Seeking Italian campaign advice

[bsaerens]

After almost a year of I'm getting back into WitW. I'm really enjoying the game and getting to grips with more of the mechanics then my previous try. I'm trying my hand again at the Italian campaign as the Allies and am finding it harder than the first time I tried it. I'm at turn 27 (Jan '44) and am only now nearing Naples and the Foggia airbases.

Some things I want your advice on:

* For the most part I'm having to brute force my way through Southern Italy and having only marginal success. I get my fair share of victories but most of the times at a high casualty rate. I try to pick my fights and mostly only attack if I have a higher (or better yet double) combat value over the enemy. Yet still it is not uncommon that I get double the casualty figures. Is this the norm or am I doing something wrong.

* Winter set in and the weather is getting quite bad. I'm letting my ground forces go ahead and try to gain ground where I can without accruing to high casualties. As for my airforce I'm mostly letting it rest as most of the time they don't seem to be to effective with bad weather anyway. Even though I'm grounding my planes I notice that during the Axis turn I'm getting operational losses. There seem to be enemy sorties but I'm not getting any reports of air battles. So I'm not sure what is going on there.

* Coupled to my previous point: what do you do with your airforce during the winter? To use or not to use?

[Dobey455]

ORIGINAL: bsaerens

* Winter set in and the weather is getting quite bad. I'm letting my ground forces go ahead and try to gain ground where I can without accruing to high casualties. As for my airforce I'm mostly letting it rest as most of the time they don't seem to be to effective with bad weather anyway. Even though I'm grounding my planes I notice that during the Axis turn I'm getting operational losses. There seem to be enemy sorties but I'm not getting any reports of air battles. So I'm not sure what is going on there.

This is most likely training missions. In addition to setting training missions for each squadron there is also a "pilots" tab on the air doctrine screen where you can set the minimum experience for pilots to fly, any pilots below that level will automatically fly training missions. If you set the experience level lower then fewer pilots will train. You can see the number that will train from each air command in the brackets to the right of the training experience field.

So in the below image Fighter command will fly training missions for any pilot below 50 experience - in this case that is 10 pilots.
If I set the experience required to 75 then hundreds of pilots will now train each turn, if I drop it to 30 none will train.

[bsaerens]

Ok, having training related casualties would make sence.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around operational losses. I'm guessing that other operational losses might be botched landings, weather related mishaps, craft malfunctions and such?

Anyway I'm getting used of checking the daily logs of the air execution as I've learned that they have a lot of useful information.

[Denniss]

Maybe losses from automatic naval patrols ?
Check the minimum weather required for flying, if at standard poor increase it one level.

[MrBlizzard]

ORIGINAL: bsaerens

Ok, having training related casualties would make sence.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around operational losses. I'm guessing that other operational losses might be botched landings, weather related mishaps, craft malfunctions and such?

Anyway I'm getting used of checking the daily logs of the air execution as I've learned that they have a lot of useful information.

I found usefull going to graph statistics button, there you can filter air mission and figure out in detail which missions are giving you losses.
In general there are 3 kinds of missions automatically generated by AI for your planes:
- Training
- Naval patrol
- CAP
If you explicitally put on rest your airgroups you can avoid last 2 (not creating air directives doesn't prevent AI from generating these missions)
For avoiding training missions even putting in rest is not sufficient, you have to lower experience level as well explained in a previous post.