loadouts

[tonyscrase]

I was looking at the load outs on my aircraft on the commanders report
most of my Level bombers have fuel tanks but they are in easy range of the target without them. why is this.

THANK YOU

[cfulbright]

Tony,

Which level bombers? If it's the Lancasters or Halifaxes, they have auxiliary fuel tanks with most of their standard loadouts. If it's the B-17's and B-24's, then it's the AI making a mistake. I do all manual loadouts for my air groups to make sure I get what I think is best.

Cary

[tonyscrase]

For some reason all LB have auxiliary fuel tanks even those 10 hexes away from the target

[Denniss]

No real idea how auto loadouts are chosen but it's possible the shown loadout is just based on ammo/fuel availability at the base.
It may be possible the unit dynamically chooses a loadout without aux tanks if target is reachable without them.

[JoeyBlau]

"I do all manual loadouts for my air groups to make sure I get what I think is best."

It may be that the AI cannot figure out anything related to the air war and you have to micro manage every little aspect when all you wanted to do was overrun Metz on the fly and cross the Rhine.

[cfulbright]

Tony,

Check the staging base. Sometimes the AI picks an out-of-the-way staging base, in which case those LB's would need to backtrack or otherwise fly out of their way, therefore needing the extra fuel.

Cary

[tonyscrase]

Hi Cary
I have checked the staging bases and they all seem sensible. I played Breakout and pursuit a month ago and the load outs look good in that scenario. I have noticed in current game (Italian campaign) that when you set up a mission there is no green line from the air units base to the staging base although there is the usual line from the staging unit to the target.
so I have uninstalled the game and will reinstalled it see if that does the trick !!

THANKS FOR YOUR HELP

[cfulbright]

The only reason there should be no green line is if the staging base and the base where the planes are based are the same base.

Cary

[Saturn V]

I think the loadouts for the Allied bombers need a reworking.

There is no loadout for incendiary bombs for the USAAF heavies, for example, despite the 100-lb incendiary being the fourth most dropped bomb by the USAAF over Europe (behind, in descending order, the 500 lb GP, 100 lb GP, and 250 lb GP). The 'Tokyo tanks' in the B-17 are treated as if they are optional auxiliary tanks when in fact they were a standard part of the aircraft, and were routinely filled for missions, even if not necessarily needed, in order to give the bomber plenty of reserve fuel. (The 'Tokyo tanks' were added during the B-17F production run, meaning the B-17F should really have two separate versions within the game, one with the tanks and one without. A similar issue with auxiliary tanks exists for the B-24.) There's no 8,000 lb HC bomb loadout option for the Bomber Command heavies, and in general loadouts available in the game don't reflect enough the variety of bomb loads the RAF used. (I've spent quite a bit of time going through squadron ORBs finding the actual bomb loads carried on missions during the war.)

Part of the issue without loadouts is that there are too few loadout options. The game allows only five loadouts per aircraft, with each loadout able to hold up to ten devices. From my look through the CSV data files, the most devices an aircraft uses in a loadout is five, meaning the other five device slots are wasted space. It would have been so much better had it been ten loadouts available, with each able to contain up to five devices. That's the same total of loadout/device slots, but would have yielded far more options to equip aircraft. Oh well . . .