Soviet Pilot Training

[mmoaorrke]

If I send an air unit to the reserve that has mostly 20-40 experience pilots, what happens to those pilots? Are they considered already trained pilots and just parceled out to units coming back to the map to make the squadron average experience?

Or will they actually improve up to 50 experience at some future point?

Or should I just leave them on the map to be killed or improve and if I want a better experienced unit have no replacements and then send to the reserve? Given the high losses filling with only trained pilots doesn't seem to be an option.

[loki100]

its a bit complex but the fundamentals are:

a) a unit goes to the reserve, its pilots are aggregated to a single value.
b) that trains up to exp-NM
c) the good news is whilst this is happening the original pilots don't get re-allocated
d) it comes out the reserve and claims pilots that average to the morale-exp of the unit

Note:

i) this allocation at (d) can include some duds, I believe the system is not meant to include too many outliers but with an any random system that can happen

The thing not to do ...

Don't disband a low exp formation. Those pilots then go into the 'trained' pool and can make a mess of formations you are trying to control with the TPI allocation approach

Something you can do ....

train up a formation to a decent exp and then disband, this can usefully give you an allocation of a particular pilot type

edit - airgroups on map struggle to train up, the game combat and operational loss systems are brutal in respect of low exp pilots so they keep on dieing and getting replaced, usually with equally low exp replacements

[jubjub]

Or will they actually improve up to 50 experience at some future point?

Loki covered the mechanics well. I will add that very low XP pilots tend to crash a lot during training, so it's best if they are training with I-153's and I-16's.

Given the high losses filling with only trained pilots doesn't seem to be an option.

It's not an option. You need to be constantly rotating air groups to and from the reserve to train pilots. They train fairly quickly in the reserves, and by constantly training new pilots in the reserve, you can overcome the shortcoming of only 200 trained pilots a turn. The Luftwaffe doesn't have nearly as many air groups, and will eventually struggle to keep up with the amount of training the VVS can do.

I only keep my fighter/fighter bomber air groups with the highest XP and best planes on TPI. Decent XP fighter groups get second amount of priority. Everything else gets normal priority replacements.

Don't disband a low exp formation. Those pilots then go into the 'trained' pool and can make a mess of formations you are trying to control with the TPI allocation approach

Good advice, it will also mean you have fewer pilots training up per turn.

[K62]

While we're on this subject, what happens to the "extra" pilots in an air group? Let's say I have 10 planes in a unit and 15 pilots. If I send it to the reserve and bring it back now it has 10 pilots. Where are the other 5? I seem to remember an old thread where M60 was saying they just disappear and it's better to keep such units on map. Is that accurate?

[jubjub]

I thought that was only an issue when air groups' size changed from 60 -> 32 -> 20.

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: K62

While we're on this subject, what happens to the "extra" pilots in an air group? Let's say I have 10 planes in a unit and 15 pilots. If I send it to the reserve and bring it back now it has 10 pilots. Where are the other 5? I seem to remember an old thread where M60 was saying they just disappear and it's better to keep such units on map. Is that accurate?

extra pilots stay in the unit, so you can as jubjub says have excesses when the VVS moves to smaller air groups.

Don't tend to last long due to losses.

If you want to shed them, place the air group in the reserve, when it comes back it will only claim enough pilots to meet its plane numbers. The balance go into that particular pool