Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Tom Hunter


Sneer I am not suprised that the Japanese won, but I don't think that 100 superior Japanese fighters could even find all 48 Mohawks, much less shoot them all down.

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ORIGINAL: Gen.Hoepner

Remember that our game still has the old replacement rates for the 4Es...which means you get hundreds of them very early in the game. Now with 15 B-17Es/month it's more difficult to keep the pace you had with me.

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ORIGINAL: Gen.Hoepner


Anyway there's no way, imho, Japan can hold the air superiority against masses of 200/300 4Es striking at the same time 4 different theatres...even if they come unescorted. No way.

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ORIGINAL: castor troy

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ORIGINAL: Gen.Hoepner


Anyway there's no way, imho, Japan can hold the air superiority against masses of 200/300 4Es striking at the same time 4 different theatres...even if they come unescorted. No way.

hmm, in my ongoing game against Wolfpack he sent about 150 B24 and B17 unescorted at a base with about 100 Tonies on CAP. He hasn´t done it very often after he faced my Tony daitais. And that´s the experience I made in other games also. There are far too many 4E bombers but with Tonies or better Jacks facing them when unescorted I never really had a problem and my opponents did cancel their attacks.

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ORIGINAL: dtravel

Throwing another two pennies onto the growing mountain.

There seems to be a consesus that very large A2A battles don't work the way we'd like. There also appears to be some agreement that there are too many very large A2A battles in most games.

Why are there "too many" VL A2A combats? Because players concentrate their forces much more than happened historically.

It has been suggested that reducing aircraft production/replacement rates will fix this.

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ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

I know the original poster and many of those who have replied have read our earlier comments on this. I don't want to appear unsympathetic to new posters, but I have say that we've commented on this pretty definitively and at length, multiple times. You may not like the answer, but we've certainly made the effort to reply and to see if this could be addressed.

You need only look over the detailed patch notes since v1.00 to see how many changes other than bug fixes have been made, based on requests on this forum. In addition, many balance changes and tweaks to the combat systems based on player feedback have been made.

We've said several times that the air model does give unrealistic results in very large battles. We spent several weeks looking through the code at various times to see if there was an "easy" change to this. Some changes were made. The upshot is that the designers and programmers feel that changing how the air model to "fix" this will effectively mean redoing the entire air model, which is likely a multi-month proposition given development and testing. The air model works well for historical battles and for battles of small to medium size. Very large battles get very bloody and differences in quality of aircraft and pilots (especially on the order of a 20-30 point difference in experience) tend to exacerbate that.

While I may have a different answer for you in the future, right now the only answer I have is it's advised that experienced players take it into account when planning very large air battles. The focus of our future WitP efforts is on fixing bugs rather than addressing areas where there are flaws in the designed models. In a game this size, with the amount of freedom you have, you will eventually find a combination where the model(s) don't perform perfectly. In a game where these units were all represented by counters that were removed with a single good die roll, this wouldn't be a problem for most, but when you see each plane and pilot, results like these do stand out.

Please take the increased lethality of very large scale air combat into account in your games. If you want a very bloody air war, large raids and large air combats are the way to go. Otherwise, keep it to more historical numbers and the results will come out better.

Regards,

- Erik

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ORIGINAL: dtravel

Personally, the problem I have with tightening up deployment by HQ and Political Points is that the assignments and reinforcements (at least for the Allies) only make sense if the game proceeds nearly identical to real life.

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ORIGINAL: Oleg Mastruko

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ORIGINAL: dtravel

Personally, the problem I have with tightening up deployment by HQ and Political Points is that the assignments and reinforcements (at least for the Allies) only make sense if the game proceeds nearly identical to real life.

Both sides tend to have abundance of PPs by spring 42, at least I do in my games from both sides. Allied player usually mis-use this abundance to totally denude West Coast sending everything up front, while Japanese players usually do the same with 4 homeland divisions, or dream of doing the similar thing with Manchurian army divisions.

Not to mention that most Allied players simply stop paying any attention to Brit withdrawal rule by April 42, since the abundance of PPs allows them to keep everything London wants back.

All this is gamey and another example of "candyland" rules we all live by, and some of us love If one plays by candyland rules (PDU & co.), one should be aware that box with candies may be in opponents hands on any given day.

O.

This game does not have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff.

"Bomb early, bomb often, bomb everything." - Niceguy

Any bugs I report are always straight stock games.

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ORIGINAL: dtravel

But to get vaguely back on subject, it sounds like you believe that without an overhaul of the PP system it is not a candidate for "fixing" air combat. Yes?

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ORIGINAL: Tom Hunter

Jim you need to bring more planes to the party, you will never win with inferior equipment at 1 to 2 odds. You may not win with superior equipment but at least it will be closer. It sucks, but its the way the game is built.

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This is why I am going to play with pretty tight stacking limits , and CAP limits from now on!!!

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ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns

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ORIGINAL: Tom Hunter

Jim you need to bring more planes to the party, you will never win with inferior equipment at 1 to 2 odds. You may not win with superior equipment but at least it will be closer. It sucks, but its the way the game is built.

LOL after the loss of 250 other fighters, there were no other planes left to defend this rear area base. Imphal is the front line now and I couldn't afford more than 50 fighters for Dacca. Prior to this Dacca had another 50 hurricanes but they were needed at the front after massive losses decimated all my other fighters in theatre. Everyone keeps assuming I had a choice in the matter, this battle occurred at the end of a very bloody week of fighting, 300 of my fighters to 10 of his lost.

Basically any base in range of his Tony groups (no matter how many planes I could base there) are untenable. The air model will decimate my groups inside of 1 or 2 days and low replacement rates take months to rebuild the groups. I've tried bombing him with my heavies, but without escorts, he shreds them. My last big bombing raid saw half the heavies shot down and the mission aborted, and my heavies have experiience in the high 70's low 80's.

The closest battle we fought saw 125 of my best fighters (experience 70+ groups of Spit’s, Hurricanes and P-40E’s) against 140 of his Tony's. I lost about 80+ fighters and he lost about 5 planes.

Jim

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ORIGINAL: ADavidB

Change your approach and you may well find that you can start to get things your way.

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As I said before, there is no possibility of a Cactus Air Force scenario in WitP, you either control the air or you don't, period.

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This goes back to my main argument about the game. Since all combat is predicated on experience, I'm sure experience was THE deciding factor in this battle. (Not to mention 2:1 odds) I have no idea how the scenario was set-up, but I'm sure the Japs had 20-30 more points of experience than the Mohawks. Which brings me back to my most vocal argument...where did every Jap ship, plane, and land unit GET all this experience. The majority of Jap forces at the beginning of the war were just as green as the forces they were fighting.

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but when I was called to talk
I think about september 39 in Poland where old fighters managed to score kills on few occasions in much better-equipped germen units

Pinky: Hey Brain what are we goeing to do this evening?
Brain: The Usual Pinky we will try to take over the World;)

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ORIGINAL: dtravel

ADavidB, all your advice is fine but it is all based on one assumption. That the Allied player has any choice in the matter. As you concede, the Allies start out at lower experience levels than the Japanese so they have the advantage there. The Japanese aircraft have longer ranges, so if the Allies fall back far enough to avoid being wiped out then they abandon the battlefield to the Japanese. The Japanese can then bomb Allied land and naval forces without opposition and will gain even more experience, multiplying their advantage there. The Japanese start out with more aircraft, so they can outnumber the Allies on all fronts. Even if the Allies do manage a local numerical superiority somewhere, the interior lines of communication allow the Japanese to shift reinforcements in faster than the Allies and counter the numbers. (Assuming that they even need to since they are likely to be taking fewer casualties than the Allies because of their range and experience advantages.)

Now, in normal play the answer is for the Allies to stand and fight, knowing they are going to lose in the short term, hoping to slowly attrition the Japanese air forces in the process. But that can't work if they can't shoot down any Japanese aircraft, which is exactly the situation the original poster is in.

And quite frankly, he's in that situation solely because of the PDU.

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So remember all, "what's good for the goose is good for the gander"...BOTH SIDES can attack with hundreds of planes at any one spot and overwhelm an unwary or unprepared opponent. Both sides have 1000s of planes that they can almost instantly mass at a given locations. That's just the way that the game is designed...

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Thanks ADavidB I'd already pretty much decided to do just that. It's just pathetic that in september of 1942 I have to surrender air superiority to Japan becasue the games air model won't allow me to be competative unless I fly against undefended bases.

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As I said before, there is no possibility of a Cactus Air Force scenario in WitP, you either control the air or you don't, period.

The situation in the Solomons in the early Fall of 1942 was one of limited resources for both sides. Both sides were at the limits of their supply chains and neither side was committing serious amounts of forces. The Japanese fighters were at their very limit of action over Lunga and the major problem for the US Marine fighters was naval bombardments. It took the US months to gain air control as both sides committed more and more forces.