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I've been playing the game for a little more than a week, after having had previous extensive experience with WitP-AE. In light of that earlier experience, I am surprised that the choice was made to make air bases as mobile as they are in this game. Not only can you just click on an air base and send it scampering cross-country, aircraft and all, with only a week's disruption in function, but you can send it a considerable distance to boot. And I'm not even talking about railroad transportation here! [:D]

So what gives? Were airstrips really that easy to set up on the Eastern front? Or, as I think may be the case, were air bases a bit of on afterthought for this release, waiting a more detailed treatment in some later expansion? What makes me tend toward the latter opinion is that a successful model for airbases, including realistic limits on how many air units a base could host, was built into War in the Pacific, but seems to have been droppped here.

On a related note, I am surprised that air base attacks don't seem to do any damage to the base itself, they just put a bunch of holes in the airplanes. Here too, if this is right, it abandons an effect that I thought worked rather well in War in the Pacific.

Airbases on the Eastern Front weren't concrete runways with all the bells & whistles - for the most part, you're talking dirt runways, a few huts and slit trenches, with the bare bones of support. Given the fluid nature of the war, there wasn't time to build anything more permanent in most cases.

in WitP, pretty much you are talking, building, hacking a airbase into a area, that never had any kind of, well, anything there, and even then, you had to find the best spot, as just any place could not be hacked into a usable airfield, and the build system is about the support needed to make a airfield out in nowhere workable

in WitE, these airfields are any open flat piece of ground, the support system is almost hand to mouth, you would send out a couple of trucks with a radio, they would find a spot, and set to set up, and put out a radio call back to the base, or to the planes in the air, as to where to go, in fact, the LW did the same thing in France

Yes, I get the difference. I guess what is surprising is that there's no effect for having bases house more units. Even if they're jsut hacked out of fields, as you guys claim, I would have thought that having a large number of units on a base would require a more extensive set of improvements. Or, to put it another way, to leave an airbase in place for several weeks would yield the player some benefit of one kind or another.

I had a similar concern but I've been convinced by the picture below and the discussion in this topic:

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ORIGINAL: nukkxx

I had a similar concern but I've been convinced by the picture below and the discussion in this topic:

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So nobody flies during the muddy season?

nice pic though

Yes, it's a nice picture, but it doesn't show what the game allows you to do, which is to pile half a dozen or more bomb groups onto the same "grass strip". But sometimes one has to sacrifice something for playability.
Thanks for the link to the earlier discussion. I had looked for something like that, but didn't find it.

ORIGINAL: Kriegsspieler
Yes, it's a nice picture, but it doesn't show what the game allows you to do, which is to pile half a dozen or more bomb groups onto the same "grass strip". But sometimes one has to sacrifice something for playability.
Thanks for the link to the earlier discussion. I had looked for something like that, but didn't find it.

Dive bombers of IIIrd Gruppe of Sturzkampfgeschwader 1 photographed at a forward landing ground near the River Dnieper in Russia during 1943.

Air War WW2 style, just mud and water.





Mixture of USAF and RAF units with fighters (Spitfires with P47 in background)and a bomber in Italy, just to indicate this is how it was for all sides at forward airfields. The way to visualise this is not just as one grass strip, but within the size of a WiTE hex, several strips for different air groups.

Ju 87B in Greece, note sophisticated bomb storage system, fuel tanker in the background. Aircraft, fuel and bombs, that's all you need for an air war.

Major maintenance in the field, somewhere in Bulgaria.
Can we consider this item put to bed.[:)]

Nice Pic

again though, remember we talking about a big HEX, and a airbase is the HQ for those units, you could a lot of planes into one of those hexes

Does moving increase operational loss ? My current GC game, of my 190 AC losses, 85 are due to OP loss. The only thing I can think of is the aggressive airbase moving to keep my spearheads under air cover.

ORIGINAL: Skoop CRP

Does moving increase operational loss ? My current GC game, of my 190 AC losses, 85 are due to OP loss. The only thing I can think of is the aggressive airbase moving to keep my spearheads under air cover.

Probably more a case of pretty light combat losses & high sortie rate. [;)] Op losses will mount with the number/distance of missions, regardless of exposure to enemy fire. The longer/more often they fly, and the more times they take off and land, the more chances there are of something going wrong.

Don't forget the time frame, a week a long time in war.