The Sky’s the Limit- PBEM GC 41 jubjub (Axis) vs. M60A3TTS (Soviet)

[HardLuckYetAgain]

I will ping you on Discord to chat

[Sertorius21]

Did I see Romanian artillery attached to German corps? Does this improve its performance significantly?

[M60A3TTS]

Did I see Romanian artillery attached to German corps? Does this improve its performance significantly?

You would think so, given the higher numbers that the German leaders possess.

[Sertorius21]

I will try that in a couple of areas then.

[Sammy5IsAlive]

How do you have your ground support allocated? On the face of it it seems like you might be better off committing twice as many planes to half as many battles. For me fighting the LW at 1:1 odds is just going to give their pilots free XP?

[M60A3TTS]

How do you have your ground support allocated? On the face of it it seems like you might be better off committing twice as many planes to half as many battles. For me fighting the LW at 1:1 odds is just going to give their pilots free XP?

I'm not sure I understand the question. How do you commit twice as many planes?

[Sammy5IsAlive]

How do you have your ground support allocated? On the face of it it seems like you might be better off committing twice as many planes to half as many battles. For me fighting the LW at 1:1 odds is just going to give their pilots free XP?

I'm not sure I understand the question. How do you commit twice as many planes?

Say for example you have 200 planes and two armies. You could create a GS directive for both, leave the allocation on auto and let the AI sort it out. Or you could have the same two directives and allocate 100 planes each. Or alternatively you could have one directive for one of the armies and allocate all 200 planes to it.

Like you are saying it is always going to be an uphill struggle trying to close the gap in pilot quality between the two air forces. But at this point in the war I would have thought that the Soviet player should be able to mitigate this somewhat by having the advantage in numbers?

[M60A3TTS]

How do you have your ground support allocated? On the face of it it seems like you might be better off committing twice as many planes to half as many battles. For me fighting the LW at 1:1 odds is just going to give their pilots free XP?

I'm not sure I understand the question. How do you commit twice as many planes?

Say for example you have 200 planes and two armies. You could create a GS directive for both, leave the allocation on auto and let the AI sort it out. Or you could have the same two directives and allocate 100 planes each. Or alternatively you could have one directive for one of the armies and allocate all 200 planes to it.

Like you are saying it is always going to be an uphill struggle trying to close the gap in pilot quality between the two air forces. But at this point in the war I would have thought that the Soviet player should be able to mitigate this somewhat by having the advantage in numbers?

I had previously tested the idea of multiple GS directives to increase the aircraft, but it didn't work. The AI decides how many aircraft to commit to a battle, and it does that regardless of how many aircraft are in multiple directives. It does seem that the more troops that are defending, the more the AI allocates. So maybe if it is practical to use GS on larger stacks rather than say on a small brigade, that will make better use of GS aircraft.

[Wiedrock]

You can try changing the Escort percentage on GS missions in the Doctrines. Not sure if that applies to Patrols/Sweep/CAP (all the other weird things fighters do) tho, you have to see.

[M60A3TTS]

You can try changing the Escort percentage on GS missions in the Doctrines. Not sure if that applies to Patrols/Sweep/CAP (all the other weird things fighters do) tho, you have to see.

I also had previously tried fooling with percentages. Doesn't work.

CAP and Patrols is a whole different issue, as the VVS doesn't truly get an aircraft that can fight at the default Patrol level of 15,000 feet until late war. This air game is a basic carryover from WitW, where things would work fine as a P-47D at 15,000 feet would have a max speed of 385mph. But the VVS is built around low-level operations and is not getting the Yak-9U in the field that can compete with LW fighters at 15,000 feet until July 1944.

[FriedrichII]

This blog is very interesting to read. I am looking forward to see how the war will proceed.

Could you please write which mods you are currently using?
Thanks in advance.

[M60A3TTS]

Like you are saying it is always going to be an uphill struggle trying to close the gap in pilot quality between the two air forces. But at this point in the war I would have thought that the Soviet player should be able to mitigate this somewhat by having the advantage in numbers?

This may be a good time to review that gap. We will put aside the two years of practice by the LW fighter pilots that have been shooting down Soviet pilots in their thousands.

In 1942, Soviet Air NM is 45. The LW NM is 75, a 30 point difference.

In 1943, Soviet Air NM increases to 50. A large number of guards fighter arrive early in 1943 and they get a +5 bonus to NM. So they are at 55NM. The LW NM drops by 5 to 70. So in the case of Soviet guards vs LW, it is 55NM to 70NM, a deficit of 15. There are no further changes for the remainder of the year.

In January, 1944, Soviet air NM increases to 55, Soviet guards to 60. LW NM remains unchanged at 70, so the deficit is now 10.

In October, 1944, Soviet air NM increases to 60, Soviet guards to 65. LW NM drops by 5 to 60, so the deficit is now gone.

By October, 1944 the war is largely decided, and few weeks of good flying weather remain.

The Soviet advantage in numbers serve to keep them in the game. If a few hundred of Soviet fighters are lost each week, that is treading water. Losses of 500 aircraft in a week brings the VVS closer to ceasing most operations as without fighters, the bombers are just relegated to pointless suicide missions.

[tyronec]

I had previously tested the idea of multiple GS directives to increase the aircraft, but it didn't work. The AI decides how many aircraft to commit to a battle, and it does that regardless of how many aircraft are in multiple directives. It does seem that the more troops that are defending, the more the AI allocates. So maybe if it is practical to use GS on larger stacks rather than say on a small brigade, that will make better use of GS aircraft.

I think it also depends on how many HQs are committed, so for example if you are attacking with 9 units you will get more aircraft if they all belong to different armies.
Also, proportionally you are going to do more relative damage attacking stacks with less men. At the start of VtB air attack can be devastating against Axis regiments.

[HardLuckYetAgain]

Joel & team put in limits to how many Aircraft can be committed to battles no matter what you committ. At least that is my understanding when it was initiated and I have not seen anything to take it out.

[M60A3TTS]

Joel & team put in limits to how many Aircraft can be committed to battles no matter what you committ. At least that is my understanding when it was initiated and I have not seen anything to take it out.

IIRC it's 200 bombers but I can't recall seeing anything close to that. I've seen maybe somewhere between 110-120 flying GS. More aircraft supposedly fly on defense.

[M60A3TTS]

Now is a good time to go over what type of Soviet pilot is scoring A2A kills, based on their experience level.

In reviewing the pilot list contained under the air tab, I have 1,442 air-to-air kills. This includes our pilots both dead and alive.

With an experience level of 70-99 which I will refer to now and in the future as highly qualified pilots, a total of 217 pilots had 352 kills, an average of 1.62 per pilot. Their 352 kills accounted for 24.4% of all air-to-air kills.

With an experience level of 60-69 which I will refer to as qualified pilots, a total of 544 pilots had 713 kills, an average of 1.31 per pilot. Their 713 kills accounted for 49.5% of all air-to-air kills.

With an experience level of 50-59 which I will refer to as marginally qualified pilots, a total of 279 pilots had 328 kills, an average of 1.18 per pilot. Their 328 kills accounted for 22.8% of all air-to-air kills.

With an experience level of 25-49 which I will refer to as unfit pilots (which the game can consider as skilled), a total of 47 pilots had 49 kills, an average of 1.0 per pilot. Their 49 kills accounted for 3.4% of all air-to-air kills.

Now we will look at how many pilots have experience numbers based on Soviet Air NM over the course of much of the game.



This spreadsheet is a bit busy, but I chose 5 air regiments with experience levels of 50-65 and counted the number of pilots that filled their units based on the criteria above.

In the case where 5 air units had experience 50, which would be expected for 1943 non-guards air units, there were no highly qualified pilots. This is just a sample size now, there can be a highly qualified pilot in a unit, it just didn't happen with this sample. A total of 14 pilots in these same units were qualified, almost half the total were marginally qualified and 37 pilots, 37% of the total were unfit. Go back now if you have to and re-read what I noted on kills. 86% of the pilots had experience levels between 25-59 that only equated to about 25% of all kills. This is how the numbers for the very start of 1943 kind of look like.

Now eventually in October, 1944 about 2 pilots in 3 are either highly qualified or qualified. So things certainly will get better for our fighter pilots. But as I mentioned before, at this point the war is largely decided so how much of an impact this much more experienced force has is not promising to be considerable. But with luck in the Spring of 1944 there will be a noted difference. Hopefully.

[Wiedrock]

Nice data and analysis.

At first sight this pretty much COULD show how "little" effect the actual SKILL/EXP (for Soviets) may have (1.0 vs 1.62), ...if one would consider that +62% "little".

Generally just making the percentage of totals seems fine as you did it, but the ratios per pilot may be missleading since you are only looking at pilots which actually scored at least one kill ...since all others are not listed in the pilot list......right (can't check right now, correct me on that if false)? ... not sure how much different the ratios would be when accounting for 0 score pilots which you lost, don't think there is a way getting the whole data on those guys.