Matrix Games Forums

Hello everyone.
I just picked this game up yesterday. I am a big fan of grigsby's others (been playing War in the Pacific AE PBEM for yeas and love it). Needless to say this game is quite different, and at the moment I am pretty overwhelmed. I don't have the manual yet so I am really flying blind. I tried a one day game to get a feel for the interface and then (as I often do) just dove into the full 1940 campaign agains the AI to learn the ropes. The first day went ok (playing as the Luftwaffe) losses were about even but the last two turns I have been getting mauled.

One thing that I don't have a great grasp on is the "delay" for escorts. I am worried that my escorts are not cordinated with the bombers and it seems hard to tell. I haven't messed with the delay, is this bad? I usually never set close escort, choosing high escort instead (usually 4-8k above 10ft raids. Typically I have been sending in pretty large fighter sweeps on airfields early followed by large bomber raids on airfields and radar sites. So far in three days I have lost 2:1. Heavy losses for Ju87s mostly even when escorts, but I guess I should expect Ju87s to get the worst of it.

Also, I haven't moved units to other airfeilds yet, I suspect some units are flying longer distances than they should. Any thoughts would be appreciated and of course I will be reading more on this forum.

Thanks all.

You don't need to worry about "Co-ordination" in this game the way you would in WITP AE. In WITP Co-ordination penalties are an abstraction of things that you directly control in EDTBTR. (in other words if you set fighters to escort bombers they will attempt to do so provided they have the range. they won't fail a die roll and turn into a fighter sweep instead, although they may be grounded be weather and not fly at all)

Delay is a big deal, and you really do need to set it. Delay affects when and where your fighters join up with the bombers. You CAN have the fighters escort the bombers all the way from the form up point(ie, 0 delay) but this will seriously reduce their range and leave the bombers exposed for longer. ideally you want the fighters to join up with the bombers at the latest possible moment before they encounter fighter opposition. You should see a green line on the flight plan when setting escort fighters. one end will have a green box, this is where the escort will rendevous, the other end of the line has a yellow box, this is where they predict that they will reach bingo fuel and break off. Combat will of course reduce this range.

Setting close escort is important too. It will be less effective agianst interceptors than the high cover, but it will also reduce the number of fighters that are actually able to get through to the bombers to attack. You need to try to set a mix of escorts with some close and some high to watch the backs of the close escort.

Thanks Dobey!
That was extremely helpful. I was messing around with setting some close escort with high escort and it seems to be working better. Now I will work on setting the delay. Thanks again.