Not bad turn 1 air

[Hanny]

ORIGINAL: dudefan

ORIGINAL: HardLuckYetAgain

ORIGINAL: bairdlander2

I used the AI pre set missions as Axis.Changed ground attack to all 7 days and intensity to high as well as set target to units.Results of air losses.

WOAH!

You won't have any German Airplanes left at that rate. I personally don't use the AI pre-set at all. Of course I don't mind micro-managing everything in the game and as such you can see in my snapshot below the differences. There is a learning curve but well worth it if you don't mind managing your Air Force.


This is what I get for Turn 1 and only fly "only" the 1st day bombing missions for comparison. (this is from the last Beta AAR game I did) You really can't fly the airforce into the ground (nor the ground troops either or you are going to pay a price)

Whoa. Can you send a screenshot of your directives?what altitude do you use?

Historic first sortie losses for comparison, on 31 airfields, note the majority of Ju88 and He 111 were from SD2 oridinance exploding inside the aircraft when deployed, removed after first sortie as unsafe for use.
Me 109 2
Me 110 1
JU87 1
He 111 6
Ju 88 8

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: carlkay58

...
3. But the Air Directives are executed in the order in which you define them.
...

with the very important proviso, that this is weighted by priority. So the missions execute in priority order first and then in the order you created them:

[DeletedUser1769703214]

ORIGINAL: loki100

ORIGINAL: carlkay58

...
3. But the Air Directives are executed in the order in which you define them.
...

with the very important proviso, that this is weighted by priority. So the missions execute in priority order first and then in the order you created them:

What Loki said.

[Bamilus]

Thanks for tips, guys. Using single hex ground attacks, prioritizing fighter bombs first, and not going past escort range, first turn I was able to get 2200 soviet air losses vs 100 axis. I know it's not great but way better than the 400-500 axis losses vs 2000-2500 soviet losses the default AI settings give you.

[DeletedUser1769703214]

ORIGINAL: Bamilus

Thanks for tips, guys. Using single hex ground attacks, prioritizing fighter bombs first, and not going past escort range, first turn I was able to get 2200 soviet air losses vs 100 axis. I know it's not great but way better than the 400-500 axis losses vs 2000-2500 soviet losses the default AI settings give you.

That is an excellent upgrade!!!! Little more practice and you will be just fine.

By the way my loses are high because I fly at 6,000 feet for bombing on the first turn I ran a few test and showed me that I got better results at that level. But I don't know anymore since I take a ton of Flak loses & that was many patches ago when I ran those test bombings. I am sure it has changed and I need to put in some more time for testing more things.

You just can't force things in the air. Will take a finesse as a German to make things work.

[CapAndGown]

quote "1 bombing mission per airfield"

Since you only get 10 air directives that would seem to mean only 30 airfields bombed (10 per Luftflotte) with no ground support or recon. I am not understanding. Is this what is intended?

Could someone walk be through step-by-step of how to set up air doctrines on the first turn? From just running the AI assist missions in my few test runs it seems clear that AI assist is totally inadequate.

[Sammy5IsAlive]

ORIGINAL: CapAndGown

quote "1 bombing mission per airfield"

Since you only get 10 air directives that would seem to mean only 30 airfields bombed (10 per Luftflotte) with no ground support or recon. I am not understanding. Is this what is intended?

Could someone walk be through step-by-step of how to set up air doctrines on the first turn? From just running the AI assist missions in my few test runs it seems clear that AI assist is totally inadequate.

HLYA will correct me if I'm wrong but there are enough airfields close to each other that you can set up ground attack directives with 1/2 radius and hit them both with a single directive.

[king171717]

ORIGINAL: HardLuckYetAgain

ORIGINAL: dudefan

Air superiority missions as well?

Even though i only do Medium intensity day1 bombing I lose at least 500 and destroy around 2500-3000

1. The order in which you bomb Soviet air bases matter.

2. Altitude matters.

3. Bomb load out matters (I know many in BETA said it does not but it does, this goes hand-in-hand with altitude)

4. I don't fly Air Superiority missions 1st turn.

5. Anything bombing past 8 - 10 hexes requires an escort of fighter(s). Otherwise you are going to get mauled if intercepted flying un-escorted on the first turn. I do use drop tanks but only when needed.

6. I don't do wide hex bombing.

thank you for this! this is definitely helping me.

[TheFerret]

It almost seems like, counterintuitively, you don't want to do too well with your D1 ground attacks, because when you get to the ground phase what's left of the VVS will happily fly to you. (Did this happen historically?)

Here's my best air execution phase result after fine-tuning my air directives. I went for maximum destruction on the ground, using 1 AD per airfield (except for a couple targeting 2 or 3 airfields in LF 4 because I hit the AD limit). I found that with my settings 1 mission aircraft destroyed about 1 to 1.25 Soviet aircraft on the ground, so I assigned mission aircraft roughly equal to the number of planes at the target field, a little more for the key fighter bases and a little less for some bomber/auxiliary bases. I assigned all the Ju-87s and bomber-trained Bf-110s to hit specific fighter bases near the border in the first wave, to keep them out of air combat and prevent the air staff from doing silly things like sending them to targets at the edge of their range where I'd rather have level bombers hit.

I found that fighter escorts weren't necessary if I was disciplined about hitting every fighter base first. Strikes at the edge of bomber range in the north and center were untouched. In the south there's more fighters in inconvenient locations close enough to intercept but too far to realistically eliminate, but they only intercept if you try reaching out really far to i.e. Crimea or the airfields around Kyiv - but hitting targets that far out pretty drastically increases your ops losses too, so I don't think they're worth it anyways.

[TheFerret]

To the original point, here's the end-of-turn losses. Despite destroying over 300 more airframes than HardLuckYetAgain's example, I eliminated over 150 fewer pilots - and I gather from loki's AAR that losing pilots hurts a lot more than losing airframes. And my ops losses were over twice as high as HardLuck's - all of the extra were level bombers, which I assume means I flew my bombers harder in the air execution phase.

(sorry they're just attachments - I think I have another week until I'm able to actually link pictures inline, haha)

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: CapAndGown

quote "1 bombing mission per airfield"

Since you only get 10 air directives that would seem to mean only 30 airfields bombed (10 per Luftflotte) with no ground support or recon. I am not understanding. Is this what is intended?

...

doesn't really mean that. You set an AD, can be anything from a single hex (0) to 10*10. The game routine then does a rough calculation of how many targets are in the box, what your mission intensity is and how many planes you allocate (or leave to auto), and comes up with a number of strikes. What you can do is over-ride that number, so lets say your box has 4 airfields, set that to 8 strikes and (if the mileage/time is available) each gets hit twice from just the one AD.

edit - you also have more than 10 ADs so not sure where you have taken that from. Each Air command can have 30 on their own (not a good idea as its going to be chaotic but the capacity is there)

[dudefan]

Did you check if automatic naval patrol was on? In my experience this brings only heavy LB losses with no gain

[DeletedUser1769703214]

ORIGINAL: king171717

ORIGINAL: HardLuckYetAgain

ORIGINAL: dudefan

Air superiority missions as well?

Even though i only do Medium intensity day1 bombing I lose at least 500 and destroy around 2500-3000

1. The order in which you bomb Soviet air bases matter.

2. Altitude matters.

3. Bomb load out matters (I know many in BETA said it does not but it does, this goes hand-in-hand with altitude)

4. I don't fly Air Superiority missions 1st turn.

5. Anything bombing past 8 - 10 hexes requires an escort of fighter(s). Otherwise you are going to get mauled if intercepted flying un-escorted on the first turn. I do use drop tanks but only when needed.

6. I don't do wide hex bombing.

thank you for this! this is definitely helping me.

You are welcome

[DeletedUser1769703214]

ORIGINAL: TheFerret

To the original point, here's the end-of-turn losses. Despite destroying over 300 more airframes than HardLuckYetAgain's example, I eliminated over 150 fewer pilots - and I gather from loki's AAR that losing pilots hurts a lot more than losing airframes. And my ops losses were over twice as high as HardLuck's - all of the extra were level bombers, which I assume means I flew my bombers harder in the air execution phase.

(sorry they're just attachments - I think I have another week until I'm able to actually link pictures inline, haha)

Yes, the lose of pilots hurt You almost lost two times your trained pilots in the first turn for Germany. May be something else to consider when you are doing your Air War (You can look up your airframe rate)

[MagicMissile]

Hello everyone,

I was thinking about starting a new thread but since it concerns 1st turn bombing I thought I could just post my question here.

I played a fair amount of WitW so I skipped the AI help and bravely set sail on my own [:)].

I have been dabbling a bit with the 41 campaign. My problem is that autoassign with my manually set up ADs work fine for Luftflotte 1 but both 2 and 4 refuse to autoassign any bombers. I do exactly the same thing for all Luftflotte and when I execute Luftflotte 1 bomb and everythng is fine but Luftflotte 2 and 4 do not fly at all. Anyone have an idea why?

Also I saw that recon airplanes losses on turn 1 looks awfully high if you follow the AI set up. Anyone else felt the same? And what to do about it? I am thinking maybe only recon one time per week.

/MM

[Nix77]

Wrote this on another thread, might as well add it here too. I've been practicing the German T1 air war on Road to Leningrad scenario:

My lessons learned:
- Read the manual
- Continuing from the above point, I learned that Turn 1 Day 1 the Germans have a surprise bonus, so use that to your advantage. I ran bombing sorties only on D1 without any recon (didn't seem to need it)
- Read everything about altitude from the manual. At least on German T1, 6000-9000 feet seemed to be a good setting. Could be different later on (AA, opposition, air mile optimization, more experienced pilots etc.)
- Air mission priority, use that! Make escorted sorties on Very High to hit fighter airfield at first (on T1). In general, get the opposition fighters out first, then fly bombing. You can do this on RtL scenario quite easily once you figure it out, and optimally destroy 800ish Soviet airplanes with only 10-20 casualties. Not sure how Air Superiority missions fit into this later on, but on T1 AS seems useless. You can fly bombing and ground recon later on with Low priority with just a few operational casualties.
- Use drop tanks selectively if needed, don't overdo it. I separated JG53 to be my "drop tank wing" and escorted the sorties to more distant Soviet fighter airfields with them. Check which staging base suits best to your escorts range.
- You'll probably want your best pilots on the fighters, so tag "Trained Pilots" on them
- You can evade AA by editing mission pathing nodes. Use the "Show AA" map mode, tag "Follow Path" and fly through low AA gaps.
- At least on GE T1, you need only 1-2 strikes per airfield with 50kg bombs. You can actually limit the number of bombers and escorts on the strikes manually to reduce fatigue and you'll still do OK. 20-30 bombers with 10 Bf-109 escorts do short work of most airfields.
- The more Air Directives you plan, the more you can control the results. But you'll do perfectly fine with bigger area directives if you consider them carefully.

I managed to get 800 SU aircraft destroyed in Air Phase alone with only 10-20 losses for Luftwaffe on the RtL scenario, using the full 10 Air Directives. And I'm sure there's still room for improvement though!

About recon, at least on T1 it's probably not worth flying any. Or if you want to do it, do it after you've cleaned up enemy fighters from the air, maybe Low priority on D1 (close fighter cleanup: Very High, long range fighter cleanup: High, unescorted bombing: Medium)

[Hanny]

ORIGINAL: HardLuckYetAgain

ORIGINAL: TheFerret

To the original point, here's the end-of-turn losses. Despite destroying over 300 more airframes than HardLuckYetAgain's example, I eliminated over 150 fewer pilots - and I gather from loki's AAR that losing pilots hurts a lot more than losing airframes. And my ops losses were over twice as high as HardLuck's - all of the extra were level bombers, which I assume means I flew my bombers harder in the air execution phase.

(sorry they're just attachments - I think I have another week until I'm able to actually link pictures inline, haha)

Yes, the lose of pilots hurt You almost lost two times your trained pilots in the first turn for Germany. May be something else to consider when you are doing your Air War (You can look up your airframe rate)

Lw aircrew personnel losses June 41
Kia 92
Wia 162
Mia 322
Total 585

[Dreamslayer]

ORIGINAL: loki100
edit - you also have more than 10 ADs so not sure where you have taken that from. Each Air command can have 30 on their own (not a good idea as its going to be chaotic but the capacity is there)

Also a small remark - Soviet AF's should not have 37mm AA guns and DShK's at beginning of the war in their TOE.

[TheFerret]

Continuing thinking about pilot vs. airframe losses - I tested the theory that letting the VVS fly and beating them in the air will eliminate more pilots than destroying the VVS on the ground. I launched very limited airfield strikes, targeting a few of the largest fighter bases near the border plus most of the bases in the Bessarabia/Odessa region since there's no ground combat there T1, turned on ground support, set a couple of AS directives over Bialystok and Lvov, and let the air battle work itself out during my ground phase.

The result: compared to HardLuck's example, I lost 350 more Axis pilots - but eliminated 600 more Soviet pilots. I'm sure this approach can be optimized (this time around I tried adding drop tanks to all the fighters, which I assume contributed to the very high ops losses) but I'd still expect to lose 300+ Axis pilots - the question is, what is a favorable loss ratio for pilots, and how many losses can the Axis realistically afford at that loss ratio? And note that my airframe losses are shifted away from bombers and toward fighters - I'm not sure what to think of that; while I like the idea of having more bombers around, they won't be worth much if they're sitting around twiddling their thumbs for lack of fighter escorts.

[CapAndGown]

ORIGINAL: Dreamslayer

ORIGINAL: loki100
edit - you also have more than 10 ADs so not sure where you have taken that from. Each Air command can have 30 on their own (not a good idea as its going to be chaotic but the capacity is there)

Also a small remark - Soviet AF's should not have 37mm AA guns and DShK's at beginning of the war in their TOE.

I just tried adding an 11th AD to Luftflotte 1 and it would not let me. This seems to confirm that 10 AD per air command is the max.