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I am in a campaign game which is now in May 42 playing as allies. Several Dutch airgroups now reside in Australia. I have many British, Dutch, and Australian airgroups that are 8 plane groups. Also the one australian 2/xx (starting as hudsons) are also in play as many small airgroups. Can groups be combined? IN doing so by disband, the combined group still shows a limit of 8 planes. There seem to be many more airgroups than the number of baseforces and aviation support groups can handle. should these small airgroups be disbanded or withdrawn? (Brewsters, Demons, hudson/beauforts).

Hi Bill,

You can't combine them. Disband/withdraw depends a bit on the AC type. In general you should be able to use most of them sooner or later but here's a few things that I think you should consider:

1. Pilot replacements. The Dutch only get a few replacement pilots so it will be more difficult to keep many of their groups in service with decent experience pilots. A bit like the Japanese situation [:)]

2. Replacement aircraft. Usually I find it difficult to keep all Catalina I groups full because the replacement rate is low. Some of the Dutch groups are Catalina Is (at least one) and you'll have a hard time getting ACs for the British and Australians so...

3. Upgrade paths

Do-24 upgrades to PBYs and you usually have enormous amounts of them so they can easily upgrade.

Brewsters upgrade to Kittyhawk III but that's not until a long time later. Keep them training meanwhile.

F.K 51 upgrade to F-5A which will be very useful later on. The Allied side has very few Recon groups compared to the Japanese.

That's a few examples.

I think you will have to check pilot availability, replacement rates and upgrade paths and make a decision for each group.

Regarding the base forces needed I believe you got answer in another thread about shipping in US base forces.

Regards
BPRE

E One thing I do to avoid small groups is put them into one location and then disband one into anther of the same plane type thus reducing group numbers and filling up the remaining groups to max capacity. I usually disband them and let them.come back in 120 days.