Air Units in The Ground Game

[SeattleKCD]

I have been coming up to speed on WarPlan, so far I like the clean strategic feel of the game.

I have basically been invading Poland over and over again and trying different things. I can consistently defeat Poland in two turns (against AI) at this point.

I have found the air units the most fiddly and opaque part of the game so far. I understand the idea of keeping it somewhat vague so you can't game the game, but it feels like there is very little reward for the complexity of the air system and resources spent on them for use in ground combat. For instance in my Poland invasions it seems to make almost no difference if I use my air units or not.

So how do I measure the value of them?
- The pieces for them have combat values, but I cannot tell what they measure.
- Tactical units seem to be able to knock off some effectiveness and thus combat strength in air strikes, the mouse over for combats does not seem to take ground support into account, so no way to see effectiveness here.
- Medium air units seem useless, I have seen no measurable effect in strikes or support.
- When should you use air strikes versus ground support?

[AlvaroSousa]

Totally depends on what you want to do. But the key to remember is that you will never have enough if the players are relatively equal in skill. I'll give a few examples but to discuss this in depth would require me to type for 1 hour.

Say you have 10 land units and 5 bomber groups vs.....

A fortified single or double location - You air strike with 6 operation points and save 4 air operation points ground support1 attackng 1 of the units.
A line of 10 enemy units - You air strike with 2-4 operation points and save 6-8 air operation points ground support attacking 2-3 of the units.

ground attack vs tactical - range and oil use make a difference for some countries. The Allies need range. Axis need oil.

Every decision has a different benefit or detriment. The game is a balance of that.

[SeattleKCD]

Alvaro, thanks for the reply.

From what I have read more than a couple air strikes has no more effect, so I do I have any idea how many to allocate to a unit. Do air strikes have any effect on entrenchment/fortification? If so I have not seen anything in the manual about this. Also it appears that air strikes only can effect units down to a certain level of effectiveness, but there is no way to know if the unit is already at that level or not.

Given your examples, how do you have a feel for what the breakdown of air strikes vs ground support is effective? I am not necessarily looking for an formula, but I can get a feel for armor vs infantry, but the ability to determine the value of air units feels very unclear.

As I produce units, it is very hard to have a measure of how you should breakdown your purchases particularly for air.

[AlvaroSousa]

I'd start with historical builds and test from there.

Overseas supply is important for the Western Allies. So you need to know exactly what you are bringing ashore in 1943 and 1944. Otherwise you will get stuck. I had to modify the map in Spain because it was too hard for the Allies to get into Spain.

[SeattleKCD]

I will continue my exploration/experimentation with the game.

Two requests if possible:

1) Can you update ground combat odds mouse over include ground support?

2) Can you add a mouse over estimate for ground strike?

Thanks, KC

[OxfordGuy3]

ORIGINAL: SeattleKCD

I will continue my exploration/experimentation with the game.

Two requests if possible:

1) Can you update ground combat odds mouse over include ground support?

it would be great to see what the odds with/without ground support would be easily prior to an attack. Ideally I'd also like more easily to be able to specify exactly which air group to use for ground support for a particular attack (it can still be done of course, by making only one plane in range available for it)

2) Can you add a mouse over estimate for ground strike?

I can see why that could be quite tricky, though would be useful in some cases

[AlvaroSousa]

Incredibly tricky. You have to account for the opponent ground support.

[SeattleKCD]

So with an afternoon of experimenting (thanks Covid-19) here are some of my empirical observations/guesses;

Air Strikes
- a ground strike will inflict an effectiveness loss in % around the ground strength of the air unit (remember there is diminishing return for multiple strikes, and the lower the effectiveness of the unit being struck)
- ground strikes have a small % chance of inflicting strength loss, you can't really count on it.
- according to the rules air strikes have a good chance of inflicting interdiction (AP loss), I have not been able to observe this (may be broken, my experiment was hitting the Polish cav with every German tact/medium unit with every strike I could, and even with many tries never saw it happen, playing both sides on hot seat).

Ground Support
- an air unit adds it tactical strength to a combat (on offense/defense), so a 4 attack vs 4 defense with 4 tactical air supporting attach is effectively a 2-1.

Strategy Conclusions:
- Ground strikes are best against high strength units, knocking 10% effectiveness off 10 combat factors reduces it by 1, off 2 combat factors reduces by insignificant effect.
- Apply ground support to offset defensive ground support and/or get those last few factors to the next odds level.
- Medium air seems best used striking enemy airbases forcing them to commit their air. It's too low for very effective strikes or support.
- Ground strikes and ground support will be most useful against spots where you cannot get many hexes to attack from. Having 2-3 full effectiveness tactical units, apply several ground strikes, and add ground support can reduce defender effectiveness by 20-30% and add 7-8 combat factors to the combat.
- Air units supporting ground will have some importance to Axis/Russia (map bottlenecks), vitally important to Allies for invasions.

Alvaro can confirm/deny my observations.

[Flaviusx]

The main difference in the latest air rules is this: originally it was possible for air power to grind ground units to powder, not just in terms of readiness, but also raw strength. There was no limit to the amount of points you could remove from their strength.

Now you can only remove 1 point from unit strength total. Any airstrikes beyond that only affect readiness, with diminishing returns. Airpower is much weaker now than at release as a result, since you could originally direct your entire airforce at any single unit and grind it down to powder prior to an actual ground attack. A good change, imo. Airpower still matters, but it is not the IWIN card it used to be.

[Flaviusx]

Note: despite this limit of 1 point, I've seen single airstrikes remove more than 1 point at a time. But only once and against minor powers. Not against majors. So it is still possible for airpower to get disproportionate results on surprise attacks against minor powers. I'm okay with this, but it is something to take into account.

[OxfordGuy3]

I thought it's been stated before, but for completeness in this thread, is it a) only the first air strike that has a chance of inflicting a strength step loss, or b) if the first air strike does not cause a strength step loss, do subsequent air strikes still have a chance of causing a strength step loss, if one hasn't been caused previously? Also does the same apply to bombing airfields?

[sillyflower]

1st ground attack may cause a loss, or more than 1 - though my observations are the same as Flavius's
2nd ground attack from same unit will not.

That's what the rule says and I haven't seen any different in any of my games. I only started playing after .06 came out. Restriction doen't apply to naval bombing. I have no idea about airbase bombing.

[AlvaroSousa]

That's right and some information isn't available to the player attacking. You don't know if you interdicted. Part of the FoW.

WarPlan is a game of incomplete information like poker.

So feel good popups saying you perfectly destroyed 17x Pz Mark IIIbs'

[magic87966]

ORIGINAL: SeattleKCD

Ground Support
- an air unit adds it tactical strength to a combat (on offense/defense), so a 4 attack vs 4 defense with 4 tactical air supporting attach is effectively a 2-1.

Is this confirmed?

[AlvaroSousa]

Yea

[Harrybanana]

ORIGINAL: AlvaroSousa

Yea

Are you 100% sure of this Alvaro? I have run a number of tests and the ground supporting air unit does not appear to add its tactical strength to the combat odds. Or at least if it does, it does not appear to be reflected on the combat results screen. For example, If I attack a 3 defence strength enemy unit with a 10 strength friendly ground unit alone, then when I look at the combat results after the battle it will show the odds as being 3:1. If I redo the attack but this time add a 7 tactical strength bomber and then check the combat results, it will again show the odds as 3:1. I have never seen an air unit adding its tactical strength to a combat increase the odds in the combat results screen.

[Nirosi]

Hi Alvaro,

Just to make sure I understand correctly from the manual, can you confirm, or if not infirm, the following please?

There are not real “odds tables“ (3vs1, 4vs1 etc.) in the game were the computer rolls a results. It is more of an indication of relative strength to help us have a feeling of the possible results? What actually happens is the following:

All steps involved in the battle “fire” at the enemy in the order showed in the manual. So all steps fire their artillery strength with an x% chance to hit and destroy a step (or sometimes just reduce effectiveness) and then results are applied. Then all surviving defender steps fire their guns and results are applied. Then all tanks etc.

So when you say that ground support adds the tactical value to the odds, are you saying in fact that all air steps that managed to reach the battle hex will “fire” at the enemy with their tactical value and try to kill steps at the start of the battle (same time as artillery)? Or to put it in another way : it adds its tactical value as extra "artillery" points (per air step)?

[AlvaroSousa]

Let me rephrase.... Air ground support supports the odds in the sense of other effects. But when you hover over a unit it doesn't count. I believe the combat logs also don't reflect the ground support "odds". I don't remember but I will check.

And yes the odds are an estimate of men and machine at the moment as if you were a general looking at recon estimates on the enemy.