How to get the most of air warfare?

[T4rget]

I'm having a hard time to figure how I can get the most from planes.


How do you use them?

For now I feel the air system very nice but overcomplicated for I do with. SO I'm wondering how you use it? or if there is nice things to nknow about to make the air planning a lot more interesting for me.

[stryc]

I'm having a hard time just trying to understand how I can lose 50% of my Recon assets in just a few turns to what appears to be almost nothing at all! (See Ops losses thread.) Either I'm misunderstanding something crucial (quite likely) or something is way off.

[Bamilus]

ORIGINAL: stryc

I'm having a hard time just trying to understand how I can lose 50% of my Recon assets in just a few turns to what appears to be almost nothing at all! (See Ops losses thread.) Either I'm misunderstanding something crucial (quite likely) or something is way off.

What altitude are you using? What is the intensity and # of days set to? If the intensity is set to medium or high and you're doing a decent area (4 hex range or more) then they're going to run a ton of missions (unless you manually override the sorties).

I have my intensity set to low and 17K altitude and run on D1 and D7. I run about 3-4 recon AD's per Luftflotte for most of 1941 and I never run out of recon. Sure, some get depleted but I can keep up.

You can't treat German recon planes like Allied recon planes in WITW, they're a lot crappier.

[stryc]

The only thing I'm doing different to you is I'm not changing the altitude - default 9K. I wasn't sure what the benefits of doing so would be beyond:-

- That (your) height puts them out of 'light' AA reach
- Diminished recon value for hexes flown over to reach the recon point?
- Recon target is recce'd at 'payload ideal' altitude. (Don't know how to find that out.)
- ???
- Profit. (Only I don't seem to be profiting much at all.)

[Bamilus]

I can't answer that, then. If you're running low intensity and only 2 days and not running a ton of AD's then I wouldn't suspect you should have lots of recon losses. I get maybe like 20-30 op losses a turn but that's enough to keep pace.

Are you resting squadrons at morale less 50% and rotating any depleted ones?

[stryc]

By rotating do you mean sending them into reserve?

Not sure how to rest low morale sqdrns beyond manually checking each one at point of AD creation and excluding them, which seems extremely micro intensive.

[Bamilus]

ORIGINAL: stryc

By rotating do you mean sending them into reserve?

Not sure how to rest low morale sqdrns beyond manually checking each one at point of AD creation and excluding them, which seems extremely micro intensive.

1) Yes, there's a "rotate depleted" button in the AOG section in commanders report. It moves depleted air groups to reserve and then tries to replace them with ready ones in reserve (if available). AI Assist does this automatically but you can press button if you don't use AI assist (like I don't). Otherwise, you can manually filter on commanders report for Depleted = Yes and then manually move each one.

If there are air groups in reserve that don't replace a depleted one, but are still ready, then you'll need to manually move them from reserve. This button will only move all depleted to reserve and only move out ready ones if they are a match (e.g recon for recon, LB for LB, etc).

2) In commanders report you can set a filter on Morale 0 to 50 and it will show you only Air Groups with 50 or below morale. Then you can click the Mission Setting button at the top and change to Rest and all of the filtered air groups will change to rest. Or you can just sort Morale ascending and anything under 50% you manually click their mission type button (e.g. DN, DO, etc) to change to rest.

[stryc]

Ah. Wasn't aware of #2. I'll keep that in mind. Cheers.

[Bamilus]

ORIGINAL: stryc

Ah. Wasn't aware of #2. I'll keep that in mind. Cheers.

No worries, let me know if this helps at me (it might or might not). Typically my recon dont go under 50% morale but I've seen it happen and if you use them more then there's a greater chance they will.