flak that tightens when you fly a steady, predictable line and widens when you jink — the AAA-heavy Vietnam threat the engine never modelled, as pressure to manoeuvre rather than a hidden missile. The third is naval gunfire support for coastal campaigns: offshore gun ships (the New Jersey's 16-inch batteries, cruisers, destroyers) shell shore targets — call a fire mission on an F10 map marker from the radio menu, or let the ships bombard enemy coastal positions automatically. The fourth is convoy interdiction (Steel Tiger): the enemy runs a real supply convoy up the road behind the front (the Ho Chi Minh Trail) — carrying actual reinforcements, so hunting it down on an Armed Recon genuinely denies the enemy those units, and letting it through means they reach the line. It's a live logistics target in the campaign, not a scripted prop. Right-click an enemy supply route on the map to frag the interdiction package straight onto that corridor — and the Armed Recon plans a real road sweep (search points at the start, middle, and end of the hunted route, each with its own engagement zone) instead of a single waypoint parked on the origin base. The fifth is airbase harassment: forward enemy airfields draw sporadic rocket/mortar fire near the ramp — the near-constant siege of Bien Hoa, Da Nang, and the Khe Sanh strip — so the rear stops feeling like a safe area. Your active spawn fields are never targeted, and a startup grace period keeps it off while you're still starting up. The sixth is the Super Gaggle: a formation of transport helos — drawn from a real friendly helicopter squadron, with a fast-mover suppression flight — runs supplies into a cut-off forward outpost (launch field → outpost → back), which you can escort in. Lose a helo and it's a real airframe loss to that squadron; get the supplies in and the garrison is bolstered — the Khe Sanh hilltop resupply. The seventh is FAC(A) marking: an airborne forward air controller (an OV-10 Bronco loitering over the battle area) marks nearby enemy ground with white-phosphorus smoke so you can visually acquire the target and roll in — the iconic Vietnam Bronco putting willie pete on the target. The eighth is snake and nape: press a low, fast Snakeye delivery onto enemy troops and each bomb's real impact point erupts in napalm fire — the signature Vietnam CAS run, with the wall of fire drawn by your actual ripple (a dry pass lays nothing; a miss burns where it missed). Unlike the flak gauntlet (which punishes a predictable line), this rewards pressing the run in on the deck, and the fire genuinely hurts soft targets. Real Mk-77 napalm cans keep their own (Splash Damage) fireballs. And it isn't just you: under the Vietnam doctrines, AI CAS/interdiction flights now fly their attack runs on the deck too (an authored 500 ft low-level profile — Skyraiders pressing in low instead of level-bombing from 20,000 ft), so an AI Snakeye pass can lay the same fire — and eats the same AAA. See docs/dev/design/414th-vietnam-ops-notes.md. The Vietnam campaigns (1968 Yankee Station, Velvet Thunder, Red Flag 81-2) turn on the whole battlefield suite by default — naval gunfire only on the coastal ones, where offshore guns can actually reach the shore.
• The Vietnam campaign layer changes why you fly, not just how it feels. Political will tracks each side's capital for the war: your Political Will (Washington's patience — drained by airframe losses, with a downed B-52 a national event; by aviators sitting as POWs in Hanoi; by lost ground — and, on 1968 Yankee Station, by the war's sheer duration: Washington's patience is a one-way ratchet that erodes turn over turn, and the wins that push it back up (claimed MiGs, rescued crews) are deliberately too small to offset the drain — so body count is a trap and time is genuinely against you) against the enemy's Regime Resolve (Hanoi barely registers airframe losses — it drains from trail-logistics strangulation and the whole air-to-ground campaign: CAS, armed recon, and the Arc Light B-52 carpets all bleed it). Two things sharpen the squeeze on Yankee Station: escalating the war costs you at home even when the strikes are sanctioned — resuming the deep bombing at Linebacker, and the Linebacker II "Christmas bombing," each dent Washington's patience up front (an early, decisive campaign never pays it) — and a commitment ceiling: as your will falls, Congress trims the war budget, starving a losing war of replacements, so the war is quite literally taken out of your hands rather than merely lost at the table. The war can now end at the negotiating table: break Hanoi's resolve before your will runs out and they agree to terms — you never had to take a base; run dry first and Washington orders the withdrawal, whatever the map says. And when Hanoi answers your escalation — surging the trail during a bombing halt, opening a Tet/Easter ground offensive — you get a "Hanoi's response" briefing so the enemy's plan is as legible as your own. Territory victory still works. And with the static front on, the ground war fights like the era's: the front line bends with the battle inside a narrow band around where the campaign started — pressure reads on the map — but never sweeps onto a base to capture it; deliberate Air Assault operations remain the one way to take ground, and attrition pays out through political will instead. Both are opt-in (Vietnam Ops → Campaign) and preseeded on in the Vietnam campaigns; watch the will meters move on the SITREP band each turn. The Washington/Hanoi framing is just the default: any campaign can carry its own will profile (a will: block in the campaign YAML) that renames the meters, rewrites the exhaustion headlines, and re-weights every feed for its era — including a new warship-loss feed, so a naval war (a Falklands, say) bleeds will from sunk ships the way Vietnam bleeds it from downed B-52s. And the Vietnam campaigns now fly under Washington's rules of engagement: an authored Rolling Thunder → Bombing Halt → Linebacker → Linebacker II arc where a red dashed sanctuary zone on the map (the "Hanoi" hub) is off-limits, deep target classes (factories, power, airfields) show a RESTRICTED badge you can see but may not hit — the defining Rolling Thunder frustration — and the AI planner obeys. Those no-fly zones aren't just circles: a campaign can define a box (a training range, a Route Package) or a corridor (an ingress lane, the Ho Chi Minh trail) — or draw the shape directly in the Mission Editor and reference it by name — and they're painted onto the in-cockpit F10 map, not just the planner, so you see the rules where you fly. You can always break the rules; the strike goes through, and Political Will pays the bill. Escalation arrives on schedule or faster the more your will bleeds, until Linebacker II takes the gloves off entirely. And the MiGs fight like it's 1968: Vietnam-era interceptors fly GCI hit-and-run — they scramble late, slash your strike package close to the target, refuse to chase far from their field, and go home after one pass — while their sanctuary bases stay untouchable until the escalation lifts.
• The three Caucasus Vietnam campaigns are consolidated into one — 1968 Yankee Station now carries the whole in-country air war in its features and scenario, and the standalone Khe Sanh: Operation Niagara and Steel Tiger: Trail Interdiction campaigns are dropped. Nothing is lost: the Steel Tiger trail war is folded in as the order-of-battle tilt (Navy Intruders, Skyraiders and Broncos flying BAI/armed recon on the Ho Chi Minh Trail alongside the route-package strikers), and the Niagara siege is folded in as the DMZ front — Da Nang starts depleted so the line begins pressed in near the wire, the forward strips draw airbase harassment, and the encircled FOB Khe Sanh lives on the Super Gaggle resupply. One map, one campaign, the whole war: the coastal route packages, the trail, and the siege. Needs a NEW game.
• The 1968 Yankee Station theater is a "coastal ladder." North Vietnam lives where the terrain says it should: Hanoi (Kutaisi) inland up the river delta behind its SA-2 ring, Haiphong (Senaki) on the coast, and the route packages laddering south through Vinh (Sukhumi) and Dong Hoi (Gudauta) to a single DMZ front at the Psou narrows, held from Da Nang (Sochi-Adler) and the FOB Khe Sanh hill outpost right under the line. The carriers moved onto a proper Yankee Station off the delta; the Air Force crosses the mountains from the "Thailand" fields (Ubon = Maykop, Takhli/Korat = Mineralnye Vody) — the real 1968 Navy/USAF split falls out of the geometry. The Ho Chi Minh Trail is a real, cuttable supply web: the trail FOBs carry their real names (Mu Gia, Ban Karai, Ban Laboy, Tchepone…), every leg crosses a bridge, and the last leg feeds the front. The ROE sanctuary sits over Hanoi itself — where the MiGs, the SAMs and the industry actually are, so Rolling Thunder's restraint finally costs something — plus a permanent "PRC border" ring at Tbilisi that never releases, even in Linebacker II, exactly like the real war.
• A new Afghanistan - Operation Enduring Resolve (COIN) campaign — the first living counterinsurgency (a fork of Starfire's Operation Shattered Dagger). The insurgency's strongholds regenerate: cleared cells come back toward their original strength each turn — and your last recon picture stands until you re-fly it — throttled by hidden ammo caches you recon and strike; kill a stronghold's caches and its regeneration collapses to a trickle. The war is decided at the will meters: the Coalition's mandate (airframes, lost bases, strikes into the Lashkar Gah population-center ring — where the insurgency hides its caches and runs its trail, so the restraint actually costs something — and plain time) against the insurgency's momentum (caches, trail convoys, strongholds — almost never its dead fighters). Disrupt the Network → Clear and Hold → Break the Momentum, with FOB standoff fire and the supply-trail ratline running throughout. Body count alone wins nothing. And the ROE draws the horror of COIN onto the map: the populated river valleys — the Helmand green zone, the Musa Qala feeder, the Tarin Kowt bowl, the Delaram junction — are drawn as big no-strike "positive-control" areas where every fixed strike near the people costs you at the mandate meter. The open desert and the northern gate are free; trail convoys and troops in contact are always fair game, and air assaults are never blocked — so you still retake your objectives, you just pay for the collateral when you fight where the insurgency hides. And the map plays the intel game with you: a hidden insurgent object you haven't found yet — an IED, a leader's convoy, a cell in the countryside — doesn't sit on the map as a marker at its exact position at all; it shows as a dashed amber "suspected activity" circle offset from the truth ("in here somewhere"), and only flying recon (or hitting it) pins it to a real hostile NATO symbol drawn as what it actually is (an infantry cell, a roadside IED, a named leader, a stronghold's militia) instead of anonymous armor. And the insurgency moves and comes at you as the right kit: the named leader travels as a small convoy you have to find and run down in his home valley (not a parked jeep waiting to be bombed), the cells are technicals and riflemen that wander their patch of countryside (and the infiltrators taking your ungarrisoned base creep toward it during the mission), a roadside IED is an emplaced device with a security team dug in around it — kill the bomb and it's cleared even if the team runs; strafing the guys alone doesn't defuse anything — and some devices are suicide VBIEDs, a lone truck that drives for your nearest forward base, so you intercept it en route or it detonates and costs you at the mandate. The war also comes to you: friendly airfields and FOBs within mortar reach of a living stronghold draw sporadic insurgent rocket/mortar fire during the mission (never the field you spawn at) — pushing the strongholds back is what silences it.
• A new Nevada - Red Flag 81-2 campaign — the ultimate war game, played as the war it rehearses. An F-4E wing detachment deploys to Nellis, January 1981 (after the Reflected Simulations campaign the squadron flies) against the integrated Red Force of the real 1981 exercise: 64th/65th Aggressor F-5Es flying MiG-21 GCI hit-and-run, the 4477th "Red Eagles" Constant Peg MiGs out of Tonopah Test Range (their actual 1981 field), an SA-2/SA-3/SA-6/SA-8 emulator array around Tolicha Peak, Fire Can-directed KS-19 flak belts on every corridor, four F-86-dressed mock airfields, and a simulated enemy army on a FEBA north of Camp Mercury — the range laydown re-pointed at the commercial 81-2 campaign's own mission files (a NEW game picks it up). The whole Vietnam mechanics stack rides along — Red Flag is the institutionalized Vietnam feedback loop — political will as the TAC assessment, the static front as the exercise FEBA, and a three-phase escalation arc (Week One → Force on Force → Surge Week) that releases target classes as you prove the force. The Groom Lake box never opens — enter it and the assessment bleeds, exactly like the real range.
• A new Germany - Red Tide campaign — a Red Storm Rising-flavoured 1988 NATO counteroffensive, built for the 414th. The Warsaw Pact opened the war by overrunning the Fulda Gap, taking Hamburg, and seizing Copenhagen — but the Soviet thrust has culminated, and the 414th now spearheads the push to retake the lost ground. A Soviet Baltic fleet and the captured Copenhagen field open a northern over-water front, and the enemy IADS is thickened with S-300 and SA-11. Every squadron is now a named historical unit wearing a matching livery — real GSFG/VVS regiments on the red side, 414th Joint Fighter Group identities (VMF-29, Voodoo, the 414th TFS, JFG Hornets) on the blue — so the air war no longer spawns mismatched paint schemes. Fulda is now a blue forward helicopter FARP in the Gap (Apaches, Kiowas, Hueys) with the front line routed through it — and it lives like a frontline FARP: fields within artillery reach of the front (Fulda, and red's Haina spearhead) draw sporadic enemy artillery harassment during the mission (never the field you spawn at; the "Frontline artillery harassment" setting, preseeded here). Frankfurt adds a KC-135MPRS drogue tanker. The Crossing the Rubicon campaign it forks from is left untouched. See docs/dev/design/414th-red-tide-campaign-notes.md.
• A drop-spawn sandbox tool lets you right-click blank map space to place a unit group (ground force, SAM, EWR, ship, or coastal/missile site) attached to the nearest friendly command post, with optional deploy-next-turn timing and respawn; right-click a unit you placed to remove it. It is gated behind two cheat settings (unlock placement, and an optional free-placement mode that skips the budget cost), and respects terrain and a range limit from the nearest CP.
• Numerous mission-generation and debriefing fixes are included, along with selected upstream backports newer than the fork's original base.

Most campaign-facing systems have their own setting or plugin toggle — e.g. the combat-SAR enemy-capture race (the enemy trying to seize a downed pilot) is a combatsar plugin option you can turn off, and the AI rescue package is gated by the Automatic Combat SAR setting; existing campaigns keep whatever they were saved with.

For engineering details, implementation paths, defaults, and known limitations, see docs/dev/414th-features.md.

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Download / Latest build

Pre-built .exe releases are published automatically every time main is updated. No GitHub account needed — just grab the zip and run.

Download latest build

1. Download 414th-retribution-latest.zip from the link above.
2. Extract anywhere.
3. Run retribution_main.exe.
4. Point it at your DCS World install on first launch.

The latest release is a rolling pre-release that always reflects the current main branch. For pinned campaign builds, use versioned releases (tagged v1.x.x) if available.

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Running it (from source)

Same as upstream Retribution. Quick start (Windows, PowerShell):

.\scripts\bootstrap-env.ps1
.\scripts\check-env.ps1
.\venv\Scripts\python.exe -m qt_ui.main

You need a working DCS World install and the MOOSE-dependent features assume the bundled mission plugins under resources/plugins/ are present. See README.upstream.md for the full upstream setup, dependencies, and wiki links.

Windows environment sanity

This repo is sensitive to Python drift on Windows. If .venv was created from a Python install that later moved, was removed, or lost execute permissions, all repo-local commands will start failing in the same confusing way for humans and assistants.

Use these two scripts from the repo root:

.\scripts\bootstrap-env.ps1  # find Python 3.11, recreate .venv, install requirements
.\scripts\check-env.ps1      # verify Python, venv, and Git LFS auth health

check-env.ps1 also warns when Git LFS is unauthenticated, which is a common cause of GitHub push/upload failures for repos with LFS-tracked content.

Dev checks (must pass before pushing)

.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m black --check .      # formatting
.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m mypy game tests       # type checking (CI only checks game + tests)
.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pytest tests -q       # unit tests

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Relationship to the 414th workspace

The 414th also maintains a separate mission-building workspace (campaign plans, .miz files, and any Mission-Editor-loaded scripts not yet integrated here, such as the standalone MANTIS IADS). That workspace is private.

Features that started as standalone ME scripts and are now fully integrated into this repo (do not use the standalone versions):

• C-130J EW/ISR → resources/plugins/c130j/ (FlightType.JAMMING)
  • Supersedes the retired generic ewrj / "EW Jammer Script"; do not use that standalone script for F-16/A-10 pod jamming.
• QRA / AI_A2A_DISPATCHER → resources/plugins/intercept/ (per-squadron intercept_reserve)
• TARS recon → resources/plugins/tars/ (runtime engine for FlightType.TARPS)

This repo is the engine-level side: capabilities planned and spawned automatically by the campaign generator rather than hand-placed in the Mission Editor.

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License & credit

DCS Retribution is licensed under the LGPL (see LICENSE). All upstream authorship and the project's history are preserved. The 414th additions are provided under the same terms. Upstream project: https://github.com/dcs-retribution/dcs-retribution.