ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins
From what Joel has said, it's my understanding that there are several things going on with flak and ops losses. First, the flak and ops losses over the course of a turn, or a week or a month are roughly realistic. However, the air system does not generate "sorties" 1:1 compared to historical sorties, so on a per-sortie basis, they look high. Second, there were some reporting issues that mis-reported flak or ops losses is past versions. Third, there is player action and it's easier than it should be to inadvertently fly into a lot of flak if you don't check and it's also easier than it should be to either forget to turn your GS off or to fly outside the range of your escorts and end up with an interception that causes havoc with your bombers. The sum total of this is that I know Joel, Gary and Pavel are continuing to look at saves and where they see an issue they'll adjust, but I don't think flak and ops are far off from where they should be, barring the last case.
On the last case, we plan to make some UI improvements in the future to make it easier for players to see when they have GS on, when it's out of range of escorts, to remind them at the end of the turn if they want to turn it off, to also make it easier to note potential flak issues and (hopefully, this is apparently a much tougher "feature") to make it easier for the AI to avoid inadvertent flak "traps" as well.
Regards,
- Erik
Playing 1.02.11
Hi Erik, appreciate your reaction. And I appreciate it is very difficult to accurately model the air war especially. After all, how do you measure it's impact and success? While playing the game (and manually managing the air component) I've seen:
- Tactical bombers being fairly effective to destroy, damage and disrupt soviet formations (GS role) but also being absolutely shredded (repeatable) by flak - even simple '41 rifle divisions with minimum flak support from higher HQ Is the loss vs effect ratio realistic? If they help achieve a breakthrough maybe it is
- Level bombers rather ineffective @ damaging / destroying ground elements. Okísh disrupting. Losses perhaps acceptable when flying above 14k, but at default altitude (9k) they get shredded by whatever is shooting @ them - as I am still not sure what is......
- Issues with escort (only patrolling fighters, no escorts)
- Issues with intercepts as that does not seem to work, only in turn 1 and during GS by patrolling fighters
The game is still very enjoyable when you accept these issues (for now I am just playing AI) but I am determined to get Joel his data so the team can improve the (air) game further....
