air planning

[jnpoint]

I like the idea that I can influence the air planning. Only I find it very time consuming and I do not know how much better I can do it than the AI?

How good is the AI to pick out the targets? And how much do I gain doing it myself?

[Nico165b165]

The AI does a good job of fine-tuning the AD (altitude, number of planes, etc...) and the ADs for the first turn are generally scripted to give some good results.

Strategically, it's more difficult for the AI. It won't setup some totally stupid ADs, but it has one big default : the AI is not in your head. How would the AI know that you want to send this planned invasion this turn and not the next turn ? How would it know that you're planning to use those armored reserves behind the lines to attack now and that you need every air power on those few hexes where you want to break the front ? You can also have the opposite problem : if you intend to rest this turn, no need for some 1000's of ground attack sorties with the associated flak losses.

One good example is the Bulge scenario : default WA ADs cover the whole front. You could do the whole scenario without touching them because the front won't move a lot and you'll need to attack nearly everywhere during the 12 turns. But :

1) You'll get a lot of flak losses on places where you did not intend to attack this turn, thereby losing some precious VPs
2) Because your airpower is spread everywhere, you won't have the proper concentration at the right place at the right time.

[Helpless]

I'm have no much experience with AI doing AD setup, but in general it tends to target larger areas. The only problem I see is that AS air directive doesn't support partial coverage, so it may get canceled all together if at least one group is not able to reach all hexes. So I suggest to double check AS ADs done by AI.

[tiger111]

There seems to be a lot of odd behaviour exhibited by AI controlled air directives.( mainly no-fly behaviour) Is anybody looking into this as it seems buggy.?