configuration/coalitions.md

Coalitions

If you want to support Blue and Red coalitions in your Discord and your DCS servers, you’re good to go! As there are major changes to how the bot behaves with COALITIONS enabled, I decided to have a separate documentation about it. It has redundant information in it, which is usually a bad idea, but I thought it might be easier for you guys to have everything in one place.
Coalitions are implemented by slot blocking, but can use the recently added feature of coalition passwords in DCS, too.

With COALITIONS enabled, some persistent displays will not appear in your server status channels (or will be changed) like Player information or Mission Statistics, which would render all the work useless, if you could peek in there and see what is going on. You can still use the commands .players or .missionstats in your dedicated coalition channels, but you can’t see data from the opposite coalition anymore.

The option COALITION to handle this feature can be enabled in each server section of dcsserverbot.ini individually. So if you only want to enable strict red/blue handling in one server, you can do that. Every other server (and their persistent embeds) will not be affected.

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Bot Configuration

There are some specific settings for coalitions that you can set in your dcsserverbot.ini:

a) BOT Section

Parameter	Description
GREETING_DM	A greeting message, that people will receive as a DM in Discord, if they join your guild.

A GREETING_DM is not mandatory and not linked to coalitions, but it is recommended to tell your new joiners to join a coalition. I have provided a sample message that you can adapt or use as it is.

b) ROLES Section

Parameter	Description
GameMaster	Members of this role can run commands that affect the mission behaviour or handle coalition specific details.

c) Server Specific Sections

Parameter	Description
COALITIONS	Enable coalition handling, default = false.
COALITION_LOCK_TIME	The time you are not allowed to change coalitions in the format “nn days” or “nn hours”. Default is 1 day.
ALLOW_PLAYERS_POOL	Enable the in-game players pool view (default = false, if coalitions are enabled).
Coalition Red	Members of this role are part of the red coalition.
Coalition Blue	Members of this role are part of the blue coalition.
COALITION_BLUE_EVENTS	Coalition events channel for blue coalition. If not specified, the respective chat channel will be used.
COALITION_BLUE_CHANNEL	Coalition channel for blue coalition.
COALITION_RED_EVENTS	Coalition events for red coalition. If not specified, the respective chat channel will be used.
COALITION_RED_CHANNEL	Coalition channel for red coalition.

Make sure, that all channels for red and blue coalitions have read access only for this coalition and not for everyone and not for the other coalition! The CHAT-channels for red and blue are similar to the general chat channel, but they only replicate chat messages that are being sent to that specific coalition in game. Unfortunately, it is not possible to chat back yet, as the DCS API doesn’t allow it (or I am too dumb to use it).

Discord Configuration

The bot uses the following internal roles to apply specific permissions to commands. You can change the role names to the ones being used in your discord. That has to be done in the dcsserverbot.ini configuration file.

Role	Description
GameMaster	People with this role can see both coalitions and run specific commands that are helpful in missions.
Coalition Blue	People with this role are members of the blue coalition. See Coalitions below for details.
Coalition Red	People with this role are members of the red coalition. See Coalitions below for details.

Discord Commands

These discord commands are either exclusively for coalition handling like .join and .leave or have been amended for coalition use, which means, that the data they display is filtered to data that belongs to your coalition only.

Command	Parameter	Channel	Role	Description
.password	coalition	admin-channel	DCS Admin	Changes the password of a specific coalition on this server.
.join	red / blue	all	DCS	Joins either Coalition Red or Coalition Blue discord groups.
.leave		all	DCS	Leave the current coalition.
.players		status-/chat-/admin-channel	DCS	Lists the players currently active on the server (for your coalition only!).
.briefing/.brief		all	DCS	Shows the description / briefing of the running mission (for your coalition only!).
.missionstats		status-/chat-/admin-channel	DCS	Display the current mission situation for either red or blue and the achievements in kills and captures.