Below are some of the settings that you can try adjusting to optimize the performance of your Retribution campaign.
Given the wide amount of differences between systems, it will take some trial and error for you to find the settings that work for your campaign. Don't be afraid to test out different settings to see how they impact your game!
Distant Unit Culling
Enabling "Culling of distant units" in the Mission Generator settings can improve performance by removing some distant units from the generated mission. One could potentially turn on culling for the first turn (where performance will likely be the worst) and then reduce the distance or disable it entirely for subsequent turns.
Distant unit culling removes all ground units (including buildings) that are beyond the set range from any culling exclusion zone. These culling exclusion zones are placed:
- At the front line and its attached airfields, if a front line exists.
- At the closest two opposing airfields, if no front line exists.
- At all non-BARCAP mission targets.
Culling exclusion zones can be displayed on the map using the "Culling exclusion zones" option in the "square pancakes stack" icon in the top left corner of the map in the Retribution UI. If set too large, culling will have little effect. If set too small, the game experience will suffer as many SAMs will likely be culled.
Air units are never culled. Restricting departure airfields for air units does little to limit unit counts, so does not help performance. Instead, the income scale modifiers can be used to limit the amount of aircraft the AI is able to purchase. Using proper squadron size limits can also help limit aircraft numbers.
Budget
The starting budget and income multiplier not only affects the difficulty of your campaign but it can have a dramatic impact on performance in your campaign. If you are finding that the default values are causing too much of a burden on your campaign, try adjusting them down. If you already see a negative performance impact in your first turn flying a mission, try lowering the starting budget and re-generating the campaign. As a rough guide, keep the maximum aircraft under 150 per side.
The starting budget and income multiplier is set during the initial campaign generation:
During the campaign, you can still adjust both your and the enemy's income multiplier in the settings menu:
Miscellaneous Performance Options
In addition to unit culling and budget management, the mission generator page in the settings menu gives you a few more options.
Smoke visual effect on frontline: can have a big framerate impact if you are looking directly at it. If you regularly perform CAS and notice a drop in framerates while you are over the frontlines, consider turning this option off. Note that this only has an impact on GPU, so if you are CPU bound (and most people are), it may have little to no impact unless you are using a very old video card.
Convoys drive the full distance between control points is a performance option which will limit the length of the convoy routes, when the setting is disabled (it's enabled by default). DCS ground vehicle pathfinding AI is CPU heavy, especially when traversing long distances or when having to avoid obstacles and buildings, so this setting aims to help with campaigns which have a lot of ground vehicles between control points. Often the vehicles will not be able to traverse the entire length of the supply route during the mission, so running pathfinding for the whole route will be unnecessary. This is more of a problem on old campaigns that do not have supply routes and convoy spawns properly defined. On newer campaigns, it should not have a significant impact.
Generate infantry squads along vehicles: More units equals more resources required. Infantry does not count towards the behind-the-scenes determination of a frontline victory/loss so removing them will not affect gameplay. Note: manpads will still spawn when this option is still turned off if you have the Manpads on frontline option checked.
Include destroyed units carcass: Another case where more units equals more resources required. Unchecking this box will remove dead units and will help improve performance.
Skynet IADS Script
Using Skynet can help improve performance as it manages most of the SAMs in the campaign and keeps them shut off until an enemy unit is within a pre-determined firing range. However, AI SEAD aircraft will no longer complete their mission objective and will simply RTB if Skynet is on. Using Skynet is not a necessary to get playable framerates in most campaigns. We recommend users weigh the pros and cons before using Skynet for singleplayer.
Tacview
Using Tacview can lead to significant framerate drops as every aircraft, ground unit, missile, and bomb is being tracked. Consider turning Tacview off when running Retribution missions.
Use a Dedicated Server
While setting up a dedicated server on your local machine helped improve their performance in the past, this is no longer helpful nowadays that the DCS client has multi-threading. We do not recommend doing so as it will have no benefit at best and potentially worsen performance. Most Retribution campaigns are designed to run fine without requiring a dedicated server. However, using an external dedicated server can still be helpful for those who wish to run Retribution campaigns in multiplayer. Refer to the Dedicated Server Guide wiki page for more information on how to set a server up.