Is strategic bombing broken?

[Arkham]

What does "The pilot pool is capped at 10 days" mean? What the best way to kill pilots, kill a lot of planes trying to land?

So at this point is it even worthwhile hitting airplane factories or avionics? If he has a pool of 17,000 airplanes waiting to go up, should i stop bothering with hitting critical industries and just work only on railyards?

Because honestly at this point if there is nothing I can do to win the air war by shooting down his planes, or depriving him of oil why bother trying.

[wernerpruckner]

Each country gets a certain amount of pilots each turn, but they are not stockpiled! (Co-Axis get their own pilots as well as each of the Commonwealth states)

Best way to kill pilots is to kill A/C - killing them during landing (or low on fuel) will give a higher KIA number, use your escorts, use sweeps, use various legs to the same Targets, etc....

Yes, it is still worthwile hitting aircraft industries, because the AI has stockpiled what it has produced, which means obsolete aircraft (a G-6 is worthless in late 44)

Wining a pure airware victory works only in BoB, but you may be able to get up to 12 victory Points in late 43.....and later even higher (have seen HardSarge with 24 or such a number)

[Arkham]

So if i keep up killing his pilots the average experience levels for his groups will go down, and if i keep hitting alum, rubber and start hitting aircraft factories and engine plants he's going to be stuck flying crappy G6's late in the war, and will be fodder?

(oh, and the totals of my air supperiority, industry and terrors peaked at 23 at one point in late 43. Then the weather hit. Killing powerplants and steel around the Ruhr REALLY hurt him)

[wernerpruckner]

I meant air supperiority only

[TaggedYa]

ORIGINAL: Arkham

What does "The pilot pool is capped at 10 days" mean? What the best way to kill pilots, kill a lot of planes trying to land?

The Germans get 15 new pilots each day but the Pool is capped at 10 days or 150 pilots. Each of the German allies gets a couple and also are limited to 10 days replacements in the Pool. Excess pilots are lost. Actual code is pool(Nation)=pool(Nation)+RepRate(Nation); if pool(Nation)>RepRate(Nation)*10 then pool(Nation)=RepRate(Nation)*10;.

What this really means is that at any time you can only be about 250 lost pilots from a German pilot shortage. The way you attack his pilots is by increasing the tempo of your operations. If you want help on that start a thread for it in the war room.

So at this point is it even worthwhile hitting airplane factories or avionics? If he has a pool of 17,000 airplanes waiting to go up, should i stop bothering with hitting critical industries and just work only on railyards?

Because honestly at this point if there is nothing I can do to win the air war by shooting down his planes, or depriving him of oil why bother trying.

We are into that grey area of "Opinion" now.

You can't "run him out of planes". However, the planes in the pools are everything from Bf109G-2s to FW190A-6s. There are probably 1000 or more D520s in the pools. Probably 5000 Bf109G-6s. These older model planes don't fair to well against p47D-20s and P38Js.

Without knowing what you have done and what your strategy has been I can't give definitive answers to this so I will say what I would do if I was starting a scenario from where I think you are at. 8 and 15 AirForce would attack nothing but aluminum until it was at 0. Not 100, not 10, not 5, ZERO. That would stop airframe production for a time. It would not stop Aircraft production. It would limit Aircraft production to what was in the Airframe pools. I.E. More of the same old junk he already has 1000s of.

I would then attack engine factories until his engine production was at zero and it would stay there until the game ended. This would keep him from modernizing his Airforce. The new great plane types are based on new engines he doesn't have a stockpile of and the new planes are engine intensive.

But the primary basis of my effort would be to get the Luftwaffe into the air at the crack of dawn and keep them there until the next morning. Attack his pilot fatigue. Attack his maintenance crews. Attack his unit moral. His night fighters are mostly twin engine. Camp every field with night fighters every night and send bomber command to get him in the air.

You have fighter bombers until hell won't have them. Use them. Hit his airfields with fighter sweeps first thing in the morning. Three hours later hit it again. A couple of hours after that hit it with a typhoon raid. When your bombers are outbound and his fighters are up hit his big fighter fields with typhoons to crater the runways. You will get some crashes. If you do enough damage he has to move. That is a unit out of play for a couple of days and a loss of moral for the move and a loss of moral for the crew losses and a loss of moral for poor aircraft maintenance.

[TaggedYa]

Quick addendum:

Do not hit ball bearings at all until you have had alum critical for 200 days and it isn't effective any more. Then shift to 100% against ball bearings until they are at Zero and keep it there

[wernerpruckner]

The Germans get 15 new pilots each day

That´s for BoB and not BtR????

[TaggedYa]

ORIGINAL: swift

The Germans get 15 new pilots each day

That´s for BoB and not BtR????

No this if for BTR. I don't generally speak to BoB as I don't play it. I did however check and there is no test for which game is being played (this test is used a lot in the code) and no test for scenario date (also seems to be used allot to apply things to different scenarios) so it is probably applicable to both games.

Curt

[Arkham]

I've taken to rotating my airforces which are active each day, so my pilots get rest. On even days the 2nd tactical and the 12th airforce is the 'up' airforce, and they run missions. On odd days the 9th and Med run missions. 15th and 8th run every day, , but I chose which bombers are active by type. One day I run b17's, the other day I run libs. Escorts get rotated by the last digit of squad number, so even on even days and so on. Also every night I run my Mossy's deep into germany to drag the german NF's around the sky for hours on end. On nights that the moon isnt too bright, I send my night bombers in two to three hours after the mossies run around.

I'm hoping this tactic will exhaust the LW in a few weeks. Typically I get between 20-30 pilot KIA a day now between escorts and camping airfields.

It hard to get the timing right on airfield camping. I typically launch FS's 90 - 120 minutes after my heavys depart.

Plus, I am staggering my tactical raids so i have stuff going out almost hourly. Even if i don't hit anything well, i still consider it a success if it gets interceptors up there.

[wernerpruckner]

I've taken to rotating my airforces which are active each day, so my pilots get rest.

that is a good thing to do, especially for your Strategic Forces. But I would suggest you use fatigue/morale numbers - some Units can take a lot of punishment and still be very effectiv


My main Problem was always the very limited number of missions, so I am always forced to limit my amount of pain brought to the Axis.
If I plan an BC turn in 44, I need up to all 199 missions for that alone (30+ bomber missions, 20+ ECM/RCM missions, NIs over known fighter bases 60+, NIs in stream all the rest!)

What I have seen in your save is that you do not really use the BC for ist Job.
BC is the most dangerous weapon until middle 44 (after that it is a matter of opinion)

Can you tell me how you used BC so far?

[Arkham]

I don't use tons of night missions, but i have few bomber losses. I don't send out the heavys every night, only every few nights. I've been doing it more lately as part of operation exhaustion.

Typically i send about 4 -5 squads of mossie level bombers deep into Germany turf around 8-10 PM. Then around 10 PM i have the 205 squad hitting a southern german city like Munich. This drags all the night fighters after them and when they are trying very hard to intercept the fast bombers my heavies are going in to another area all together. The mossies also capture good radar data for use in jamming. I typically send about 150 bombers to each city in the city cluster area. For bigger cities I send raids of 60 bombers in with initial points at the 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock and so on positions. They all hit at the same TOT, but they bomb different areas of the city so 500 bombers are not hitting the same area over and over. Setting different initial points is very important for this.

at the same time i have all my Halifax ECM's (24 bombers total) sitting on top of all the radar stations around the target cluster. When i watch the map and have radar ranges turned on, i typically only get one long ranger circle around the area I am hitting, everything else is shut down. I hardly ever lose bombers for this.

I need to get better about timing my night intruders however, so i can get more camp kills from NI's landing.

Using this method I have taken cities from 10-20 urban damage to about 70-90. Plus this way does not cost me a ton of missions or time to set up. Its a huge pain in the butt to do it the way described in the war room.

[Arkham]

http://www.filedropper.com/save008

This is a save i quickly threw together with the above tactic. I took Mannheim from about 10 percent urban damage to 80, at the cost of 25 bombers. And considering I had 1200 bombers going out, a 2 percent loss rate is not terrible at all. Furthermore, 10 of the losses were due to AA, so only 15 bombers were actually shot down. Three nights later i've totally recovered and ready to do it again.

Also, i normally would not have flown so early due to the moon giving light. I typically only go out when the moon is not up. My losses normally are much lower.

[edit] I also did nothing to camp the NI's. Enemy losses would normally be much higher.

[wernerpruckner]

Nice concentrated attack.

For a higher Terror and Industry score you could attack multiple small cities, and attack in the City circle (damaged site + Terror).
In a PBEM your plotting would be deadly for your crews, but against the AI the tactic works better than I thought it would.

[Arkham]

I've noticed that the lowest ready luft amount shown in the campaign summary is starting to slowly drop. It has been hovering aroune 4002 for the past few weeks, but its going down now and currently is sitting at 3950 or so. Is this due to the pilot shortage starting to take effect?

Every day I KIA at least 15-20 pilots, some days even better.

[Arkham]

Its now for me early April '44, and I still can't break the f'ing Gustov line. Oh well, keep pounding I guess.

I am having an interesting result with my campaign against luft pilots. A few game days ago I had 90 pilots KIA and another 100 or so wounded. As I kill more and more, less and less planes are able to take off and be damaged. So I am now seeing a result where I get something like 4-500 luft sorties during the day, and 3500 available planes. Thus, my AS score is dropped to two since there are so many ready planes.

All these planes sitting empty on the runways without pilots to go break them. Kind of funny honestly.