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I'm trying to figure out how properly to conduct air war. As German I know that I should maintain air superiority and prevent Soviet air force from getting too strong. That will require bombing of Soviet airfields from time to time. In order to get more experience about right composition of airfield attack missions I started experiment on some of already finished turns from my ongoing PBEM game.

I planned following mission (it is turn 24, snow):




These are units which are selected to conduct bombing raid. Pay attention that this single mission have 121 fighters and 149 bombers (270 aircraft in total).



Also, they have enough fuel, supply and support. Every single unit which will participate in attack is fully rested (fatique is 0 or 1).

For example:





Air Doctrine settings are:

Percent required to fly: 10
Airfield Attack: 100
Airfield Attack Escort: 110


Unfortunately, in reality only 33 planes participated in attack (which is 12% of initialy planned 270)!



I don't understand why? Only reason I can come up is because of weather. Manual says:

Air missions attempted in snow and mud have a forty percent chance of being scrubbed. If the air mission is scrubbed, the air group unit’s miles flown will be increased by one, which will prevent the unit from flying the air missions that require that no missions were flown earlier in the turn.

But still, 12% seems very low. Even If we write off 40%, of planned 270 planes, we can still expect around 160 planes. Can anyone provide more details about this? Is this WAD?

You should get some long answers from people here, but I suspect the short version will still be that:

Airwar is FUBAR atm, so ignore [>:]

This is annoying me as well in my latest vs. AI game, where I'm trying to bomb Soviet air bases to see how long I can keep the VVS out of shape. Most of the selected planes don't fly the mission, even in clear weather and at 300%. Escort settings are also broken, it seems, as they don't match the settings you select in the air doctrine screen. That the game uses a nominal number is one thing, but that it can't stick to a basic mathematical formula (the escort settings are just a percentage of how many bombers fly, so if it's at 50 and 40 bombers fly, you should have 20 participating fighters, but that's not what happens) is a bit odd.

Then, definitely manually doing bombing mission (with shift + right click) is not what players should do, as it seems broken. I have played with above test a bit more and every time when you manually select your air units, only tiny fraction of them will actually fly that mission. On the other hand if you right click directly on target (and let AI to do selection) most of aircraft will conduct given mission (in example from my first post it is about 220-230 planes out od 270).

Effectively this also means that you can forget about bombing industry and production centers because, in that kind of air mission, you need to manually determine type of target (manpower, specific factory, heavy industry...). and to select air units for attack. Whatever you select only fraction of planes will fly bombing raid causing minimal damage to target and huge losses to attacker.

Too bad that this bug is present after numerous patches and half a year after product release.

If you want to use your tankbuster planes and kill afvs, or bombing airfields and such, play WiR [:D]

The air war doesn't have priority and it has essentially been accepted that for now, it has many flaws. Not everything can be fixed or finetuned at the same time, as part of 2by3's staff is working on future titles and testing takes time.

I don't think anyone on the testing team is happy with the current air war, and I don't think the developers are either, but it's something that will slowly be improved. Currently, the focus is on improving the ground war.

What are the support levels of your airbases? Are your airbases overloaded? I've noticed that the German airbases have pretty pathetic support levels when at full TOE. Only 250. Rumanian airbases are twice as big and go up to 500!

At a 250 support level, the airbase is only fully supporting about a squadron and a half of medium bombers. The best mix I've found for the German airbases is to run at two sqaudrons of fighters, and one of medium bombers. That works out to about 80 fighters and 40 medium bombers per base.

If you put your recon planes in the army airbases, they don't contribute to the Luftwaffe base overload problems. If you split your bases between bombers and fighters then you can alleviate the overload problems. The 'common wisdom' of clumping your fighters and bombers into homogeneously grouped bases is probably the wrong tactic for the Axis player. However, it is probably still a good idea for the Soviets since there are some hard-coded mission prioritizations for them, dependent upon base designations.

Hmm, maybe support unit requirements could cause some of these issues, but it's still odd that for ground support, the kitchen sink is thrown in and other support missions feature only limited amount of aircraft (which can vary substantially).

JAMiAM, I didn't change much in airbase composition from first turn (actually I didn't change anything and left that to AI).

In case above airbases around Moscow (VII Fliegerkorps) have following support levels (support/need):

12th LW AB - 250/052 (34 A/C)
13th LW AB - 251/114 (40 A/C)
14th LW AB - 251/178 (48 A/C)
15th LW AB - 251/217 (68 A/C)
16th LW AB - 251/253 (98 A/C)

Total A/C: 288

I don't think that support level, supply, fuel or fatigue is problem. When you left to AI to conduct mission aircrafts are flying but when you manually select same units they don't fly.

The manual states that the amount of aircraft arriving at the target hex won't be all the planes listed as ready for it.  The idea is that units gets lost along the flight path.  The initiative rating, maybe air rating too, of the leader will help/hurt, along with weather conditions.

ORIGINAL: randallw

The manual states that the amount of aircraft arriving at the target hex won't be all the planes listed as ready for it.  The idea is that units gets lost along the flight path.  The initiative rating, maybe air rating too, of the leader will help/hurt, along with weather conditions.

Sorry, but that is not issue here. Please, read post #3 again.

ORIGINAL: ComradeP

The air war doesn't have priority and it has essentially been accepted that for now, it has many flaws. Not everything can be fixed or finetuned at the same time, as part of 2by3's staff is working on future titles and testing takes time.

I don't think anyone on the testing team is happy with the current air war, and I don't think the developers are either, but it's something that will slowly be improved. Currently, the focus is on improving the ground war.

With sincere all due respect, that is a bit "lame". I think Air War evaluation and fixes could get a bit higher priority? I don't really accept fubar and flaws. Are we talking overhaul or, at least, can the Air War be tweaked without huge level of development effort?

support is now waning? I was afraid of that.

With sincere all due respect, that is a bit "lame". I think Air War evaluation and fixes could get a bit higher priority? I don't really accept fubar and flaws. Are we talking overhaul or, at least, can the Air War be tweaked without huge level of development effort?

support is now waning? I was afraid of that.

Support isn't "waning", part of the 2by3 staff is just busy with future products now, a situation we obviously didn't have pre-release. Pavel's on vacation at the moment, which means there are fewer hotfixes and we're primarily testing some major changes.

Evaluating the air war is one thing, changing it is a completely different matter. Like I said, we testers are not happy with it and I expect the developers are not entirely happy with it either, but there are limits to what can be coded in using this engine, so we're working on trying to locate and remove the problems. That isn't always easy. For example, these commitment problems have been there for a long time, but it's unclear what's causing them. Sometimes issues reappear.

Both the developers and the testers have been clear since release that there are limits to what the WitE engine can do. We can't and won't promise you the impossible, we're saying that we're trying to shape WitE into the best thing possible with the engine. That process takes time, both because it's a monster game and because every feature we add (and numerous features have been added or changed since release) also increases the chance that something else breaks. There are not hundreds of people working on WitE, there are a few dozen, so the pace of the changes matches that.

may be the air leader rate as something to do with ? 

As a player who's done just the Soviet side I see air leaders with ratings of 5 or 6;  the Germans ought to be much better and not facing a lot of failed dice rolls.

Thanks for bringing this up. Gary found one bug where some morale/exp/leader air rating checks were inversed which caused better air groups to be less likely to assign lots of aircraft while poor groups were more likely. This was only one calculation being made to determine the number of aircraft in a mission, but it was not working correctly. There are definately some things that restrict that number of aircraft that can fly on any given mission. Gary saw a few things that he thought could be improved, but it will take more time and testing to further improve the air model. This is one of the areas that Pavel expects to focus on in the coming months. We realize the air model can be improved and hope to do so in the future.

ORIGINAL: Joel Billings

Thanks for bringing this up. Gary found one bug where some morale/exp/leader air rating checks were inversed which caused better air groups to be less likely to assign lots of aircraft while poor groups were more likely. This was only one calculation being made to determine the number of aircraft in a mission, but it was not working correctly. There are definitely some things that restrict that number of aircraft that can fly on any given mission. Gary saw a few things that he thought could be improved, but it will take more time and testing to further improve the air model. This is one of the areas that Pavel expects to focus on in the coming months. We realize the air model can be improved and hope to do so in the future.

Joel, please pay attention that when you let AI to automatically pick units for bombing mission (right click on target only) you will get reasonably high number of airplanes and they will fly that mission. If you reload turn and for same target manually pick (shift + right click on target only) same air units, from same bases, only tiny fraction of them will actually fly that mission.

That doesn't seem like morale/exp/leader issue. One would expect in both cases to get approximately same number of aircrafts if it is only rating checking issue.

Yes, that's the other issue Gary noticed when looking at the air code, but it requires a more complex set of changes. It's one of the things we expect to work on and improve in the future.

Emir -
 
I have noticed this quirk and no longer manually choose planes for the missions; btw I think that overloading the airbases way over the support level wrecks havoc with missions; this was confirmed by Pavel in another thread.
 
Marquo