How to best employ jet fighters?

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All Forums >> [New Releases from Matrix Games] >> Gary Grigsby's War in the East Series >> How to best employ jet fighters?

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How to best employ jet fighters? - 9/29/2016 2:24:26 AM

BlueAndGray

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I'm new to WitE, but played a lot "Second Front: Germany Turns East". I'm playing the 1944 Campaign as the Axis and I've made it to mid-summer of 1945. I'm on the latest production version of the game (1.08 I believe?) I now have 10 of my best fighter units equipped with the Me 262-1a (roughly 300 in service) and was about to convert more of my Bf 109 and Fw 190 crews over to the Me 262, but I keep noticing that I almost never see the Me 262s show up for just about any air mission. They will rarely show up in defensive ground battles as CAP when viewing the details of the engagement.

The Me 262 units are based at the same airfields roughly 4-7 hexes from the front as the other fighter units and all of them are set to fly day missions and they are all at 100% TOE. I've checked every battle over multiple turns where the Red Army is attacking heavily in Army Group Center's area where I based most of my Me 262s and I seem to at most get 2-3 Me 262s to fly per week even in engagements where 300+ of my piston-engine fighters show up. The Bf 109 and Fw 190 units will engage over and over again, but the Me 262s seem to be unable to get into the air. This has been constant for the 25+ game turns that I've had them upgraded. I was thinking they might have extra issues in cold weather, but after 10-12 turns of summer I'm wondering if something else is the issue.

I read here in the forums that somebody thought that maybe the Jet Fighters were deemed to be too fast for escort missions, but that was not confirmed by any official source. I could see how Me 262s would have issues escorting very slow Stukas, but I would think Fw 190A-9s and especially Ar 234B-2 jet bombers could be reasonably escorted (or be assisted by jet fighter sweeps offensively). I tried manual missions based on section 16.3.3.5 'Air Superiority Missions' but they are never available for selection. I cannot select them from any of the manual missions for recon, bomb unit, etc.

So here are my 2 questions:

1) Is there any way to force what should be my best fighter to fight either offensively or defensively?

2) Should I just cut my losses and downgrade back to piston engine aircraft?

3) If so what's the best way to determine which aircraft I should use? I saw mention of top speed, maneuver and something else (firepower?), but it just seems like there are dozens of stats for an aircraft but most of them are irrelevant or have low impact? I'm concerned if I try the Do 335s or the Ta 152s I might run into similar issues - although I have fewer of them than I do Me 262s in my production pool so I would need to mostly stick with 109s and 190s.

Thanks!

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 9/29/2016 7:16:08 AM

morvael

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Jet fighters do not escort other planes. They only intercept.

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 9/29/2016 4:40:05 PM

BlueAndGray

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Thank you for the official response. I don't understand the reasoning here, but I understand the answer.

Based on that should a player playing against the AI just chalk up all of the Jet Fighters as false upgrades due to the fact that as a player you have no control over how they are used and they seem to never be picked for intercept missions? If that's the most efficient way to go, I'll go that way, but it seems counterintuitive that Jet Fighters are that useless on the Eastern front.

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 9/29/2016 8:33:02 PM

Aurelian

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The reasoning would be that they flew too fast to escort anything using a piston engine. And they lacked the agility.

In fact, piston engine fighters ended up guarding their airfields during take off and landing.

Sure,it was fast, but since you couldn't slam the throttles forward or back without flaming out, it took awhile to accelerate/decelerate.

At least from what I remember.

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 9/30/2016 12:10:10 AM

BlueAndGray

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Well again, I have Ar 234 Jet Bombers that actually have a HIGHER cruise speed than the Me 262. Granted I don't have very many of them, but the planes that they would be escorting would be Fw 190 A-9s and F-8s (the fighter bomber and tactical bomber variants of the Fw 190) have cruise speeds of 301 and 288 respectively. The speed differential is less than that of a Bf 109K-4 escorting a Ju-87 Stuka (330 vs 198 cruise speeds respectively) This will absolutely cause issues with close support of attack aircraft, but that shouldn't preclude them from being tasked with performing sweeps of the target area and engaging any enemy aircraft. There are many uncomplicated ways where fast jet fighters could support strike packages.

The Me 262s were often used to attack allied bomber formations, but they absolutely were capable of engaging piston-engined fighters. Pulling a few examples from the wiki (if anybody has better examples please chime in):
- The Me 262's top ace was probably Hauptmann Franz Schall with 17 kills, which included six four-engine bombers and 10 P-51 Mustang fighters
- Oberleutnant Kurt Welter claimed 25 Mosquitos and two four-engine bombers shot down by night and two further Mosquitos by day flying the Me 262 (the Mosquito being a multi-role twin-engined fighter/bomber/recon plane)
- Luftwaffe pilots eventually learned how to handle the Me 262's higher speed, and the Me 262 soon proved a formidable air superiority fighter, with pilots such as Franz Schall managing to shoot down 12 enemy fighters in the Me 262, 10 of them American P-51 Mustangs
- Other notable Me 262 aces included Georg-Peter Eder, also with 12 enemy fighters to his credit (including nine P-51s)
- Erich Rudorffer also with 12 enemy fighters to his credit
- Walther Dahl with 11 (including three Lavochkin La-7s and six P-51s)
- Heinz-Helmut Baudach with six (including one Spitfire and two P-51s) amongst many others

So the Me 262 has a lot of warts (especially at low speed as you mentioned - but at high speed it was quite maneuverable), the engines required a huge amount of maintenance, and as you mentioned the engines did not handle sharp speed adjustments well at all, but it historically did engage and shoot down the fastest and most nimble allied fighters. They had a lot of problems, but the biggest problem by far was lack of fuel, lack of pilots, spare parts, and allied air dominance allowing for allied fighters to loiter over their airfields. If as a player you can keep your Rumanian oil fields under friendly control, support them with 2,300+ piston fighters, and keep production humming then these guys should be able to have a modest impact on the air war once you get a chance to stockpile 500+ of these. Instead they appear to be idle most of the time even when air battles are raging both offensively and defensively.

*** But, back to my original question - is there ANY way to get these guys to reliably fly ANY missions where they will engage the Soviet Air Force? ***

< Message edited by BlueAndGray -- 9/30/2016 12:13:59 AM >

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 9/30/2016 1:56:39 AM

Michael T

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Air War in WITE 1 is not good. Never will be.

I get my Air War thrills from nice combat flight sims

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 9/30/2016 1:57:33 AM

Michael T

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Your only hope is morvael weighing in with some info.

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 9/30/2016 3:12:25 AM

heliodorus04

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Whenever you explore a problem with the air war (or supply) system in War in the East, look first to War in the West for how the air war improves there. As Michael T said, WitE's air model won't support that level of tactical realism (and the ground combat black box is similarly tactically unresponsive to doctrine).

But war in the west does some nice things, and if you have not yet, you should at least check out the capabilities in the design, because they are cool.

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 10/1/2016 12:01:01 PM

morvael

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I will check whether 262 fly intercepts.

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 10/1/2016 1:56:52 PM

morvael

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I tested 262 and it flew against: recon, unit bombing, city bombing, airfield bombing, land attack (and they got 34 kills during enemy turn). I even got them to fly CAP during my own land attack. It was impossible to send them as escorts for any kind of mission. It looks like they work as designed (despite me finding a bug with incorrect mission type set for groups that switched to jet fighters from fighters; I repeated the tests after fixing that and results were identical, so maybe that mission type wasn't so important).

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 10/1/2016 9:52:46 PM

BlueAndGray

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quote:

ORIGINAL: morvael

I tested 262 and it flew against: recon, unit bombing, city bombing, airfield bombing, land attack (and they got 34 kills during enemy turn). I even got them to fly CAP during my own land attack. It was impossible to send them as escorts for any kind of mission. It looks like they work as designed (despite me finding a bug with incorrect mission type set for groups that switched to jet fighters from fighters; I repeated the tests after fixing that and results were identical, so maybe that mission type wasn't so important).

Your comment about mission type actually led me down an interesting new path of research. I've been poring over turn after turn of combat detail screens for my campaign and from what I can tell Jet Fighters do not fly Sweep missions - either offensively or defensively. They only seem to be available for CAP missions? I see you mentioned that you've been able to have them fly CAP missions for your land attack missions. I need some help here since I never see ANY planes of any type flying CAP for my offensive ground attack missions(F6). I only see Escort and Sweep in the details for any offensive Bomb Unit Mode (F6) style attack - # of CAP sorties always equals zero in my experience. On the defensive side the Me 262s only seem to be showing up as CAP (again not Sweep regardless of whether or not my bombers fly defensively).

If that is the case then the issue might be that they are only eligible for 1 out of 5 possible fighter mission types (see my little chart below) which would explain why they show up so infrequently on battle reports based on the proportion of Me 262 units in the area. On top of that it doesn't seem like you can nudge up priority for CAP or Sweep like you can for escort which leads to point where normal fighters end up flying missions 10 times more often than a comparable jet fighter unit. I'm not 100% sure this is what is going on, but this theory would absolutely fit with what I'm seeing. As an example in an air battle with 304 of my defending fighters engaging, 174 are escort, 50 are Sweep, and 48 are CAP (17 of which are Me 262s). If CAP is all the Me 262s are eligible to fly then they were only eligible to fly in 48/304 = 16% of the defensive missions and IF they can't really be sent on offensive bomb unit planes (they don't fly Sweep and CAP just isn't utilized in the first place) then it fits with the theory that jet fighters fly in about one tenth of the missions that a comparable piston fighter unit will.

Another potential issue is that due to the reality of the situation on the ground (fighting defensively in the Western Soviet Union in the summer of 1945) I'm really only doing 3 basic things with the Luftwaffe:
- bomb enemy troop concentrations that aren't well dug in (for attrition purposes), ground support both offensively (not much of that) and defensively. Interdiction was causing disastrous attrition to my gutted bomber forces so I shut that off (quite unfortunate there, but that's a separate issue but my bomber casualties on interdiction were much greater than what I took bombing entrenched troops with less gain). The AI isn't in position to bomb my factories and generally only bombs my units as direct ground support (AI doesn't try to bomb my troop concentrations).

Here's a table showing what I'm seeing as far as what missions the Me 262s will fly:

Type . . Offensive . Defensive
Escort . N . . . . . N
Sweep . .N . . . . . N
CAP . . .N/A . . . . Y * - I've never seen CAP planes on any of my bomb unit missions so marked CAP as N/A - needs further verification.

Could you verify if you are getting CAP sorties on Bomb Unit missions? At this point I've checked well over 50 air engagement details and I only see planes assigned to Bomb, Escort, and Sweep - I've never seen any planes assigned to CAP for offensive Bomb Unit missions (F6).

I know this can be a picky subject, but would you be willing to explain what bug you had run into regarding mission types when switching to jet fighters from fighters? The German reinforcement schedule never assigned me any units with jet fighters already assigned. I had to convert all 10 of them manually so I'm concerned that the bug you mentioned could be very relevant here.

Bottom line - from what I'm seeing jet fighters (even Me 262s) are a decisive net DOWNGRADE over any other fighter (at least playing against the AI). When they fly I absolutely see a spike in Soviet aircraft casualties, but if they rarely fly I'm better off with anything else that does fly and therefore FIGHT. I feel that shouldn't be the case, but if it is then this should be better documented. Unless I missed something big in the manual? As it is, I made a faulty assumption that Me 262s would be big upgrades so I meticulously upgraded my most experienced air units to this aircraft type and the net result is more of my ravaged bombers get shot down because the Me 262s along with my most experienced pilots rarely engage the enemy air force.

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 10/1/2016 10:15:16 PM

morvael

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During your own offensive air missions CAP is not flown, only escorts. It seems CAP only works during land battle and against enemy offensive air missions. CAP = Intercept
Seems like land battle is very flexible, there can be escorts (of which some may convert to sweep) and CAPs. Offensive air missions can only take escorts, so CAP aircraft (jet & night fighters) won't fly.
Yes, it seems, given the low number of big German air groups that have to cover long front, jet fighters are a downgrade, because they don't perform the full range of missions.

The bug is not really relevant. It's an invisible mission type, which determines what kinds of missions the aircraft can/will undertake. And it wasn't properly switched to CAP-only for jet/night fighters coming out of fighters (only jet/night fighter groups at scenario start would have this correctly set), but fixing this didn't change much, because there are other checks which don't look at mission type only plane type (so jet fighters were excluded from being escorts also because of their type).

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RE: How to best employ jet fighters? - 10/1/2016 11:03:51 PM

BlueAndGray

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Unfortunate, but this does help explain a lot. I'll continue converting my last jet fighter units back to standard fighters and make due. I just wish this had been a bit better documented. I didn't see Sweep or CAP mentioned when searching the manual or any mention of jet fighters having different mission roles. I'll work on different approaches to preventing my bombers from getting torn apart now that I know that Me 262s will never be effective there.

That being said, my sincerest thanks for your help looking into this! Your time is very much appreciated.