ORIGINAL: Chris H
ORIGINAL: morvael
1) Cons: you will go over support provided by airbase and will lose more planes due to operational losses. Only 6 groups per base needed to spawn new bases.
2) Cons: costs AP, simply reduce load to less than 6 per base if you don't want more bases. A temporary, AP-free solution to conserve manpower is to reduce MAX TOE to 50% for unused airbases.
3) Cons: see 2)
4&5) In my game I have estabilished two "types" of airbases. VVS and not VVS. VVS would get 1 long-range level bomber and 1 FB group set to night missions, 1 transport and 1 recon. They were to support partisans, resupply troops and recon. All non-VVS airbases (whatever their name) got the same setup: 3 F/FB, 1 tactical bomber (Il-2), 1 light level bomber (Pe-2). Later, when the F/FB/TacB groups expanded to 40 aircraft and level bomber to 32, I removed 1 F/FB. Each front had about 5-6 such non-VVS airbases and 1 VVS airbase.
Thanks
1. So 9 is the max but 6 is optimal.
2/3. I was thinking more about the start
4/5. So a/b type has no effect upon the game.
1- it depends, each type of air unit brings a different demand on the airbase. Ideally you don't want to exceed this as the number of inoperative and destroyed planes will increase.
When 20 is your default air unit size, then the U2s take next to no space. Try as an experiment loading up a base with 9 and you'll see. You can also get away with 9 FBs or Ground support units. But the Il-4s take up a lot of space so you'd struggle to fit in more than 3 or 4 of these.
2/3 - whether you mix fighters and bombers or not is a matter of choice at most bases (again before the late 42 re-organisation). One gain to keeping the Ground Support separate (Il-2, Su-2 and the U2VS) is they cause more 'kills' according to the game logic. Thus those bases have a higher chance of flipping to Gds status than either FB or mixed allocations.
So thats worth keeping in mind, but I'd be as influenced by the situation and what I was trying to do on a given structure.
4/5 - only VVS (use as Morvael suggests) and the PVO bases do anything special. The latter should only have fighters/fighter bombers and use them for interception. I tie both to the remaining BAK commands (I keep 3 of these) and deploy where I want extra fighter cover or to prioritise the partisan war.