ORIGINAL: castor troy
don't worry greyjoy, you got enough experience (more than many of those saying the world is beautiful and perfectly right) because of the fact you have driven your game well into 44 while the "experts" mostly dump around in 42 never seen a bigger air engagement than 100 ac on one side and 120 on the other side.
Now a 6 year old that roughly got a clue about numbers (and no clue about air battles) would smell the flaw when you see 50 ac shot down when 200 ac clash in the air but only 20 are shot down when 1000 meet each other, of the same types, same pilots, same conditions. But hey, seriously, there can't be something wrong... NO WAY CAN THERE BE SOMETHING WRONG THEN. Heck, people even argued months after the pre Cap flak BUG was squashed that there was no problem. Not even the official statement there was a bug made a difference. Same for strato sweeps, for 12 months, all was so perfectly well and then the official statement it would be an "exploit" to use them which implies there isn't all so perfectly well. Be aware, it seems you either are joining the vocal PBEM minority or the dark side, where you have to close your eyes and ears or shut down common sense.
C'mon now, Castor Troy-let's not be binary or polemic in this.
From a subjective POV, it does look like there are fewer aerial losses than would be expected based upon the number of combatants. I hear you about efforts to explain this away not passing the 'sniff' test and I agree with your previous examples of apologists / deniers of admitted bugs.
Having played a number of scenarios in the 1944 time frame (notably the AE Tournament II versus Captain Mandrake), I can tell you that large CV/CV + LBA clashes do occur with hundreds of aircraft on both sides involved in the scrum and they're extremely bloody, as I would have expected. I've not been disappointed in the modeling of my 1944 air battles from the scenarios.
I've played deep into 1943 and, in May 1943 in my Scenario 1 PBEM had a major carrier clash: 600 IJNAF aircraft versus ~450 USNAF. The combat(s) were modelled well and extremely bloody to both sides.
So, yes, if I extrapolated the template of my expected aerial losses to GreyJoy's game, I'd expect greater losses than this one combat demonstrated. Does this mean the game is borked? Hardly.
For me to admit that the game is borked, I'd have to see that other-most-of these large combats resulted in losses / intercepts that were well below expected. Then I'd want to see if this was a systematic problem (other PBEMs in 1944 witnessing the same thing or just a few exceptionally vocal people?). I'd want to compare game versions (which I believe is an underrated cause of some buggy behavior) and whether the game had been upgraded to a beta patch or if it was operating on an official patch too.
To summarize: while this one combat does seem off, so what? If this isn't a systematic problem-almost universally experienced-what do you expect to come of it? There's not enough PBEMs going deep into 1944 to troubleshoot these mega-aerial fights for the Devs to get a handle on how much of a problem it is. My experiences in 1944 (scenarios) do not suggest a problem, so maybe it's an individual thing.
Recognizing an aberrant event is not a solution, but merely the first stage in exploration of one.
well, this time it's pretty impossible to do a feint...so the landing site is pretty much obvious...Hachinoche is my first choice!
