Soviet Airbases

[hfarrish]

In late '43 I have huge numbers of these sitting empty near the Urals that I suspect I will never need nor use (other than fighter regiments every servicable aircraft unit is at the front already). If I embark on a disbanding campaign:

(a) will it reduce my truck burn/usage (I already have them all sitting on railways)

(b) will the system just keep spawning new ones (thus rendering the disband pointless)

(c) other than manpower and potential truck savings, are there any other reasons disbanding these would be worth the AP burn?

[morvael]

I wonder how you do it. What is your count of air units and air bases? Do you operate with overloaded airbases? Once the change to 32 planes per regiment kicked in I had to take out a lot of air units to reserve, which stopped my air base production.

[hfarrish]

I am probably overloaded. Does this have a major impact like it does with ground units? I never really had much of a sense from the boards that anyone was that concerned about it, but perhaps that's just because of the general mess of the air war model that its hard to tell.

[morvael]

I am concerned - my operational losses went from 30-40 machines to 160 in December 1942. In 3 months I lost more planes due to that cause, than for the previous 12 months. The problem is with the current rules (6 air units per airbase on average to spawn new base) that it's impossible not to be overloaded if you want new bases. I decided to just disband a lot of airgroups and keep lower count of planes. I compared my situation (101 bases, 17k planes) to '44 scenario (100 bases, 10k planes) and decided not to increase Red Airforce anymore.

[Seminole]

The problem is with the current rules (6 air units per airbase on average to spawn new base) that it's impossible not to be overloaded if you want new bases.

You can start up a human v human game and send everything to national reserve then click through the end turn to assign them (use air units that are 'full', because support depends on how many air frames are actually in the unit) and see what they cost in support, or just assigning a single air unit and noting the change in AV requirement in you current game if you don't want to go through that hassle. IIRC most of the fighter/FBs are around 20 support each at regimental strength. The level bombers are the 'big eaters' (support costs are tied into ammo consumption, the formula was posted in a thread somewhere that led to adding the AV support requirement display to the air bases in a patch). I usually put no more than two of those in an airbase. You can easily get over 6 units assigned by fleshing the rest out with fighters, FBs, and tactical aircraft like Sturmoviks and U-2VS.

[morvael]

With 32 planes per regiment, FB can take up to 50 AV, so that's not that easy (IL-4 takes 100-110). I think one has to keep overloaded bases until December 42 to spawn as many bases as possible, but later one has to stop.

[hfarrish]

I pretty much crammed everything (except for SADs, which I left empty) full to the max in '42 before a lot of the additional bases came online, so most bases have 8-9 regiments (bombers in BADs/ShADs, fighters in IADs, levels in VVSs)...am I severely hamstringing my air effectiveness by letting this ride? Just such a pain to reallocate everything.

[mmarquo]

There is a relation between the total number of aircraft in the pool and the generation of airbase but I forget the formula.

[morvael]

No, only air units per airbase (6 on average) do count. Air units in reserve and planes in the pool do not count.

[mmarquo]

Yes, you are correct.