I’ve been on and off Enigma’s Cold War Server and then later Heatblur’s Cold War Server (when it changed hands) since the server gained in popularity. I was never a regular but I did pop in from time to time. Recently, however, I’ve been flying with my regular group on the server more and I thought I’d share a more general approach to my journal with this one.

How is it going on the server?

Heatblur have been managing the server since Engima stepped away from it back in 2024. There seems to have been some rebuilding going on more recently but the server’s population has been rebounding and the relatively approachable experience makes it a boon for most DCS fans so long as they have one or more modules in the Cold War era.

Right now the server is running scenarios on Caucasus only. The setup has a boardgame-esq system with hexes denoting friendly and enemy territory. Player actions directly affect territorial gains and losses either by striking and depleting enemy units and bases, defending your own, or taking out more strategic targets like factories that are placed around the map.

I started with a few rounds on Blue team with some pretty interesting Huey and F-4 flights – a subject I will return to soon. But more recently its been Red team operations that I wanted to write about. My team and I have been flying in mixed modules including the Mi-24 Hind, MiG-21bis, Su-25A, the A-4 (which is on Team red right now?) and I’ve been gearing up on the Mirage F1.

DCS World track files have proven to be unwieldy and generally useless. Perhaps more forcefully… they are garbage! I rarely resort to such simplistic language but in this case its deserved. We’re long overdue a tracking system that can provide for effective and easy replay. See IL-2 Great Battles or X-Plane 12 for inspiration. Meanwhile, I got some great help from the community (including Bullet4MyEnemy who just posted this guide) but I was still not really satisfied with the outcome… so this journal is going to be more overview and cockpit shots than a play by play. Eagle Dynamics: the day you roll out track files on the level of IL-2 Great Battles, I will get to doing some more play by play with great screenshots! Till then…it is what it is.

Hind on the front

I’ve written about the DCS: Mi-24P Hind a fair bit on the blog before but I wanted to really highlight just how much fun this module is on a server like this. The Hind brings a bit of everything to the fight with its wire guided ATGMs able to hit targets from a reasonable amount of standoff range, the rockets and cannon make short work of other targets, and the Hind has the passenger/cargo space so you can load up troops and drop them off.

The server uses a system where you can load and unload soldiers. They can be standard troops (which can do battle and destroy targets), recon teams which spot targets for the entire team, or special forces which can be used to destroy strategic objectives.

A few of us were flying Hinds regularly and doing double duty. We’d fly into enemy territory, drop off the recon teams, spot targets for the entire team, and then we’d proceed to whittle down enemy ground targets on our own. A pair of Hinds can make short work of a few different target zones in one sortie if all things go well.

Of course, things don’t always go well. More than a few times we were surprised by enemy positions that we hadn’t spotted visually and that hadn’t yet been revealed by a recon team. Ground fire, including 20mm radar aimed cannon fire, took me out on more than one occasion. Hostile tanks also seemed to be able to engage and hit our maneuvring Mi-24s with a far higher rate of accuracy that I would have thought possible.

To this day I remain somewhat critical of how DCS World’s ground AI systems interact with aircraft often being able to pinpoint and fire with precision and speed that seems unlikely. Especially with Cold War era systems.

Helicopters do appear on radar reports and so unless you’re at treetop height or below, you will appear and often find enemy fighters vectored onto you. On more than one occasion I was engaged by an enemy fighter that largely missed with their cannon and missile fire but did succeed in plowing straight into me. It’s quite hard to dodge a fighter jet in a Mi-24 and the server currently doesn’t allow you to take the R-60 air to air missile for defense.

Frustrations aside, we also had quite a few good sorties and repeat sorties taking off from a FARP (Forward Arming and Refueling Point), deploying recon teams, attacking, recovering the team, returning to base to refuel and rearm. It was all quite fun when it was working well and the DCS: Mi-24P Hind remains one of my favourite DCS World modules with a superb flight model, sounds, visual design, and the relative simplicity of the helicopter’s systems. It’s fun to have Petrovich AI to pick off targets at range and then come in and finish things off with the cannon or rockets.

A wild Frogfoot appears

Another aircraft I’ve been employing on the server with just a couple of sorties so far has been the Su-25A “Frogfoot.” The Flaming Cliffs level aircraft is a far easier way to get into DCS World and the Frogfoot excels in the kind of low altitude close air support engagements that we’ve been doing on the server.

Armed with a mix of guided and unguided weapons, I’ve mostly been using the cannon, rockets and unguided bombs deployed with a CCIP style pipper to target ground objects. And its really good at that kind of experience requiring mostly short flights that you can setup and go in very short order.

The forthcoming upgrade and freely available Su-25A should be a boon to the Cold War server and give the Red team quite a formidable attacker. A full fidelity module has also been talked about and I would welcome it!

And the Su-25 isn’t that bad when you get targeted by enemy aircraft. An enterprising F-86 pilot tried to get the drop on me but was distracted by a friend flying a MiG-21bis which allowed me to swing around and dispatch the F-86 with a pair of R-60 missiles.

It’s not a Mirage

My next series of missions are likely to involve the Mirage F1! I’ve been enthralled by the idea of doing low altitude strike missions again (ala with the Viggen and Phantom) and the Mirage F1 seems like a solid option for the Red Team to perform that kind of flying.

With ample bomb load and a pair of fuel tanks plus a pair of heatseekers for self defense, I’m currently practising low altitude and dive bomb attacks against targets with the Mirage F1 so that I can take that experience online. A future journal perhaps!