Air War - Experience of Pilots, SKILL, DIS and Mission Effects

[Wiedrock]

This is an Attachment to this Thread/Post, since there the topic of DISruption of Air Missions came up. And since before talking about/looking into things that can reduce effects I feel like understanding what causes/impacts effects needs to go first. So then, here is a report (bug/manual-off/off'ness) I was looking into for several times over the years when trying to determin the relationship between SKILL/DISruptions/Effects, since I never managed to observe a relationship between these three when looking at Missions with an "effect" (so non-GA UNIT/GS).
e.g.
→ You see high SKILL low DIS missions with low effects
→ You see low SKILL low DIS with high effects
→ You see high SKILL high DIS with high effects
....and so on. No scheme observable (to me), whatsoever.

---

So here we go.

Initially we may start with some quotes from the Manual, there are no Erratas to those concerning this topic I could find.
To me these quotes indicate that the usage of Experienced Pilots will result in an increased Mission effect/efficiency in both,
- a Mission like GA UNIT or GS at hitting more tagets
- or a Mission which causes "effect"
...to have a bigger number.

SKILL_Manual.png (280.75 KiB) Viewed 164 times

So I have set up 2 AGs, with the same planes. One having Experienced Pilots of average 95 and the other having Pilots with less experience of average 40 before the Missions.

SKILL_AGs.png (943.49 KiB) Viewed 164 times

Both are located at the same Airfield. Each AG does one mission per day with 24 planes each Mission. So we end up with a total of 14 Missions. I have chosen the Mission GA Railway, since this provides some good "large numbers" to work with.

SKILL_Staging.png (569.1 KiB) Viewed 164 times

These 14 Missions now each have an "effect".
/rant start
First I want to highlight a general thing.
The difference between the worst and best Missions is at least 1:5, if not higher (testing TacB), so there is massive RNG involved giving one close to no chance developing a "feel" for the matter or actually "seeing" the impact of things (like Experience). It also makes it hard for normal people to figure out what Altitude or planes are best for certain tyes of missions or other adjustments to the mission one can make. As expected, for the whole week this difference drops to give an average, but then again when comparing week to week results we again have ratios of almost 1:2 for the exact same mission/loadout/week/days/pilots between tests fogging up every change to a mission one tries out.
...I am not even mentioning here that for Level Bombers the differences between missions are much larger (1:10-1:20 ranges, occasionally 1:100 [50effect vs 5000effect]).
I want to Note that tactical Recon reduces those "failed missions" and increases overall Mission effects (once some serious tactical Recon values are achieved), but setting tests up with those just adds another layer of them having random effects, so I kept it without them.
/rant end

Analyzing the Tests:

• For this first test run (the screened one), the low EXP AG had higher effects in 5 of 7 days!
• In Sum, the low EXP guys caused 42% more effect during Test 1.
• Combining the results of 3 Test runs the less experienced AG caused overall more effects (56633) than the almost max EXP AG (51212)!
• Noteworthy, the lowest ever achieved weekly Effects were done by the high EXP AG (13316 - Test 3) and the highest ever achieved effect were done by the low EXP AG (24697 - Test 1).

SKILL_Testruns.png (694.62 KiB) Viewed 164 times

My Hypothesis is that Pilot experience (by itself) has no impact on Mission "Effects" (the numbers missions) caused.
The inexperienced pilots will lose more planes to OPS, yes! They will eventually run out of planes quicker, yes! But taking the individual Mission, they perform exactly the same (randomly even better) than MAX EXP Pilots!

Indeed, this tests exclude Flak and enemy fighters and I mostly tested TacB, but LB looked similar at a glance (but as mentioned with up to 1:20 ratios for Mission Effects). Including Fighters/Flak, things may change, like more experienced Tactical Bombers being less likely to be hit (or similar things), but that's another matter.

Overall to me this means that either I am looking at it from a wrong angle or mislead expectations, if so, tell me how other to interpret the manual to make sense of these results.

Point being, that there is no observable difference between High SKILL and Low SKILL Flights for this GA Railway Missions, similar non-relations I may also attribute towards the DISruption numbers shown in the Combat Report. A good example of this can be seen in Mission 7, having 2 flights losing 2 planes to OPS, having (for whatever reason) both Flights with high DIS (32 & 51) and still get the highest effect of the whole week with 4724 effect!

DIS: The percentage of disruption to the aircraft flight, which results in a coordination penalty that reduces the effectiveness of the flight during air combat and attacks on ground targets.

[Joel Billings]

There's a lot here, and I've failed my initiative check. Right now we are focused on some of the ground issues that have been brought up. Air combat code was written by Gary, while the display info was put together by Pavel (and in some cases Pavel's code was used by Gary to fill in the display). As is the case with ground combat, in order to get answers and possibly make changes, Pavel has to spend time to understand what Gary did. When I have more time/focus, and I think Pavel might have some time to look into it with me, I'll circle back to this item. I don't know when I'll be able to get to it, but it might have to wait until we get the next update into testing. We hope to do that sometime in December, but that could slip.