Japanese Naval Air Pilots

[okami]

In my game with Scott1964 it is 7/30/44 and I have just been hit with the lose of Japanese Naval Pilots. Any fighter squadron with 27 or more pilots and an experience of 70 or more has lost 50% or more of their pilots. For those of you who would ask questions, today I lost a grand total of 12 planes and so these can not be attributed to game loses. It happened to carrier squadrons on their carriers in port. It happened to fighter squadrons in bases in rear areas set to Training 0. I can not see this as a bug. It is too specific. Only fighter squadrons with high skill and numbers. I had two 9 plane units in Japan at 83 experience and yet they lost nothing. All my naval bomber squadrons lost nothing. Naval fighterbomber units lost nothing. Army units of any kind lost nothing. Comment please. Suggestions from programmers welcome. Will I get them back? The Emperor is not pleased.

[BrucePowers]

I would post this in the techinical support forum and if you haven't done it, don't throw away the last game turn save. One of the support people may want to see it.

[2ndACR]

Sorry, known bug........you have run into the hardcap of active pilots and so pilots have to be purged. IIRC, the hard number is 20,000 pilots being tracked. That includes Japanese and Allied.

[Q-Ball]

My opponent and I are at 3/44. We implemented a house rule capping the total number of planes on the map, 6750 for Japan and 12250 for Allies (with a 1000 extras as fudge factor). We did this to avoid the pilot bug. Kind of stinks having to scale back planes, but it's better than unplanned losses.

[Mistmatz]

Q-Ball, capping planes alone won't do the job when certain training mechanisms are used. This can easily end up in units having more than double the amount of pilots per plane.

OTOH, that can also be house ruled or simply not be used by players if using a more historical approach.

[bradfordkay]

How can the players stop receiving new air units? It's not like I can go into the reinforcement screen and click a button "do not arrive"...

[Q-Ball]

You are correct in that you can overload units with extra pilots. We have to trust each other that neither of us are doing that. I am playing Japan, and I am not.

That's also correct on the reinforcements: The only way to create "room" for them is to allow other units to wear down. This particularly includes transport and recon units, where we won't replace pilots.

I agree it's not a clean or easy solution. It's a choice of the lesser of two evils: Manage a reduction in pilots ourselves, or have it done for us.

I'm open to any better ideas to avoid the pilot bug, but from everything everyone has said to this point, unless the players somehow impose limits on themselves, the bug is inevitable in 1944.

[Local Yokel]

Okami, I think the detail contained in your original post merits greater attention than it has so far been given. This certainly sounds like the well-known disappearing pilot bug. If this is, in fact, what has bitten you then the details you give may tell us something about the way it does so.

My understanding is that the bug arises when all available records in the pilots table of the game's database have been assigned to pilots who have gone into active service, and the game's mechanics need the use of additional records that have to find a place in that table. Since the number of records in the table cannot be increased, existing pilot records have to be overwritten to accommodate the new pilot arrivals.

The process of overwriting pre-existing pilot records could be accomplished by recourse to a variety of methods. The details you give suggest that existing pilot records are selected for cleansing and re-use by reference to the unit of which they form part. It's a bit like decimation of a Roman legion (but without conferring an incentive on the survivors to fight better/harder!). And it's really not a very clever way of selecting records for overwriting.

If it's got to be done at all I would have thought that that the more intelligent basis for purging records to create new 'pilot spaces' would be via a multi-stage test, e.g. Is he dead? If so, was he an ace? If so then conserve his record else purge it for re-use. And if the ranks of the dead don't suffice to clear sufficient record spaces, then perhaps select by reference to number of missions flown, again conserving aces' records.

The purging selection method chosen appears inelegant and unfair: it hits the unit rather than the general pilot pool. This is a boundary condition the game falls down on badly. Enlarging the pilot table (as in AE) merely moves the boundary. That may suffice. If the solution adopted in AE isn't one that can be applied to the standard game, then the problem is a priority candidate for a patch to the overwrite selection methodology. Given the critical impact that pilot quality has, players shouldn't be left in the position of having to improvise kludges so that the boundary is never hit.