Air dropped freight

[cato13]

in my current mp game my allied opponent is managing to fly around 20 air freight missions a turn even though i over 500 planes flying air superiority missions in both air phases over a 3 hex area in Sicily.

the thing is i havent intercepted a single mission over a number of turns. i have fighters flying at roughly the same altitude so i know it isnt that.

any ideas?

[cfulbright]

For some reason the game code doesn't intercept freight transport flights.

Cary

[cato13]

Haha yeah good one [:D]

[cfulbright]

That's the way the game is coded.

[cato13]

Thats insane! I'm actually quite shocked at that with how deep and realistic everything else is that planes flying in supplies are impossible to intercept absolutely bizarre [&:]

[cato13]

You sure about this? i found this old post from a few years back

ORIGINAL: Baelfiin

I am not sure Pelton ever dealt with a heavy interdiction environment for his air supply.
If there was no allied airpower I see how this can make the Germans pretty strong. In my game with him his transports got shot down in droves trying to supply his guys on Sardinia and to a lesser extent on the frontline around Rome.
In my game with AWG he was putting a lot of interdiction on my invasion beaches and I would take hundreds of casualties every time I flew a supply mission.
I wonder how sustainable those frontline depots are if you are paying double to resupply?

I think you can get 20k stored in a depot So theoretically that could last several turns. I guess it would boil down to how much freight you can get to the front and how fast you use it up.
Doing a lot of movement in high level interdiction sounds dangerous but maybe it is not as harsh as I remember it being.

Good point on the airstrips. Maybe that is something that they should look at. Maybe reducing freight delivery depending on how big the airstrip is, 3 = full, 2 = 2/3, 1= 1/3.

[cfulbright]

I'm pretty sure. AA seems to take some toll, but I've never seen A2A affect, and it's been discussed in this forum. Go ahead and search.

Cary

[Chris21wen]

Still learning but if this is correct it is ridiculous. Why should air transport be invulnerable to A2A makes no sense?

[cato13]

it does seem to be the case bases on what im seeing. just curious is the same issue present in wite2?

i guess i dont have to explain the amount of gamey exploits this can lead to.

[cfulbright]

I'm not sure how severe the gamey exploits would be.

1. It's only the Allies who have significant transport air groups
2. Flak still works against the transport planes
3. Aerial resupply doesn't change the status of an Isolated hex and the units in it

Now what's gamey is starting to build an airbase in the hex to be resupplied, which significantly increases the amount of supply landed in that hex.

Cary

[rmeckman]

In some cases the transport aircraft receive more flak losses than you expect, because they always fly in a straight line from the staging base to the target hex. The aircraft make no attempt to avoid enemy flak concentrations. I've been burned a few times when a transport mission happened to fly over enemy-held cities or enemy units with a lot of AAA.

[cfulbright]

True. You can affect that some by picking a staging base that routes that straight line to avoid the worst of the flak.

Cary

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: cato13

it does seem to be the case bases on what im seeing. just curious is the same issue present in wite2?

....

Less so, a lot of work went into recoding the auto-intercept routines and the interaction between AS and air transport (& indeed AS and GS) missions.

In the main in WiTE2 I tend to avoid air drops too close to the front but there are times when you need to do so to resupply pockets etc (another new set of concepts around the effect of isolation) and you need to escort.

Problem is the code bases split some 3-4 years ago and the stuff above is related to a wider overhaul of the functionality around air transport missions (of all types).

[cato13]

Yeah i figured as much, its a bit immersion breaking seeing it happen but just one of those things i guess.