414Ret - 414th Joint Fighter Group's DCS Retribution Fork

This repository is the 414th Joint Fighter Group's customized build of DCS Retribution - a turn-based dynamic campaign generator for DCS World.

It is a squadron-focused build of upstream Retribution (dev branch), combining the 414th's campaign, mission, and quality-of-life work with selected newer upstream fixes and backports. The unmodified upstream project README is preserved as README.upstream.md.

For AI assistants / other Claude sessions: read CLAUDE.md first. It is the engineering handoff doc - architecture, where each feature lives, the branch layout, and what is still in flight.

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What's different from upstream

414Ret is not a collection of reskins or a single extra aircraft pack. It changes how a Retribution campaign is planned, understood, and flown by a multiplayer squadron. The current build starts from upstream dev at dce851ea, then adds the 414th feature set and selected later upstream fixes.

Intelligence is incomplete — and recon has a purpose

• Enemy sites can be known without their exact composition, strength, damage state, or threat rings being known. Attacking or scouting a site reveals it; confirmed battle damage can require a surviving recon pass.
• TARPS is a real player task for F-14s, supported by the TARS film-and-debrief system. What the aircraft photographs is carried back into the campaign as confirmed intelligence.
• When you need the ground truth anyway — debugging a campaign, planning the opposing side, or just checking the real laydown — tick Reveal fog of war (overview) in the map's layer panel (top-right, with the other enemy-intel toggles). It turns the fog off and shows the true picture: full enemy composition, threat rings, and otherwise-hidden command posts. It is a view toggle only — it never changes the campaign and is never saved.
• The map layer panel is a single grouped, collapsible control (dark-themed to match the app) with one-click preset views — Default, SEAD, Recon, Clean — and it remembers your layer choices between sessions.
• An optional Approximate target area mode removes perfect player coordinates and offsets steerpoints, making visual acquisition, talk-ons, and reconnaissance matter. Against mobile SAMs, DEAD and SEAD flights get a single fuzzed target-area waypoint instead of a precise steerpoint per launcher/radar; Strike keeps exact per-target points since buildings don't move. DEAD kneeboards always trade exact coordinates for a rough bullseye cue (bearing and range to ~1 NM) while still listing each target's steerpoint number.
• Mobile short-range defenses are kept off player datalinks while larger SAM sites remain available for deliberate SEAD/DEAD planning.

Missions are built for squadron play

• SCAR adds a player-led moving-target hunt: identify the real HVT among decoys and clutter, then stop it before it reaches safety or, for a SCUD, reaches its launch point. Prosecuting the wrong convoy is a mis-identification that costs budget (tunable via the SCAR mis-ID penalty Campaign Doctrine setting; set 0 to disable), so reading the target signature matters — it's printed on your SCAR kneeboard, and the on-scene controller's calls go to your flight (and the C-130 King), not the whole coalition. Real armor and missile sites can become the moving objective instead of a disposable scripted stand-in. An experimental option (on by default for new campaigns while it is being playtested) uses finite purchased SOF teams to capture a commander alive: a C-130 inserts the team ahead of the fleeing HVT, a clean grab reveals enemy command posts (the team escapes with the hostage), and a botched grab strands the team as a "downed SOF team" objective you can fly a helo CSAR recovery against on a later turn before it is overrun. An opt-in SCAR auto-planning setting can frag a SCAR hunt into your ATO automatically each turn (off by default while the in-mission scripting is being playtested).
• Combat SAR makes a downed pilot worth flying for. A CH-47 orbits near the front as the rescuer while a C-130 holds overhead as the HC-130 "King" — on-scene command with an air-tracking TACAN the helo homes on (an AI King lights it automatically; a player King sets it from the planned channel in-cockpit) and an F10 survivor-locator readout. When a human pilot ejects, they spawn with a beacon; recover them and deliver them to any friendly field and the campaign spares the aviator (you still lose the jet, but the experienced pilot returns to the squadron instead of being lost). Player-flown, with an optional AI standing alert. It is a separate task from the SCAR SOF-recovery CSAR above.
• JAMMING turns the C-130J into an EC-130H/RC-130H-style EW and ISR platform with standoff jamming and ELINT gameplay. This is the only 414th scripted EW model; the old generic fighter-pod "EW Jammer Script" is retired.
• Strike and DEAD packages can receive auto-planned TARPS follow-up, while BAI remains the normal planner task for conventional anti-armor work.
• The fork also carries newer suppression behavior: AI SEAD can loiter near the target, react to emitters, and break off on a computed timeline instead of making a single inflexible pass.
• The auto-planner no longer sends strikers through a SAM belt it only intends to clear: if a planned DEAD can't actually reach a SAM shielded behind another live radar threat, the strike that depends on it is held back until the belt is genuinely down, instead of bombers being tasked into defenses that are still alive.

The air war behaves like a campaign, not a queue of isolated sorties

• Squadrons can hold aircraft in a QRA intercept reserve for runtime base defense.
• BARCAP coverage uses overlapping, jittered, threat-weighted waves and a more useful forward defensive line. Quiet sectors retain baseline coverage; contested sectors gain more.
• Transit routes treat the active ground battle as a hazard, reducing the tendency for unrelated AI flights to loiter over the FLOT.
• AWACS and tanker racetracks are anchored on the front line and stand off into friendly airspace, so support orbits sit centered behind the fighting at a sane distance instead of being flung far off-axis or pinned onto a home airfield.
• An optional auto-planner unpredictability doctrine knob (per side, off by default) varies which offensive targets the enemy services first, so red stops striking the same targets in the same order every turn. Its reactive air defenses stay just as sharp.
• Doctrine controls expose patrol-altitude floors and scatter, and the aircraft task priorities have received a conservative role-based rebalance.
• Soviet/Russian air defenses use improved legacy SAM layouts and radar composition. Campaign-map SAM rings, emitters, routes, and IADS links are easier to inspect and read.

The generated mission feels occupied

• Troops In Contact (TIC) produces prolonged, formation-aware frontline firefights with ambient suppressive fire instead of letting vanilla ground AI instantly erase the battle.
• Frontline formations are distributed along the line rather than piled onto one patch of terrain.
• Flight Control adds player-facing tower sequencing at friendly land bases, with SRS voice and optional text fallback.
• Civilian regional traffic adds light rear-area activity, while the 414th-tuned Splash Damage 3 build improves weapon effects without returning to the plugin's harsher stock values.
• Nation-specific voiceovers per squadron — each squadron's aircraft fly under their own country, so a mixed-nation coalition hears each unit's real national radio voice instead of one shared faction voice. Single-nation factions are unaffected.

Planning and debriefing expose the information crews need

• Ground targets have an intel panel showing known strength, mission suitability, ranges, IADS membership, visibility, and capture/purchase state.
• Package and flight dialogs show task, TOT, player slots, departure bases, squadron fit, available aircraft, and target distance without making planners hunt across windows.
• The map provides clearer SAM, route, emitter, and IADS interaction; waypoint altitude editing supports practical bulk changes.
• Debriefing begins with mission impact — territorial changes, runway damage, and losses — before the full event detail.
• Kneeboards are restyled to use the page: clean headings with underline rules and spacing (no wasted bottom-half), and the Friendly Packages list flows into two columns when long.
• Custom kneeboards can be imported from the Kneeboards toolbar button — add an image once and it's injected into every flight's kneeboard (or scoped to one airframe), stored in the campaign save, instead of hand-editing each mission.
• Plugin settings explain what each system does and use squadron-readable labels and units.

Additional 414th content and integrations

• Native F/A-18C DTC export generates a terrain-tagged cartridge with CAP and tanker racetracks for the Hornet SA page, embeds it in the mission, and mirrors it into the player's Saved Games DTC library. It is disabled by default because the current DCS build still requires players to select the cartridge manually once per sortie.
• The CurrentHill Iran integration adds Shahed-136 and IRGCN FAC assets plus a dedicated [CH] Iran 2020 faction behind a new-game mod toggle.
• The settings screen was audited end-to-end: dead and duplicate options were removed, the two AI-radio toggles were merged into a single AI wingman radio behavior choice (Normal / Suppress contact reports / Radio silence), and many labels were clarified. Existing campaigns migrate automatically on load.
• A new Germany - Red Tide campaign — a Red Storm Rising-flavoured 1988 NATO counteroffensive, built for the 414th. The Warsaw Pact opened the war by overrunning the Fulda Gap, taking Hamburg, and seizing Copenhagen — but the Soviet thrust has culminated, and the 414th now spearheads the push to retake the lost ground. A Soviet Baltic fleet and the captured Copenhagen field open a northern over-water front, and the enemy IADS is thickened with S-300 and SA-11. Every squadron is now a named historical unit wearing a matching livery — real GSFG/VVS regiments on the red side, 414th Joint Fighter Group identities (VMF-29, Voodoo, the 414th TFS, JFG Hornets) on the blue — so the air war no longer spawns mismatched paint schemes. Fulda is now a blue forward helicopter FARP in the Gap (Apaches, Kiowas, Hueys) with the front line routed through it, and Frankfurt adds a KC-135MPRS drogue tanker. The Crossing the Rubicon campaign it forks from is left untouched. See docs/dev/design/414th-red-tide-campaign-notes.md.
• A drop-spawn sandbox tool lets you right-click blank map space to place a unit group (ground force, SAM, EWR, ship, or coastal/missile site) attached to the nearest friendly command post, with optional deploy-next-turn timing and respawn; right-click a unit you placed to remove it. It is gated behind two cheat settings (unlock placement, and an optional free-placement mode that skips the budget cost), and respects terrain and a range limit from the nearest CP.
• Numerous mission-generation and debriefing fixes are included, along with selected upstream backports newer than the fork's original base.

Most campaign-facing systems have their own setting or plugin toggle. The experimental SCAR commander-capture/SOF campaign mechanics are on by default for new campaigns while they are being playtested (toggle SCAR command-post intel on the Campaign Doctrine page to turn them off); existing campaigns keep whatever they were saved with.

For engineering details, implementation paths, defaults, and known limitations, see docs/dev/414th-features.md.

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Download / Latest build

Pre-built .exe releases are published automatically every time main is updated. No GitHub account needed — just grab the zip and run.

Download latest build

1. Download 414th-retribution-latest.zip from the link above.
2. Extract anywhere.
3. Run retribution_main.exe.
4. Point it at your DCS World install on first launch.

The latest release is a rolling pre-release that always reflects the current main branch. For pinned campaign builds, use versioned releases (tagged v1.x.x) if available.

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Running it (from source)

Same as upstream Retribution. Quick start (Windows, PowerShell):

.\scripts\bootstrap-env.ps1
.\scripts\check-env.ps1
.\venv\Scripts\python.exe -m qt_ui.main

You need a working DCS World install and the MOOSE-dependent features assume the bundled mission plugins under resources/plugins/ are present. See README.upstream.md for the full upstream setup, dependencies, and wiki links.

Windows environment sanity

This repo is sensitive to Python drift on Windows. If .venv was created from a Python install that later moved, was removed, or lost execute permissions, all repo-local commands will start failing in the same confusing way for humans and assistants.

Use these two scripts from the repo root:

.\scripts\bootstrap-env.ps1  # find Python 3.11, recreate .venv, install requirements
.\scripts\check-env.ps1      # verify Python, venv, and Git LFS auth health

check-env.ps1 also warns when Git LFS is unauthenticated, which is a common cause of GitHub push/upload failures for repos with LFS-tracked content.

Dev checks (must pass before pushing)

.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m black --check .      # formatting
.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m mypy game tests       # type checking (CI only checks game + tests)
.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pytest tests -q       # unit tests

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Relationship to the 414th workspace

The 414th also maintains a separate mission-building workspace (campaign plans, .miz files, and any Mission-Editor-loaded scripts not yet integrated here, such as the standalone MANTIS IADS). That workspace is private.

Features that started as standalone ME scripts and are now fully integrated into this repo (do not use the standalone versions):

• C-130J EW/ISR → resources/plugins/c130j/ (FlightType.JAMMING)
  • Supersedes the retired generic ewrj / "EW Jammer Script"; do not use that standalone script for F-16/A-10 pod jamming.
• QRA / AI_A2A_DISPATCHER → resources/plugins/intercept/ (per-squadron intercept_reserve)
• TARS recon → resources/plugins/tars/ (runtime engine for FlightType.TARPS)
• Flight Control ATC → resources/plugins/flightcontrol/ (players-only tower comms)

This repo is the engine-level side: capabilities planned and spawned automatically by the campaign generator rather than hand-placed in the Mission Editor.

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License & credit

DCS Retribution is licensed under the LGPL (see LICENSE). All upstream authorship and the project's history are preserved. The 414th additions are provided under the same terms. Upstream project: https://github.com/dcs-retribution/dcs-retribution.