Air Directive priority setting

[jecunningham]

I've read the manuals and scanned through all of the threads but can't find anything that explains how the Priority settings in the Automatic Air Directive Creation ultimately affects the type and number of resulting AI created Air Directivbes.

When or why would I choose H, M, L or N. How many of each should I choose? etc.

Thanks!

[loki100]

there are two ways to allocate planes to air directives. One is manual, you select the planes that will fly in that particular AD and, importantly, those planes will then do nothing else apart from that AD. Lots of times when this is exactly what you want but it is also limiting.

The alternative is you leave the assignment to 'auto'. Now all the planes can be assigned to more than one AD. Sometimes you only have 2, say a ground attack and a ground support mission or a couple of strategic bombing missions. In that case, I'd not worry too much about the priorities as it'll work out ok.

Lets say you have 5-6 AD, say a couple of GS and a number of ground attacks. If you are not careful, your planes will use up all their mileage doing the ground attacks and have little or none left for the GS. Or one of ground attacks is the mission that really matters.

In this case assign high to the critical ones and the routine will assign (or hold back) planes specifically for that. If you don't use the priorities, the allocation routine will fill out the top AD first, then do its best for the others. So basically priority allows you to shuffle the order so it reflects your perception of which mission really matters.

I often use it for strategic bombing missions, I may have one mission that is very much secondary, so I'll set that to low so as to ensure the bombers go over the target I'm really after, if the secondary target gets hit that is a bonus.