What we need

[HMSWarspite]

My list of issues (only partial, what I can think of now, and not bothering with anything already mentioned)

- NF airfield hanging: prevent one NF shooting more than a couple of returning NJG without either the rest diverting, the attacker being out of position, someone attempting to find it and shooting it down etc. I have have 3 NJG losses in 3 minutes to one intruder on many occasions. Not possible. The Intruder has to reposition after each kill, will lose night vision every time he fires (mizzle flash etc). This should be toned down

- Increase the NF number of engagements following successful detection of NGJ in flight. I have never done any stats, but it will less than 5% (at a guess) of detections that result in an engagement, let alone a kill at present! A 99% experience Mossie crew should get engagements up to 50% of the time against 110, (note - engagements, not kills - based on accounts from expert crews, and relative a/c performance)

- Sort out the >30000ft bombing accuracy bug

- sort out the flak trap issue - the placing of huge amounts of flak around airfields should still be possible, but should be less effective. I have had horrendous flak losses on airfield attackes with 100+ light flak (>50%) 10% losses due to flak sjould be really exceptional. I don't know if there is any attenuation of flak, but after say 10 positions (guns) around a point target, light flak would have to be too far away to fire at full efect, so the next set (20 positions?) should be less affective, the layer beyond that even less. The attackers do not dive 5 miles from the target and then fly at bomb release altitude over hundreds of flak guns!

- Over populated airbases do not seem to have enough impact (maybe my perception, but 6+ units on a 4 size base does little)

- B groups, and realistic flying numbers for US BG (not 32 a/c per group)

- Diversions allowed for damaged a/c (heads for nearest suitable airbase, and then is unavailable for x days)

- sort out SAS pilot deaths

- sort out high squadron OC death rate

- Improve recon soutines - too tedious to plot manually, but auto visits the same targets too often. Simplest fix may be for an extra filter ('minimum time from last photo' in days, so you could concentrate on all sites you haven't visitied in 10+ days or something). ALso, a minimum altitude setting would be good. Due ti the flak trap issue above, I have to change all the 500' AF recces manaually to avoid horrible PR losses on auto.


I will add more later when I have played the game, and remembers them!

[Hard Sarge]

Good list
ahhh, for the NI, while I can agree, I can also disagree, I know I pilot got 3 kills when he flew in behind some landing (think 88's) his fire knocked down the target and the planes on either side of the target, both banked and flew into the ground

he said he was laffing so HARD to have to stop his attacks and fly away, until he could control him self

so, it is a shouldn't, but it could, but it does seem to happen too much in the game

but then again, depending on how many missions you send out, you don't get anything on more then half or two thirds of them, but when you do, it stands out, when it don't, it is oh well

but, we can look at it

YES, JC was doing a lot of work on the NI/NF side of the game,in fact, to counter your complaint about NI, if we could, we could try and have ALlied NF units, which can "only" fly with raids and act as NF's, and units that are NI and can try and raid AF's and catch planes that are returning to base or drop bombs on the sleeping pilots of the day fighters

which also, there were a lot of bugs with the different Jammers and Intell and what not

Mandel(think that was the one) was nice when it worked right, it shuts down radar sites, you could plot a single plane here and there and any radar close to it, shut down (I'll look, not sure if I still have the pics of it when it worked right)

the SAS bug, is a strange one, from what we can tell, the game see's the pilot is still in the plane, the plane is damaged too bad to be repaired, so is destroyed, once the plane is destroyed, the pilot is too, since he was still in it, now we got a back and forther, if the plane was damaged too much to be repaired, then the pilot, if he was in, was pretty much mangled too, so overall, should of been killed

the hassle here is a accounting system, if the plane was that badly damged, destroy it then and there, kill/wound the pilot and get on with the game

now why it waits a day or two to report is, is the main bug

JC was trying to hunt this down

B Groups, the main hassle right now, is we got a pilot limit, there are only 20,000 pilots allowed, which counts the dead also, but the dead will be overwritten if a slot is needed (hassle, Aces/real Pilots which should of been last to be overwritten we the first, Harley Editor did some work on trying to fix these issues)

the OOB before the last one, we had the B groups for 8th FC pretty much set up, but we needed to cut the number of pilots down, so they were taken out, we can now get into the Exe, so we are hopeing we can change the pilot total

which then we should be able to return the B FG's and hopefully add in the B BG's also (the 78th FG was know to even fly a C Group)

numbers/size of units I believe is again set by the Exe (Harley was able to change the unit size, but not how many planes were attached to a size) but again, we can get into the exe now, we maybe able to make changes to unit sizes

FC/2nd Tac went to the Wing Formations about this time, do we keep all the single squadrons for the English, or do we make Wings ? or do we try and let the player decide, if they want squadrons, or to combine units into Wings ??

yea, that is a odd ball, the planes that are damaged will fly for 100 miles to return to base when it is flying over base after base that it could land at, I agree (GE should be able to land anywhere after the attack) I just not sure how it could be programmed, but I believe that was on our list of things we wanted to look at

along with my main beef, a cloud at 10,000 ft over your landing field and every plane trying to land will crash, the clouds are at 10,000 ft, not 5, it is nice and clear where they are trying to land ?????, which if we can get the above worked out, maybe we can have planes that there bases are cloud covered, land else where and then count as underepair until they rejoin there units (admin detail)

OC ? you mean CO ?, YES, we been talking about that, we think we understand part of the combat system and why, the CO seems to be picked out, I hope to push for a total revamp of the combat system, Aces (high Exp) should mean something, that is something we want to look at

for the recon and also for the staff plotting, I also wanted to have more filters added in, max and min alt is a good place to start,wish we could get a smart system in, don't think we can, but something that hey you wanted to see Rottendam, it was cloud covered yesterday, you want us to try againt today, or, once you plot something, have the AI replot, until it is a good mission ??

(that could be dangerous, as you say, Flak traps and what not, you don't pay attention, 30 planes have gone out to the same target and not returned)

but, over all, that looks like one of the top areas, we are hearing complaints from, so it will be looked at

the Flak Traps, hmmmm, what version patch/OOB have you been playing ?
one hassle and something we need to talk about, is JC added some tricks in to stop some of my success at sweeps, but over all, part of the hassle is 10 guns will make a mess out of a low level sweep

but overall, there are a number of bugs with Flak,how the AI wants to place them, guns the AI don't want to use, I think JC fixed the one with the 255 guns at one site

but, there is a idea for more waypoints, which is good, but the main one in that area is making the units fly the waypoints, a lot of times, just the lead group or a few units will follow the way point while the rest just decided to fly home

keep em coming and we will try and look at them, and see if we can fix or change them

(hassle being, not everything can be fixed, and not everything can be changed or interduced, but we will try)

play as many of the games as you want invite your friends, invite people you don't even like !
lets get BoB/BTR back into our blood and minds

[:-][:-]

[Hard Sarge]

ORIGINAL: seydlitz

This sounds like one of those BASF commercials...you know...

"At BASF we don't make the things you buy. We make the things you buy better"

that is the General Idea

if we can do half the things I want, let alone what everyone else wants, this is going to be great

[Speedysteve]

Totally agree HS.

Something i'll go into more detail between the testers but just wanted to express a little bit here since you mention the EXP effect (or at least the effect it should have above). I strongly feel that the combat model as a whole could be tweaked/improved a bit.

I feel especially in the the impact of experience. At present you can have JGR's with experience in the hugh 40's knocking down a load of 70-80 EXP Allied flyers. Should be much less likely with this disparity in EXP. Plane charcteristics are clearly very important but the skill/EXP of the pilot too.

I wanna say more but i'll save it.

In short bud I agree something we can look into for sure.

Good list Sailor. Thanks.

Steven

P.S. If ANYONE has any other thoughts/ideas post away. The more that is said = the more that can be looked into = the more that could possibly happen.

[Greyshaft]

* Able to plot missions for ALL targets within a single category (say primary airfields) with a single command (Not sure if this has been said)
* AI able to plot paths that don't traverse high flak areas
* Able to get a single list of all fighter squadrons with one-click' sort on fatigue/morale etc

[Denniss]

Is it not possible to have pilots, with their aircraft destroyed on the ground, automatically assigned wounded but only 1 turn ?

I find it really annoying with damaged planes flying all the way back to their base, most often they crash and pilot/crew is killed. It should be possible to dramatically increase the survival rate if crashing over friendly (land, not sea) territory.

I very much like the recon system to be improved but not the recons speeded up so far as in JC mods (becoming nearly uninterceptable even by 109 G-10/K-4 and Do 335, I assume it's the same with Ta 152).

There should be a system introduced to use set bombloads for max load and max range and not something inbetween as now (gradually reducing load until half load = max range is reached). I saw this on BoB also - I don't think a Ju 88 is able to take off with two bombs below the left wing and only one below the right wing. Currently for max range the number of bombs per slot is halved or, if only one bomb in this slot, the capacity/weight is halved.

Freeza ray : I consider this as major bug - it looks like the germans use combat fuel usage but the allied cruise fuel usage thus breaking much earlier.

Drop tanks - currently there's a problem with drop tanks, their real effectivity seems to be optimized for twin-engined planes, single engined should get double the time out of a drop tank. Second, the effectivity of Axis drop tanks is lower than that of the allied despite equal, if not lower fuel consumption due to direct fuel injection.

Someone should have a look at weapon statistics, the 20 mm guns should be much more effective than a boring 7.62, 7.7 , or 7.92 mm MG. Currently there's only a two point difference. 3 cm weapons should be much more effective than 2 cm ones, currently only one point. Not to talk about the super heavy 37, 40 and 50 mm guns. (one hit of 50/40, maybe even the 37 mm, was enough to kill a B-17, 3cm usually needed 3-4 hits, 20 mm about 20 hits)

On the ge side the Schräge Musik upgrading mechanism seems broken - it always removes defensive armament on Bf 110 and others. In reality they usually had both. If you have modified the 110 to have MG FF as Schräge Musik (as they did historically) then the exe wants to have them additional two 20 mm MG 151 Schräge Musik guns. The exe always tried to add SM guns to single-engined night fighters.

Aircraft stats have to be revised to prevent some errors like 15 mm MG 151 as cowling weapons on 109 K-4 and Do 335. The first did still carry MG 131 and the latter 20 mm MG 151. The He 219 is way too fast in AFAIK both JC and last official version.

Prevent the zero OP aircraft movement - if low on OP I change a group to a different aircraft, then back, then move it to a different location. They need at least two days to become operational again but are well rested then.

And as ge player you want to have some more op points to move all your FlaK guns ....[:D] , maybe 100 points more because you have to move them through entire Europe (allied players may want them too). In Bob the OP points should at least be doubled. I liked to play the brits but it's not funny with these many OP points (move either AA or planes but no both)

[HMSWarspite]

ORIGINAL: Denniss

Is it not possible to have pilots, with their aircraft destroyed on the ground, automatically assigned wounded but only 1 turn ?

I find it really annoying with damaged planes flying all the way back to their base, most often they crash and pilot/crew is killed. It should be possible to dramatically increase the survival rate if crashing over friendly (land, not sea) territory.

I very much like the recon system to be improved but not the recons speeded up so far as in JC mods (becoming nearly uninterceptable even by 109 G-10/K-4 and Do 335, I assume it's the same with Ta 152).

There should be a system introduced to use set bombloads for max load and max range and not something inbetween as now (gradually reducing load until half load = max range is reached). I saw this on BoB also - I don't think a Ju 88 is able to take off with two bombs below the left wing and only one below the right wing. Currently for max range the number of bombs per slot is halved or, if only one bomb in this slot, the capacity/weight is halved.

This is not a completely simple issue. I agree with you in principle, but you have to take into account the number of bombs, the size (weight, but also volume), and the type of bombs. At present it is just an almost invisible abstraction. It would be very easy to introduce more anomolies thsn are fixed by the less automatic variabilty in bomb loads. For example, BC loads are optimised for area attack (mix of HC/MC HE, and incendiaries). For a very long range attack, you can just scale that down, but it might be better to just keep the cookie (4000lb MC HE) and ditch the rest, rather than scale the cookie dowm to a smaller bomb, and reduced incendiary numbers. This could be a whole new area of frustration unless you introduced a 'bombload selection' option into raids allowing almost bomb by bomb choice...not sure that would be warrented, unless target damage modelling justified it.

Freeza ray : I consider this as major bug - it looks like the germans use combat fuel usage but the allied cruise fuel usage thus breaking much earlier.

I only recall this happening once to me, and had no real effect...am I just lucky or what?

Drop tanks - currently there's a problem with drop tanks, their real effectivity seems to be optimized for twin-engined planes, single engined should get double the time out of a drop tank. Second, the effectivity of Axis drop tanks is lower than that of the allied despite equal, if not lower fuel consumption due to direct fuel injection.

New one on me - have you figures to show that Ge fuel consumption was better, and this was due to direct injection? I would doubt this without further info, and even if true, does it hold out to the end, when fuel quality drops off in Ge? (Don't get much 100 Octane in Ge!)

Someone should have a look at weapon statistics, the 20 mm guns should be much more effective than a boring 7.62, 7.7 , or 7.92 mm MG. Currently there's only a two point difference. 3 cm weapons should be much more effective than 2 cm ones, currently only one point. Not to talk about the super heavy 37, 40 and 50 mm guns. (one hit of 50/40, maybe even the 37 mm, was enough to kill a B-17, 3cm usually needed 3-4 hits, 20 mm about 20 hits)

I have looked quite a lot at (mostly air-air) weapons. There are several factors that need to be accounted before you can assign a single number 'effectiveness'. The easiest to understand are: weapon accuracy (largely a function of mounting - wings are more flexible than fuselage, so more scatter), Rate of fire, energy of round (mv for solid rounds, add explosive damage for shells), type of ammo (HE, AP, ball, incendiary, tracer - can affect the ballistics, etc).
There is a good coverage of the age old 'was the US correct to retain the 50cal (1/2") mg in the P47/P51 etc to the end of the war, when almost everyone else was on 20mm+ cannon?' on various sites (see below).

On the specifics of the points values in the game: your 2 point difference between a 20mm cannon, and a rifle calibre mg is actually a factor of 3! (AAMG vs 20mm Flak). Your point about the larger cannon is true, but the chance of getting a hit with a slower firing big cannon is much reduced, so the effectiveness is much reduced. If you like, a MG will have a fairly uniform damage profile between 'min' and 'max', but a 30mm (or 37mm Flak) should have a very much 'all or nothing' profile, unless fitted with proximity fuses (which we needn't worry about here!).

On the ge side the Schräge Musik upgrading mechanism seems broken - it always removes defensive armament on Bf 110 and others. In reality they usually had both. If you have modified the 110 to have MG FF as Schräge Musik (as they did historically) then the exe wants to have them additional two 20 mm MG 151 Schräge Musik guns. The exe always tried to add SM guns to single-engined night fighters.

Aircraft stats have to be revised to prevent some errors like 15 mm MG 151 as cowling weapons on 109 K-4 and Do 335. The first did still carry MG 131 and the latter 20 mm MG 151. The He 219 is way too fast in AFAIK both JC and last official version.

Prevent the zero OP aircraft movement - if low on OP I change a group to a different aircraft, then back, then move it to a different location. They need at least two days to become operational again but are well rested then.

And as ge player you want to have some more op points to move all your FlaK guns ....[:D] , maybe 100 points more because you have to move them through entire Europe (allied players may want them too). In Bob the OP points should at least be doubled. I liked to play the brits but it's not funny with these many OP points (move either AA or planes but no both)

Which version have you got - BTR was changed to 500 OP, which is a lot

Some sites for armament affectiveness

http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~frontacs/WBSt ... amage.html
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pettypi/elevon/g ... /fgun.html
http://users.belgacom.net/aircraft/edit ... tml#204549
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/ ... un-ta.html

[Hard Sarge]

for Drop tanks
I know we have had a number of talks about them, there is goofiness with them, and Harley and I did a lot of talking about it from his tests, the numbers don't match up, which it was turned over to JC to look at

(for Allied, you still got more hassles, as you, should be getting bigger and better tanks as the war goes on, but, the main plane data will still show the lesser tank, plus, you can have planes in the FG that have different tanks depending on hit it has been upgradeing itself)

for me range and tanks will be looked at

the P-51 can not fly to where it flew to during the war, that is wrong

for the GE, to be honest, I got hassles with them having Droptanks to start with, it was more a ferry device, then a standard combat load, but I believe it is in the game more for the fact that in RL, the GE could shift fields during a raid, and the current set up, they can't, so they need added range to be able to intercept

Freese Ray, that is still more a GE side of the game thingy, you need to intercept a sweep head on and the AI is programmed not to do that

weapons and loadouts will be looked at, but over all, I think the combat system needs to be checked

so saying, the Oscar was a decent fighter, but any game that tries to compare firepower, the Oscar is going to be a dog, but in RL, it wasn't until tactics changed and later model planes came in, that the Oscar was shut down as a fighter, it wasn't the weak firepower the plane had

for load outs, there are things we may be able to do, we couldn't touch the Exe before, so we couldn't change the system, only the data, and the system still wanted to add bombs to a plane that wasn't carrying any

(maybe we can get a way to get Tall Boys and GlandSlams into the game, hmmm, maybe we can get the Allies to build bombs, and stock pile them, don't want to be able to say, BC can use Tall Boys and then the rest of the war, every BC plane is loaded with them, but maybe if we had enough for a single raid, use them, and then wait for more to be build, stocked piled before the next raid can be set up, I mean, say, day 192, 5 Tall Boys will start production, after so many days, one Squadron would be able to change there load out to Tall Boys for a raid, instead of it's standard load out, then the player has the choice to make, do you go after that subpen you want to knock out now, or wait till you got two squadrons that could carry the bombs)

depends on what the Programmers/OOB workers can do

something was said about the speed of recon planes, and not fair (?) that some GE planes can't catch them

well, part of my hassle is, they couldn't

if there was a Recon plane in the area and you had to take off to chase it, you were not going to catch it, if you were in the air and in the area and headed the right way, yea, you got a chance, but since Recon seems to be a big hassle for most players, we will look at ways to make changes to it (we need to check Recon loss totals to get a better idea on how many were lost to air to air combat and how many were lost to AA fire, and try to work out a system to match those losses)

[Denniss]

As said the recon system needs to be worked at. As long as this is not abstracted by removing recons and adding a say 15% chance per day to get new target images and say 5% to spot new targets and as long the recon are flying and generationg fatigue to german planes they should be interceptable by the german fastest planes. If G-10/K-4 and Do 335 are not waitung just in front of these recons at roughly the same altitude with direct attack tactics the they'll usually have no chance to intercept despite being much faster than the typical Lightning or Spit.

The Idea with the bomb load is to have a fixed loadout (not just lbs but composition of bombs) for either max load at very short range or standard layout at standard/common range and a fixed bomb load for long to max range missions. This should include removing external bombs for long range missions (AFAIK the A-20G had 2000 internal and 2000 external bombload, at the moment this is reduced to 1000 internal and 1000 external instead of 2000 internal (or less)).

The exact figures of fuel consumptions are really hard to find because many authors love to use cruise speed for allied and max cruise for 109/190. At least the 75 imp gallond and the 300l (~79 imp gallon) should both have the 1 minute per gallon rating. There are also differences in fuel consumtion between different airplanes, the 190 should consume more fuel than the 109, same with P-47 and P-51.

With drop tanks there should someone keep an eye on what sized allied planes get, not every allied planes was able to carry 105/110 or 150 gallon drop tanks. And if they carried then then either only as recons or on fery missions. AFAIK P-47 were able to carry a 75 gallon belly tank and upgraded to 105/110 with the new P-47D but not bigger. P-51 usually carried two 75 gals, 110 gals maybe yes or only as F-6 recon planes.

For weapons you have at least three values, effect/power, armor penetration and accuracy. My complain was about effect/power, sometimes armor penetration (the big guns have 4 effect but 7 penetration). Accuracy is a somewhat abstract mix of rpm, muzzle velocity and flight characteristics (maybe more). Currently the 30 mm MK 108 has good statistics in range despite its low muzzle velocity and bad flight characteristics but suffers in effect (as the MK 103 does).

Another thing to note is the 109 G-6 equipped with MK 108 engine cannon (109 G-6/U4). AFAIK they first appeared in late 1943 or early 1944 and were soon sent to units in the West to fight allied bombers. Currently they are available from start.

Production/factory change: Currently there's a huge production delay for other factory lines of the same factory if you change production. This needs to be reduced (but not eliminated) because the other production lines should not be that much affected as the changed line. Especially if a factory complex is bombed out and moving to other locations with already existing production this is a huge blow for the german player cause he's losing this (not damaged by bombs) production for the same time as the bombed-out production that moved into this factory.

The light AA should need some adjustments in accuracy - even MG AA is dangerous for fighters flying in low to strafe an airport. But there should be a huge penality if this is a surprise attack (coming in below Radar alt of 500 ft). Fighters and Fighter-bombers drop bombs from higher alt and should only be affeted by 20/37 mm AA. I did some tests with MG set to ~25, 20mm to ~15 and 37mm to ~10 accuracy and AA losses were considerably higher but not too high because of lower weapon effect (compared to aircraft guns). Without this allied strafers often killed or damged ~10-15 planes with pilots often killed without many AA losses (despite packed with 100 guns of light AA, often 30-40 MG 30-40 quad 20 mm, 20-30 37mm).

Maybe ther should be a new factory type created, an AA gun factory converting single 20 mm guns to quad ones at a 2-1 rate and a production rate three to five times times higher than a standard AA gun factory producing quads (Should only convert singles to quads, producing nothing else). These single 20 mm are a waste of time and effort, the quads are much better.

[Hard Sarge]

I don't know mate
I did a lot of reseach on the tanks used by the 8th FC, so will have to look up my notes or make some new ones

but, 47 C's could carry a 200 gallon ferry tank (used in 43, not filled all the way up and normally dropped as soon as the coast was reached, as they leaked and were not liked)

first pages I look at, I see early 47's with a rounded 108 gallon belly tank, next page shows a flatten belly tank

but I will look and see what I can find, I know the last time I was looking, I was more concerned with ranges with the tanks, then the type and sizes used

Agree, don't know if we can get that detailed with different fuel use per plane, but we should, and as you say, a 100 gallons for a 47 was not the same as 100 gallons for a 51

Production, whooooo, you just opened a can of worms, some of the best posts on the BTR forum, were JC explaining how the Germen Factory system worked, and didn't work

but over all, if JC thinks the production numbers are close, with his reseach on it, I will go with JC judgement

Still got to disagree about chaseing a Recon plane, I still got to say, if I am at 25-30 K flying 350-380 mph, and your in a 109 G10/K4, Do 335, you are not going to catch me, I am going to be miles and miles away before you get anywhere close to my alt (and you are not going to be flying top speed to get to my alt)

now if we are co-alt, then you got a chance, and if it turns into a tail chase, you can out run me, but you should not be able to take off and run me down

not sure I follow on the quad 20mm, if they made single barrel guns, then we should have them made

and for the air to air guns, I still think a revamped combat system, should make the guns look better

for the 109, I will look into the dates, we may be able to change the default weapon, and set up a upgrade to the 30mm, but I thought JC had set up a number of the 109 JGs to have the 20mm instead at start (hassle is the unit report does not really report what the unit is using, just what the default should be, the 110's already have a number of different weapon packages)

but if nothing else, we will look into it

[Hard Sarge]

one of the books I am looking at, claims that once the universal wing became standard, the P-47 could carry two 150 gallon and one 75 gallon tank, this is the paddle blade model, P-47 D-20-RE (hmm, that is still one of the razor backs)

yea, a different book also states that the plane could carry two 150 gallon wing tanks and either a 75 gallon belly tank or a 500 pound bomb

(one that looks strange, the plane when it carried two 75 gallon wing tanks had a opp range of 340 miles, but when it carried a 108 gallon belly tank, it had a opp range of 375 miles (I am reading between the lines, on placements, as it states tanks and tank, so assumeing wing tanks and tank, so belly ?)

interesting fact, when loaded with full bomb load or fuel, the ammo load was lowered to around 267 rounds per gun)

[otisabuser2]

Hi all,

what about that message you get telling you unit "z" takes of from "y" with "x" number of Fw190d ? This tells the Offensive player far too much about the defences. ( forget the actual wording right now ).

Admittedly I am bad. I am one of many who jots all this stuff down. Bad side is that I know exactly where all the Defending fighter units are along with their strength and equipment.

The ideal, I suppose, would be to not even be able to see the Defending plot until it come in visual range of one of my attacking units. Rather boring though.

Another way of looking at this, would be to regard this information as legitimate intelligence gained. Then, as a trade off, I could loose 50% of my recon capacity ( either downsize the unit strengths or loose some squadrons ). It's only fair after all as the game is doing part of my recon for me [:D].

Less recon capacity may appeal to those who feel swamped by the depth of management in the game. May also free up some pilots in the database.

regards Otisabuser

[Speedysteve]

Definitely OB i'm with you there.

I've mentioned this before in mails to HS etc.

I think that the Allied player should NOT be able to see this kind of stuff at level 3 messages. I had a thought whereby an intel page could be represented for the Allies whereby through radio intercepts, spies, ultra etc certain info would be presented to the Aliied commander on a daily basis.

E.G.

1/JG2 is currently based at Tille
Bussig NAG is currently producing 10 x Daimler Benz engines etc

That way the Allied player would get snippets of info through realistic intel channels but wouldn't have the god like view of the Axis world.

Regards,

Steven

[von Shagmeister]

ORIGINAL: Hard Sarge

Still got to disagree about chaseing a Recon plane, I still got to say, if I am at 25-30 K flying 350-380 mph, and your in a 109 G10/K4, Do 335, you are not going to catch me, I am going to be miles and miles away before you get anywhere close to my alt (and you are not going to be flying top speed to get to my alt)

now if we are co-alt, then you got a chance, and if it turns into a tail chase, you can out run me, but you should not be able to take off and run me down

I agree Sarge, the problem isn't having a/c with the performance to catch recce a/c but is with detecting them in the first place. At present in BTR the Axis radar network detects and tracks accurately all medium/high altitude raids irrespective of the number of a/c in the raid. Maybe the solution would be to limit the effectiveness of the radar network to detect single a/c, especially ones with a with a low radar cross section (predominantly wooden Mosquito for example).

There are many examples of recce a/c being shot down if they are detected and tracked but it's finding them in the first place.

My solution would be to give every a/c a radar cross section (signature) rating (ie Spitfire PR.XI = 1, B-17 = 4), a raid of 120xB-17 would have a "detection" figure of 480 where as a lone PR. Spit would have a "detection" figure of 1. I wander which raid would be easier for the Luftwaffe to detect and track. You have to remember that the radars in BTR are only simple pulse radars, there are none of the fancy new FMICW (pulse doppler) or pulse compression techniques to improve target definition and detection. They rely on the amount of energy returned from the target, big target - big return, little target - little return.

I think the whole of recce side of things need a good review. At present one recce sortie will photograph one site, in reality that one sortie might take photos of half a dozen or more sites, some of them quite a long distance apart geographically.

As others have mentioned some way to auto plot recce sorties, but I think this is dependent on having a more robust AI to act as an intelligent staff.

Regards

von Shagmeister

[HMSWarspite]

ORIGINAL: von Shagmeister

ORIGINAL: Hard Sarge

Still got to disagree about chaseing a Recon plane, I still got to say, if I am at 25-30 K flying 350-380 mph, and your in a 109 G10/K4, Do 335, you are not going to catch me, I am going to be miles and miles away before you get anywhere close to my alt (and you are not going to be flying top speed to get to my alt)

now if we are co-alt, then you got a chance, and if it turns into a tail chase, you can out run me, but you should not be able to take off and run me down

I agree Sarge, the problem isn't having a/c with the performance to catch recce a/c but is with detecting them in the first place. At present in BTR the Axis radar network detects and tracks accurately all medium/high altitude raids irrespective of the number of a/c in the raid. Maybe the solution would be to limit the effectiveness of the radar network to detect single a/c, especially ones with a with a low radar cross section (predominantly wooden Mosquito for example).

There are many examples of recce a/c being shot down if they are detected and tracked but it's finding them in the first place.

My solution would be to give every a/c a radar cross section (signature) rating (ie Spitfire PR.XI = 1, B-17 = 4), a raid of 120xB-17 would have a "detection" figure of 480 where as a lone PR. Spit would have a "detection" figure of 1. I wander which raid would be easier for the Luftwaffe to detect and track. You have to remember that the radars in BTR are only simple pulse radars, there are none of the fancy new FMICW (pulse doppler) or pulse compression techniques to improve target definition and detection. They rely on the amount of energy returned from the target, big target - big return, little target - little return.

I think the whole of recce side of things need a good review. At present one recce sortie will photograph one site, in reality that one sortie might take photos of half a dozen or more sites, some of them quite a long distance apart geographically.

As others have mentioned some way to auto plot recce sorties, but I think this is dependent on having a more robust AI to act as an intelligent staff.

Regards

von Shagmeister

That's a good idea. Another idea would be the reduction of straggler visibilty (removing the need to play with stragglers off). Once detected, raids should have to pass repeat checks to stay detected. Big raids as above would be easier, but lone PR, and stragglers would come and go. Thus, if you can see them, fair game, but mostly you wouldn't see them for long enough to intercept. This would make shadowing small raids important etc. Day raids would get a bonus for staying spotted from ground observers, but night raids would not. At present, raids are detected too reliably, and once detected, you can't lose them.

As for recce planning, maybe a quicker interface, where you just select (tic a box) on sites in each category, and it puts a mission to each one until out of a/c. Ideally with min/max alt filters, morale etc.

As for multiple recce, even being able to do primary and secondary targets automatically (depending on weather) would be good?

[von Shagmeister]

[/quote]

Another idea would be the reduction of straggler visibilty (removing the need to play with stragglers off). Once detected, raids should have to pass repeat checks to stay detected. Big raids as above would be easier, but lone PR, and stragglers would come and go. Thus, if you can see them, fair game, but mostly you wouldn't see them for long enough to intercept. This would make shadowing small raids important etc. Day raids would get a bonus for staying spotted from ground observers, but night raids would not. At present, raids are detected too reliably, and once detected, you can't lose them.

[/quote]

That's exactly what I was getting at, a check could be carried out for each target within the detection range of each radar (modified by target range, target size, transmitter power etc, etc). So it is possible that lone a/c (PR types, stragglers, etc) are detected but probably not on every sweep of the radar antenna, whist the big raids can be detected and tracked relatively easily.

von Shagmeister

[Nikademus]

an option for the Allied player to turn off plane graphics in favor of boxes would be nice too.....major clutter seeing all those planes even without stragglers.

[Speedysteve]

Can be done now bud.

During the CR. Click on the 6th button down. It will replace the plane graphics with boxes.

[Nikademus]

I looked for it and couldn't find it. It is available on the Luftwaffe side....saw that, but i couldn't find the same button with the PBEM Allied replay. ????

[Nikademus]

where's my turn Bomb-magnet?

Bomber Harris keeps ringing my office