New 1.02.27 Public Beta Now Available!

[battlefield91]

We confirmed there is a slowdown in combat execution in .27 and have fixed it in the next version we're putting out to our testers this weekend.

Hello Joel please do you have any idea when This update will be released?

Look here: https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 0&t=383759

[Joel Billings]

Yes, if you want to get the fix for the slowdown in combat, you can download the exe hotfix that's in the thread listed above. It's likely this update will go out by the end of next week.

[tyronec]

Manual Addendum: Fighters, and fighter bombers with a Mission setting of Fighter, display their escort range for radius in their air unit detail screen. Fighter bombers with a Mission setting of Bomber, display their combat range (in this case bombing range) for radius in their air unit detail screen. When the range circles are shown on map using the AOG functionality if the unit consists of fighter bombers one of two circles will be shown. If its Mission setting is Fighter, the purple circle will show the area within which it can escort missions.

Am not sure if I am understanding this.
This combat shows fighters based in Valmeria participating in GS.
However they appear to be out of range as shown by the purple range circles.
T4 of my game with Toxic.

X01.jpg (157.77 KiB) Viewed 657 times

X02.jpg (394.4 KiB) Viewed 657 times

[Joel Billings]

Fighters are showing escort range as their range circle (if their mission fighter, if bomber, they show bombing mission range). Patrol aircraft are not escorting the flight, but going to the battle area directly, so I assume they get the longer mission range.

[tyronec]

Manual Addendum: Fighters, and fighter bombers with a Mission setting of Fighter, display their escort range for radius in their air unit detail screen. Fighter bombers with a Mission setting of Bomber, display their combat range (in this case bombing range) for radius in their air unit detail screen. When the range circles are shown on map using the AOG functionality if the unit consists of fighter bombers one of two circles will be shown. If its Mission setting is Fighter, the purple circle will show the area within which it can escort missions. If the FB’s Mission setting is Bomber then a purple circle will be shown indicating the range over which the plane can fly to strike a ground target. This distance is 4/3 further than the escort range, but is usually then lowered due to having a bomb loadout (this can be checked on the load out tab for the air unit). If an airbase has aircraft but no ground units present in the hex, then left-clicking on the hex will generate one or two range circles depending on the aircraft at the airbase. The green circle is the greatest escort range of any fighters or fighter bombers with Mission set to Fighter that are at the base. The purple circle is the greatest combat range of any air unit at the base. So if the airbase only has level bombers only the purple combat range circle will be shown but for fighters and fighter bombers with their Mission set to Fighter, both the shorter escort and the combat range circles are shown.

So patrol aircraft have a longer range than escort aircraft, even though they are both on exactly the same settings. The whole of Luftwaffe is on GS here, I have no other combat ADs.
This makes for a complicated and confusing situation. When do they fly as escort and when as patrol ?
And the purple circle is not the maximum range as described above if they are on patrol instead of escort.
This seems overly complicated to me, could we not just have escort the same range as patrol and the range circles reflect that so you could tell where your fighters can cover.

I would argue that in this case the escort range should if anything be longer than the patrol range rather than the other way around.
The combat took place just one hex outside friendly territory so the escorts could arrange their flight plan to be at that location when the combat was bombing was taking place - unlike strategic bombing far behind enemy lines there is limited need to escort the bombers along the flight path. While the patrol aircraft have a huge area to cover, what chance to turn up at the right place at the right time at the limit of their endurance.

[Stamb]

its even more confusing when you look at this:
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 7&t=382613

and the worst thing is that escort or patrol, dont remember which one, do not follow your air directives
so you can set all air directives to use 5k altitude and all planes that will use one of this type of mission will still fly at their own
annoying

[tyronec]

Yes, there are far too many intercepts by patrol at very long range. If you did an analysis of it am pretty sure it would show that there is no way that patrol aircraft could be achieving this level of intercepts while covering such a wide area. I would suspect the algorithm doesn't fully take into account the distance from the home base.
If you want air cover over a specific area at distance then AS is more appropriate.

[Stamb]

if only we could adjust/create air directives during ground turn...

otherwise it might be waste of planes

[AlbertN]

if only we could adjust/create air directives during ground turn...

otherwise it might be waste of planes

It goes beyond that.

Since some air directive themselves could rely on air recon - recon airfield and then bomb them. The game expects the directives to be in the same phase, where one may recon empty airfields, or airfields to be vacated during enemy turn.
A land breakthrough happens - can you call recon to check better the rearlines... no you cannot.
Etc.

[Stamb]

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 9&t=376958

[Joel Billings]

The basic concept started from the idea that escorts must meet up and fly with slower bombers, thus, by the time they arrive at the target, they have less fuel available than aircraft that fly out to the target location. Is this all simplified and not 100% accurate. You bet it is. Gary's system of putting patrol over a ground battle was something he added for a number of reasons. It does take control away from the player, but it is attempting to make sure there are some fighters over a ground battle. It's more liberal with these, allowing them to fly out to the further range instead of using escort range. We're juggling things in the air game, and part of the juggling is between trying to keep things easier for players and easier for the AI, but also allowing lots of player (micro)management in a lot of areas. If we limited Patrols to escort range, we'd probably see more cases of bombers getting no protection at all, especially by the AI (I know some of you don't care about the AI, but the overwhelming majority of users play against the AI).

Trying to get more control of air directives during the ground phase would be a huge change in the system, requiring lots of rework and a huge risk of new problems being added. This would involve Pavel's time, as he wrote all the air phase AD design, but only some of the ground phase air code. The list of work for Pavel, including some of the air items that can and will eventually get looked at is already long enough (like the low chance of intercept of GA ADs). Redesigning the basic system isn't going to happen. We do agree there is confusion with the color circles that we could have handled better and hope to improve in the future.

[Stamb]

any chance of allowing players set patrol altitude?

[tyronec]

The basic concept started from the idea that escorts must meet up and fly with slower bombers, thus, by the time they arrive at the target, they have less fuel available than aircraft that fly out to the target location. Is this all simplified and not 100% accurate. You bet it is. Gary's system of putting patrol over a ground battle was something he added for a number of reasons. It does take control away from the player, but it is attempting to make sure there are some fighters over a ground battle. It's more liberal with these, allowing them to fly out to the further range instead of using escort range. We're juggling things in the air game, and part of the juggling is between trying to keep things easier for players and easier for the AI, but also allowing lots of player (micro)management in a lot of areas. If we limited Patrols to escort range, we'd probably see more cases of bombers getting no protection at all, especially by the AI (I know some of you don't care about the AI, but the overwhelming majority of users play against the AI).

Trying to get more control of air directives during the ground phase would be a huge change in the system, requiring lots of rework and a huge risk of new problems being added. This would involve Pavel's time, as he wrote all the air phase AD design, but only some of the ground phase air code. The list of work for Pavel, including some of the air items that can and will eventually get looked at is already long enough (like the low chance of intercept of GA ADs). Redesigning the basic system isn't going to happen. We do agree there is confusion with the color circles that we could have handled better and hope to improve in the future.

There are two questions here. One is whether patrol should have greater range than escort. I would argue not, at present for air cover we have GS escort, AS and Patrol. Of these Escort and AS have the shorter range, AS uses up fuel and ops losses even when there is no combat while Patrol can cover a greater area and uses up no resources unless there is combat. And yet it can deliver a high percentage of fighters to a combat even at it's maximum range. To provide cover to those end of range hexes it would have to be flying a lot of patrols and the game doesn't expend any resources for it to do that.
However this is just my opinion about the game design and I can accept that there are the considerations about fighters flying escort with bombers and further just because I disagree with a design element it doesn't detract from playing the game.

The second question is about the range circles. Fighter range circles are important, I use them all the time both for planning the ground war and for positioning aircraft for GS and fighter cover. And fighters on the same 'orders' have differing range circles depending on how the engine decides to use them for a particular combat. In other words one of the tools we are using to play the game is not working in play. Do the benefits of having two different ranges for fighters outweigh the cost to playability because of this. I would say no, my preference would be to have just one range for fighters whether they are on escort, AS or patrol. Should it be the shorter range or the longer one, am not sure - possibly the longer one because I think the game underestimates the ability of fighter air groups to move forwards to newly captured grass airstrips.

[Zovs]

Could we have other colors for range circles?

Bombers red
Fighters (escort normal range) green
Fighters (long range) blue

[Lurberri]

possibly the longer one because I think the game underestimates the ability of fighter air groups to move forwards to newly captured grass airstrips.

Yes, the game clearly underestimates the continual shifting of bases that occurred during the early stages of Barbarossa, especially among the shorter range fighter and ground attack units.

[Erik Rutins]

This has been replaced by the new 1.02.29 Public Beta update.