Fighter Escorts

[warshipbuilder]

From what I get from this excerpt of the manual, the only control you have of fighter escorts is how many you assign to a strategic bombing mission. That seems rather weak. If I assign a mission that is 300 miles away and have two groups of fighters that can only fly 200, I think I should be able to have one group cover the 200 ingress and the other the 200 egress. Please tell me you can do that and that part of the manual was not shown? You should also be able to layer your escorts i.e. close escort or 1k, 2k, 5k or whatever above the bombers. Or does this part of the game not have that level of sophistication?

PS What is the reasoning behind all the different FB settings?

[Helpless]

I'm not sure that I understand your concern correctly, but fighter escort management is one of the most complex part of the air game. Player can influence it by modifying air doctrine setting, toggling air group assignment (vs auto), setting required amounts (vs auto), setting min requirement, disabling/enabling partial escorts. Ingress/egress assignment is done automatically, but if you have just two groups in most cases it will pick 1st for the ingress and second for the egress (depending on requirements and plane availability).

You should also be able to layer your escorts i.e. close escort or 1k, 2k, 5k or whatever above the bombers. Or does this part of the game not have that level of sophistication?

It is done automatically by the game.

PS What is the reasoning behind all the different FB settings?

FB has just one mission setting - Fighter or Bomber. Then it is compared to the group specialization, which also cane be changed by re-training.

One thing to emphasize, with given level of high details inside the engine (air hqs, air bases, air groups, pilots, planes, air doctrines, load outs, etc) on one end and global game requirements (weekly turns, area targeting, high degree of automation) on other end, development had to balance between two ranged opinions - "let me check the cockpit" and "skip the dirty details of air war". So in one or other way there will be someone who is missing something very important and someone who has too much. So far second group was more numerical or more vocal, so automation was a priority, but good news are that engine allows to expose many currently hard coded details to be modifiable by player. But it is not always leads to better gaming experience.

[carlkay58]

There is also the Air Superiority mission. It uses only fighters, but you can setup fighter sweeps in an area. This will help give additional fighter support to other missions such as recon, ground attack, bomb city, etc.

As Helpless mentioned above, you can control a lot of the aspects of the air war - if you wish. But sometimes the stuff you change will make things worse for you . . .

[warshipbuilder]

Ok I didn't realize how much was automated. I much prefer a more nuts and bolts approach, but perhaps as the game evolves, those things will in incorporated. So is the LW set up so that the 109/190's go after fighters and the 110/410's go after bombers, assuming a mixed group is sent to attack an incoming strategic bombing raid?

What I was referring to as far as the FB's go, was 5.3.4.1 Fighter Bomber Settings. What is that all about? Is this to reflect that Spitfire's were basically just bomb trucks during the last part of the war?

Once an FB unit has gone Winchester, is it also considered guns dry? If not when RTB over an Axis AB will it get down and dirty or do they keep their ammo for protection?

Which leads me to this question, how are FR squadrons handled?

What are the minimum altitudes that you have set the Freya and Wurzberg radars to pick up incoming a/c? Can you get below radar? Sometimes it is good to get down in the weeds depending on what you want to recon or clobber as the case may be.

[cmunson]

You also get to control the load outs on your planes - add drop tanks to increase range of escorts, add incendiary bombs, etc. There is plenty for an air war guy to love here and the bombing especially has been repeatedly tweaked and works very well.

[carlkay58]

Believe me - if you want more nuts & bolts control on the air war you can. As Chris mentions you can micromanage down to the actual weapon load the aircraft is carrying, which air units fly which air directive/mission, the pilots and aircraft assigned to each squadron, etc.

I just like to stress that, while this level of control is possible, you don't have to play it that way to do well.