How does one prepare an attack?

[henri51]

In the Air War tutorial, I wanted to get all my planes in the air before launching the attacks, so I created an area with 4 points, and created a bunch of missions to go into this "waiting" area. The first planes up were the Tomcats, and they quickly wiped out all the enemy planes. But as soon as my Corsairs got up, they did not wait in the area and attacked the enemy targets, followed soon after by the bombers. The game froze when the second wave arrived, but I reported that in the bug thread and is irrelevant to this post - I think). I thought I had told them not to attack outside the given area, but maybe I made a mistake.

So exactly how does one go about preparing an attack like this (getting everybody up before attacking)? Since there is no "time-over-target" capability, it seems to me that this would be a good way to make sure that everyone is ready to do their jobs when the time comes (for example, Hawkeye radar, radar jamming, refueling assets etc). It also should make it easier to manage the attack, since once everyone is ready, one has only to tell the appropriate assets to attack, for example first the fighter sweep, then the anti-radar bombs and the jammers, then the bombers to finish the job, and one is cedrtain that the support assets such as long-range jammers (is there such a thing?) are ready to do their job.

[snowburn]

try making the Waiting Area a support mission. (dont use Patrol)

[navwarcol]

I am almost positive that the devs are working on something along the lines of strike planning/TOT ability. I saw that in a thread a few weeks ago I think, but cannot find it now. I think that the latest build for me has been better at keeping them in the area you want, until you are ready. One thing is that if you have them in groups, you also want to give the individual aircraft the stay order I think... it seems that sometimes aircraft in a group, if you have given the group orders with regards to emissions, etc, override those orders if the individual planes were not given them. I have noticed that a few times, and seem to get by it easily enough by launching as individual aircraft, giving them their ROE, then grouping... but that is pretty much an ad hoc approach, I am sure there is a more "official" way[:D] just I don't use up much time on the manual haha.