Air supply woes

[DTomato]

Not having much luck as the Allies in late '44 using air supply. I'm told that there is insufficient freight at airfields, or I'm losing huge numbers of transports to flak.

I tried building depots near English airfields, but that hasn't helped. I'm also building an airbase in London as a transport base, figuring it will never run out of supply.

As for drop hexes, it seems suicidal to drop supplies next to a German hex (which are always full of flak). Is it better to stick your armor on an airfield, and then transport supplies to there?

[Joel Billings]

Always much better to transport supplies to an airfield. Much less get to the units if they have to drop them out of the aircraft. Best not to drop on the front line as you found due to enemy flak.

I'm surprised you're having problems with freight in England unless you don't have depots near the airfields with available vehicles. Always best to have a depot in the airfield if it's on a rail hex so you know you have enough. If you have a situation where you're getting the message and you think it's in error, you can attach it her or send it to 2by3@2by3games.com and I'll take a look.

[Seminole]

Not having much luck as the Allies in late '44 using air supply. I'm told that there is insufficient freight at airfields, or I'm losing huge numbers of transports to flak.
I tried building depots near English airfields, but that hasn't helped. I'm also building an airbase in London as a transport base, figuring it will never run out of supply.

Does having a staging base selected (left click on a friendly airbase) in England before trying to move air transport the freight resolve the problem?

[LiquidSky]

I had that problem a lot as well when I play the allies...

I tried asking months ago where the supply actually comes from....was it trucked in from nearest Depots, or used from the airfield itself? Or do they get it from the staging airbase? I didn't get a satisfactory answer so I tried some simple tests.

I tried putting a depot in and around the airfields my transports are based at...that seemed to work okay.

As the Germans I am trying something different by having my air transports based close to my national supply....as a result, they never seem to run out of supply when I fly.

Flak on the otherhand is a big pain in the butt. It seems that every single enemy unit they fly over gets to shoot at them. I put a bug report in once because I was flying a freight mission to units in the middle of France which was all mine. Because they happen to fly over some isolated port that contained Germans, they got to shoot at me...but I didn't know that, and couldn't figure out why I was suffering flak losses.

I usually fly auto, but I think you cannot actually choose the path they take, although you can influence by choosing the staging base.

EDIT: I did notice in our game that on one turn you did take a rather large number of losses from what looked like to be around 1000 flak guns. They must have flown along my units in the front.

[RedLancer]

The latest exe in test has reduced AA effectiveness (plus loads of new goodies).

[Joel Billings]

Gary remembers putting in a little variation in the flight paths of transports so they don't always fly a direct straight line to the target, but it's only a 1 or 2 hex variation IIRC. You can use stage bases to try to get the transports to avoid flak if you can. As far as Gary and I remember, the goods comes from the airfield that the transports start from (not the stage base), and if the airfield doesn't have enough it will try to pull in freight from nearby depots. I don't know how restrictive the rules are for this auto resupply (i.e. if there have to be unused trucks at the depot or if it will pull in some from the vehicle pool). If you are within 1 hex of the depot then you don't need vehicles, so it's always safest to have a well stocked depot in or adjacent to the airfield.