Air - *Night Missions*

[Wiedrock]

So....I will share some examples.

[Wiedrock]

EDIT: THESE ARE THE BARRAGE BALLOONS!!!

So, here we go.

Focus:
1. effect of a mission
2. losses of a mission
2.1 A2A
2.2 Flak [and ammo expended - seen at the end of the Logistics Phase log]
2.3 OPS
3. may follow
O. Oddities (besides the obvious already shown before)

I'd like to look into the "DIS" column and its impact on the mission's effects. But during Night bombing you will see this will not be necessary *hint hint*. For daytime I am sure it is equally relavant.


We start with some Strat bombing.
The setup and results.
We fly at 2k. Target all what is inside Leningrad.
We have removed all the static Flak AA SUs out of Leningrad.

Night_50kg_Leningrad_004.jpg (371.97 KiB) Viewed 166 times

So, due to the high losses we only could get 3 Missions out in total instead of planned 14.
The following is mission 1 of Night 1.
1. "effect" the mission achieved, is zero [0].
2.1 - || -
2.2 The losses 14 Flak of the Division inside Leningrad caused and the Ammo the Flak consumed (this you see in the picture above at the bottom [it is 9tons for all 3 Missions combined]).
The losses are 100/166=60.2% of bombers.
2.3 I may hint here already before later test results. Night OPS seem to be relatively stable at 10% (yes 1/10 planes just crashes - for German pilots with high EXP at least). Lower results are caused by A2A and Flak Losses.
And yes, I know I am flying low, I wanted to test how the 10% OPS increases flying that low - that's when I found the funny Flak results.

Night_50kg_Leningrad_001_01.jpg (444.58 KiB) Viewed 166 times

The following is Mission 2 of Night 1.
1. effect zero
2.1 -||-
2.2 zero
2.3 zero
O. It is interesting that a Mission can be flown with 1Plane.

Night_50kg_Leningrad_002.jpg (206.78 KiB) Viewed 166 times

The following is Mission 1 of Night 2.
1. effect zero
2.1 -||-
2.2 14 Flak (see pic for types) caused 54% losses to the bombers.
2.3 The ESCORT get the usual ~10%, the Bombers as well - but besides the Destroyed ones by flak (so a high OPS RNG)

Night_50kg_Leningrad_003.jpg (93.93 KiB) Viewed 166 times

[Lurberri]

Given that the bombing raids take place at night and involve German pilots—who are, after all, highly experienced—even the 10% loss rate you mention seems high to me; the bomber losses you are suffering are simply brutal—completely unsustainable. It seems obvious that altitude is the issue (it's too low), but even so... It doesn't seem realistic.

[Wiedrock]

Test round two. It's the same as before with Altitude 23k (above 37mm altitude). The Flak that we see shooting is mostly in adjacent Hexes/Hexes on path to mission [4x85mm is in the Division in Leningrad].

The setup and results.
We fly at 23k. Target all what is inside Leningrad.
We have removed all the static Flak AA SUs out of Leningrad, 4x85mm is in the Division in Leningrad.
1. effect 0-2%
The "spread" (loosely quoted) the manual speaks about - which i would interpret as "you target the Station but hit the Industry" or "you target the industry but hit the residential area" seems to be rather lackluster or close to non-existant during nightly attacks.
2.1 -||-
2.2 The Flak listed with ~220 high altitude Flak 76/85mm is moslty in Hexes adjacent and on route to the target. It should mostly be Airfield/City stationed Flak except the 4 mentioned 85mm inside the Division. The total Flak Ammo expenditure is 583 tons and scores a total of 3 planes shot down.
Now we can compare these 220 Flak spending 583tons for 3 kills with the 14 AA spending 9 tons for 134 planes shot down in the 2k altitude example.
2.3 OPS amongst 2418 Sorties is 240 - 10%.

Night_50kg_Leningrad-23k_004.jpg (534.51 KiB) Viewed 145 times

I have randomly selected Missions 1 and 10 for further investigation.

Mission 1.
1. effect of +1 to manpower. Manpower is the biggest target of 40.
2.1 -||-
2.2 1 Fighter shot down. Flak on path had no effect on the DIS value on way to target.
2.3 OPS show a bit more than the average ~10%.

Night_50kg_Leningrad-23k_001.jpg (188.11 KiB) Viewed 145 times

Mission 10.
1. effect of zero [0] to manpower. Manpower is the biggest target of 40.
2.1 -||-
2.2 1 bomber plane shot down. Flak on path had no effect on the DIS value on way to target.
2.3 OPS show a bit more than the average ~10%.

Night_50kg_Leningrad-23k_002.jpg (189.58 KiB) Viewed 145 times

[Wiedrock]

Given that the bombing raids take place at night and involve German pilots—who are, after all, highly experienced—even the 10% loss rate you mention seems high to me; the bomber losses you are suffering are simply brutal—completely unsustainable. It seems obvious that altitude is the issue (it's too low), but even so... It doesn't seem realistic.

I can hint that it won't get any better. I have found nothing in several attempts over the years that made any sense to me.
The OPS we could try to get some proper figures with an edited scenario with always good weather. But depending on Airbases/Weather/Pilots ..... OPS vary anyways between setups but the ~10% are a average I frequently encounter....so 10% it is.

Some nice exploits are obviously also in the mix.
My suggestion is to ban all Night ADs in PvP/PBEM/Server games.
[hint: You can set all your AGs/AOGs to "Day only"]

---

Not quite sure why Night missions were kept in the game/code at all with how it is "balanced" (imo it certainly isn't).

• The missions do nothing - literally! You can test the above tests with heavy bombs - it will make things even worse - altough I am aware that these are 2 "extreme" altitudes/cases and 50kg vs 1000kg bomb Loadouts as well. This is not supposed to be a Thread about minmaxing the "min" - If one would start a Thread on how to make which Night mission the most effective I would like to read it!
  Even when removing ALL Flak and ALL Air, the German Pilots with 90EXP WILL STILL SUCK. What is supposed to be if there were any (Night) Fighters and Flak Around? There is not much "effect" to lose if there is none to begin with!
• And then the OPS, ...they are ridiculous!
• The low level Flak result above, not sure what to say or whether to laugh or to cry.
• The Night Bombing / Night Harassement AOGs which used obsolete planes for nighttime harassment do not work at all, since they do not get any night bonus (or the 0effect gets multiplied by the bonus which gives still 0). So you just fly 4k bomber-sorties for nothing.
• Night Intruder Mission is - I don't know what - a single plane shooting down a single plane (someone has to explain and give a tutorial what it is, what it is supposed and how to make it work and what to use it against/for).
• The Night Recon AOGs can't fly during night since no recon can.
• And I have not even posted A2A - the following teaser may give some hints - but it is even weirder than that!
  Since ESCORTS DO NOT ESCORT.
  You have 150 Fighters escort 150 Bomber and then 150 Soviet Fighters blow your bombers out of the Sky while the German Fighters do.... NOTHING! ...other than crashlanding.

Two little teasers I made in 2024 and 2025. These are Summer '41 results.

Night teaster.jpg (53.37 KiB) Viewed 137 times

[AltCampaigner]

Amazingly unbelievably bad results.

[Sammy5IsAlive]

Just an alternative perspective - not intending to agree/disagree with your results or conclusions.

In the Blitz about 40,000 civilians were killed in about 250 days. So roughly 160/night or around 1k a week. Around 60% of those were in London so 600 a week. For the sake of argument let's say 2/3 of the casualties were people who could not be recruited to the armed forces due to age/infirmity/caring responsibilities. So that is 200 deaths of 'combat capable' people in London a week.

In 1941, 1 manpower point adds 33 men to the manpower pool. So if you have inflicted 10% damage on 40 manpower points that would equate to 132 deaths of combat capable people in a weeks set of missions.

So the bombing results seem to be 'broadly' reasonable.

What is less clear are the ops losses. The figures in the Wikipedia article for the Blitz suggest that the Germans took roughly 1% of sorties resulted in a loss. So on the face of it your losses are off by roughly 10x. But what muddies the waters a little is trying to match the definitions of losses. In particular do the Blitz figures include planes that returned home but were beyond repair or crashed on landing? Or just the planes lost 'in action'? How much does the likelihood of a plane being written off increase when it is flying from and being serviced by an airfield deep in Russia compared to one flying from an airfield back in Germany that is connected to the main permanent industrial and logistical networks?

Edit - a couple of other thoughts

1) The night intruder missions are left in from WITW I think and are supposed to represent attempts to catch out enemy night interceptors as they returned to land at their home bases. So it's something that makes sense from a western front perspective but less so on the Eastern front where there isn't really a night time strategic bombing campaign.

2) As you say the U-2 bombers are useless as assets in the air phase. I would have made them a type of support unit (they could have either have been a combat support unit that directly took part in battles or one that stayed in the HQs but increased attrition in the logistics phase for nearby Axis units). But that horse has long since bolted and I assume most soviet players just keep them hanging around in the reserve.

[Wiedrock]

Amazingly unbelievably bad results.

As hinted, the results we certainly can improve upon with other altitudes/loadouts/planes. But the OPS are ridiculous for what they produce as effects.

Just an alternative perspective - not intending to agree/disagree with your results or conclusions.

In the Blitz about 40,000 civilians were killed in about 250 days. So roughly 160/night or around 1k a week. Around 60% of those were in London so 600 a week. For the sake of argument let's say 2/3 of the casualties were people who could not be recruited to the armed forces due to age/infirmity/caring responsibilities. So that is 200 deaths of 'combat capable' people in London a week.

In 1941, 1 manpower point adds 33 men to the manpower pool. So if you have inflicted 10% damage on 40 manpower points that would equate to 132 deaths of combat capable people in a weeks set of missions.

So the bombing results seem to be 'broadly' reasonable.

Thanks for that input.
Yes it is not supposed to represent a "realistic" view/conclusion in any way. I know about the inaccuracy of bombing in WW2 and all the debates around its effectiveness. If it wasn't clear, the CAPS WRITTEN PARTS are stilistic exaggerations and have to be read with a twinking eye.
I just had to post this now, knowing about the exploitative nature of OPS (see the teasers) already for ages and now the additionally encountered low level AA BUG (Edit; not a But but Barrage Balloons - Manual seems off, see further down) and the Night Harassement being not rly a thing.
One thing you may need to include are the total (bomber) sorties to achieve an effect and in some way.
I am sure we can double (maybe triple) the effects with the 2x1000kg or 2x500+2x250+fuel Loadouts at Altitudes between the two shown (like 7-15k should give good results [ignoring AA]).
The thing I am wondering, I know about that missions could completely fail due to navigation and such. But this would still mean we would need to have some chance of scoring a "good mission" which does not have major errors. But this seems to not be the case. ....unless we see the 2% as +100% of 1% ....well, then it is a top success indeed.
And if it is still a "failure" by not hitting the intended target, like a Railyard (which is understandable due to general inaccuracy + night) in the center of the city, then we at least would have to hit the neighbouring residential buildings (which in return should have the same effect as during a daytime bombing (or at least to a somewhat larger portion of it) or shouldn't we?

What I am generally wondering about regarding the effects is, if the...
1. EXP of pilots matters at all in A2G missions (in the past I found it not being the case, and if so in which it does and in which it does not).
2. DIS column has any effect at all or is used for anything, I would probably bet that there is a missing link in the code.
3. Distance to the target matters for the effects? Fighters should lose efficiency at longer ranges when approaching their maxium radius (supposedly). But what about such (strat) bombing missions?

What is less clear are the ops losses. The figures in the Wikipedia article for the Blitz suggest that the Germans took roughly 1% of sorties resulted in a loss. So on the face of it your losses are off by roughly 10x. But what muddies the waters a little is trying to match the definitions of losses. In particular do the Blitz figures include planes that returned home but were beyond repair or crashed on landing? Or just the planes lost 'in action'? How much does the likelihood of a plane being written off increase when it is flying from and being serviced by an airfield deep in Russia compared to one flying from an airfield back in Germany that is connected to the main permanent industrial and logistical networks?

Yes, it seems completely ridiculous to lose 10% (in this setup) without even having Flak (in the target Hex) and no A2A at all.
On a bright note tho. I think the High Level Flak adjacent/on path in the 23k tests seems to perform reasonable from my PoV (tho I am missing damaged planes at the end of the week again, but that may just be me). Now,... how it looks adding AA SUs into Leningrad again we may have to find out.

1) The night intruder missions are left in from WITW I think and are supposed to represent attempts to catch out enemy night interceptors as they returned to land at their home bases. So it's something that makes sense from a western front perspective but less so on the Eastern front where there isn't really a night time strategic bombing campaign.

So I would have to have Night Fighters on Night Intruder over enemy Airfields, while the enemy would need to have Night Fighters/(Fighters?) that Auto-Intercepted my bombers (there are no Night Bombers) during night missions?

2) As you say the U-2 bombers are useless as assets in the air phase. I would have made them a type of support unit (they could have either have been a combat support unit that directly took part in battles or one that stayed in the HQs but increased attrition in the logistics phase for nearby Axis units). But that horse has long since bolted and I assume most soviet players just keep them hanging around in the reserve.

Yea Reserve or just as normal GS planes, but competing against IL-2s which are quite a lot off built is also hard.
Nigth harassement is certainly something that worked, people can say whatever they want. One side did it, the other copied it. What I at least would expect is an Fatigue effect on enem CUs, that's all I'd be asking for.
How I could imagine it.
You set the AD, set the area, the enemy does not know/see the area. When he stands inside this area he just gets added X Fatigue at the end of your Air Phase (or whenever). Similar to some effects by Interdiction but not the same.


On another note. Does anyone know...if repairing stuff in cities consumes freight? If so, how much? Where does the freight come from? Does it reduce "military" freight throughput?

[Wiedrock]

Some A2A.

Here I want to highlight 3 weird things, as opposed to daytime.
1. somehow the ESCORTs are seemingly not rly escorting
2. meanwhile interceptors are finding and killing the bombers at ease
3. somehow the bombers learn how to use their armament

Setup:
AA SUs are for this test still attached to Leningrad!!!
I have opted for a new Altitude of 8k and new Loadout of 2x500kg+2x250kg+fuel. So we see some new "effects" (got up to 2-3% with this setup).
Additionally some Units were moved around in the east of Leningrad but that should not impact the test.

Since this is about the A2A, let's take a look at the Logistics Phase report + Losses Screen.

Yellow: number of German planes the Soviet Fighters managed to shoot down.
Orange: number of Soviet planes the Germans managed to shoot down.

Night_A2A_Leningrad_8k_4xBombs.jpg (701.21 KiB) Viewed 61 times

Besides some of the last Missions, all Missions had 3 Combats (2xAir Combat, 1xGround Attack), I will in the following show the first Mission's Combats. This is the one with the most planes and most casualties, but the overall/average we obviously can observe using the picture above.

1. In this situation we actually get some DIS-column numbers, I like to see this, but no idea what it is worth, especially looking at 0-3% effects.
2.1 The Ju88 managed to shoot down 9, so more planes than the ESCORT Fighters did, only scoring 7.
There generally seems to be a thing that during night missions the LBs suddenly learn how to use their defensive armaments/ armaments, not sure if they actually fire with their front guns or the others facing other directions, this would be something worth looking into since at daytime those "secondary" armaments seem afk.
As mentioned before, the ESCORTs fail at their job while the interceptors perform rather good for a nighttime interception without night fighters.
2.2 Flak (now with AA SUs attached to Leningrad!) I am not sure about. Flak kills seem a little high to me for a nighttime mission intended to avoid Flak effects, so not sure...
Damaged planes happen. So we end up with quite some damaged planes in the Airfields somehow. This is rarely the case like that when having A2A in GS. Nice to see things not miraculously get repaired in an instance.
2.3 The OPS remain high as before.

[Wiedrock]

The initial 2k test were the Barrage Balloons.

19.3.3. Barrage Balloons
All ports are assumed to have barrage balloons that will impact any raid that is
bombing anything in the port's hex. Aircraft bombing under 3000 feet have a chance
of being destroyed by the barrage balloon equal to two times the size of the port (port
3 means a 6% chance that bombing aircraft will be destroyed). For night missions, the
percentage chance is tripled (so port level 3 means that each plane has an 18%
chance of being destroyed).

But don't worry, here the results at 3k with the 50kg which finds us another Manual error since Balloons seemingly also affect planes flying at 3k.
This is again 50kg loadouts, no AA in the city and no A2A.
Will do another one at 4k later.

[Wiedrock]

So ......4k barrage balloons are still relevant. So the manual is off by 2k.
So this is 5k altitude.
50kg bombs.
no A2A.
no AA SUs inside Leningrad.

And we see some better results, turns out you end up doing every altitude without wanting to...

OPS remain crazy.....man...

Night_50kg_Leningrad-4k_001.jpg (291.29 KiB) Viewed 40 times

[56ajax]

Like most things in the air war, not worth the time and effort.

In a campaign save your air force in the reserve till 1943 then let it rip. Who cares if it gets destroyed.

[AltCampaigner]

Night interception is just way too good. Should be very minor chances for it to happen, period. The best night for night defence of Germany, with a huge radar network, and with a huge number of radar-equipped night fighters was only 104 bombers. Ivan in his Rata should have 0% chance of catching a bomber.