New Airwar losses...... So

[Titanwarrior89]

I lost 90 B-17As to 45 german fighters. Is that some what historical or is that me or the system? [X(] This was just one mission. I am learning the game and getting it together.

[K.Pooley]

It's really not possible for anyone to say without some more details. But as you say, "I am learning the game", and this is likely to be a large part of it.

Kevin

[Titanwarrior89]

It was a daylight mission with about 8 squadrons of B-17s and 4 squadrons of fighters. The target was a factory in france. The fighters were set to hight escort.

On the aircraft loss tab it showed 90 B-17s loss for the campaign and that day. No fighters except for the germans-45 fighters.

[joey]

Close escort protect bombers. High escort goes after enemy fighters instead of protecting bombers. With high escort, you will have high bomber losses with high enemy losses. That's the trade off.

[Titanwarrior89]

Thanks guys. Still getting this game down.

[DBS]

Titan

For what it is worth, I wrote a short guide to early game escort tactics in The War Room section (top of the page when you enter this forum). Can be found here.

Obviously depends on how many gruppen you have to face. If you managed to knock down 45 German fighters, then that is somewhat better than I would expect, with my tactics, to score. But I would be surprised, on a raid to France, to lose more than single figures of B-17s.


David

[Augenstein]

It requires a lot of "skill" if you manage to lose 90 (?!) B-17F's in a raid to FRANCE? My 2nd day of Long Campaign included 3 x B-17F raids to targets in Northern Paris and I lost 2 x B-17F, the other one was shot down by flak.

If you could take screen shots of your planned missions with visible paths and include the AAR we could to you what went wrong with your planning.

[Hard Sarge]

this game is going to be bloody

lots of reasons, and lots of reasons why, the numbers will be higher then in Real Life

Cardboard Solders/Pilots follow orders, that a Human wouldn't or would break off

the LW wouldn't stay on the coast, wouldn't attack raids until they thought they could do something, early on, the would fly along side the raid, and just wait for the Escort to break off, as the Spits and P-47s had very short legs, in the game, they going to attack as soon as you start to cross the channel

plus a lot of the losses, are really what most games now would be calling Opp losses, which would not show up in the combat reports as combat losses, remember, a major raid may of "lossed" 60 bombers, but many more crashed in England, or landed and were written off (and some times, these after losses were major, or worse then the Raid losses), in the game, they are going to show up as combat losses

[wernerpruckner]

If you play an historical and carfull game, you will get historical losses (more or less)
If you start to use everything you have, the AI will throw everything it has against you => much more losses.

And in PBEM it depends on the mindset of the opponents......I have had one turn with a total of 1600 losses (Axis+Allied)

[USSMaine]

In the original game for most of 43 if I could keep the loss ratio of Allied to Axis at or below 2:1 I was happy as a clam. (This was against the AI and I got better as time went on)

I haven't played the new version enough to get a feel yet

(edit: corrected spelling errors)

[von Shagmeister]

One reason for higher losses is that damaged a/c are unable to land at the nearest base like in real life and try and fly back to their home base.
 
Another reason is that many more a/c can be brought to bear than in real life with correspondingly higher losses as a result. The actual ratio of losses to a/c involved seems reasonably close to historical ranges, suggesting the combat model is quite realistic.