By Bill

If they gave an award for “Most Anticipated Sim of the Year” Ubi Soft’s Lock On:  Modern Air Combat (LOMAC) would be among the leading candidates for 2003.  After a long (and sometimes anxious) wait the baseline version of the sim hit the street in the U.S. in November.  If forum commentary can be used as a guide it was to decidedly mixed reaction in the notoriously hard to please combat sim community.  A patch (Version 1.01) has since been issued for the U.S., U.K., French, and German versions of the sim that addresses many of the issues associated with the original release.  This review is based on the patched version.  Although some additional individual user problems have been reported on the forums as a result of installing the patch we recommend that you run with this version to get the most functionality out of the sim.

With the departure of Jane’s Combat Simulation’s as a serious player in the combat sim field, LOMAC publisher       Ubi Soft has emerged as the heir apparent to the title of air combat sim leader with its solid “IL-2 Sturmovik” and “IL-2: Forgotten Battles” WWII based titles.  Does LOMAC live up to the standard of its two historical cousins?  Is a king’s crown appropriate for this modern day combat sim?

In this review we’ll take a look at those philosophical questions as well as examine the detail of this ambitious effort to bring the expansive world of “modern air combat” to life on your desktop

As befits a major sim release like this we here at Avsim assembled a team of experienced combat simmers with real world military aircraft experience to put LOMAC through its paces.

Managing Editor and lead reviewer Bill Dailey has been flying combat sims since the early 90’s and has 20 years of real world military tactical flying experience.  Senior Combat Sim reviewer Dave Slavens is a current active duty Air Force member and a well known participant in combat forums.  Special guest reviewer Dalibor “Dali” Jovanovic adds real world military jet trainer, general aviation, and glider flying experience as well as an extensive simming background going back to 1982 to the team.

The splash screen that displays while LOMAC first loads up features the F-15 together along  with a mix of realistic background radio chatter

Here’s a map of the area of operations in LOMAC.  It’s the Crimean Peninsula, Caucasus, and adjacent Black Sea region of Russia – the same area covered by the earlier Flanker series of sims

Here’s what Bill, Dave, and Dali had to say.

Installation & User Interface

By Bill

The sim comes on a single CD which needs to be in the drive to run the sim.  For this review I did a clean install which is straightforward and I encountered no  installation hiccups on my test system. The sim started up without any hang ups.  The install consumed about a gig of hard drive space.  Installation of the patch (a 23 MB download) was similarly without incident.

Now comes the fun part.  There are very extensive configuration options within the sim for everything from realism to graphics.  By my count there were 5 major option configuration categories with anything from 6 to 17 sub items per category.  You can do the maths if you want to but the bottom line is that works out to a lot of combinations and permutations.  So what’s the point?  Just this – when you first get started expect to do a bit more trial and error in working thru these options to arrive at the best configuration for your system than you do with most sims.  The screenshots below show the main user interface and some of the options screens.

Unless you’re running with the very latest processor and graphics technology you are pretty much guaranteed to have to make a bunch of tradeoffs between performance and appearance/realism in LOMAC.  Maxing out all the settings and running with it most likely is not going to work for you.  So be prepared and don’t complain when it happens. Just for the record the box recommended hardware requirements are:

P4 2.0 or AMD 1800 Ghz Processor
Windows XP
512 RAM
128 MB Video Card
DirectX 8.1 or higher
4X CD-ROM
LAN or minimum 56 Kbs for Multiplayer

As you can see the review team’s test systems covered the spectrum with Bill and Dali being below the processor spec and Dave being above.

The main interface screen is well designed and provides easy access to all of the sim features.  You can jump into any of the player flyable aircraft and be up and flying with in a second with a bunch of defenseless targets in the immediate area.  A great way to get familiar with the aircraft systems and weapons without fear of being shot down while you learn.

LOMAC features many different user selectable options to custom configure the sim to your specific system.  Be prepared to make tradeoffs to get the optimum performance.  “Scalability” is one of the good features of the sim

This shot of the graphics configuration screen shows the many user options available.

Before discussing the LOMAC flight models I’d like to begin with a few words on how things got to where they are today. 

In 1992, Nick Grey, the boss of the Fighter Collection Company, located in Duxford, UK, went to Moscow in search of a successful software company he could invest some money in. He and A. Masalovich, who was working on an Su-27 Flanker simulator, quickly found a common language and together they started a company called Eagle Dynamics Ltd (ED). A team quickly began to form that included some members from TsAGI (the Central Aero-Hydrodynamics Institute), who brought with them in depth knowledge and wide experience in modern aerodynamics.

Since then, ED has worked on several software projects, but within the gaming community they are known only as flight simulator developers. Their first products Su-27 Flanker, and Flanker 2.0 won many hearts among flight sim enthusiasts but those titles were not financially successful enough. When Matt “Wags” Wagner came to UBI Soft and became the Flanker 3 producer some things changed. The biggest novelty was the introduction of a “relaxed” flight and weapons modelling option in hopes that a broader market could be reached. Somewhere in the middle of beta testing, ED tried to incorporate a so called an “alternative flight model” as an option for the “hard-core crowd” but could not incorporate it without causing serious problems to the enhanced Flanker 2 engine under development. This lead to the LOMAC solution, which may be controversial to some, but at the end of the day it works fine and most importantly, has left the doors for improvement open.

Now to the sim.  I’m going to focus on the Russian air superiority aircraft but my comments apply to all.  As we’ve mentioned three Russian fighter aircraft are simulated in LOMAC (the Su-27, Su-33, and Mig-29) which are well known for their excellent handling characteristics, especially at low speeds and extreme angles of attack. Manoeuvres like the Cobra, tail slide, and such have become their trade-mark. Since the alternative flight model was not going to be incorporated into the engine, an interim solution had to be found, and it came in the shape of partially scripted flight modelling. It is not used throughout the flight envelope though, but only in some situations such as landing, the Cobra, and some others. The logic behind this is – it is better to have partially scripted behaviour on critical and supercritical angles of attack, where complex calculations for aerodynamics would require too many CPU cycles, than low fps or even a wrong flight path for the aircraft. Partially scripted behaviour has weak areas – one is landing and the other is ground handling. On landing the aircraft doesn’t behave like it should, i.e. a few inches before touch-down it just drops to the runway and stays there glued. There is no sign of the inertia you would expect in the real world. Ground handling also doesn’t seem right. The planes taxi as if they were on rails and there is no feel that you are moving 30 + tons of aluminium, titanium, and fuel around. But, to be honest, those shortcomings do not seriously disrupt the feel of the aircraft. Taxiing on the aprons is not what this sim was meant to be. The real fun begins, when you kick the burners and set the beasts into motion.

We’re talking here about the depiction and representation of the various air to air, air to ground, and ground to air weapons systems contained in LOMAC as well as the sensor systems used for detection, targeting, and guidance for these weapons.  Overall I would rate this area as very realistic.

LOMAC does an excellent job of representing the major current weapons employed in air combat both air to air and air to ground and giving the user a good feel for how these weapons are employed.  In addition there’s a very good depiction of the air defense environment that modern combat pilots must operate in.  Can you say “High Threat?”

The weapon inventory that can be employed on the player flyable aircraft is pretty comprehensive be it radar guided, infrared, laser, electro-optical or plain old “dumb” iron bombs or unguided rockets.  In addition, there’s a very good and thorough discussion of the various weapons and their employment as well as reference tables in the pdf instruction manual.  It would pay you great dividends to read this material before trying to employ any of these even if you are an experienced combat simmer.

If you don’t want to chance the realistic weapons and sensor modes you can jump right to the “good stuff” of blowing up bad guys by using the Easy Radar and Auto Lockon feature if you want to get into action without the frustration and most likely fatal consequences of fiddling with systems trying to figure them out while in the midst of combat.  Easy radar will show all friendly and enemy units around your aircraft color coded and auto lock on will enable you to lock on to and engage the nearest enemy target.  Don’t be too proud to try this even if you consider yourself to be an expert combat simmer because the more realistic weapons and sensor modes will require some study to gain proficiency.

In my experience the radar modeling and study necessary to correctly employ it in LOMAC is not quite to the level of detail in Falcon 4.0 but is definitely challenging and will require you to correctly select the best mode for your situation and practice to gain the reaction speed you will need to stay alive.

The sim weapons and sensor modeling also gives you a good feel for the relatively higher workload in Russian designed aircraft versus their Western counterparts but make no mistake - modern air combat s a high intensity endeavor in either environment.  Correctly and effectively employing the wide range of weapons and sensors in LOMAC is most definitely a challenge that will test the most experienced simmer.

Current high angle off bore site weapons targeting and launch, a technology pioneered by the Russians,  is accurately depicted and a key aspect of modern air to air combat. enabled in LOMAC.

Simmers tend to get hung up sometimes in arcane debates about whether the representation and performance of both aircraft and weapons conforms to the exact performance numbers in the real world.  I think this misses the point. A good sim gives you the feel for the weapon – this one has a longer range than that one or whatever the relative difference is. 

Overall, from this perspective I found the weapons and sensors modeled in LOMAC to be very representative of the relative performance and effectiveness of their real world counterparts.  In my view that’s a pretty good endorsement for any combat sim.

Included with LOMAC are 4 mini campaigns totaling 27 missions. I call them mini as they’re brief tastes of what one can do with the mission/campaign editor which I will go into later. There is an A-10 campaign consisting of 7 missions, an F-15 campaign of 7 missions, an SU-25 campaign of 6 missions, and finally the Su-27 campaign of 7 missions. I flew the A-10 and the Su-25. The A-10 campaign was fun, and not to difficult to win. The Su-25 was more of a challenge as the plane itself has no fancy MFD’s, gadgets etc. So in addition to learning the plane I was trying to keep from getting my can shot off. So if you are looking for a challenge, try the Su-25 campaign first. I am in the middle of the F-15 campaign and I am having a heck of a time winning it. In one mission you have to cover some A-10’s, well no matter how many times I get the Mig’s before they get to the A-10’s I can’t seem to win the mission. This brings me to my next point, getting to the next mission stage. In order to do that you must successfully complete the previous mission. Some people have heart burn with that and I can understand that, however in real life you must complete a mission before going to the next one! If you don’t complete it you will hit that target until you do. You can’t half ass it, a partial success doesn’t cut it either. If a target has to go then it has to go. Any tactical planner would tell you the same.

I didn’t like the fact in the campaign you couldn’t choose your own load outs, as I didn’t agree with some of the load outs that were given. However I talked to Matt Wagner and he stated that this would be fixed in the patch.

Frame rates in the campaign are not bad on my computer which is a 2.4 GHz, P4 with 512 RD RAM and a 128 MB GF4 Ti4600. However I did get stutter and anyone with a low end machine may have some difficulties with the amount of objects in the campaign. Again it was stated that with the patch, the campaign will be optimized for low end users. 

Overall the campaigns were not bad. Need to be longer? Yes. Would LOMAC benefit from a dynamic campaign? Big time!

The Fast Battle Planner (FBP) is something that can really extend the life of LOMAC. It is easy to use and that is what a lot of users want. You can set the weather, time, distance, height, and loadouts of your plane. You can add ground units to attack, or make it just air to air. There is an endless amount of combinations a user can choose. I did have a few problems with it though. When I chose winter terrain it stayed on the summer terrain. Also when I chose the A-10 to fly and put missiles as its loadout it gave me bombs. I think that is a bug for sure. So if you haven’t ventured into the way the Mission Editor works then starting with the FBP is an excellent place to start.

If you rather not mess with the FBP, then when you fire up LOMAC there are 6 quick start missions all ready to go. Just hit fly. This I found out is a real excellent place to start to learn the weapons system etc without getting your can shot off. I find myself going back to them often to try different things outs. A good example would be Andy Bush’s article on using the A-10’s weapons systems in LOMAC. This can be found here. Using the A-10 quick mission I tested out those techniques to help gain a better understanding of how to employ the A-10. So I recommend using the quick missions as a good area to start learning how to use your arsenal of weapons.

Also included in LOMAC are a myriad of training missions for your viewing pleasure.  By viewing pleasure I mean they are tracks recorded in which you just sit and watch how to do something. The entire training missions are in depth but they suffer from a serious flaw. No voice over, I found myself having to pause often to read the text and then un-pausing to see what the instructor was talking about. After awhile that gets old. But that is the training mission’s only flaw in my opinion. The depth of the instruction was good though and gave you a concise way to employ your weapons, land your plane, or to even taxi. I found that the F-15 training on using your AMRAAM, AIM-7, is one of the best training missions in the bunch. Mark Shepard went into great detail on how to use your weapons correctly. There is also a bonus in the training mission that can not go unsaid. In the F-15 training it shows him beaming an incoming AA-10C and causing it to break its lock. If you know how to use your A2A missiles in LOMAC, that is great. However you need to watch it just to watch his beaming technique. The other excellent training mission is on how to use your weapons when flying the Su-25. Since the entire cockpit of the Su-25 is analog, no fancy avionics, then knowing how to use your laser guided weapon on the Froggy makes this tutorial a must. In fact using this training mission is what is getting me through the Su-25 campaign now. My advice? Go through that before you start the campaign, keeps your can in place instead of riding the silk elevator because you couldn’t figure out how to shoot a missile.

Nothing extends the life of a combat sim like a good Mission Editor. In the old Flanker 2.0/2.51 days I made a slew of them. In fact I made more missions than I spent time flying. The Mission Editor in LOMAC only builds off the fantastic editor of the Flanker series. First of all, there are more objects than you can imagine. The only limitations are your imagination. You want to set up a US Navy Carrier Battle group vs a Russian Surface Action Group, you can. You want a pinpoint strike of B-1B’s coming in low to hit an enemy headquarters, you can. Want civilian traffic on roads or cargo ship moving goods around the Black Sea, you can. You can control the weather like never before. You want to take off in 0 Vis during a snow storm, you can do it. How about a thunderstorm with lightning and lots and lots of rain……….oh and lets add strong wind and turbulence. You can do it. Now that you’ve done that, take off in it. Go ahead, I dare ya. Also the terrain size is huge, twice as much land than in the Flanker series. That can make for some long missions in which you can do some aerial refueling. I literally can not even begin to touch the ability of this very powerful tool.

Setting up your missions to run right takes time. I am still making sure I have targets selected, mission goals, load outs done in a campaign I am making for LOMAC. You can very easily forget to do that, test your mission and find your plane without weapons. Or you set up some targets and didn’t assign anyone to attack them. So there is a learning curve, all you have to do is dig in and see what’s what. Something the editor is lacking is triggers or flags that some editors have. If they are in there I haven’t found them. Triggers/flags basically tell the sim that if this target gets attacked or this plane goes here, then there will be this response by the sim to do this or that. That adds for an element of surprise and gives a mission life. I have yet to find is the ability to set up a branching campaign. Basically a branching campaign’s missions are set up that if you pass or fail them then it affects the outcome of other missions. As it stands right now you can make linear campaigns, but that element of surprise is what make the difference in a campaign. The best instance of a branching campaign goes back to Jane’s F/A-18E, in which that campaign editor was found accidentally by a simmer. I am hoping there is a way to do that in LOMAC and it has not been revealed yet.

This shot shows a formation of 4 F15Cs.  I’ve just given the close formation command and the wingmen have closed up.  Unfortunately they did so from a trail formation in about 1 second so this area needs a little work.  Things don’t happen that fast in real life.

Here you can see one of the comm menus displayed. There’s a pretty good number of communications commands and functions but no explanation of them that we see in the sim documentation.