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I'm playing the Battleground Italy 43-45 scenario, and I've run into a lot of difficulty rebasing the tactical airforce because of missing air support elements. I've tried a couple of different ways of prepping airfields:

* Setting the airfield to the proper HQ (tactical airforce), set a minimum TOE(usually 50%, I've tried 100% as well)
* Setting the airfield to the proper HQ, and leave TOE on auto
* Setting the airfield to Mediterranean Allied HQ, TOE @ 50%
* Setting the airfield to Mediterranean Allied HQ, TOE @ 25%

Supply, Fuel, and Support all immediately start trickling in, but Air Support does not.
Either it never fills, or sometimes months pass before a trickle of support comes in.

I have to be doing something wrong here....

In the meantime I have no air force. Either I am out of range, or I move my planes forward and they all go into reserve.

I've looked at the pools and I can't figure out what is going on. Looking at the British Air Support line, with All Pools selected, it says I have 1115, with 0 built during the scenario (I am on turn 27 now). If I click on which units have air support it says 1899 ready/36 damaged. When I click on the filter for Active Pools, it says 479, and 636 when I select transit pools. This, of course adds up to the 1115, but it doesn't account for what I see when I click through to the unit assignment detail.

I've also played around with supply priority, and deliberately only operating out of a couple large fields to try and keep enough support in one place. No joy...

Help!

When you hit the "N" key, what color are the airbases in question? Red means bad, yellow okay, an green is good. Planes can also go into reserve if there aren't enough pilots so check how many pilots are in the groups in question. You can also go thru your airbases and set ones away from the front to priority 2, and the ones your taking to priority 4. If you have the airfield set to auto toe, you have to move planes there for ground support to start showing up.

Yeah I've checked to make sure that I'm not set to priority zero or anything, and all my bases show green. As I said, fuel, ammo, normal support all show up quickly. However the air support does not.

I have never prepped airfields. Fly the aircraft in, check HQ alignment, put supply to an appropriate number of necessary, and by next turn the field is operational (assuming a valid depot is near enough).

in general, don't put airfield TOE<100. Key is that the number of support squads starts to reduce and those are what you need to keep planes flying. If you don't have enough support squads you'll see that damaged planes are less likely to repair or that planes are shown as being in 'reserve'.

More widely, not really a good idea to play with the TOE of any of the HQ units either. As you reduce the TOE, you start to reduce the leadership of attached officers so its a good way to seriously weaken your overall combat performance

Please state the version you are playing and upload a save for investigation.

Sure, I'll post it later this evening. I have autosave on, is there any particular save that would be best?

Edit: Adding details

Battleground Italy 43-45 (1.00.08)

(attached turn 32 save here)

ORIGINAL: HMSWarspite

I have never prepped airfields. Fly the aircraft in, check HQ alignment, put supply to an appropriate number of necessary, and by next turn the field is operational (assuming a valid depot is near enough).

I agree, this works every time. Within a week or two (at the most) my airfields are up and running.

You said that you tried moving air groups to the new base, but that they went to reserve status. Have you tried leaving them there for a turn? I think the ground support is added during the logistics phase only if the program detects air groups are present.

I leave my airfield TO&E on Auto.

Yeah, that's what I'm finding weird about this whole thing.

For example, I'm currently on turn 32 of the scenario (Battleground Italy 43-45 v1.00.08)

I moved some units to Brindisi, port is ok, railyard is ok, air base has been active since I moved units there from Barcellona on turn 24 I think. Supply priority is set to 4, MAX TOE is Auto, HHQ Tactical Airforce. I do have 19 Supply, 876 Fuel, 192 Ammo and 19 support on base, but no air support. TOE shows up as 5/5. Now other airfields in the area have had air support show up, but not this one for some reason. I messed with the HQ for a couple of turns trying to find some magic combination to get it to populate, but no luck.

Pool shows 515 total, 355 active, and 160 in transit for BR Air Support. If I click into the Commander's report on where they are deployed, it says 2743 Ready, 26 Damaged.

Any thoughts?

(attached turn 24 save file as text here)

I'll have to play around with that myself. Early on I used TO&E percentages but sometimes got lazy and forgot about beaucoup of air SU sitting around at air bases in the rear.