empty air units

[randallw]

I'm up to about turn 110-115, and there are a bunch of Soviet air units that are completely empty; there are spare planes in the pool, but none of the units are drawing from the pool, so they sit with a total of 0 planes.

[Joel Billings]

Can you post a save before the Soviet logistics phase, and one in the Soviet turn and indicate which units you are seeing not getting replacements. Are they in the national reserve?

[Bourguignon]

are you speaking about air units or air bases? 

[randallw]

They are units in the national reserve.

[Bourguignon]

So why don't you assign your air units of the National reserve pool to your air bases? 

[randallw]

I deploy level bombers but are holding off on IL-2 and U2V for now.

[delatbabel]

I can also verify that many of my front line air units don't get replacements from the pool in 1.04.30. It hasn't caused the units to drop to zero planes yet but I have many Yak-7B units with 5 and 6 planes in them, but I have over 200 Yak 7Bs in the pool. It doesn't seem to affect all units.

The solution appears to be to swap the airplane type to (e.g.) Yak-1, at which point the unit fills up with planes, then swap it back again next turn. However that is a waste of 2 APs.

[Joel Billings]

Gary's found that the system is limiting the number of total plane slots to 32,000. We never anticipated the number of planes would grow so large. It appears that your strategy of not-upgrading the existing air groups to newer models, has led to the formation of large numbers of new air groups. Taken together with the old aircraft, you've got close to 27,000 aircraft. The Soviets fought most of the late war with between 10-15,000 aircraft (sources vary, but this is the ballpark other than some sources that indicate by 45 the Soviets had near 20,000 aircraft). One thing is that our amount of non-combat losses is probably too low, especially for a force so large. We cannot easily exceed the 32k max limit, and don't think it will be an issue for most games. We are going to take steps in future versions to both free up aircraft slots (place aircraft in reserve back in the pool) and increase op losses from training when a side gets over 20,000 aircraft. If you email 2by3@2by3games.com, I can email you an experimental exe once we have it ready to see how it works with your game. Now in order to avoid getting into a situation where you are paying for having over 20k aircraft, it's suggested that you allow more upgrading of aircraft to take place (either automatically or manually), as this will get rid of some of the obsolete aircraft that really shouldn't be flying in combat anymore. Thanks for bringing this problem to our attention.

[delatbabel]

Thanks for your work on this, it's useful to know.

What would probably be a better option is to allow the game to swap out older aircraft for newer types even though they weren't on the upgrade path. e.g. in one game I have now 18 units of I-153s still flying, and although I have about 400 + Yak-7Bs in my pool the game won't swap them out automatically and as per usual as the Soviets I can't spare the APs to do it manually.

I would have no objection to the game swapping those useless biplanes out for something a bit more modern but the critical shortage of APs throughout the game basically prohibits the soviet player on spending APs to do it.

[randallw]

I'm not averse to upgrading planes; I tend to do it when the pool for the older type runs low, like some of the I-16 models.  I'm also slowly converting SB-2s to IL-4s.

[molchomor]

Soviet AI gets around 27k planes very fast in the 42-45 campaign and it will stay that way forever even if you hit some of their plane factories. Can't say I am bothered with this too much as all those planes don't seem to make any difference, same as for the Luftwaffe...pretty much ignoring the airwar as everybody else.