No posts in a while in part due to lack of time, and in part due to fact that it is groundhogs day right now. I sweep and bomb trying to wear down his air force and destroy his industry / infrastructure. While doing this, I started (possibly) noticing something with respect to sweeps that I wanted to study a bit more.
A little background. At first I was just sweeping with everything at max altitude, figuring it "best practice". JFBs all seem to whine about "the dive", so with no house rules restricting it - hey, why not? But the results were less than satisfactory. I watch nearly every sweep in total, and sure enough I get to dive a few A/C, but after diving on what seemed like between 2 - 5 A/C it started to get mixed up - and he seemed to be doing better in the mix up. To further complicate it, when I did bomb, nearly every time, the sweepers would arrive after the bombers. Useless. There must be a better way. So I started running the bulk of my sweeps between 16k - 20k ft and the results have been much better. F4Us come into their own. Spits seem be unstoppable if only I had more top rate Aussie and Brit pilots (and if they got rid of the damn cannon and put in some 50s). Even the Jugs (especially the D2) seem to have improved their kill ratios. And they almost always arrive BEFORE the bombers!
So is this improved sweeping performance real, or did I just switch right at the critical point when his (probably) limited supply of good pilots began to dry up? So, a test.
The setup:
version 1.7.11.23x9
Using the editor, I modified the Marianas scenario (scenario 11). Specifically:
I added 100000 supply to Ailinglaplap
I made Ailinglaplap a size 5 AF, size 3 port
I added 3 US fighter squadrons at Ailinglaplap flying "jeff fighter" (more below)
I added a base force to Ailinglaplap to which I added a crap ton of support and air support
I added 100000 supply to Maloelap
I made Maloelap a size 5 AF, size 3 port
I added 3 JAF fighter squadrons to Maloelap flying "japan fighter" (more below)
I added a base force to Maloelap to which I added a crap ton of support and air support. For select tests, I added radar (see below)
Each squadron had an average experience of 75. I did not touch the leaders.
The US fighter squadrons had 25 A/C each, all set to sweep at either 20k or 35k (test dependent)
The JAF fighter squadrons had 36 A/C each, all set to 50% CAP. One squadron at 10k, one at 20k, one at 30k. Range = 0
I ran each test 5 times while changing something else in theater (sending combinations of bombers at different bases to attack different bases) in order to change the seed.
For this test, I wanted to normalize the fighters. I modified an A/C (P39D2 for US, Nate for Japan) such that they had all the same attributes. I will vary the attributes of the sweeps in isolation to see if that had any effect on results (or, more accurately, to see what those effects were). The baseline attributes:
Speed = 390
cruise = 270
endurance = 300
range = 25
normal range = 6/8
ext range = 8/10
max alt = 35k
climb rate = 2500
maneuver = 20/20/20/18/14
durability = 30
armor = 1
max load = 500
SR = 1
gun value = 18 (6x.50cal MGs mounted "forward")
Results:
At first I didn't put radar at the Japanese base (I wasn't really thinking about it). Below I've listed the average Japanese fighters killed, average US fighters killed, and kill ratio (expressed as how good the US did), first sweep kill ratio.
The tests include all fighters at baseline stats, US fighters speed bumped to 435 (P47D25 speed), climb rate 3k ft/min (tad faster than spit VIII, a bit slower than hellcat), and US maneuver set to 33/33/33/27/21 (spit VIII) with Japan maneuver set to 26/26/26/20/14 (Frank a)
Baseline 20k 19 9 2.111 .8214
Baseline 35k 16.6 7 2.371 1.625
Speed 435 20k 22 7.4 2.973 1.545
Speed 435 35k 22.6 6 3.767 1.68
climb 3k 20k 14.8 10.8 1.370 .4242
climb 3k 35k 17.6 6.4 2.75 1.389
man spit 20k 23.6 6.6 3.575 2.167
man spit 35k 21 5.2 4.038 2.5
so at first, it appears that higher is better. In all cases, the high altitude sweep outperformed the lower sweep. Some other take aways:
Speed is important, but maneuverability is king - especially in the first engagement.
a good climb rate (for the sweepers) is actually a BAD thing. I don't know if this is because they start chasing the high altitude CAP (instead of going after the lower guys), or what. But if your climb rate is good, it appears to be more important to start on top then if you have a poor climb rate. I don't understand this result, but it was consistent. I would have thought a good climb rate would enable the pilot to "recharge" his energy quicker. It does appear that this handicap disappears as you start higher.
While starting higher is important, it isn't the be all, end all JFBs seem to make it out to be. Since each test is 3 sweeps (occurring in the same phase), it appears the difference is only about 1 A/C per sweep. I typically saw 2 extra Japanese planes getting killed (on average) and 1 fewer US over the 3 sweeps.
Ok, that is without radar. Since the results above didn't seem to match what I was seeing in my game, I tried to think of what was different. Well, he usually "detects" my sweeps - perhaps the radar makes a difference. So I added 4 TaChi7 radar sets to the Japanese base force. The difference was astounding (same table format as above):
Baseline 20k 14.2 15.6 .910 .638
Baseline 35k 11.8 16.4 .719 .500
Speed 435 20k 19.4 11.2 1.73 1.15
Speed 435 35k 17.8 9.4 1.89 1.19
climb 3k 20k 15.2 14.8 1.02 .800
climb 3k 35k 8.4 13.6 .617 .428
man spit 20k 20.4 9.8 2.08 1.20
man spit 35k 16.8 8.8 1.91 .833
It is hard to believe I was measuring the same thing. This seems to confirm my antecedal observations in that flying lower is better. Let me be perfectly clear:
In all conditions except the high speed, allied kill ratios were BETTER at 20kft than at 35kft.
And the high altitude sweep was had a difference of less than 1 A/C per sweep difference.
Any JFB complaining about the dive needs to first check to see if he has adequate radar coverage over the base in question before simply attributing a bad loss ratio to "the dive" (and check pilot quality while you’re at it, though that is outside the scope of my testing).
What's more, if you’re an AFB, you should not just blindly come in at max altitude. Let me say that again: Allied kill ratios were BETTER at 20kft than at 35kft. My spits and corsairs perform perfectly fine in sweeps against Franks, Georges, Tony’s and the like. This was not the case when I was consistently coming in as high as I could. Get your A/C into their max maneuver band, and make sure your pilots are at least equal to his (preferably better). And if possible, try to get the spits to arrive first (closer basing and/or lower altitude), as again, maneuverability is king.
A few limitations of my testing:
I did not measure, or even check leaders. Except for the fact that they were consistent throughout testing (I kept reloading the same save after starting the scenario once), I do not know if / how they influenced the results.
I could not control for weather. I set "advanced weather" to off, but curiously enough I still had days of clear / partly cloudy and other days with heavy rain and thunderstorms.
I made no attempt to measure the effects over time. I did not check damaged A/C (and the effect of service rating on), pilot fatigue, pilot attrition rate, or anything you might look for if fighting an air campaign (as opposed to an air battle)
I set the pilot experience in the editor to 75 which causes the pilots to have average experience between 70-80, air skill 70-80 and def between 70-80. This last one is a big on, as a pilot can be easily trained to 70 air skill and get to 75 experience flying CAP missions that encounter no resistance, however def skill usually has a much large spread. Some have it in the 70s, others in the 50s. I think this is a big deal - as another change I made recently in my campaign was to fill USA sweep units with the highest def pilots (def > 70) with exp over 70, rather than just the most experienced pilots. This dropped my average experience by about 10 points, but I seemed to get a good bump in results. I have not tested this yet, as it would be very time consuming as I'd have to train the pilots first than perform the tests.
A few [mostly] unrelated parting comments:
During testing, if the sweeps didn't fly (or they flew as a combined sweep), I disregarded the test. Nearly every test only had one, or at most 2, cases where the A/C didn't fly. That is except for the baseline 20k and climb 20k when the bad guys had radar. Here, they failed to fly more times than they did fly. It may mean nothing, but it was interesting.
Only a few times did the sweepers come in a combined group (50 or 75 fighters sweeping at once). When they did, I got a message in the combat log about failing to fly due to weather or some such. I thought it a bit interesting that the combat log said "screw it, we aint going", but in the event they joined up for a mega sweep.
In order to ensure a different "seed" in between iterations of like tests, I set bombers to hit some of the other Japanese airfields (not the one where the fighters were based). I had set fog of war off so that I could get accurate combat reports - and found that when I do this the amount of supply destroyed due to airbase supply hits is listed in the report. In case you are curious, it was between 50 - 100 supply points per bomb usually, though on a couple of occasions it was over 200 points for 1 bomb hit.
I didn't explicitly track it, but I did often look at time to detect once I added the Japanese radar. The times were all pathetic - usually around 10 min with a high of 16 min. I know I've seen an AAR or 2 where the Japanese player seemed to think this meant the radar was near worthless. This does not appear so. Even with the poor detection times, results were much, much better for the Japanese with radar than without.
