The Soviet Air Juggernaut in 43

[MechFO]

To gather some experience with mid War combat I loaded the 43-45 campaign.

Instead of attacking I pull back to straighten the lines and wait for counter attack opportunities. During the Soviet turn the AI obliged and left himself open in some convenient places.

Full of glee I have Pz Div's attack exposed exhausted Rifle Corps, only to get massacred by Soviet Air (about 700-800 ground attack aircraft per battle). My Panzer Divs were nearly stopped cold even before crossing the line of departure with losses of something like 30% before the Ground Phase. So far so bad. Even worse is that in some case I had significant fighter cover but they didn't seem to be interested in going after enemy bombers.

This was something that I would expect in 44 in the West, but not 43, or even 44 for that matter in the East.

So 3 questions.

1) Is this WAD?
2) What does one do to mitigate it?
3) Is there any way to put fighters into intercept mode?

[elmo3]

Haven't tested the 43 campaign myself so I'll leave that for others to answer.  You can adjust how likely your air units are to intercept via the Air Doctrine screen.

[karonagames]

Some of the last testing I did before the game released was 1943 against the AI, and I experienced the huge bomber attacks, which did reveal a bug which is fixed in 1.01, so you shouldn't see as much damage to your units from air attacks.

On turn 1 as the Axis, I definitely recommend running air-missions manually- it will take time but I think it will be worth the effort. The missions that I suggest you run are "Fighter sweeps", which are Airfield bombing missions, but without the bombers. I run them against the airfields that contain enemy fighters. You should be able to take out a fair number of fighters ( I can't give you guide figures as the air combat model got changed late in testing, and I had to look at other stuff), and weaken the soviet air support on their turn.

Your fighters will intercept automatically with the default air doctrine settings, but the 1943 campaign positioning for air units does not give good coverage to the whole front, I would suggest that you attach a fighter squadron to an air base that is close to each Army HQ, with the smaller squadrons in the far north and the far south.

[MechFO]

This was with the 1.01 Beta patch.

The Soviet Air was much less effective when the Axis was defending, Maybe the routines were adjusted for one case but not the other?

I'll make a few experiments and see how things work out.

The only other hope I have is to load the the Panzer Divs with AA attachments and hope that attrition works it's magic.

[karonagames]

Maybe it's the game's way of telling you not to attack in the early turns![:)] Seriously though, there was some late tweaking on sturmoviks which may need to be looked at again - so much to be checked so little time.

In the 1943 AAR of my game with Flavio, I didn't start counter attacking until I had absorbed a little bit of the initial punch, where ammo and fatigue starts to work in your favour.

Did the AI try bombing your airfields on Turn1? I found a turn1 fighter sweep campaign minimised this.

[MechFO]

ORIGINAL: BigAnorak

Maybe it's the game's way of telling you not to attack in the early turns![:)] Seriously though, there was some late tweaking on sturmoviks which may need to be looked at again - so much to be checked so little time.

In the 1943 AAR of my game with Flavio, I didn't start counter attacking until I had absorbed a little bit of the initial punch, where ammo and fatigue starts to work in your favour.

Did the AI try bombing your airfields on Turn1? I found a turn1 fighter sweep campaign minimised this.

Well the date corresponds with the opening of the Kursk offensive and even though the Soviets had limited Air Superiority, I can't remember Air Power playing a big role in blunting the German attacks. So the results were a bit unexpected.

[Flaviusx]

Sigh. Why can't I ever get my Red Air force to do this well?

[MechFO]

Try this...




This is fairly representative, though I have seen worse.

There are still a few air attacks to come so that's not the final casualty figure. More interesting is that while losses are heavy, the CV figure (which started at 166) for the unit has dropped much further as a percentage.

In addition, I keep on losing equipment to 0 Kg GP Bombs. Some Device bug somewhere.

Also I keep on getting messages like "Wespe destroys Wespe" or "Panzer Grenadier Squad damages Panzer Grenadier Squad". No ideas what's up with that.

[ComradeP]

In the 1942 campaign, my men were being butchered by what by Western standards would be a militarized crop duster, so I'm not surprised the same problem is in the 1943 campaign where the VVS has better planes.

The air model will have to be tweaked some more, but that's not anything new. First ground unit attacks did little to no damage, after a change they were overpowered for the Soviets, then the Germans were supposedly brought in line with them although results are thus far extremely disappointing. German interdiction is brutal, however. About as brutal as suffering hundreds of casualties from U-2's.

[gingerbread]

I find it strange that the german fighters does not kill any soviet bombers. 7 bmr lost assumed to be from flak.

[karonagames]

I have run a test using the 1.01v5 beta patch which is probably going to be the official v1.01. I ran a small number of fighter sweeps on airfields in the Kursk bulge, and I relocated air bases to give better interception coverage. V1.00 contained a bug that meant interception was not working correctly.

It looks like the fix has worked, and that even small numbers of interceptor disrupt the bomber groups and reduce the damage that their bombing is doing.

Example 1:

[ComradeP]

To continue the discussion here, and not in the is Axis victory possible thread:

MechFO: there are some things that should be taken into account when judging how WAD or whacky the results are. In my experience, bombers mostly target guns and AFV's, and if they attack squads, they're mostly attacking support squads. The problem here is that guns like AT guns are not big targets, and more or less impossible to hit unless the bombing is very accurate. An artillery position would be easier to hit, as it's more likely to be in the open, has a bigger crew and has a bigger gun and thus forms a bigger target.

The IL-2 used, by Western standards, low payload and wildly inaccurate rockets, had a poor bombsight and only carried a fairly weak regular payload. It was not a precision strike weapon. It was much more effective attacking unprotected formations in the open than attacking dug in positions. The cannon was in such cases much more useful and the bombs or rockets could at least cause some splash damage.

The in-game problem currently is that IL-2 doesn't seem much less effective when attacking a defensive position, and even when it's attacking a mobile formation, it's still destroying lots of devices it would not normally be able to hit or even spot (guns and support squads).

I'll discuss on the tester forum whether it would be possible to lower the effectiveness of tactical bombers against entrenched formations and to change the air war formula's in such a way that it mostly targets combat units, not supporting artillery and support squads.

As to the U-2: the U-2 is simply extremely overrated at this point.

[karonagames]

Example 2: I don't know if Gary has made an undocumented "tweak" to U2s, but from what I could see on the combat reports, they were doing very little damage.

[karonagames]

I have made a recommendation to Joel that the AI mission builder be looked at, as it is frontloading too many squadrons in the initial attacks, and hardly sends anything to support attacks later in the turn.

[karonagames]

It looks like bombers are killing .5-1.5 men per bomber compared to the 10-15 per bomber in your screen shots, which I think is a more acceptable level.

[karonagames]

I am now going to run a test, without Fighter sweeps, and will try to position airbases to give maximum interception capability.

[karonagames]

Air losses up to end of SU turn 1. These numbers a very different to any of the previos tests I have done, where the SU has lost up to 3K planes in the first turn, which is obviously way too much, but Axis losses have increased dramatically.

[ComradeP]

Luftwaffe CAP went from being powerless to being super, it seems. 22 fighters stopping 700 enemy aircraft, 10 fighters stopping over 550 Soviet aircraft? Even if all 22 pilots were clones of Hartmann, that's rather incredible. It seems that a fix for one part of the air war breaks some other component.

What I was hoping to see was about 100 fighters showing up, disrupting the bombers, not a single squadron nullifying the effect of the bombers.

[MechFO]

Thanks for taking a look, however, from your screenshots we are measuring to fundamentally different things.

You are measuring the effect of Ground Support against the Defender. I don't have any problem with the balance as it is.

All my test have been about the effects on the Attacker.

[MechFO]

ORIGINAL: ComradeP

Luftwaffe CAP went from being powerless to being super, it seems. 22 fighters stopping 700 enemy aircraft, 10 fighters stopping over 550 Soviet aircraft? Even if all 22 pilots were clones of Hartmann, that's rather incredible. It seems that a fix for one part of the air war breaks some other component.

What I was hoping to see was about 100 fighters showing up, disrupting the bombers, not a single squadron nullifying the effect of the bombers.

The interceptors are not stopping the attack, air attacks against units on the defensive are much less effective. This has been the case since the release as far as I can tell.

BigAnorak and I are measuring 2 different things.