altitudes

[MuguNiner]

Greetings and Salutations,

I am wondering what you think is a good altitude for different aircraft. I have been flying my B17/B24 at 10,000, my F's at 10,000, and my medium bombers and FB's and NAC at on the deck (100). Do you think a dive bomber would have better attacks from a higher altitude?

Thanks for the flak

[Local Yokel]

The lower your level bombers fly, the more accurately they deliver their payload. The higher your bombers fly, the less they will be affected by flak.  Dive bombers take flak first at their assigned approach altitude, then again at 2000 feet (in effect their pull-out altitude).  Torpedo bombers receive flak in a manner similar to dive bombers but descend to 200 feet rather than 2000.  Check out section 7.2.2.10 of the manual for more details.
 
Choice of attackers' altitude is one of the tools in your tactical armoury.  I don't know how far the AI adapts tactics in a solitaire game, but in PBEM I find altitude selection is like a rock-paper-scissors game.

[rockmedic109]

A dive bomber needs to fly from 10,000' in order to dive bomb {accurate}.  Less than this it will Glide bomb {Less accurate}.  At 10,000' the bombers will come in on ships in groups of four {spreads the bombs out-good for pasting convoys}. 
 
At 15,000' they will come in after ships in groups of nine {good for pasting carriers}.  Fighters should go in a few thousand feet above the bombers.  They might get to bounce the CAP. 
 
Only fly on the deck after specific targets and only once in a while--the morale hit and ops losses will kill you.
 
In stock, you can fly B-17/24 at 6,000' and get better bombing results and avoid heavy AA the way the AA guns are handled.  It gets so bad that I have a personal rule that 2E bombers fly no lower than 9,000' and 4E no lower than 11,000.  

[Feinder]

You take flak at your approach altitude (whatever you set your altitude at), and again at your attack altitude.
Level bombers, attack is same as approach.  So if your level bombers are set at 12k, you take flak at 12k and 12k.
Dive bombers, fighter-bombers, fighters, night-fighters attack at 2000'.  So they take flak at approach (your alt), again at 2k.
Torpedo bombers attack at 200'.  Take flak at approach (your alt), and again at 200'.
Level bombers on torpedo attack will attack at 200'.
Torpedo bombers level bombing will attack at their approach alitude (like level bombers).
So now that you know at altitudes you -will- take flak at.

There are a few tiers in alitude.
Under 14k you will attack in sections of 4.
There's another break at about 20k I think 9-plane sections.
And above 20k (or whatever the break is), 12? planes will attack in section.
You can play with it and determine the breaks.
What that means tho is that the section of planes will all attack the same target, and -seem- to affect the accuracy of each other (it seems that when the lead plane hits, the others are more likely to hit as well).  But bear this in mind, whether you want to attack a diversity of targets (such as transport convoy) you might want to select a lower alt to create more sections (and thus attack more targets), or have more planes per section concentrate on a few targets (say attacking CVs that you want to make sure you get enough hits to sink).

The accuracy of dive and torpedo attacks are unaffected by altitude because they're always made at the same altitude.  For level bombers, the higher up you go, the less accurate you are.  There also used to a situation where if you were under 6k, you accuracy *decreased* (ostensibly because the bomb-sites couldn't be properly calibrated), but I don't know if that "feature" is still in the game.  Note this does NOT apply to skip boming at 100', further discussion in a minute.

While exp affects how often you kit (duh), Morale affects how often your guys fly.  Less than 50% and you're guys have to roll less than their morale to fly the mission.  Flying missions under 10k will lower morale, so your guys will fly less often.

Skip bombing at 100' really needs exp over 70 to even attemt.  Over 80 to be effective.  Also be advised that while "most" bombing hits are vs. deck armor (about 90%e), skip bombing usually hits vs. belt armor (which most bombs won't penetrate).  Skip bombing is slightly more accurate (if you have the exp), but is usuful mostly vs. unarmored targets (that whole belt armor problem).  Also, flying at 100' will tank your morale, so you can't do it every day.  (* personally I rarely use skip bombing because of he belt hits and the morale hit, and if you've got 80 exp to effectively skip-bomb, you're good enough at level bombing anyway).

You can see how your choice of altidue is often a matter of what you're trying to accomplish.  But generally, I set my level bombers at 12k.  FYI, there's a problem with the flak routines between 6k and 11k - you suffer less flak than normal, and in PBEM going in under 10k (to exploit the error in flak), can be considered gamey.  For your dive and torpedo bomber alts, it's going to be personal preference.  It's largly how large you want your sections to be (since you're going to take a static amount of flak at your attak alitude anyway, and your accuracy is NOT affected because of the static attack alt).  You could reason that you might as well minimize your approach flak by setting your planes to max altidude, but this does create larger sections, and you might not wanting 12 dive bombers concentrating on each transport.
So that's how alt affects bombing.
For Escort-CAP-Sweep
Escort - your alt is irrelevant.  Your fighters will fly abut 3k above your bombers approach altitude.
CAP - It's really best to defend against what you know best about where you enemy is putting his bombers.  If he comes in at 12k, put your CAP at 15k to be most effective vs. bombers. Or your want to nail is his escorts, maybe at about 18k.  However, if you enemy is going to sweep you with fighers, altitude is your friend, and higher is usually better.  If you can manage it, you'll want to be no more than 5k under the bombers (obvously above is better), and not more than 10k above your targets (or you'll be less effective in teh intercept).
Sweep - Generally speaking, the higher the better.  If your under your enemy, you're defeating the purpose of the sweep.  If you're over your enemy, you're going to dive on him.  If you'r at 32k and he's at 2k, you're not likely do much to each other.  But the disparity of altiude is less of a factor in sweep.  You can be at 32k and your enemy at 16, and you'll still likely to mix it up, and you'll at least have the alt advantage - better an advantage that you can't use (because you're too high), than charge in at a DIS-advantge because you're too low.

Whew!  That was alot!
-F-

[deanver]

That's a lot of info.  Very useful.

ctrl+p 

[MuguNiner]

Thanks for the info! I raised my dive bombers up to 2k and started getting better results. Guess I will send them up to 10k and see what happens. Didn't even think my fighters! When I played Solomon campaign, I got better results at 100' with my medium bombers than at higher altitudes. My B26's were doing a lot of straffing. Of course, I am playing against the AI.