New patch in the works

[Pete McCullagh]

Look at wikipedia: USAAF organization and equipment. There it lists 72 ac for heavy bomber Groups. My own experience, 1972 Army helicopter troops had 30 ac assigned for nominally 24. In fact number was normally 32-40. This is especially true if aircraft are older models.
The goal was to have ready use ac. Any ac received from pool normally requires a few days to be made combat ready. Ac from reserve do not.
Naval squadrons have a much smaller reserve(kept ashore) usually 2 or 3 ac for nominally 12 flying.
Groups had 60 pilots assigned for48 flying ac.
There is a very informative table on the wiki page. Worth looking at.
Varying from historical accuracy is ok if the feel is correct. I fully understand the need to make it all balanced and playable.

[Pete McCullagh]

By the way. Authorized Assigned Aircraft for Fighters as of Feb. 45 was 111-126!!! This number varied due to availability of ac, earlier in the war shortages were common.

[Pete McCullagh]

There always has been a philosophical difference between how US Squadrons and Groups have been organized and their Allies. In WW1 US adopted the British model, but this changed between the wars as US aircraft industry matured. By the beginning of WW2 the philosophy was to have a full compliment of flyable aircraft available at all times(fully mission capable). Maintenance, Personnel and assigned aircraft were all tailored to this end. When I was an aircraft maintainer in Vietnam I saw a troop lose 3 ac of 10 flying, yet by the next mission time(4hours) fly 10 ac. This was due to the reserve system.

[warshipbuilder]

Ok I wasn't clear with my earlier post. It should have read 12 serviceable a/c. I believe the actual number per squadron was 16-20. The LW player has his hands full as it is, (hence the new rules for victory for the Allied player) so it would a bit silly to start throwing more USAAF a/c at him at this point. In the mean time, I will have a look at just how many a/c the USAAF were putting up per group per mission to get a better feel as to how accurate the current set up is.

To all of you who live in the USA, please enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday and remember when to put your fork down.

[Pete McCullagh]

The goal was to put 16 ac per squadron in the air. Manning, ac numbers, and maint. Crews were tailored to this. Assigned ac were meant to fly, reserve were to fill gaps immediately so as not to impact mission readiness, pool ac were to replace battle and operational losses and took several days to bring to combat readiness.(bring out of preservation status). This is why manning levels of units normally had twice the number of pilots assigned as nominal flying ac. The mission was always the purpose. I thing the current levels in the game reflect fairly accurately the feel of this. Remember, all of this changed dramatically between 8/43-5/45

[Pete McCullagh]

The reason for USAAF having 16 active ac in a squadron was that the US flight was using the finger four instead of RAF vic. For BG the emphasis was on the Box, which didn't work as well if fewer ac flew.
Looking at the game/sim : a suggestion would be to limit numbers in FG flying both A and B units to 60 ac per unit. FG without B units would remain at 72. This would be in line with USAAF org numbers.
Without completely re doing OOB it would be impossible to be accurate. I believe the goal would be to retain play ability while getting the historic flavor. In no way am I criticizing the efforts of the team, they are doing a fine job. Remember...No plan ever survives contact with the enemy!

[Pete McCullagh]

Did some more research on numbers of aircraft in USAAF FG. Wow! Complicated! Ok here goes:
4th FG only had 3 Squadrons, but launched 79 aircraft on a single mission! 3x16? I don't think so. Single engine FG had authorized compliment of 116-125 aircraft and 96 aircrew. Basically a 100% reserve! By utilizing this reserve, these very large missions were possible. The real reason for these reserves was to be able to support missions every flyable day.
I had to go to multiple sources to find this including squadron histories, 8th AF unclassified documents. And good Ole wikipedia. It seems no one has ever published a definitive work on this. If anyone knows of one please let me know.

[demyansk]

By the way, what would you guys suggest for a noob to learn the game?

Also, settings that need to be on, I noticed the mouse clicks were a little sluggish in the game, not instant results.

[Pete McCullagh]

Try turning off clouds. Suggest start as allies with a short scenario. Once you have a feel for it try cappaign44. Don't worry you will make lots of mistakes, so did the real Generals. Good luck Have fun

[demyansk]

Thanks Pete for the suggestion

[Mappo]

Great work [&o] I take this opportunity to ask a couple of questions. Why do Americans in the Mediterranean have fighter groups and fighter squadrons and in Britain have only fighter groups? I think being able to use only groups instead of squadrons is less convenient, because in certain missions it would be sufficient to use only one squadron instead of a whole group of 48 planes. For example, during the war, escorting a single Recon Mission could be done with a single section of four airplanes or at most one squadron, while currently I would be obliged to use an entire group. Second question, after the Italian armistice it would be possible to keep the data of the disbanded Italian squadrons in order to be able to see them at the end of the campaign as happens for those of the Luftwaffe? I ask this because being Italian I would like to see the performances of my compatriots
Many thanks again [:)]

[fthein]

Any news when the patch will come out? Want to start a new game and I am not sure if I should start now or wait until 1.05 will appear. Especially as 1.05 will not be save game compatible to earlier versions. Thanks.

[simovitch]

ORIGINAL: fthein

Any news when the patch will come out? Want to start a new game and I am not sure if I should start now or wait until 1.05 will appear. Especially as 1.05 will not be save game compatible to earlier versions. Thanks.

It's in Matrix's hands now, so we can't answer that. Hopefully before the holidays.

[joey]

That would be a nice present for the holidays! Thanks for all your hard work.

[lecrop]

ORIGINAL: simovitch
It's in Matrix's hands now, so we can't answer that. Hopefully before the holidays.

Great news! [&o]

[demyansk]

Good job with the patch

[Saturn V]

Just thought I'd ask this, because it's something I see a number of games doing in their interfaces and it drives me nuts: is there any chance of having columns of numbers be RIGHT-aligned? Right now in EDTBTR all columns of numbers are LEFT-aligned. That's just wrong, wrong, wrong. (I see this same mistake in the interface of other games as well). Columns of numbers should ALWAYS be RIGHT-aligned. They are much easier to read that way, and allows for quick, almost intuitive comparisons between the figures.

When columns of numbers are left-aligned, now you have the 1's place under the 10's under the 100's place under the 1000's place, making it much harder to quickly scan the numbers in the columns and get a sense of how the values stack up against each other.

For example, this . . .

Code: Select all

1235
 86
 794
 5

. . . is harder to visually process than this . . .

Code: Select all

1235
   86
  794
    5

In the second version, now all the digit places line up like they should.


I'm guessing such a GUI change isn't possible, but I wanted to mention it anyway because it's irritating to see how often columns of numbers are incorrectly aligned.

[simovitch]

ORIGINAL: Saturn V

I'm guessing such a GUI change isn't possible, but I wanted to mention it anyway because it's irritating to see how often columns of numbers are incorrectly aligned.

This type of GUI change is totally possible, it's just tedious and not high on the priority list.

[Saturn V]

Fair enough. Even if a low priority, I'm happy just to have it on the list somewhere.

[mark dolby]

Is this patch available now?
I downloaded v1.04 in March and have just won a German long campaign on turn 310.
However my Wilde Sau units were able to change to other nightfighter units before the deadline. Unfortunately they then stayed as regular NJG. My 3 Gruppen still equipped with single seat could change to regular day fighters but could not return to the Wilde Sau version even though plenty remained in stock, I mention this as now flying as day fighters they not only had the extra cannons (109) but could also carry 4 WGR 210! Very potent if you can avoid the Mustangs.....