Putting Experienced Air Units in Reserve

[Naughteous Maximus]

Playing the Germans, I will sometimes take an air unit that has high morale and experience with a lot of veteran pilots but maybe at a 30% to 50% loss in planes and put it into the reserves for a few turns and then pull them out when they have recovered their strength, yet all the veteran pilots are gone, my morale and experience have dropped, and I have almost all low-quality pilots. I can understand if the unit was almost rebuilt from scratch, but not when I had a substantial number of experienced pilots in it before I put it into the reserves. Can someone explain to me how I can prevent the loss of my experienced pilots?[&:]

[DeletedUser44]

Is your AC unit still in AR?

Because I believe that when you send AC to AR, the pilots are removed.

[Naughteous Maximus]

I pulled my air units from reserve and put them back on the eastern front, they are back up to strength but lacking experienced pilots. went into reserves with an experience in the 90's, 4 turns later, pulled out of reserves with experience at 48.

[Gunnulf]

The simple answer is surely to just set them to rest on map in a well supplied base.

[DeletedUser44]

Is it possible that those trained pilots that got pulled from your AC were assigned to other AC and no longer in the pilot pool?

I would be curious too as far as what was going on.

I move stuff around a lot and I haven't seen that big of a hit yet. But I also save my trained pilots for fighters / fighter-bombers, so I may have larger pilot pool available.

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: Naughteous Maximus

.. Can someone explain to me how I can prevent the loss of my experienced pilots?[&:]

as others have said, in this case refit on the map is the answer, assuming you have the planes

for the impact in/out of the reserve see 16.7.3

its not that their pilots are 'removed' or 'reallocated' but that they are aggregated to match the average morale/experience. As far as possible when they return they pick up a group of pilots who average those unit values - but there will probably be a few outliers.

general advice is not to send to the reserve unless the unit has picked up untrained pilots due to losses and then its a good place to deal with low experience - which is how the Soviet player has to use it

[Stamb]

During a winter Axis should keep planes in Germany not to lose good pilots?
Would it be hard to implement such a feature that pilots are trying to get to their air groups, without matching average morale/exp when sent to reserve?

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: Stamb

During a winter Axis should keep planes in Germany not to lose good pilots?
Would it be hard to implement such a feature that pilots are trying to get to their air groups, without matching average morale/exp when sent to reserve?

16.7.3 sets out what happens when an air group goes to/from the reserve. The pilots lose their individual names and become an average group of say 20 fighter pilots with avg morale/exp that matches the original unit. When it returns it pulls in a group of pilots that again match its avg morale/exp

This saves a huge amount of processing demand from the game engine

No reason to keep the LW in Germany during the winter, simply make sure its in decent supply, rest on the worst weather and use sparinggly

[Stamb]

ORIGINAL: loki100

ORIGINAL: Stamb

During a winter Axis should keep planes in Germany not to lose good pilots?
Would it be hard to implement such a feature that pilots are trying to get to their air groups, without matching average morale/exp when sent to reserve?

16.7.3 sets out what happens when an air group goes to/from the reserve. The pilots lose their individual names and become an average group of say 20 fighter pilots with avg morale/exp that matches the original unit. When it returns it pulls in a group of pilots that again match its avg morale/exp

This saves a huge amount of processing demand from the game engine

No reason to keep the LW in Germany during the winter, simply make sure its in decent supply, rest on the worst weather and use sparinggly

As you know supply is just horrible during a winter period. Around 16k-20k on short front line as Smolensk, Kharkov, D, Z cities. Is it worth to keep planes there?

[loki100]

I do ..., as long as planes are not flying their supply draw is relatively low

[Hardradi]

So if you are playing with Theatre box control ON, isn't the Axis Reserve the pathway that all air units must flow through to go to and from the map?

This would mean any manual moves would be subject to this routine.

This wasn't really the case in RL. For example, some of the Stuka Groups flew straight from the Balkans to Poland just before Brbarossa began.

[loki100]

I've never used them, always play with them off for balance reasons.

so all I've engaged with is map-reserve transfers etc

[tonyhnz]

So related question with air upgrades - for soviets I will have a high morale older model plane in the reserves such as I-153. It may only have 10 planes ready out of max 67 say.
When i tell it to manually upgrade to say yak-1 and it shows > 67 yaks in the pool, i guess i was expecting it to end up with 67 planes but instead it only ends up with the 10 it originally had.
Do i need to bump the asset priority up on that unit to get it to fill out with the yaks ?

[loki100]

the initial conversion adds no new pilots so the allocation is to pilot numbers (as close as possible)

that unit will now draw on more pilots - most likely untrained as this is a Soviet example. If so the avg morale/exp will dip as they come into the formation. If you set it as TPI (ie only take trained pilots) this will be much less but the Soviets don't get enough generic trained pilots

so the best way is to give a unit that is short of pilots some old junk and put into the reserve. Let it train so that exp matches the air NM (as good as its going to get) and then give it the better planes.

Manually managing the VVS is an admin load mainly due to this pilot problem and only really eases up in late 44 when your losses start to drop substantially