Air Directives and Days of the Week

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All Forums >> [New Releases from Matrix Games] >> Gary Grigsby's War in the West >> Air Directives and Days of the Week

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Air Directives and Days of the Week - 12/6/2014 7:13:15 PM

PaulWRoberts

Posts: 897
Joined: 4/22/2001
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I'm curious about the daily scheduling (D1-D7) of air missions for each Air HQ. It's possible to give quite a lot of attention to this, but what is the payoff? And is there a likelihood that we will handicap our air campaigns if we just go with the defaults? (The default in scenarios I've opened seems to be that every type of mission is set to fly every day except for Bomb City, which flies about four times a week.)

Do air units fatigue twice as rapidly if they fly six days a week instead of three days a week? Or are the same number of sorties simply divided over the given number of days?

Is there any benefit to being very hands-on and scheduling attacks so that different groups fly similar missions on separate days, thus never giving the enemy a rest?

I'm just wondering about the best ways to use the seven-day scheduling.

Post #: 1

RE: Air Directives and Days of the Week - 12/6/2014 7:43:28 PM

Jim D Burns

Posts: 4013
Joined: 2/25/2002
From: Salida, CA.
Status: offline

I can�t give any definitive answers, but I tweaked the defaults so I only fly missions on days 2, 4 and 6 and I upped the percentage flying to 30. I fly recon missions on days 1, 3, 5 and 7 and upped their percentage flying to 25. I then gave everyone a default altitude of 22000 (I left recon at 30k) and am so far seeing good results.

I should note I am basing my decisions more on an understanding of how past Grigsby games have worked then on how this game might work. So for example flying recon missions before any strike missions helps increase target detection levels and thus will make strikes more accurate is based on what I used to do in the Bombing the Reich game he made. Flying strike missions every other day gives time for the groups to rest and recover some damage and I base this on how air is handled in WitP.

My altitude setting may be too low for my strategic bombing, I�m not sure yet. But I know in WitP there was a lot of flak that simply won�t shoot at this altitude so I am hoping to reduce flak and op losses. As I learn the system I�ll probably tweak individual commands more and not use such a generic setting for everyone. Even with my settings the AI assigns some missions as low as 15k, so there may be some minimum level requirements for some mission types, but again I haven�t learned the specifics yet so can�t explain the AI override of my settings behavior yet.

Jim

< Message edited by Jim D Burns -- 12/6/2014 8:45:15 PM >

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RE: Air Directives and Days of the Week - 12/6/2014 8:24:14 PM

Helpless

Posts: 15793
Joined: 8/27/2004
Status: offline

Besides very good points by Jim, I could add that after each "air day" you have so called air maintenance phases, when plane repair, airbase resupply, pilot replacement, training and resting is going on. So better planning may allow to concentrate your air strikes and make then more efficient and reach higher sortie count for less losses.

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Pavel Zagzin
WITE/WITW/WITE-2 Development

(in reply to Jim D Burns)

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RE: Air Directives and Days of the Week - 12/6/2014 9:47:55 PM

marion61

Posts: 1688
Joined: 9/8/2011
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For my strategic bombers, I would put the first directive on days 1, 3, 5, 7 and the second one on days 2, 4, 6. This way the targets get hit everyday and I never saw any real fatigue issues from it. Your going to lose planes, mostly to operational damage. Just fly around the flak concentrations until you go for the target and airfields if you can. I've lost over 40k planes in one campaign as the allies, but you get plenty.

Tactical air forces are a bit different. I leave them to strike everyday, but just lower the intensity if I want them to rest or increase it to achieve something. Also, my strike aircraft altitudes I set very low, but my air superiority I increase from the default. When you move planes and the base has no more aircraft, make sure to set the base to zero priority unless your planning on using it again soon.

(in reply to Helpless)

Post #: 4