ORIGINAL: Aurelian
The ability to set airbases to "no fly".
Hard to build a force of IL-4s to bomb Ploesti if they keep flying and get shot up.
Agreed, and I've lost count of how many times I've bitched about this. The two workarounds that I've come up with for this are:
1. Send all the heavy bombers you can to the National Reserve, and move your empty airbases and their HQs to the Crimea. Then, on a single turn select all the fresh air groups you can to load up those air bases. Next turn, hit Ploesti/Bucharest.
2. Instead, set the bombers to fly night missions. Then they should not get shot to pieces so much and instead be around to dedicate to some refinery runs. Just remember to turn them all off from night missions before you fly the strike.
Of course, this tedious micromanagement would be avoided if the air bases and/or air groups could just be assigned a mission type of "rest" so that they do not fly at all, except for interceptions against air base strikes on their own base.