Vitelski
Posts: 6
Joined: 7/20/2004
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EDIT: I changed the headline, because the original ("Pilot training kills the game") was a little over aggressive and not really called for. The annoyed comments below were written in response to the original headline. The rest of this post is unchanged.
Edit 2: Added "unnecessary" to the headline.
Don't get me wrong: I find the pilot training mechanics pretty cool. But it takes TOO MUCH TIME. And most of that time is spent just clicking the mouse, moving pilots around according to a pre-planned schedule which was decided long before. A computer programme could manage the actual shuffling of pilots better than me, in something like one percent of the time.
So I have a suggestion which has the potential to halve the playing time, getting rid of the boring, mindless part and letting me concentrate on the fun parts, like planning convoys.
1: introduce a switch for air squadrons, turning them to training squadrons. This should be separate from the training mission - it's likely that one would sometimes want to set a frontline squadron to training for a while without enabling automized pilot recruitment and discharge.
2: a training squadron would be set to the training mission, 100%, range 0 by default, but it should be possible to change these settings manually. Exp is better trained through the CAP mission, for example, and I'm sure there is a myriad of reasons why people would want to let the computer handle pilot management while doing something else than 100% training.
What mission to train would then be set manually.
3: the programme would recruit pilots into a training squadron according to preferences set by the player. This would include which pool to recruit from and what stats the recruited pilots were required to have. For example vet bomber pool, ground bombing min 70, nav search max 40, nav bomb max 40, lo nav max 40. (For a US army squadron intended to train dedicated ground bombing pilots, avoiding to recruit pilots who have already begun training as dual ground/nav bombers.)
4: the player would set how many pilots to recruit, default probably being number of pilots = number of planes, and most common player choice probably to simply max out number of pilots.
4: the programme would also have a target when to discharge pilots, such as lo ground min 70. Or an Exp target, or several targets.
5: the programme would override the incredibly annoying requirement to manually activate supernumerary pilots - or there should at least be switch to turn it off. Might be useful for frontline squadrons, but not for training, IMHO.
Manual recruitment and discharge from these squadrons would still be enabled, to maximize player control and flexibility. (For example to allow elite trainers in the squadron, whom it would still be possible to manually protect from discharge.)
With this scheme it should be possible to plan a comprehensive training programme and let the computer do the dull work.
For example: Bomber squadron 1 recruits from the replacement pool, no required stats for recruitment, trains nav search and will discharge pilots when they reach nav search 70. Fighter squadron 1 will draw recruits from the bomber vet pool, min nav search 70, max grd bomb 40, max nav bomb 40, it will train lo nav and it will discharge when pilots reach lo nav 70. Fighter squadron 2 will recruit from the fighter vet pool first, replacement pool second, it will recruit any pilots with Air skill less than 70, train escort at some height above 100' and discharge when they reach Air 70. Fighter squadron 3 will recruit from the fighter vet pool , recquired air skill at least 70 and defend skill max 69. It will train sweep at 100' and discharge pilots when they reach defense 70. Fighter squadron 4 will recruit pilots with Air 70, Defend 70, Exp max 49. It will fly CAP somewhere safe and discharge pilots when they reach Exp 50. In this way able fighter pilots would be trained automatically, and some of them would be trained for effective naval bombing.
The player would still be responsible for setting up training squadrons and keeping the number of different training missions balanced. A degree of player supervision would be recquired, but nowhere near the micromanagement needed now. There would be no loss of detail, flexibility or control on the part of the player but the amount of time spent just clicking the mouse without making any actual decisions would be reduced most drastically.
I'm a relatively new to WITP:AE, I just reached '43 in my first campaign game against the AI. (Which I jumped straight into - I figured the Allies made a mess of things in the beginning and came out on top anyway, so why shouldn't I.) I haven't seen any proposals resembling this one on the forums so I thought I'd share my ideas. I have no programming skills though so this is as far as I can take it on my own.
< Message edited by Vitelski -- 5/13/2015 5:13:32 PM >
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Pilot training is a massive, unnecessary time sink - 
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