Why doesn't the Luftwaffe follow my orders?

[Nova1984]

On ground attack I can set the number of planes for escorts which works fine. If I set the number of escorts requested to '1' only one escort fighter will be flying the mission.

However on air supperiority and ground support my settings are ignored.
Even when I add only a fighter AOG (JG 54) to the ground support directive their are bombers, too.
And there will often be 100's of planes in both ground support and air superiority missions despite me setting the requested planes as low as 1%.

I would like to have only a small covering force of fighters when attacking with my foudn forces, lets say 10 or 20 planes per mission.
With the large number of planes currently participating there are only a few missions performed before my fighters stay on the ground for the rest of the turn and my gound forces have to fight without air cover for the most part of the turn.

(I just relalized I posted in the wrong sub-forum, maybe a mod can move it?)

[GibsonPete]

Are you using air assist? If the answer is yes that may the issue.

[loki100]

could you provide a bit more information.

I assume from your post that you are amending the airdoctrine screen?

If so, then yes the choices you make there in terms of % allocations should be followed but its a complex relationship.

lets say you set the mission % for fighters in an air superiority directive (auto-intercept follows this) to 50%.

In that case the AI mission allocation routine would normally send say 20 fighters to a given battle (its judgement of what it needs at 100%), if it doesn't have 20 it sends nothing. Now what you are saying is fly this mission with 10 planes - which may get you more missions but with the cost that your airforce is constantly flying badly outmatched in combat.

More generally with GS, if you expect a large number of battles in a turn then turn it on and off as the turn progresses and you see battles you really need to bring in air support

[Nova1984]

GibsonPete
I'm not using air assist.

loki100
I want to use it in T1 after NOT bombing the air bases.
It's fine to send 20 axis fighters against let's say 100 fighters+100 bombers. The kill/loss ratio is fine, maybe better then sending more fighters (as you loose some due to operational losses)
If i could get the luftwaffe to restrict itself to 20 fighters I could provide air cover to nearly every battle and destroy most of the enemy air force this way.

I found in the manual that unused fighters may decide to intercept, so that could have something to do with it.
Doesn't make much sense if you specifically set up an air superiority mission in that region but the code probably doesn't takes this into account.

[loki100]

yes, if you are going to run an AS in a sector, it may still run auto-intercepts - it depends on if you have enough planes from the AS in action. In the main, my strong advise is that AS is a very specialist mission in WiTE2 and to rely on auto-intercept and deployment.

You should only really be using it when you want your fighters in action significantly behind the enemy lines

as to the rest, well I'm sure there is a painful solution involving endless use of the reserve option and so on. In the end you are trying to get a level of micro-control that the game isn't really assuming fits your role. So if you really want to be micro-managing every possible air interaction to gain the optimal use of the LW then, yes I can see how to do it, but I'd rather just accept what happens with the intended routines.