DCS Campaign
Manager
The game master's page for a SECTOR campaign: which vehicles each side fields and what they are called in the conflict, which aircraft with which loadouts, what everything costs, and the cut-off date that keeps out vehicles that came later. A scenario exports to a file and loads from a file, so one group prepares a real war and the others take it.
What it is
The Campaign Manager prepares the scenario of a Mission Control campaign: which vehicles each side fields and what they are called in the conflict, which aircraft with which loadouts, what everything costs, the campaign engine’s settings and the cut-off date that keeps out vehicles that came later.
It is the game master’s page. The scenario holds for the whole campaign, and the engine picks it up on its own from the round after it is saved.
It lives inside SECTOR, the group’s DCS tools application, and is reached from gcidemo.
A real war, with the real names
The point is that DCS does not have every vehicle of every war. South Africa’s Olifants are M-60s in DCS, an Abrams of a particular version is just an Abrams. The scenario lets you write the name in the conflict beside the DCS type, so the map and the logs show what the pilots expect to read.
And a scenario exports to a file and loads from a file: one group prepares a real war with its forces, its costs and its date, and the other groups take it, whole or only the parts they need. SECTOR ships with a library of scenarios, the first being SECTOR stock, with the usual vehicles, weights and costs.
The four tabs
Scenario. Name, author, a short description and the cut-off date. The engine fields only vehicles in service by that year: the year written in the entry counts, otherwise the DCS type’s. A T-90 in a 1985 campaign is not born.
Ground. Both sides side by side, one group per card. Each entry has its name in the conflict, a selector that filters the type list (tanks, IFVs, APCs, reconnaissance, tank destroyers, artillery, air defence, infantry, logistics, and the Second World War pack), the DCS type, the year, the weight that says how often the engine picks that entry, and the cost in credits.
Air. Each side’s aircraft, taken from the catalogue with their loadouts.
Settings. The campaign engine’s parameters for that war.
Who changes what, and when
The scenario does not touch forces already in the field: a platoon born before the save stays as it was, with its name and its cost, and only new ones are born with the new values. That is the rule that lets you correct a scenario mid-campaign without rewriting what has already happened.
Every save is a new version, with the last ten to go back to. If two people save at once, the second gets a conflict instead of erasing the first one’s work.
Status
It is work in progress, like the whole campaign engine: the scenario works and the engine uses it, but the dynamic campaign as a whole is still coming out piece by piece.
Access
Open at gcidemo.alessandrosimonitto.it/campaign, read only. On a group’s own installation it is opened by Mission Control’s management and by the administrator.