I want an Air Fleet of Li-2s

[DeletedUser44]

Seriously, these guys are insane.

Each one has a 'bag of holding' and carries 10,000 freight per sortie.

They all have 'stealth' tech as the Luftwaffe hardly intercepts them.

When the Luftwaffe does, they can't kill them as they have adamantium armor.

I am ready to scrap all of the Luftwaffe for an air fleet of Li-2s.

I would not need any escorts, as nobody can shoot them down.

I would use them as Bombers too. Heck, just strip the cannons off my FW 190s and mount on Li-2s. They can serve as interceptors as well.

----

The Luftwaffe did good this time and actually shot-down 3. Fortunately, they had no escorts or the Luftwaffe would have been in serious trouble.

As the Germans, I have had 20 'escorted' Ju-52s shot down at a time. But the Soviet Li-2s are Juggernauts and are unstoppable.

[HardLuckYetAgain]

Yup, I mentioned before in a post and glad others are seeing the same thing. Those Li2's are tough as nails. As I posted in your other thread I will post here too that I believe all of our "WOEs" of the air come from the marrying up of the Air programming written by two different people. Please see this link https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.a ... age=2&key= post #31 by Mr. Billings. I also mentioned in your other thread https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=5088189.

[tonyhnz]

My initial thought from seeing this was finally the soviets have one piece of equipment that is not complete crap - that you don't have to rely on quantity to make up for the quality.
But I know there are other air issues going on as mentioned.

[metaphore]

ORIGINAL: Sauron_II
Seriously, these guys are insane.

No wonder why the were called LI-2 "Shturmovik"

That's a full game inside the game: try to shoot down a couple before the fall of Berlin and you might be rewarded with diamonds on your Iron Cross.

[metaphore]

ORIGINAL: tonyhnz

My initial thought from seeing this was finally the soviets have one piece of equipment that is not complete crap - that you don't have to rely on quantity to make up for the quality.
But I know there are other air issues going on as mentioned.

Yeah, that's because it's actually US tech. nearly as good as the legendary M3-Lee.

[Joel Billings]

There's nothing I see in the stats that should make the Li-2 be more survivable than the JU52. Not sure why you are seeing what you are seeing. The load is only 6617 so I don't see how they are transporting 10000 freight. I just flew 32 Li-2s and got a delivery of 104 tons of freight, which is the 3.3 per aircraft that is to be expected. Was your comment just a bit of exaggeration or did you see this kind of thing?

[DeletedUser44]

I really don't know their staffing issues. All I know is that some aspects of the game are fairly polished and robust. While other aspects, like the Air Transport system, looks to have been implemented by a CS dropout.

Why would you even code a UI list-box that is not sort-able? (as shown in my other thread fussing about the Air Transport unit selection....)

[AlbertN]

I believe part of the 'business' is that if a bomber squadron is intercepted by a measly amount of fighters, in general they get obliterated.
Air Transport interception seems ... different.

I've a game ongoing where I am the Soviets - will check better on the Li2 performance but I noticed they carry lots of freight (Not sure if because theyre fat or simply cover loads of mileage).

[Dreamslayer]

It's because air missions in the game too massive. Large air-raids was rare on the East Front. 71 Li-2 in one mission (it means one large formation) looks too unrealistic in July 1941. There should be more lesser missions.
Also LW should be not able to intercept everything in the air in everywhere 24/7 just because it's a very large area.

[DeletedUser44]

The 10,000 freight is a bit of an embellishment. But not the adamantium armor or difficulty in shooting them down. From what I can tell, you cannot even get the Li-2s to abort, no matter the odds.

In comparison, the JU-52s seem to have a load ratio of approximately 1.5 freight per AC.

I know I am always envious of the Soviet Li-2 load ratio when seeing the turn reports. 3.3 freight per AC may be correct, which is about 2 times as good as the JU-52.

[Joel Billings]

The air transport routines going back to WitE and especially WitW were an afterthought with lousy interface that Gary admitted was horrible and that he couldn't seem to improve (interface not being his strength). IIRC, very late in development, just before release, Pavel managed to create an interface for air transport that at least qualified as being called an interface. He had very little time to do it and yet he improved it by 1000%. I challenge anyone that has tried and failed to air transport in WitW to disagree. That said, it could be improved on, and again the interaction of the selection routines written by Gary (but using some functions written by Pavel), and the interface written by Pavel makes for some weaknesses in the system. We have 2 programmers (1 of them part time) working on a program with the complexity that deserves 5 or more. There are limits to what can be done when there are always other higher priorities fighting for programmer attention. Someday hopefully we'll have a chance to improve this, but only Pavel can improve the interface and Gary can only do so much with the selection AI given his limited understanding of some of the code he did not write.

As for the interception, yes, again this is a case of Gary jury rigging an interception model versus transports in a system designed for the air phase. It's better than what it was, and my guess is that few air transport missions were in fact intercepted. Stalingrad being the exception given they were flying deep behind enemy lines into an area where there were intercepting fighters that knew the few airfields the enemy transports would fly to. Still, in that case one site lists 214 of the 488 German transports destroyed were lost on takeoff or landing. Not sure what that says, but it was a striking number to me. The only way we could really improve this is if we had saves with situations where we could test changes and where we knew what values we were shooting for. In a recent test game, by the start of 1945 the Axis had lost over 4000 transports in the east. That sounds like a lot.

[Isokron]

ORIGINAL: Sauron_II

Heck, just strip the cannons off my FW 190s and mount on Li-2s. They can serve as interceptors as well.

I dont think they need the cannons, just wait for bad weather and then fly them close to the germans and you will achieve better k/d ratios from german operational losses than any other soviet aircraft can hope to achieve in 41.

[Joel Billings]

To fly (in bad weather) or not to fly, that is the question. [:)]

[DeletedUser44]

ORIGINAL: tonyhnz

My initial thought from seeing this was finally the soviets have one piece of equipment that is not complete crap - that you don't have to rely on quantity to make up for the quality.
But I know there are other air issues going on as mentioned.

Don't know what you are talking about. Soviet has a bunch of good equipment. I am very much looking forward to some of that captured equipment finally getting deployed into my German front line units. [;)]