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loki100 -> RE: recon (9/10/2015 1:20:49 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mattp
Yes, you should of course bomb the isolated/forward recon bases mercilessly as this is relatively low cost, high reward and gains experience. But the key to really bombing the Lufwaffe is to spam bomb (in games with unlimited bombing). Basically the Soviets have far more bombers than the Germans have fighters and it reaches a point where you are basically bombing air bases that no longer have any coverage. In games with no house rules for air base bombing you can literally hit a base 15 times or more. So yes, early in the game and early in the bombing you might take massive losses, but eventually it turns and you are destroying hundreds of Axis planes every turn. In my last game with unlimited bombing, the Axis had under 800 planes left in late September '41 and pretty much no recon planes left at all. In my current game against the same opponent, we are playing on 3 bombings TOTAL per turn (not per base) and the Axis have about 3000 planes in June '42.....
Honestly, I really need to pay more overall attention to the air war. It's a very weak part of my game. One thing I did notice just last turn when looking at some battles seeing how the Germans were able to penetrate my lines was that despite having over 10,000 planes, in major battles sometimes only 13 Soviet planes were going up while the Axis had ****loads supporting their attacks. No idea why....
which really re-enforces the argument for a limit. I'd be happy to agree to a strict version if an axis player really wanted it ... such as no more than x attacks per airbase and y in total for the turn. Both sides did carry out major airbase attacks in support of set piece offensives ... the Soviets got caught out badly at the start of Kursk when the Germans detected their incoming attack .. but it doesn't seem to have been done week after week on quiet sectors. Given the acknowledged gaps in the WiTE air war model its not something I'd really want to seek to exploit
reasons for poor Soviet performance are that up to Nov (or is Dec) 41 there is a serious malus, so the planes take off (use up miles) but poor co-ordination means they don't reach their targets. Also check the admin score of your air commanders, if this is low then you maybe missing a lot of dice rolls.
Final issue is the short range of many Soviet fighters, in the main the Germans had a large advantage in this respect so maybe able to call in fighters from a wider range. Soviet doctrine was that the fighter was there to defend Soviet airspace and protect ground operations ... they had (and this carried into the Cold War) no real doctrinal commitment to the western idea of air superiority as such. This was very much reflected in their plane design.
From their experience in the Civil War and then the concept of the deep battle doctrine, they expected ground units to outrun air cover, one reason why the at start Soviet divisions are fairly rich in AA as there was an expectation they'd have to defend themselves. As so often with Soviet doctrine/operations in 1941, the theory was fine but the execution dire.
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