Before you decide that you have a problem to correct there are a couple of things to consider:

- You have to assign an attack on the objective to your flight or the AI flight in MB.  OR you have to assign a different target to your wingmen while flying the mission.

- You have to give the AI a chance to setup the attack.  Sometimes the wingmen/AI will take a minute or so to do this, so be patient...this goes for both airborne and surface targets.  Remember that CFS2 is primarily a player-oriented simulation. 

- AND You have to give the wingman/AI access to the target...i.e. if you hog the target with repeated passes, the wingmen/AI will have a problem attacking. 

- AND be advised that if you are attempting to get wingmen/AIs to attack ground targets in very mountainous terrain (any terrain with drastic changes in elevation), you are likely to have problems.   And in most cases, you will not find a solution.  The sim has real problems calculating attack profiles under these circumstances, and tends to just ignore the orders. 

That being said, we're going to stick to broad/general terms until we start discussing specific issues. 

Let's get the most common problems cleared-up first.  So the first thing you want to do is open the mission in question in Mission Builder.  Each flight is assigned a skill (Novice, Veteran, Ace) and an aggression rating (Low, Average. High).   I tend to lean toward using Veteran/Average or Veteran/High settings here for reasons too complex to go into here, but the key is to stick with Veteran or Ace/Average or High settings....though I have seen some Novice/High flights go bananas on the opposition. 

Any other issues with wingman/AI performance will involve changes to the individual aircraft files themselves. 

These shots show AI choppers attacking ground targets.

Some examples:

I watch my wingman strafe enemy gunboat.


I observe my wingman downing an LA-11.


AI flight of F-84s destroys coastal freighter.

Moving right along....

Here is a list of aircraft families and categories used in the MISC section of the DP file.  And you will find this most useful in working with AI flights in MB:

unit_family=
1 - Fighter (default)
2 - Bomber
3 - Ground vehicle
4 - Static object
5 - Ship or boat
7 - carrier
Category=
1 - aircraft fighter
2 - aircraft level bomber (B-24, He-111)
3 - aircraft dive bomber (Stuka, Dauntless, Val)
4 - aircraft torpedo bomber (Avenger, TBF)
5 - aircraft tactical bomber (A-20, Ju-88)
6 - aircraft strike (Fw-190F2, A-4; 2-engine nightfighters?)
7 - aircraft civil
8 - aircraft recon (Storch)
9 - aircraft transport (C-47)
10 - aircraft fighter-bomber (any fighter equipped with bombs) or Dive Bombers

Which category of aircraft will perform which type of attack is pretty straight forward....but there are a few cases where you might need to experiment.

Now we come to the most troublesome setting and most likely to give you a problem in wingmen and AIs.   Those testy MOI settings.  If you have checked all of the other stuff, then you can usually solve the reluctance of wingmen/AIs to attack by halving the MOI numbers in the AIRCRAFT and/or AIR files.  Continue halving the numbers until the AI performs the attack.

(MOI of Moment-Of-Inertia values are the amount of force necessary to move the aircraft in that particular axis.  And the Pitch number is the most critica.  The sim cannot exert the amount of control force that the player can.)

That pretty much covers the subject in a brief/primer fashion. 

I can also recommend the AI/Wingman Flight Tuning Tutorial that you can download here:

http://simviation.com/1/download?file=AI_Flight_Tuning.zip

Hmmmmm, TR.  I could actually acquire CFS2 skills reading stuff like your tute and Cody's manifesto.   

Thanks for the kind words, Rubini.   It's good to know that the effort is helpful.