Matrix Games Forums

Been quite a long time since I had time to play but recently returned to this game. Have forgotten so much so been hunting through the various guides on the forum (including my thread of threads linked in my sig).

One thing I've not yet found is when planning an offensive as Allies (e.g. Breakout and Pursuit) how people judge the balance between Grd Support and Ground Attack and with the latter how much effort to put into Unit bombing, how much into interdiction.

In particular FB groups are king on both unit and interdiction and also support ADs, while 2E and 4E LBs much less useful in this role (I know many players use 4E exclusively on strat bombing and 2E on port, airfield and railyard attacks).

Anyway what rules of thumb do you guys use for deciding how many groups to assign to what AD type? Lets say you are playing first turn of Breakout & Pursuit as Allies, you will need loads of interdiction (aiming for 7+ interdiction) but how many groups to put on unit and grd support roles and what are you doing with your 2E bombers?

Thanks

Jon

EDIT PS My strategy in past I believe was to have a couple of FB groups on support, typically those near the front and the rest of the FBs on interdiction and then have LBs not needed for anything else on unit bombing. Thing is this was just my best guess and I didn't investigate if it was optimal.

You method is largely what I do too. Twins seem to be reasonably good at units, and perfectly adequate at airfields, ports and Railyards. I generally prioritise GA over GS, with a 2 layer approach... Bomb units with the 2e, and then interdict in a Separate GA AD where I am attacking. Each one gets say 20-40 bombers per hex radius (try for 20+ for a rad '0', 40 for a '1' etc.) The GS then gets what's left.

Again, no clue if this is optimum, and you need many more interdictors in poor terrain...

What works for me:

1. Use 10 to 15 FBs for each hex of interdiction. So if you have a radius of 2 hexes which covers say 20 enemy hexes than you will want to use about 200 to 300 FBs. Of course their effectiveness will depend greatly upon terrain, weather, enemy AA and day light hours. Depending on the situation I will fly 3 to 4 days of the week.

2. For the 1st turn of Breakout the remainder of your FBs can be left to provide GS. From turn 2 on you will want to use the remainder for unit attacking.

3. For the 1st turn of Breakout just use your Heavy bombers for Unit bombing.

4. I am personally not a big fan of reserving a lot of aircraft to fly GS. If you "unit" attack a particular enemy unit then you can set your aircraft to attack multiple times. But with GS, to the best of my knowledge, your aircraft only attack once. You also can't set the number or type of aircraft. Sometimes the AI will send very few aircraft to GS an important attack, while sending numerous aircraft for a less important one.

5. After the first turn you may find that many of your FBs have low morale for the next turn. One trick is to "Rest" them during your air phase but then reset them to DO during your ground phase. I believe they are then available to provide GS. I would love to know if I am right about this.

6. Personally I find the 2Es useless for anything but bombing railyards.

Thanks Warpsite and HarryBanana, seems I'm not too far off, think the only thing I've changed is finding a post stating that the altitude of FBs is just the cruise altitude as they will dive down to attack, so I've upped my FB altitude for ground attack to 21k or higher, seems to have reduced losses from flak on the way out. I'm able to get solid set of 9s across the board for interdiction in the early turns now, rather than 6 or 7s.