Getting started

The tutorial is out of date for DCS Liberation 3.0. See the other sections of the manual for help. If you want to help us update the tutorial, join the #doc-maintenance channel in our discord.

Important Note before you launch DCS Liberation :

DCS Liberation will modify the following file in your DCS installation: <DCS Installation Directory>/Scripts/MissionScripting.lua. This allows Liberation to record information about mission events. This will not prevent you from passing the integrity check to join multiplayer servers.

This file will be modified whenever DCS Liberation is opened and the original will be replaced when DCS Liberation is closed.

You must always launch DCS Liberation before you launch DCS. If you do not DCS will load the file before it is changed and Liberation will not be able to retrieve mission progress.

Installation :

1. Download the latest release. Download the dcs_liberation.<version>.zip file from the Artifacts section.
2. Extract the zip file to a new directory. DCS Liberation does not need to be separately installed; the extracted directory is your DCS Liberation install. This can be extracted anywhere, but it should be a directory that you can access without Administrator privileges to ensure that Liberation runs correctly.
3. Then launch liberation_main.exe to launch DCS Liberation.

Start your first campaign

In the top left corner, click on File/New Game to start the new campaign wizard.

Click on next to start campaign configuration :

Choose your faction, and the enemy faction. For an easy first game, choose USA 2005 vs Russia 1965.

Choose a campaign. Note that we strongly recommend against any of the "full" maps as these are extremely demanding in terms of performance. "Start at mid game" will cause the player's faction to own more control points than they normally would at the beginning of the campaign. "Invert map" will allow the player to play through the campaign in the opposite direction.

Note that at the time of writing these two options cannot currently be used together. See Issue 572 for more information.

Select any additional generation options you'd like to use. Note that the supercarrier option can be enabled or disabled later in the game settings.

Adjust difficulty and economic options as desired. Increasing enemy income and budget can increase the campaign difficulty, while reducing it can improve mission performance by reducing the number of units that the enemy can use at once.

The player assists section allows the player to enable automatic economic management for their faction so they can focus on other aspects of the campaign. These options can be toggled later in the game settings. These options are described in detail in the manual.

Click finish to start the campaign generation. It may a few minutes to generate the campaign depending on selected settings.

Your campaign has been generated! We recommend you save your game at this point.