Air transport woes

[tyrspawn2]

When I first started the Russian air assault campaign We Fly To Work I thought the air transport feature was awesome, but by mission 4 I started to get really frustrated with it. Why? It's clear that it was designed for small operations.

The most glaring issues:
1. The landing zone needs staggered per chalk, similar to how you issue formation movement. Why? Do I really like 30 units to land in the same hex? That results in immediate arty and massive casualties. This is a "nice to have" because you can work around it by micro managing serials into smaller lifts. However....
2. We need a way of more easily selecting units for loading. Ideally you be able to click on them or groups on the map to add to the cargo list. It would also be good if you could filter search using a text box in the cargo tabs. The current issue is that I need to scan through an endless number of very similar looking counters looking for a specific unit. It works fine if you have a small unit count becomes unbearable when you have multiple battalions. I also don't understand the logic of how the cargo units are sorted. This creates a lot of work for me - probably 3-5x more effort than required.

[CapnDarwin]

I pinged our transport gurus to review this post on your issues.

[SgtZdog]

1) Each TT plan in the game is by definition (you can see consistent terminology used for them elsewhere in the game like in the Ops report tab) a Serial. A serial by definition has a single pickup and landing point. So if you want multiple pickup or landing points, do them as separate plans. At some point we may decide to do a multi-serial planner (akin to how we have the formation move system), but if you've ever used the Scenario Editor Battle Planner to create these, you are already aware that doing this is actually remarkably complex still.
A separate note, a Lift is a group of Serials. The hierarchy is roughly Chalk/Load->Serial->Lift->Wave. Terms are somewhat difficult to pin down though as different branches or even different militaries may use different terms. The level of control we're giving here is fairly consistent with other places in the game.
If you want to abuse the system though, what you can do is plan your lift with a single Serial plan, then drag the drop off waypoint of the transport to where you actually want that transport to unload. The orders should get cleaned up to accommodate that and it should all just work.

2) Have you tried using the Cargo by Group tab? That is probably what you are looking for. It keeps Company/Battalion formations grouped together so you can more easily find things and will put formations that you have already added some units as passengers at the top.

That said, I like the idea of putting in a text search and have created a ticket for us to put that in the game. Ticket FPSS-7032

[tyrspawn2]

1) Each TT plan in the game is by definition (you can see consistent terminology used for them elsewhere in the game like in the Ops report tab) a Serial. A serial by definition has a single pickup and landing point. So if you want multiple pickup or landing points, do them as separate plans. At some point we may decide to do a multi-serial planner (akin to how we have the formation move system), but if you've ever used the Scenario Editor Battle Planner to create these, you are already aware that doing this is actually remarkably complex still.
A separate note, a Lift is a group of Serials. The hierarchy is roughly Chalk/Load->Serial->Lift->Wave. Terms are somewhat difficult to pin down though as different branches or even different militaries may use different terms. The level of control we're giving here is fairly consistent with other places in the game.
If you want to abuse the system though, what you can do is plan your lift with a single Serial plan, then drag the drop off waypoint of the transport to where you actually want that transport to unload. The orders should get cleaned up to accommodate that and it should all just work.

2) Have you tried using the Cargo by Group tab? That is probably what you are looking for. It keeps Company/Battalion formations grouped together so you can more easily find things and will put formations that you have already added some units as passengers at the top.

That said, I like the idea of putting in a text search and have created a ticket for us to put that in the game. Ticket FPSS-7032

Yes I used cargo by group tab a lot, but try using it on mission 2-3 of We Fly To Work. I'd recommend you ask some players to record themselves using the tool while recording their stream of consciousness and do some UX research/feedback. It's very difficult to use when you have large airborne formations in play. The need to click on groups and add them to the load plan from the map and to filter by callsign is really important. I would argue the former is probably more valuable. Happy to chat more ,i'm a senior leader in gaming industry and also worked in milsim for 7 years, just DM me.