Matrix Games Forums

Hello,

I am still learning, but also enjoying a lot HCE Harpoon.
I have a question regarding air groups.
What is better? To attack with a group composed of five planes or
launch the same five planes as individual units?

Maybe the answer depends on the view point. The realism of the game?
The efficiency, does it give the player advantange? How will it be in a real sistuation? I think planes are organized in two-four planes per flight.
Therefore, it may have little sense to use four individual flights. However, I noticed that in HCE seems easier to shoot down two planes with you attack a group composed of your aircrafts.

Looking forward to your comments.
cheers.

I think you are correct when you said "the answer depends on the view point".

HC is ideally meant as fairly abstract where it shouldn't matter whether you have 100 planes or 1 in a group and in large part I think how you play is dictated by the scenario size. I normally use one aircraft type per group. So I may send out four SEAD birds in a group, four Fighters in a group, but rarely SEAD and Fighters in the same group.

If you mean to 'game' the game I think the advantage goes to fewer planes per group since you could then saturate the "targets" value of SAM mounts that fire at you. You can certainly game out the different results and report back; educate us all

IMO, it's generally better to use multiple small groups, for the above noted SAM saturation, the fact that small groups waste less fuel waiting for the rest of the group to launch and therefore tend to have better range, and the fact that shooting at multiple small groups wastes more ammo in overkill than shooting at one large group does.

PS --- Tony is right about only having one a/c type per group, although I will occasionally put an EW bird in with other types, if their performance is similar.

It is, of course, harder to control multiple small groups.