Countering the Zero Wall

[Philwd]

Hi Monkey,
While that may be good for the Allies for the IJN all it means is every turn you get pilots with EXP 15-25 filling up your squadrons. And since the code is written to allow lower experience pilots have more missions for training it means your sqdn as a whole drops dramatically in effectiveness. With the higher ops losses for the IJN few of those lower exp pilots ever make it 50 EXP.
BTW your sweeps are not gamey. I think most players train up with cakewalk missions.

Cheers,
Quark

[pasternakski]

Mog, I think it's pretty simple. PBY, Mavis, and other such units fly almost every turn. They lose planes to attrition, and some to combat, but always fill back up to capacity. The game seems to "reward" active units with pilots, so - voila! - pilot numbers and experience build up.

Fighter groups tend to get ground up in combat, and their aircraft replacements are pretty low (even 3+ or 4+ per day is low when you are flying half a dozen squadrons that take at least 1-2 operational losses each day and occasional spikes of losses from bad combat results).

Once upon a time, the "pilot allocation" phase was added in order to clean up an even worse problem back in the v. 1.x days. Maybe it's time to look at revising that "fix" in order to refine it.

Does this discussion have any effect on WitP? I think it might.

[Apollo11]

Hi all,

ORIGINAL: pasternakski

Mog, I think it's pretty simple. PBY, Mavis, and other such units fly almost every turn. They lose planes to attrition, and some to combat, but always fill back up to capacity. The game seems to "reward" active units with pilots, so - voila! - pilot numbers and experience build up.

Fighter groups tend to get ground up in combat, and their aircraft replacements are pretty low (even 3+ or 4+ per day is low when you are flying half a dozen squadrons that take at least 1-2 operational losses each day and occasional spikes of losses from bad combat results).

Once upon a time, the "pilot allocation" phase was added in order to clean up an even worse problem back in the v. 1.x days. Maybe it's time to look at revising that "fix" in order to refine it.

Does this discussion have any effect on WitP? I think it might.

And perhaps (please see above few messages where I wrote it 1st time) that it works for Allied squadrons and not for Japanese squadrons...


BTW, I did ask this several times in past and I (we) were told that WitP has the pilot allocation fixed (i.e. no excess pilots).


Leo "Apollo11"

[Apollo11]

Hi all,

ORIGINAL: pasternakski

I'm gettin' close, Leo. I've got a PBY squadron with 12 planes, 97 pilots - AND THREE KILLS!

That's nice... [;)]

BTW, what is the EXP of lowest pilots? Is it above 50?

If that is the case then almost no harm done since they know how to fly.

In case of Japanese squadron (with similar number of MAX aircraft and with excess pilots) the lower 30% of pilots would be in EXP range of 15-25 and thus useless and making whole squadron worthless (until they can start flying properly when they slowly reach around 50 EXP)... [:(]


Leo "Apollo11

[pasternakski]

There are a whole bunch of 99s and the rest range down to a low of 68.

I quite agree that the Japanese get the short end of this deal, and I think there is a mis-designed game mechanic to blame for it.

[Apollo11]

Hi all,

ORIGINAL: pasternakski

There are a whole bunch of 99s and the rest range down to a low of 68.

OK - and that's not bad at all...

I quite agree that the Japanese get the short end of this deal, and I think there is a mis-designed game mechanic to blame for it.

I think it's just a bug.

If I recall correctly "Kidd" posted few weeks ago that Joel found 3 different bugs regarding pilot allocation and that this all is fixed in WitP!


Leo "Apollo11"

[frank1970]

ORIGINAL: Apollo11

Hi all,

ORIGINAL: PzB

You still can't match my Mavis sqd with 9 planes and 114 pilots [:(]

Ouch... this is even more bad than my "Dave" squadron (14 Aircraft MAX and 65+ pilots)... [:(]


Leo "Apollo11"

Had a nice Val-squadron of 27 planes on ASW for several turns and ended having 196 pilots.
Repaired it how Mogami told me, worked fine.

[Apollo11]

Hi all,

ORIGINAL: Frank

Had a nice Val-squadron of 27 planes on ASW for several turns and ended having 196 pilots.
Repaired it how Mogami told me, worked fine.

So... it works for Japanese as well... strange why I never ever managed to have it done in one of my PBEMs... strange indeed... [&:]


Leo "Apollo11"

[Zeta16]

I don't think it works, I had a Nell group with 64 pilots and put it on ASW and got a damaged plane. So I transfer the group and 63 pilots go with the 26 planes and 1 says with the damaged one. I also tried it with a Mavis group with 103 pilots and the same thing happened.