I ran several Duisburg bombing tests today comparing 8th Air Force raids with default local flak against equivalent raids with local and nearby flak removed. The pattern I am seeing is concerning. At 27,000 feet, local flak does not appear to make a meaningful practical difference to either Allied ...

Thanks LiquidSky — that is a very useful point, and I think the depot/ammunition issue is worth testing properly.

In my Duisburg test I did not specifically build a depot in the city, so it is possible that I was testing heavy flak without optimal local ammunition support. The flak units looked ...

I ran a small comparison test on an 8th Air Force raid against Duisburg to see what difference local flak makes. Basically nothing of any consequence.

The first test had flak present in the target city of Duisburg: **2 flak regiments and 2 railway flak battalions**. The second test removed all ...

Great point! The trade-off is morale and repair/rest versus automatic experience training through DO/NO/DN.

Not putting your squadrons on rest during the friendly turn is really only useful if you have, ahem, “Harleyed” your squadrons with lots of untrained pilots.

Of course, making sure they are ...

**TL;DR:** Ran a test using 8th Air Force to examine flak losses. Found that flak losses were barely discernible from normal ops losses even when flying over very heavily defended targets (Duisburg). Also found that what little flak effect there was largely occurred on the first bombing of the turn ...

Thanks LiquidSky you've got really good points there.

Kent got me thinking about how the air war over Germany vs the 8th Air Force might be different to France so I did some more tests. The sample size is not huge, so I would treat this as observational rather than definitive, but some patterns ...

One more thing: a higher **Pct Fly** setting also appears to filter out many reconnaissance interceptions.

In 1943, these often seem to be a poor use of scarce Luftwaffe fighter strength. The German fighters frequently lack the speed to catch Allied reconnaissance aircraft, so the interception ...

Hi Kent,

Thanks. I think the main qualification is that most of my testing has been around Paris in 1943, so I would be cautious about turning the results into a universal rule for every mission type or theatre.

My current interpretation is as follows.

1. Large versus small fighter commitments ...

I ran the same test with a 4 radius AS LW mission over paris. Set to run odd numebered days, 25000 feet same intensity settings.

The result was a small beneficial increase in loss ratio for the LW. Not sure if this is statistically significant or not.

Thanks
Matchwood

Thanks Kent, just to be sure I ran another test using the settings Pct Fly 75 / Mis Pct 300. 5 turns the same as previous. Rested Allied squadrons as soon as they dropped below 50 Morale the same as before.

107 fewer German fighter losses
49 more Allied aircraft losses
a loss ratio improvement ...

Oh I also took some screenshots of LW pilot lists before and after. I was curious to track experience gains. Put the screenshots into ChatGPT and this is the summary observation:

The observed pattern is:

**Experience growth does happen, but it is modest and selective.** In the visible before/after ...

Hi Kent, well had some spare time today so did a test. Set 5 LW squadrons set to intercept near Paris. Ran 5 turns. I set Pct Fly to 1% and Mis Pct (intensity) to 25 to best generate lots of small engagements. I had planned to run this against settings of 80 and 300 but given the data I'm not sure I ...

Thanks Kent,

Sorry forgot to add that in this test I was using assets in LW3. As per the screen shot that was set to 80% to fly and 300% intensity.

Do you mind sharing more about your use of in 1% min to fly to get more intercepts? Is that because more intercepts is expected to equal more Allied ...

Have been experimenting with Air Doctrine settings and learned a few things which I thought I would share.

1) The Superiority doctrine impacts automatic interceptions - as in fighters not on rest or train with no mission.
2) The Mis Pct is somewhat counterintuitive. You can't have 300% of your ...

Thank you, much appreciated.

When I get a chance, I might repeat the exercise for the 8th Air Force over Germany.

One thing to note is that I flew the Luftwaffe AS missions on alternate days, in order to manage the fatigue build-up that can happen from flying every day.

It is possible that this ...

Variables I controlled for:

Weather - may not have been exactly the same but fairly similar over the 10 turns.
Morale - each turn I rested squarons under 50 morale. Interestingly, on Intercept by about turn 7 some of the German squadron morale was plumbeting.
Aircraft involved - on the Allied ...

So...an interesting result so far. I put four Luftwaffe squadrons near Paris. Ran 10 turns on AS and then reloaded to 10 turns on intercept.

Key results:
The results strongly favoured Air Superiority.
AS caused slightly more Allied losses, but the big difference was German preservation: roughly ...

I'm going to run a test around Paris in 1943 as the Germans: 10 turns with fighter squadrons assigned to Air Superiority, versus 10 turns with the same fighter squadrons left to intercept.

I'll measure total airframe losses, pilot losses, morale, and experience.

Any guesses on the results? Maybe ...

Hello, from experience, Axis rail repair is unrelibable. If you do well as an Axis player and try to repell a landing it can be tricky as the rail lines often won't repair. This is paricualrly problematic in the South of Italy when the partisan attacks damage railways after a landing on the mainland ...

The 79th is 140 miles away from the form up point. The range circle is showing a straight line from the home airfield....