Early war large allied air groups

[wga8888]

in Feb 42 I have two 72 plane P39 groups. Can groups this size be effectively used or is it best to divide (into 3 parts). If I was more efficient, I may have had a base with enough aviation support to run a large group, perhaps not.

[tocaff]

It all depends on your needs and the support at airfields available where you need the planes.

[BPRE]

Hi,

There's another aspect to this that I found recently in my PBEM. You can only split 17 air groups (into 3 parts) in total for both the Allied and the Japanese side. After that you run out of storage.

Might be good to know.

/BPRE

[kmitahj]

Hello BPRE,

looks like that number (17) is more a limit of particular scenario then game engine. Engine apparently reserves slots between 2200 and 2400 for subunits of divided airunits (sentai, hikotai, daitai, wing or group) - that range is of course shared between both players. However - as one can verify using scenario editor - for stock "Rising Sun" scenario large part of that 2200-2400 range is already used up by some allied units. Counting cursorily I got a number of only 55 slots free for use for subunits (please note that some slots though apparently not used are still blocked because they have [accidently?] set the aircraft model which is used as marker for slot availability [example slots:2335-2339]). 55 slots means there is a space for division of only 18 airunits. If only one unit is divided by japan player it left 17 for allied player...
Now contrast it with CHS scenario where whole range (2200-2399) of slots is available for divided subunits. Adding up that most allied airunits in CHS comes in more flexible form of 16-24 plane squadrons we see that CHS lessened a lot pressure on that limited resource and provided more comfort to players. Just one more reason to choose CHS over stock scenario - granted its tiny reason compared to pile of others but still one more reason it is! [:)]

As a sidenote: 2399 is not the highest airgroup slot used in the game engine (though it is highest available in scenario editor), however slots between 2400 and 3000 seem to be reserved for airgroup fragments only.

[BPRE]

Hi kmitahj,

Yes, I have should of course have mentioned that I was talking about the vanilla scenario 15 War in the Pacific. There slots 2335-2339 are in use so I guess that whoever made the Rising Sun scenario didn't know which piece of data the code uses as a marker.

Never tried CHS. Could be interesting but as usual time is too short.

/BPRE