LoBaron
Posts: 4776
Joined: 1/26/2003 From: Vienna, Austria Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: cap_and_gown quote:
ORIGINAL: LoBaron quote:
ORIGINAL: cap_and_gown quote:
ORIGINAL: Halsey Radar... Stagger your CAP altitudes by bands. Bands covered cause a roll to be made by the sweepng units, to see if they drop down to that altitude. A unit set at high, medium, then low has a 33% chance of having the sweepers drop down in altitude. Where did you pick up this info? Math? Its quite simple: the attacker hits an enemy plane located in a certain alt band. The chance of hitting one specific alt band is indirectly proportional to the number of alt bands. So: to hit an alt band out of 3 you have a 33% chance; out of 4: 25%, and so on. I didn't meant about the probability of dropping down to a certain level. I meant the belief that the sweepers actually do drop down. You have been advocating a split CAP for quite a while. I used split CAPs in UV because the combat model was different and it worked there when intercepting bombers. But in AE, I have not seen split CAP perform as you claim it does. Instead, what I see is the high altitude sweeper dives on EVERYONE. I have not seen the CAP diving on the high altitude sweeper when the CAP is split. What I wanted to know is if there is if there is some confirmation somewhere that a sweeper that dives down to shoot at a CAP plane can then be dove on by the high element. It seems just as likely that the sweeper dives, executes its attack, and then that plane rolls to see if it executes another attack or has to go home, and if it executes another attack, from what altitude, its new altitude, or the one it flew in at. Sorry I misunderstood your question. Since the results improve for the defender when implementing a split CAP tactics compared to selecting a single altitude band I am inclined to say split CAP works and the sweeper does drop in altitude. This is easy to reproduce. Just count the results, split CAP nearly ALWAYS comes out on top of single alt band selection. If the attacker remained at initial alt we would not see a difference whatsoever. IF the total chance after every other dice roll is really 33 or 25% for the respecting alt bands is very hard to conclude from the combat replay because you only see the dive executed and not to which altitude, so assuming which alt band got actually hit is pure speculation. The results after the first attack would naturally get influenced by other properties of an airframe. Climb rate is something I rate as very important. Personally I doubt that is so easy. There are factors involved that are not random, like the probability when which plane gets spotted first (this could influence the results of split CAP tactics to a great extent naturally), and all the others Sardaukar has already more or less confirmed with his testing. The hit percentage per total alt band count is more like a basic clean mathematical formula for a much more complex system. The other factors could influence the results in a way that the chance distribution is more like 45%, 30%, 25% from top alt band to bottom for example. This still means it does have an effect. Whats a very interesting question is at which altitude the combat actually takes place. I do not think that its either the attacker´s or the defender´s altitude in most cases, thats just the "initial setup". After that it gets a mixture of numbers/speed/man/climb/exp/air skill/def skill.... A P40 formation thats outnumbered will have a very hard time to engage in their only way that enables it to gain initiative against an opponent like the Zero, which would be climb, dive, engage, extend, climb and so on. I suppose the reason is that to implement that tactic a single P40 needs a couple of successfull dice rolls so chances are very high that one or the other Zero reaches its "own" superiour position first. If it really works like this or is represented only by abstracted calculations doesn´t matter too much. This is why AC numbers are so important. I like it quite a lot that we have to base our tactics on assumptions which could prove right or wrong. In a way it simulates the experiences made in the war, and I am not sure if I´d appreciate it if you can sit down and just calculate everything down to the exact result by just adding the different dice rolls together.
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