If you’ve gone looking for recommendations for a DCS World campaign, a couple of authors are going to come up time and time again. Accomplished campaign creator, Baltic Dragon, is one of them! Over the years, he has developed a reputation for quality single player scripted campaign experiences that encompass a wide variety of aircraft and scenarios.

Curious to know about the person behind these works, I reached out and did a short Q&A with Baltic Dragon where we talk past, present and future!

The Q&A

My perennial favourite question to ask anyone involved in flight sims is about how you got here. How did you get your start with flight sims and did you start with combat flight sims first or did you come from the civil aviation side first? 

No civil aviation experience here, in fact – no experience at all. Although I do remember having a book from early 90’s with specifications of all major western and eastern fighters and bombers of the era and spending a lot of time digesting the infos there – maximum speed, armament, altitude etc. I also always loved playing the combat sims on different computers I had, I think starting with AH-64 one for Amiga 500 (not to mention first Frontier on ZX Spectrum, but pretty sure almost nobody remembers that computer!).

What was your first combat flight sim?

I think it was the Gunship 2000 from 1991 for Amiga. Then I was on and off with different titles. I liked sims but it was not my favorite genre back then. 

Your reputation as a campaign maker for DCS World stretches back through the last several years. How long have you been making missions and campaigns for DCS World and how did you get started?

My first campaign, The Enemy Within was reviewed by Chris from Mudspike in 2015 and this is how it started. Soon after ED contacted me asking if I wouldn’t be interested in updating it and releasing as an official DLC, and if I remember correctly TEW 2.0 was the first DCS DLC not built in-house but by 3rd party.

Then after some time I realized I need to update TEW as it was really too old and this is how TEW 3.0 came to being. It still is very enjoyable and I’ve kept it updated for the A-10C II Tank Killer. 

How do you approach creating a campaign? What do you find inspires you as you put the missions, story, and events all together?

I will answer as a true fighter pilot: it depends.

It may start with an idea for a single mission (that was the case with TEW, where I first imagined taking off during the mortar attack on the airfield). For the stock Mirage 2000 campaign I needed to have something that would combine Caucasus, training and some combat – and that is how I came up with an idea of exchange pilot upgrading his skills and suddenly finding himself in the middle of renewed hostilities between Georgia and Russia.

Raven One was a “DCS-ation” of the excellent novel by Kevin Miller. The second part was basically written from scratch by him and ‘Jell-O’ from Fighter Pilot Podcast, and so on. Each campaign is different. 

One of your early released payware campaigns was ‘The Enemy Within’ campaign for DCS: A-10C. You’ve since remastered it a few times up to version 3.0. When you go back and remake a campaign like that, do you find yourself being critical about decisions that you made before or is it like coming home to something familiar?

Oh yes. While I still really like it, I find it not very realistic with all the random chatter going on during longer parts of missions where nothing else happens. The campaigns which I build now have 3-4 times more lines than TEW (usually between 3.000 and 4.000), and almost none of it is idle chatter. But as I say, I’ve recently updated the campaign and I still find it very fun to fly!

Your next campaign to release is called ‘The Gamblers’ and it shines a spotlight on DCS: F-16C and the DCS: Syria map. Projects like these take a long time to put together. Do you have an estimate of how many hours it takes to put something like this together? Do you tend to work concurrently on other projects too?

Again, it depends. Until now I’ve been working on my projects as a side-show, with a very demanding normal job, three kids, a lot of traveling plus quite a lot of DCS time dedicated to supporting already released campaigns. Which means that some projects may take around 3 years or more to get released, just like the Gamblers.

As of the summer I am planning to move to DCS as my main activity, which should cut that time to 1 year or maybe even less per campaign and allow me to work on 2-3 projects simultaneously. So you can expect to see more from Baltic Dragon in 2024 / 2025 and beyond!

For folks who are excited to play The Gamblers. How much DCS: F-16 knowledge and capability do you recommend people have before going into the campaign? What key systems should they know how to operate?

All of them 🙂 Maybe apart whole air to air arena, as there was almost nothing of that during the Operation Inherent Resolve. But definitely all the smart bombs, good mastery of TGP, Mavericks, HARMs. Air to air refueling is optional, but won’t be necessary. On top of that – good situational awareness. 

Of all of the missions and campaigns that you’ve put together over the years, is there one or two that you think have been overshadowed by the rest and that all of us should check out?

I think that Mirage 2000 Red Flag campaign is still relatively not very well known (probably also because it is the NTTR map). I still think it is pretty fun and worth trying. Also, I think more people flown Raven One than Raven One: Dominant Fury, and the latter is a big step and improvement over the former. Worth checking out. Another one is the Iron Flag for the A-10C II in Nevada. I am super proud how well received it was but I think still many people haven’t heard about it. 

You’re doing something interesting with your next project by working collaboratively with another well known DCS campaign maker, Reflected Simulations. How has that process been? How does the shared narrative between the campaigns work together?

Greg (Reflected) is a great guy and he did some heavy lifting with coming up with the storyline for most of the missions, to which I’ve added my 2 cents and accommodated my ideas.

He has great knowledge, pays super attention to even the smallest details and I really like it. On the other hand as you can imagine sometimes we had opposing ideas for some of the things happening in the missions and had to compromise.

But you will soon get two very good campaigns that complement each other and tell a very engaging story which in some cases you can experience from two different perspectives – the Finnish Hornet or US Viper pilot flying the same sortie. 

It wasn’t too long after the first announcement on the Kola map that you were already talking about creating a campaign for the map? How excited are you about Orbx’s Kola map?

It is a very nice map. Well done, green – even if the days are usually pretty short there – and with various areas.

Reflected and I were both contacted by Eagle Dynamics and asked if we wouldn’t like to do something for the map, and we of course jumped on it immediately.

We’re currently wrapping things up, will be recording voiceovers shortly and getting the campaigns out 2-3 months after the map itself is released. 

Do you have any projects coming up that we haven’t talked about yet that you want to share? Any secret projects in the mix that you want to tease us on?

Nothing secret. After Gamblers and Kola I’ll be moving back to building a training campaign for the F-18 as third installment of Raven One series (so a training written by two former Hornet drivers, one of them being a Topgun instructor). We’re also starting to work on a similar project for the Apache with Casmo. I want to finish the Iron Flag as well, as I really like this campaign! 

Thanks to Baltic Dragon

I really want to thank Baltic Dragon for participating in this Community Q&A series. I love to shine the spotlight on creators that help make our sim experiences better and Baltic Dragon has contributed a huge collection of work to nearly all aspects of the DCS World mission experience and across multiple modules.

Thanks for giving us some insights on how you do what you do and on what’s coming up next.

Baltic Dragon is the author of numerous campaigns for DCS World including Raven One, Raven One: Dominant Fury, Iron Flag Part I, and The Enemy Within v3.0. Look for his next work, The Gamblers, to come out very soon!