ORIGINAL: tiemanj
ORIGINAL: obvert
ORIGINAL: Lokasenna
You should also pay attention to the time for all group planes to reach interception. That is going to affect the results.
There are times to intercept for ALL planes, and I've tried so far to look for patterns, but that info doesn't seem to correlate strongly with changes in losses over the run of tests. I'll keep looking of course, and I do think the time to intercept is important, but maybe not the note on the time for all planes to intercept. We might have to get at it another way.
What if I put climb at 0 and CAP% to 100? Would planes stay on their band and not leave, or would they not fly at all?
I honestly don't know... but from what we are told, 1/3 of the CAP is up.
I would guess we would see 1/3 the A/C with no more getting involved. It would be interesting, but I'm not sure it would mean anything.
Definitely not the case. Without having to dig up other reports, just scroll up to obvert's posted report. The very first report does show that only 1/3 of the CAP is in the air initially, but for the subsequent battles all of the planes up to the set amount (which he put at 50%) are up in the air.
ORIGINAL: obvert
It's always good to try and confirm things, no? There are some mysteries about what altitude planes are at between these ranges that the CR does not tell us, and it doesn't say whether all of those planes scrambling, not yet engaged or being recalled actually made it into combat or not.
I don't mean to suggest that there isn't value in getting data, just that there's no point in collecting data that's already shown in some way in the combat report.
We can't and will never know what altitude the planes are actually fighting at because the game in no way tells us.
If you pay careful attention (and I mean CAREFUL ATTENTION) to the combat animation, you can tell how many planes actually made it into the combat. The summary numbers shown on the main screen (in the black box that says something like "CAP defending | 123x F6F-3 Hellcat | 24x FM-2 Wildcat" etc.) are always going to be the same as the summary numbers shown in the combat report (your Ki-84r Frank x69 line, for example). But if you run the animation slowly enough, you can count how many planes actually take part in the fight. There will be the initial number (say, 14) and then a message will go by saying "14x Ki-84r Frank join combat" or something similar, and you'll see ones for disengagement as well ("spins away on fire", "heads for cloud cover", "dives for the deck", etc.). Count all those up, both the additions and subtractions, and you'll know how many planes participated in the fight. Tedious, but you can do it.
What should be done, at least if I were doing the test (and I'm too lazy/busy to do so; you can do yours however you like but I'm still going to provide my $0.02), is a look at the results and factor in:
1) Unit settings
2) Information from the CR (planes actually in on CAP, scramble altitudes, time to target, time to intercept, etc.)
3) Final numbers
Run that for a sufficient number of times and look at trends. By sufficient number of times, I'm talking about at least 50 here. 100 would be better. Remember that each successive iteration "costs" you less in terms of time/effort because you're simply doing another run of the same setup.
Also remember that if you are running this in a game save file where one of the sides is set as the computer, you can run the same game date over and over without actually changing any of the orders and get different results in the combat replay - it is not identical like it would be in PBEM.
