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ORIGINAL: squatter

I'm having trouble establishing the total enemy airframe losses on the Air Execution Phase Summary. I can see a total for enemy lost in air combat, but no total for enemy losses included those destroyed on the ground - any pointers much appreciated

ORIGINAL: HardLuckYetAgain

ORIGINAL: Nix77

I don't have any experience on WitW so I'm a complete beginner in WitE2 air war. I studied the results from AI assisted German turn 1, and it seems like the GE bombers are in trouble with the automated set of air directives. There's many cases where full squadrons of bombers are annihilated completely (see picture). Also there seems to be quite many recon aircraft shot down during the first week, usually around 100.

What would be a good approach to start fiddling with the air directives on turn 1, to protect the bombers and prevent these catastrophic air combats? I think historically the Germans lost less than 200 airframes during the first week? They might have been just lucky though

I tried to require escorts for the bombing sorties, but of course majority of the sorties didn't get executed due to lower range of the escort aircraft.

I also tried to run some air superiority missions early on the week before the bombing runs, but those missions seemed to be ineffective. By the way, why is the AS mission range and area so low? I'm guessing this is also dependant on the fighter ranges? 5x5 seems to be the maximum area for Bf-109 groups, and they can't fly further than 4 hexes from the base to cover that kind of area. Air superiority seems to be thus ineffective to cover the bombers. I have however ran into cases where Soviet planes have intercepted unescorted bombers really close to the front, should an AS mission prevent this kind of interceptions?

Anyway, I'd really appreciate a bunch of tips for the air doctrines when trying to protect long range bombers. Should I run escorted sorties on first days of the week and long sorties after that? How to make air superiority missions effective? How to move fighters to bases closer to the front manually, to get best range for them?

1. Don't fly un-escorted bomber missions, even on T1 for Germans.
(Don't bomb past fighter coverage, use drop tanks on key hexes but dont over do it)

2. Learn the Air System and get away from the Air AI. You will find once you take the time to learn the Air war it is "really" very easy. But again that could be just me.

3. I don't do Superiority missions on the first turn. I just escort the bombers.

4. I don't fly recon the first turn. But if you do I found in my test that flying 18,000ft one sortie for a large area(7-9 hexes) on 3 specific days(Mon, Weds, and Sun) with mass aircraft (~40-80 airframes) gets the job done well with less losses for recon. Operation losses will eat into everything you do.