Debrief on my Run of the New Soviet Campaign

Full disclosure, I did start the campaign while on the beta and completed it over several sessions into the public release via saves on the campaign menu. I may have had some bugs that are now fixed in early missions.

First mission was figuring out how best to use the RoRo carrier and in the process, figuring out the low ingress into dive bomb tactic with the yaks. I didn't lose anything, despite some cannon counter fire to the yaks. setting them to 50ft and max speed on the end of the ingress and occasionally manually dodging when my 6th sense thought a volley looked too accurate. Though I had an issue where my yak would pop up and dive, but fail to drop the bombs and turn around to set up another run. I'm guessing this could be due to a speed change on the late ingress?

Second mission I actually took 2 shots at, first was a mismanagement of ENCOM that ended with most of my fleet shwacked and I called a mulligan. Second try went much better, still using my low flying dive hits to take out the costal ships and gun batteries but spending some of my long range SSMs on missile armed enemy ships, as the yaks are prone to sm1 and 2 shots if detected before the pop and dive. Took out the extra naval targets too.

Third mission was some nice Sub hunting. Surface enemies were notably absent... and I used the 2 hunter helos to run lines of buoys off the sides of the formation to the supply ships, seeing a few targets and almost killing some whales. The pop up enemy was mainly an exercise in patience, as I had to wait for my helos to return and rearm to carpet the area of the new threat.

Fourth Mission was a nice escalation. Somehow only lost 1 yak despite fighting off several phantoms, they still are kneecapped against the yak all aspect IR missiles and Semi active AAMs still lose tracking (I assume from the launch plane having the target get off radar gimbal, though I don't know how I pulled that off) and die mid flight. I've had that happen in the beta, though I chalked it up to the new missile weirdness (it seemed to happen when firing from a subordinate of a formation, where they shoot and temporarily leave the formation position and then fly erratically trying to return to the formation spot without losing the missile tracking.) Anyway, I think I then triggered a bug for the next mission.

For the final mission, I started and then had to retry it later, as I had something IRL and since it was right at the start I didn't use a save in mission. I had been saving on the campaign mission select screen and reloaded later from there. However, despite being pretty sure I used all 8 of my long range SSMs (forgot the name), I started with all 8 SSMs, despite still not having my 2 lost yaks and being down a few SAM missiles on the Petro. Anyways, It didn't end up mattering too much, as a cruiser slapped my 2 (4 missile) volleys down. Yaks still made short work of the medium surface enemies and I lost my touch on anti sub stuff and only made one line of buoys down Petro's course, which found nothing (and I'd pay for that.) Once Enterprise sent it's big wave, I was scrambling to see if I could ENCOM my way out of being harpooned to death as I was careful about radar usage, (I hadn't found any sub contacts yet...). I lost 2 more yaks on a suicide run to take out a cruiser closing in that I didn't want to VID me (will be put in for medals). I then popped on my air search for a second and saw the incoming waves, I ended up losing my RoRo Carrier, first disabled by some A7's bombs and finished by harpoons. I saved my radar and sub helos and at least 2(?) yaks before she sank (saved 20 more men from the rafts with the sub helos). Overall a very long and harrowing fight escape.

Final losses were the RoRo Carrier, and 4 of her yaks (+1) in the previous mission, all other assets survived.