Luftwaffe night fighter strategy

[chrismilos]

Played alot allied side, so wanted to try the Luftwaffe. Got production set up right and doing great end of September 1943 with between 3:1 to 5:1 kill ratios during the day in Luftwaffe favor.

However, I can't figure out the night fighter tactics! I'm converting alot to Ju-88s for the apparently better radar & detection equipment, but my problem is that I can't get the night fighters to engage the bomber stream. I get maybe 10 attacks & 2 shootdowns total when I have 400-500 fighters engaged.

It is very frustrating how when you set up intercepts by squadron only 2-4 stay on the raid while the other 30+ disengage & stay at airport waiting to be reassigned to a raid. But I started only sending 4 aircraft vs. every bomber raid until they're identified as bombers for sure. Then I send another 15-30 aircraft vs. that bomber raid and usually most stick on assignment & don't disengage. However, all my night fighters are just flying with the stream & barely engaging. When I played the allied side the Luftwaffe night fighters would engage sooooo much more. So clearly I'm doing something wrong.

Alternately, I've also tried setting up patrols of entire squadrons over the target area (say Essen/Dusseldorf) and send only 4 aircraft for each raid to identify it. Then send them the patrols vs. the bomber raids once they're identified as raids, with basically the same results (super few intercepts).

Can some of the more experienced players please help me & explain what your tactics are so that I can get my night fighters more engaged?

[mark dolby]

Hi Chris.
The full campaign starts with the first mass use of 'window', effectively blinding your radar equipped NJG. Your best chance of intercepts is over defended targets when the bombers get caught in searchlights. I am now in the same position as you in my campaign April '45. The RAF generally had better electronics, counter measure devices and radar to the LW. And when they didn't, luck was to give it back to them. Look at the info screen for each individual Gruppe and you will see not all have the same radar suite. The game auto builds these sets and upgrades the Gruppen as the game goes on to the extent that not all the aircraft in a Gruppe will have the same radar installed. The info will only change when all aircraft have the best set so some of your Ju88 units will have Fug212 radar and some SN220. Same for the BF110 units.

I share your frustration at lack of results as the recent patches have revamped and changed the night war and made it harder/more realistic. I still get nights where 40-60 RAF night bombers are destroyed but most of them are due to flak or fighter damage and crashing a little further away. On this, get 2-4 88mm or better guns at radar, airfields and small factories that seem to be on the favoured routes by BC. You will get to know those routes. These guns come with searchlights, great for extra damage and possible identification. In fact I usually equip those targets which are favourite target of the medium and fighter bombers with 8-12 such guns and masses of attendant light flak.
You have the basic idea right. When 36 out of your 40 go green and start circling, reassign them to the same or a nearby 'box'. Keep at it. It's tiresome and seems not worth the effort but again whats the alternative? You are not going to see many aces of the NJG.

Remember that although the AI LW NJG attack your RAF with much better results, the game (in my opinion) has an inbuilt bias towards the AI side to level things up against Human opposition that will do the unexpected and should prevail against the machine. You obviously have the measure of the USAAF during the day and that's where your campaign will be won or lost. Keep at it.

Mark.

[simovitch]

Great response Mark. I don't think the Axis AI has any cheats over a human player other than to be able to allocate intercepts to each bomber group in a balanced and well-timed manner in a fraction of a second. I think this is one of the few games where the AI can sometimes play better than a human could.

I like the flexibility of assigning the computer to handle 3 or 4 of the Luftflotten and I command one or two manually. And I can always intervene at any time if the computer misses some opportunities to get kills on stragglers.

[vimhawk2]

As you know from another thread, I've recently started a new long campaign as the Germans. Unfortunately I'm finding the night phase incredibly frustrating. I absolutely take the point about failure due to technology (window etc) and how groups gradually change over to better detection systems. So from that I understand you won't get many interceptions, *but* there surely has to be a better and less labour intensive way of managing the intercepts? As alluded to by the original poster (NB kudos for those shoot down rates, I'm nowhere near that!), it's the way that the majority of the NJGs just sit around after their original orders and need to be re-assigned to interceptions. But far worse than this is the way the group divides itself up into two aircraft flights which have to be individually ordered. This is not fun, and apart from being a historical representation, a game must surely be fun too? Every aspect of a simulation is a compromise, and a lot of compromise is already incorporated. Therefore I don't care if having two aircraft flights is historical, having to input orders to the entire German night fighter force two aircraft at a time is not the way forward. *Hopefully I've missed some obvious way of ordering them all at once! I really don't mind being wrong about that!!!* So can't those in the group that don't go for the original intercept still remain as a group, even if they (quite frustratingly) don't go to where they were originally ordered?

[simovitch]

Good points vimhawk2. I don't think there is much that can be done to make the nightfighter war more interesting to the player. Some have even suggested creating options to remove it from the campaigns. How many wargames cover this aspect of WW2? Now you see why.

If micromanaging the war against Bomber Command is not your cup of tea, you can always set your NF commands to AI controlled and sit back with a cuppa and watch the AI controlled Luftwaffe show you how it's done. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what most people do.

As far as manual intercepts, I assign a couple of full strength NF groups to individual "unknown" icons up and down the bomber stream just to make sure I can get the entire command inserted into the stream and hope they detect something.

Your NF groups circling around are on patrol and can be ordered to intercept again and again, but click on the plane icon on the map to view their group display see if their com or radar is jammed. If they are then they are generally useless until the British ECM's start to head home.

[vimhawk2]

Good idea on assigning night fighters to AI. This is why I ask questions on these forums. Because no matter how obvious something seems, I may not have thought of it!

[ScrubLord93]

Is there a trick I'm missing to getting detections with night fighters? I had a massive bomber raid hitting a German city at night and planned 5 different squadrons of night fighters to sweep down the line of their return trip to try and catch German NFs that were tailing them. There were so many airborne German NFs that I couldn't even see my NF squadrons anymore, and yet I managed only a single downed BF-110. I tried to vary up my NF altitude between 18,000 - 22,000 ft, offset their time so they weren't all on top of each other and they still didn't seem to do much.

[warshipbuilder]

There could have been some RCM aircraft in the bomber stream. They do tend to mess up the nightfighters radar.

[vimhawk2]

The daytime game is fine, but the nightime game is really not enjoyable. I tried putting the Reich on AI so that it would deploy the night fighters, which it did but didn't get any better results than me. But gave up because that gave it control over the Me410s and other day fighters, which I wanted to use, er, differently (eg not launch the Me410s at everything). I get the stuff about going by searchlights but frankly I'm getting old now and if I do that together with moving around the entire night fighter force at two aircraft a time, I may not survive until the end of the game. So there may be micro management options, but there shouldn't have to be.

Incidentally I did take over one night and go all out for it, two aircraft at a time. I got one interception. And three aircraft crashed when landing back at their base. So I basically did worse than if I hadn't taken off at all.