A funny thing happened on the way to the forum

[Harrybanana]

Liquid Sky beat me (on another thread) to posting a screenshot of my recent air efforts over Brittany and Normandy. His screenshot is better than mine (below) so you may want to take a look at it.

As you can see I got good interdiction numbers and, as LS pointed out, the sneaky British managed to destroy some German fighters on the ground by bombing at night. I don't think I destroyed the 500 fighters LS said though because many of the planes destroyed on the ground were bombers on bases in Brittany, not the fighters around Paris.

Unfortunately, the RAF was unable to get the job done clearing the path to the beaches. The problem with playing the Allies is that all it takes is a few mistakes, or one really bad one, to ruin your chances of winning the game. On T46 I made one such mistake, well actually 2 related mistakes. The first mistake was thinking that fighters flying air superiority missions at 25000 feet would dive down to 9000 feet to attack enemy Bombers attacking my shipping. Apparently the 16000 foot dive (which takes less than 30 seconds) is too much for these fly boys to stomach. Well I suppose the real answer is that since my fighters are coming from 200 miles away their chances of interception are slight, or something like that. In any event I don't think I intercepted a single enemy naval interdiction mission. The second mistake was setting my aircraft in RAF Coastal to provide my own sea interdiction, but leaving it on auto. As a result it only flew 2 missions per day of about 35 aircraft each. Still I would have thought that the aircraft specifically designed and flown by the experts at sea interdiction would have had a better showing than the enemy bombers with no experience at this sort of thing. It is not that I got bad sea interdiction numbers (5s and 6s) it is just that the enemy in a few key hexes got better (7s and 8s).

In any event, the invasion is postponed for a turn or two anyway. So now I have a decision to make, proceed with the planned invasion (the location of which LS has undoubtedly figured out), or go with Plan B (assuming there is a Plan B).

[Harrybanana]

The Air Losses.

[Harrybanana]

Does anyone know why my 200+ fighters flying an Air Superiority mission at 25,000' in a 3 hex (or maybe 4 hex I can't remember) radius around St. Malo were unable to intercept any enemy bombers flying naval interdiction at 9000'? If the answer is that they are based too far away than I guess there is nothing I can do about that now. But if the answer is that they were at the wrong altitude than perhaps I can do something.

[LiquidSky]

Hmm..I missed the AF bombing in the sea of interdiction.....so now I don't know what was shot down and what was bombed on the ground.

It was my understanding that Naval interdiction, when the planes are shot down...are reported as operational losses. Myabe the Air Execution log will show the losses better.

But this is the way to deal with the Luftwaffe...you drew it out to a location you knew...then bombed the crap out of the airfields. I lost more planes then you did, and the survivors are demoralized, and the airfields are damaged which inconveniences my air operations.

I want to move forward to where I think you are invading...St. Malo? And the two hexes either side? But man..that is a lot of interdiction.


Here is what my Atlantic wall looked like the turn before. Not sure yet what it will look like now.

[Harrybanana]

Liquid Sky I have run some tests and discovered that Air Superiority Directives appear to have a 0% chance of intercepting enemy Naval Interdiction flying in the same area. So none of your bombers performing NI were shot down and it is impossible for me to do so. I have started a thread in the Bug Forum, but I am not sure as it is actually a Bug as this may be WAD. If so then I am really stymied.

[carlkay58]

I seem to recall that your AS has to be within 5000' of the opponent to have a chance of interception. Your comment above shows a 16,000' separation. I typically fly my AS missions about 15,000' or so which usually works better.

[whoofe]

so if he wanted to be sure of intercept, he may have to run multiple AS missions with varying altitudes? 5k to cover from floor to 10k, and 15k to cover from 10k to 20k, and 25k to cover 20 to 30?

that seems excessive.

I could understand if the alt changes the effectiveness of the AS mission (more/less intercepts, more/less damages or kills), but I wouldn't think being off by 5.1k would render it useless

[Harrybanana]

ORIGINAL: carlkay58

I seem to recall that your AS has to be within 5000' of the opponent to have a chance of interception. Your comment above shows a 16,000' separation. I typically fly my AS missions about 15,000' or so which usually works better.

If this is true, and I hope to god it is not, than I would say that is something else that needs looking at. Even if there was a 25,000' altitude differential it would only take a fighter diving at 600 mph (a very slow dive) about 1 minute to be at the same altitude as the bomber targets. But in any event, I also tested flying my AS at the same altitude as the bombers and I still got 0 interceptions. Just to be clear, I tested this a lot.

But I was only testing how AS flying in my friendly air phase interacted (or didn't interact) with enemy bombers flying naval patrols in the same air phase. In other words it is possible that my fighters flying AS in the enemy air phase would have intercepted bombers flying NP in that air phase.

[Helpless]

I seem to recall that your AS has to be within 5000' of the opponent to have a chance of interception. Your comment above shows a 16,000' separation. I typically fly my AS missions about 15,000' or so which usually works better.

It is not true.

[LiquidSky]

My strategy of using the German Luftwaffe bombers as a kind of shield against invasion seems to be working very well...in fact, it is working too well.

In fact, I am now thinking it is an exploit, so I will stop. It seems that by flying naval patrol (on his turn only), I seem to avoid any sort of combat.
I had fully expected (and was prepared for) losing every German bomber for this. But the only German bombers I am losing are the ones caught on the ground when he bombs my airfields.

Now that he has landed, I am sure he will bring over some fighters and the auto-intercept may take a toll on my bombers...

But as it is what is happening is: On my turn I rest my bombers. The bombed airfields repair to undamaged/mostly undamaged. Damaged bombers come back on line. On his turn, my fully rested bombers fly naval air. My airfields get attacked..I lose some bombers to this. But I lay down a nice pattern of naval attrition.

Now I cant say that there has been no losses. Its just they are very minimal..maybe 10 aircraft tops. Out of 1000 planes flying. Against an aggressive determined allied air presence.

But I am trying to think this through as the allies. How do you prevent German naval air missions? If superiority is reducing the interdiction values, is it enough or is the effect too weak?

If I was to fly this sort of interdiction over land hexes, I would have had half my bombers shot down. But because I am over water, they are suddenly protected somehow.



Of course, once he runs the gauntlet and lands it will become moot.

[LiquidSky]

Here is my bomber force in the CR before I do my air turn.

As you can see, I can keep up this naval air attack for a while, despite his best efforts to stop me.

The way naval interdiction works on moving transports makes it irrelevant what his Naval patrol levels are at. As long as they are within 2 of mine, he gets a contested zone.

Then when you calculate the damage, it looks at only my values. Which are high. So his moving units suffer high levels of attrition coming to shore. (which is victory points for me, yay!)

[Joel Billings]

What Pavel found in your game re the interaction of NI and AS missions has allowed him to fix the issue in an upcoming update. Having tested his changes today, I can tell you that your bombers would have suffered greatly (even more so if the Allies up their air superiority flights). In a way it's too bad your game progressed further as it would have been good to see what would have happened. Without fighters, in the future those bombers would be toast. So yes, effectively there was an exploit in the sequence the missions were being executed. It didn't have to do with altitude. We expect the update to go out to testers tomorrow, and we hope we'll have a new public beta within a week or two. Thanks to Harrybanana for reporting this and for both of you for looking into it further.

[Harrybanana]

To be perfectly fair it is not entirely true to say that there was an "aggressive determined Allied air presence", at least not this turn. I didn't bother flying very much Air Superiority over the sea hexes this turn as I did so last turn and it didn't appear to have any effect on the Naval Interdiction values. It also didn't have any effect in my tests so I didn't think it was worth the effort. If someone can prove me wrong on this and show that flying AS during my friendly air phase does have a significant effect on enemy Naval Patrols also flown on my turn than I would actually be very grateful (while at the same time feeling rather stupid).

Oh yeah, I am pretty sure that the 10 aircraft LS lost doing these Naval Patrols were operational losses, not shot down.

[LiquidSky]

The allied planes were everywhere! The skies were filled with their screams as they bombed my poor troops. The skies were swept of any Luftwaffe presence...I had to hide in the ocean using our submergible U-Bomber technology to escape them.

All in all, I don't think the naval bombing is going to hinder our game too badly. This is a test game to see if the allies get victory points too easily. And the only way I can give it proper thought is if I play the Germans to the best of my ability, causing as much VP damage to the allies as possible.

I was going to continue the naval bombing, but since it is now acknowledged to be an exploit, I will put it on rest.

The turn went well...I manage to take most of the beaches, sneak on to his troop transports and invade England. London will be mine next turn.

Oh wait...that was a dream.

I pulled back gingerly (lots of interdiction) and moved a few divisions forward (even more gingerly).

He only invaded 4 beaches, which means there are 4 more to come. And Herr Adenoid Hynkel insists the allies are going to invade Pas-de-Calais....so I left a good sized army on reserve.

[LiquidSky]

Yes, I tried a test myself. All I did was send the Naval Patrol in at a lower priority..unescorted. I put about the same number of allied planes on superiority...in an area they couldn't (wouldn't likely) intercept because of range.

I lost about a quarter of the bombers. I did manage to lay an impressive minefield of 7's and 8's, but it wouldn't be sustainable.

But that is also what I was expecting to see when I planned this mission. I was mostly fishing for possible invasion sites...but was hoping I could narrow it down and delay the invasion for a couple of turns..or have Harry run the gauntlet and take some extra casualties.

With a combination of bombing my airfields and air superiority over the naval zone....it would have been a rather short lived endeavour. I suspect that this plan would not work in the future.

[LiquidSky]

June 10th, 1944. It has been confirmed. Mother Nature is a German. Rain all along the invasion areas of Northern France. A huge battle is fought between 9 panzer divisions and 3 allied infantry divisions with 2 armoured divisions called in reserve.

Despite an aggressive defence, the attack prevails...pushing the Americans back.

This turn the vps were -7, but it is really hard to maintain enough casualty points as the Germans to keep it negative. I need some allied help for that

[LiquidSky]

This is the invasion area....Brittany has been effectively contained along its neck. After Brest falls, he should build up enough supplies and men to push on....and I am still waiting for his second invasion. Intelligence informs me that they are not very intelligent.

I think it will be southern France. But Normandy is looking like a possibility as well.

Hmm...it just occurred to me that Northern Italy could be a target...a bit off the wall but who knows.

[Q-Ball]

I am playing 2 PBEMs at present, vs. Harrybanana and also Smokingdave. (I've had a turn from each for a few days due to an exchange student staying with us, but should be able to pick up shortly). The interesting thing is that I did the exact same landing against both, but did the sequence different.

Against Smokingdave, I landed around LeHavre first; he bottled me up effectively in a box around LeHavre, but then I landed a few turns later in Brittany. By then he had nobody back there, so our landing in an empty Brittany basically started a withdrawl accross the Seine for Smokingdave.

I did the reverse vs. Harrybanana. I landed in Brittany first; he formed the same line, basically. I cleared all the ports in Brittany, and started to bash against the Panzer Wall. About 6 turns after the initial landing, I landed around LeHavre; Harrybanana is resisting well, though I think a breakout is coming to the south.

In both cases, I kept Landing 1 and 2 in the same Garrison Zone. I think you need to stretch the Germans out to get a real breakout. In both games it "helped" that I was not in Northern Italy, at least as far as garrisons are concerned.

To me, any initial landing in Brittany will acheive the same initial result as here: You'll get the peninsula pretty easily, and all the ports, but smashing the Germans is going to take time and casualties. My opinion, Harry is smart enough to know this, and I would bank on a landing SOMEWHERE, no idea where.

[LiquidSky]

I spent a lot of time thinking at work about what to do and what might have been.

I've come to the conclusion that *if* I lose this game...it happened when I pulled back from Rome.

At the time, Rome was fortified to level 4. The Depot was chock full of supplies...I don't recall the number but it was certainly over 125,000. I didn't know what the VP cost for the city itself was..I knew it would be some...but it turns out that it is 30 city points...which divided by 4 in 1942 is a little over 7 vps a turn. Just for that one hex.

I should have put 3 infantry divisions in it. Maybe even 3 parachute divisions. And a couple of flak regiments in the city. They would have been kissed goodbye, but with all that supply and high CV value ( and maybe a Parachute HQ on an airfield to prevent Isolation? ) they might have held indefinitely...or until the freight in the city ran out. Something I have to test later.

In 1944...the city is worth 5 vps a turn.

So now I find myself in a bit of a pickle. I now suspect that there is not going to be a second invasion somewhere. Another invasion invites risk....and he is winning the game with 412 vps. A major is 500 points away. With over 50 turns left, that is 10 points a turn...I suspect not doable without pushing inland and taking more city points. But sitting on a minor victory? Certainly possible.

So how do I turn this ship around? Well....several ideas did occur to me. Ranging from the criminally insane to the psychotically brilliant. With so much risk that I may be bumping up his easy cruise to a minor victory into a probable major victory...and maybe even a Decisive....(AACK!)

I am going to have to do something though. I refuse to go quietly into that long night. I shall rail against the forces arrayed against me. I am going to bend but not break....I will buy low and sell high. I shall walk up to the teenager who sold me my hamburger and cry "Where's the beef!"

But first I am going to bed. A good night sleep before I do something rash.

[IslandInland]

ORIGINAL: LiquidSky

This is a test game to see if the allies get victory points too easily.

Really? Is that a concern now? IMO the game is too heavily weighted towards the Axis as it is.