Joel Billings wrote: Fri Jan 19, 2024 6:00 pm
I checked out your save and my guess is you did hit the upper limit of the number of battle reports possible. You're at 2046 in the CR screen list, which is suspiciously close to 2048 (most limits are a multiple of 2). It looks like you ended up with over 2000 air phase battle reports. The number of planes destroyed on the ground is very high, so you are obviously onto something re how you set up your turn 1 missions. I will ask the programmers, but it may not be possible to increase the limit. I see your Bomb AF missions have between 1 and 7 bombers, leading to 1874 bombing missions. An easier way for us to fix this would probably be to limit the ability to fly micro missions, or for players to agree on a limit.
You must have deleted your GA air directives after the air phase as I can't see exactly what you did, but I assume you set the number of missions very high and the requested number of AC very low. We'd probably either have to reduce the number of total air phase missions allowed before the system shut down (not a great answer), or increase the Min AC and/or the Req AC for ADs so as to remove these micro missions from the game. I don't think removing the possibility of these missions would be unreasonable.
Yes, I was running small missions similar to what K62 did here -
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 7#p5119057
With how the air currently is, that is the only way to avoid losing hundreds of bombers on turn 1 from the Soviet fighters intercepting (unless you simply do not bomb anything out of immediate range of the German fighters anyway).
What I did and what seems to work is to bomb in order from the closest airbases with fighters to the furthest away ones, and make sure to wipe them out completely. Most interception seems to happen when you are flying past an airbase, not when bombing the airbase itself, so if you leave even 5-10 fighters or so at a forward airbase, they will then subsequently intercept bombers flying to the airbases further back. I think it is more effective to bomb with a larger number of smaller groups because it reduces the RNG.
If you have e.g. only 1 group of 30 planes bombing a base with 60 soviet fighters in a single mission, you will only get one roll for how many planes get destroyed. Maybe you will get lucky and destroy all 60 planes (and would have been able to destroy up to 80). Or maybe you will get unlucky and only destroy 40, leaving 40 extra to intercept your subsequent missions.
By the law of large numbers, you will end up with more "tail" distribution results in the case of one large bombing mission. Whereas if you instead have e.g. 10 bombing missions with 3 planes each (or 30 missions with 1 plane each), then you will get more rolls and it will average out. One of the Axis bombers may destroy 4 Soviet fighters and another one may destroy 0. But since you have a larger sample size of missions, it will tend to average out and you end up closer to the median expectation of how many planes you would expect to destroy while bombing.
So with small missions you can more reliably wipe out a single base, which is what you absolutely have to do given the supercharged interception.
As far as turn 1 goes, I agree it could be ok to disable smaller bombing missions, but ONLY if the turn 1 interception is changed to more or less where it was earlier prior to the interception change.
However, I think disabling small missions in general is a bad idea mainly because of its impact on recon missions. It might be relatively more ok if it only applied to ground attack, but not recon. Currently if you fly large recon missions, the recon planes will get intercepted en masse and massacred (unless they are escorted by a large number of your own fighters anyway). This makes it essentially impossible to do larger recon missions unless you want to suicide your recon planes and give the enemy fighters free kills (and counter-productively skill up the enemy fighter pilots) in anything like a blitzkrieg scenario (until your fighters have gotten caught up). But the main benefit of recon is with rapid advances.
AFAIK historically small recon missions of a single recon plane were commonly used, and these would not usually be intercepted because either a single plane would not be detected, or else it simply would not be worth sending fighters to go intercept just a single plane (if it were detected).
Also logically, it makes sense that you would sometimes want to fly smaller missions to avoid flak, to provide less concentrated targets for the flak.
Anyway, so I would not suggest changing anything regarding mission sizes unless there is an appropriate solution for the turn 1 bombing interception issue and for recon missions.
