Strategic Bombing Overpowered?

[EisenHammer]

ORIGINAL: rnickelson

From the dusty archives of my memory, I recall reading somewhere years ago that some German planners put a lot of thought in trying to identify where they could get the most bang for the buck on strategic bombing of Soviet targets. Their conclusion: bomb the electrical grid. But it never happened. But memories (especially mine) are fallible!

You are correct about a planned German air offensive in Russia.
The name of the Operation was EISENHAMMER. I pick my forum name after it.[;)]
It was a plan to strike at Russian power stations in November of 1943 but it never got off the ground.

[Harrybanana]

Ok so maybe I am making a big fuss about nothing. I finally had some spare rail cap to move the Stalingrad T34 factories and once I moved them there damage was reduced to 50%. In other words they end up in the Urals with the same damage they would have had if they had not been damaged at all prior to transport. Of course there were fewer of them to move as they have not been growing for a few turns. Is this WAD?

[Helpless]

Of course there were fewer of them to move as they have not been growing for a few turns. Is this WAD?

Yes

[Helpless]

Yes.

(I love these monosyllabic exchanges, Pavel.)

No, Flavio, no.. (I don't, just don't have time to go into pointless discussion with you here)

[Helpless]

Bob, I took a look at your save and I must agree with your opponent. You do nothing to protect your industrial cities. There is any single PVO AA unit attached to Stalingrad! Also the air base which covers it located 4 hexes south. Night intercepts are especially sensitive to the range. Once I built 4 AA Regs in Stalingrad enemy started to lose >50% of his night bombers causing very minor damage.

So you really need to build PVO in all industrial cities within the range of German bombers.

[Joel Billings]

Yes, I think Pavel was saying that if Germans don't bomb as they historically did, Soviet production will be higher than it was historically because it was accounted for in the factory numbers.

Flavio, Pavel disagrees with you regarding exactly what bombing was done. Although the German air force was clearly not in a position to do the kind of damage that came later with Allied strategic bombing, it doesn't mean that some damage wasn't done, and that some additional damage wasn't possible had the Germans decided to concentrate on bombing factories instead of concentrating on ground support. I think Pavel has plenty of specific examples of factory bombing in the East during the war. Unfortuately he is extermely busy working on WitW (and occasionally working on WitE) to spend a lot of time debating the issue. He's been doing some amazing coding lately and I for one want to keep him coding and not debating. But suffice it to say that he does not agree with the idea that no strategic bombing was done and that additional strategic bombing was not possible. It may not have had a decisive impact, but what's being discussed is did it have any impact and I believe Pavel has enough evidence that it did have an impact. Healthy, open debate is great, but you can blame Pavel's short answers on me because we're trying to stay focused on coding. In that area, FYI, Pavel has just added all the weather tables and weather effects to the editor in WitW, so you can see all MP and combat costs on screen and these can be edited. The weather system is nothing like that in WitE. It has 8 climate zones, 6 ground and 6 air weather conditions, 3 different grades of the road network, and weather fronts that move on the map to provide some randomness. It's not your grandfather's weather system. [:)]

[morvael]

Amazing, can't wait for WitE2 with those features WitW will be regimental scale not divisional, right?

[Flaviusx]

Great. So the solution here is to start building flak in Stalingrad and Gorky on October of 41. Needless to say, these cities weren't being bombed in real life at this time.

Joel, factory bombing has been a headache since Beta. It just needs to go away. First it was Ploesti, now this. The amount of trouble it has caused just isn't worth the bother. Most games on this subject rightly ignore the whole matter and don't even make it possible. I'm going to be completely frank here and say that WitE is not a good platform to deal with this subject, and you're introducing a whole new level of minutiae here that could be very easily dropped. Not to mention possibilities for cheese.

My advice to players: just say no. Make a house rule forbidding any such missions. Stop the madness.

[Helpless]

Great. So the solution here is to start building flak in Stalingrad and Gorky on October of 41. Needless to say, these cities weren't being bombed in real life at this time.

But flaks were.

My advice to players: just say no. Make a house rule forbidding any such missions.

My advice, please don't follow advise of the retired tester who didn't make any single report on city bombing.

Stop the madness.

Yes, please, Flavio.

[Flaviusx]

Pavel, I flatly refused to do it. I knew it was possible and excessively effective. We had plenty of reports from other testers about Ploesti. I didn't think I needed to add anything to that. I concluded from those reports that bombing in the game was greatly exaggerated.

[Helpless]

We had plenty of reports from other testers about Ploesti. I didn't think I needed to add anything to that. I concluded from those reports that bombing in the game was greatly exaggerated.

You are very wrong here, Flavio. Please do no harm to the game play with your conclusions made in some pre-beta version. City bombing and flak effectiveness was changed quite a bit. If you didn't test it or you are not interested in it, it doesn't mean that it should be called "madness" or with other bold statements, you are trying to operate recently.

It is up to each players to choose how to deal with it. It can be fully ignored, but it doesn't mean that it is broken to the level of "utter madness".

Someone who is witnessing to odd examples can always post on a tech forum. We can't be blamed by ignoring it. Without such reports and saves, I can just keep wasting my time in such pointless discussions, which otherwise could be used to make it better.

[821Bobo]

In my game vs Pelton, I have tried to bomb and shutdown the refinery in Ploesti. I have used 12 regiments flying from Crimea equiped with DB3/IL4/PE8. Result of every raid was 0-4% damage to refinery for loss of 20-30 bombers. It is not worth it. With only 21 IL4 produced per week I would run out of heavy bombers very fast.

[Flaviusx]

Well I'm glad to hear Ploesti has been made much tougher.

Pavel, what you're asking here is for Soviet players to play a game of whack a mole in autumn of 41 spending precious APs and armaments to put flak in cities hundreds of miles in the rear that simply were not being bombed at this time in the first place to avoid opportunistic Axis factory bombing. Ultimately, they'll wind up railing all this stuff to the map edge and saying the hell with it. (Stalingrad probably should be evacuated anyways during the winter, regardless of factory bombing. I have always done so. But now it looks like we can add Gorky to that list.)

This in my estimation isn't adding anything to the game in terms of realism. It's just introducing a whole new level of micromanagement in order to deal with some very dubious bombing missions.

[Helpless]

Flavio, you keep making strange statements.. from "broken madness" argument, you switched to "nothing adding".. what can I say - "yes there are more simple games out there and from other side it is still not as real as a war itself". Otherwise I can't agree on anything you wrote.

Gorky can be protected. AA are cheap and you don't need hundreds of them. Germans still can make some damage they historically did ( ex. GAZ was out of action for 100 days), but it could cost them much more than it was historically.

[morvael]

Now that they are upgrading equipment it may be finally possible to build effective AA units.

[Helpless]

Now that they are upgrading equipment it may be finally possible to build effective AA units.

[;)]

[Flaviusx]

Pavel, I'm going to introduce you to an American concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine

[Helpless]

too

[Harrybanana]

ORIGINAL: Helpless

Bob, I took a look at your save and I must agree with your opponent. You do nothing to protect your industrial cities. There is any single PVO AA unit attached to Stalingrad! Also the air base which covers it located 4 hexes south. Night intercepts are especially sensitive to the range. Once I built 4 AA Regs in Stalingrad enemy started to lose >50% of his night bombers causing very minor damage.

So you really need to build PVO in all industrial cities within the range of German bombers.

Ok Pavel I stand corrected. In future games I will build PVO AA Regiments in my industrial cities as soon as I can and move my airbases closer to the cities. But in my defense:

1. In this game I did build a PVO AA Regiment (along with 2 AA battalions) attached to my Southern Air Command HQ on Turn 7. I did this because Saper likes to bomb airfields and HQs and I wanted to see what effect building nearby flak would have on these attacks. Please take a look at this HQ and you will see that on T16 it has built up to only 3 76mm AA Guns when it's TOE is suppose to be 20! The reason for this slow growth, I believe, is because of a bug which prevented support units from upgrading equipment, in this case from the 76mm AA gun to the 85mm AA gun. Since the 76mm AA gun went out of production before the game even starts obviously none were being produced to fill up the PVO AA Regiments. So if I had built 4 PVO AA regiments in Stalingrad and Gorky and every other industrial city in range of German bombers there would have been even fewer 76mm AA guns to go around. I would have been lucky to have even 2 such guns with each regiment after 9 turns. So, with respect, I don't think these PVO AA regiments would have had any real effect. Accordingly, before I go and spend APs building all of these PVO AA regiments can you please confirm that this bug has been fixed and they will upgrade to the 85mm AA gun. For that matter why is the default when these units are built the 76mm AA gun in the first place, shouldn't it be the 85mm?

2. I was not aware that night intercepts were so sensitive to range and thought that 4 hexes (about 10 minutes flying time away) would be close enough, my bad. I must have missed reading this in the manual (sorry for the sarcasm I realize you didn't write the manual). I'll move my airbases closer to the cities. However, I have been pleading here and on my AAR for anyone to tell me what I could do to have an effect on his night bombing and no one until now has told me that the fighter bases need to be right next to the city. So either this is not common knowledge or else the people reading these Forums were not willing to help me (and I know the latter isn't true). Even when my fighters did intercept they were next to useless. So if I move the airbases closer will this just cause more useless fighters to intercept or will they actually be more effective in combat as well.

Finally, did you find the battle where the 7 Rumanian bombers intercepted by the MIGs caused 12 points of factory damage? If so is that WAD?

[Helpless]

did you find the battle where the 7 Rumanian bombers intercepted by the MIGs caused 12 points of factory damage? If so is that WAD?

No, I haven't seen it. I never was able to produce significant damage to the factories once protecting them.

Please let me know how to reproduce it. Thanks.