Fighter sweeps strafing. Arg.

[Bella]

I'm 5 days away from D-day in the long campaign of BTR, playing as Allied. That's 270+ turns. Still haven't found a way to prevent Fighter Sweep squadrons from strafing railyards and airfields. With only four waypoints going in, it's pretty hard to plan a useful sweep to support a bomber strike, not to mention all the unnecessary damage taken.

Any suggestions?

[simovitch]

ORIGINAL: Bella

I'm 5 days away from D-day in the long campaign of BTR, playing as Allied. That's 270+ turns. Still haven't found a way to prevent Fighter Sweep squadrons from strafing railyards and airfields. With only four waypoints going in, it's pretty hard to plan a useful sweep to support a bomber strike, not to mention all the unnecessary damage taken.

Any suggestions?

Sweeps will less likely be hunting random airfields in 1.06 (due for release any day now) since they will only attack airfields with recent recon. Attacking railyards does reduce the capacity to flow supplies to troops but we need to take an in depth look at the whole process. We need to remember that for whatever the historical effect, Doolittle enforced this tactic (beginning in January 1944) and the fighter pilots loved it. Maybe each attack on a target of opportunity should come with a morale boost...

[Bella]

That is true, Doolittle did order it at the end of January, and it was a game changer for the air war over Europe. That was for escort units, though. If heavy attacks were not coming in, about 3/4 of the escort were released for hunt tactics. I like the idea of fighters increasing morale for that. Good thought. On the other hand, bomber groups realized very soon that this meant they were bait, with a corresponding drop in morale. This release from escort didn’t necessarily include strafing of airfields, even though, granted, Doolittle did say to destroy the LW in the air and on the ground. Fighter pilots knew ground strafing was very dangerous, especially the P-51s with their liquid cooled engines, and it was causing severe morale problems in British tactical air units, from the high losses to ground fire. They preferred to kill in the air. On the other hand, trailing German fighters back to their bases and shooting them down in landing pattern was common. Later, American pilots were just shooting up everything just because there were so few targets in the air. It’s a tough one to program into the game. Might be nice to grant the Allied player a choice to release fighter units to do local sweeps around the bomber stream. I’m talking out my ass here of course, as I know nothing about the difficulties of programming. Maybe the easiest solutions is just increasing the number of waypoints allowed to fighter sweeps (be nice for bomber groups too).