Tutorial: Doctrine & Air Directive Settings for Raid Sizes

[Chuske]

This is a quick guide to the meaning of the settings you have in your Air Doctrine and Air Directives (the latter hereafter shortened to AD). This is aimed to help players progress from the AI controlled auto Air Directives to ones they can create themselves to get the maximum control over their air groups.

This tutorial will focus on how to set the number of planes flying in a turn on that AD.

Some definitions

Sortie - 1 sortie is 1 plane flying once on a mission, the same plane can fly multiple sorties per turn
Raid/Strike - This is 1 attack/interception by a group of planes flying together to the same objective

Air Doctrine

Doctrine in effect is like a template for your ADs. Every time you create a new AD its values will be filled out with those in the doctrine of that Air HQ for that AD type.

Days of the week - You can set which days you'll fly during that week, more days will, if enough planes and pilots are fit to fly, mean more sorties and more interdiction, bomb damage etc.

Intensity - is the number of raids you will mount per day. That is set to preset values for each AD type and for the size of the AD (for any given setting you will fly more raids for an AD covering a larger area).

Mis Pct (mission percentage) - defines the size of each raid. Each AD type has a pre-defined number of mission (bomber or recon) aircraft. You can set here a % of this value. 100% uses the default and you can set smaller sizes or larger up to 300% (3 times bigger than normal)

Esc Pct (escort percentage) - defines the relative size of your escort as a % of the number of mission aircraft flying. So 100% you would have equal numbers of bombers and escorts, 50% the escorts would be half the number of bombers.

So if you fly all 7 days at high intensity with 300% Mis Pct you'll put out a lot of sorties over the hexes covered by your AD.

The downside will be your losses and fatigue will go up and your morale may go down. So ideally you need the lowest settings that get the job done.




Air Directive Settings

The AD will be pre-filled with values according to your doctrine settings. So useful to make sure your doctrine settings use the most common settings you'll be using and update them as your needs change.

Once you create an AD then you can modify further.

Basic Settings

Intensity - Determines the number of raids per day, the actual number scales with size of the AD area. Changing this will override the doctrine setting in this AD only and not change the doctrine.


Advanced Settings

The advanced settings allow even finer control of your raids and sorties. All these settings will override the doctrine for this AD only.

Days of week - days this AD will attempt to fly

Strike Num - Overrides the intensity (raids per day) setting above. When set on auto this follows the default for the AD type and intensity setting in the basic settings above. If you edit it you set the number of raids you'd like per day from 0-999 (notice the intensity setting above changes to display custom).

You might not actually see your airgroups fly this number though particularly if you set it high as you just won't have the aircraft to do it, instead you'll get the most raids you can. So setting 999 will always maximize the number of raids you get per day.

Min AC and Req AC - allow you set min and maximum size of the raids flying this AD. Min AC sets the minimum number of available aircraft needed for this AD to fly. Req AC on auto corresponds to your doctrine Mis Pct and Esc Pct settings. If you enter a value the Air HQ will try and fly as many aircraft as it can up to the Req AC value.


Hopefully this will make a little sense. More sorties means more interdiction/bomb damage/recon but will result in more losses, fatigue and possibly morale loss.

[zakblood]

keep up the good work, always nice to have more tips and tutorials imo

[scout1]

Great stuff ......

Any examples of specifics beyond the "definitions" ...... helps to see the influence/impact .... also any advise levels for settings .... as you point out, flying the max sorties burns out the pilots, no sorties keeps them in the pubs .... rough starting point in between ?

[Chuske]

Thanks for your feedback scout1 I'll have a play next time I'm in game and see if I can write down some rules of thumb on that. It is very context dependent though as depends on the AD type, weather and the casualties you took as to how much fatigue and morale loss you take.

You will also have times when you go all out even at high cost in fatigue, morale loss and casualties for particular objective, a good example is the heavy interdiction needed at the start of Operation Cobra in scenarios such as Breakout & Pursuit or the June 44 Campaign. So as the commander you will need to decide on effect vs loss.

[bairdlander2]

If setting AD's manually,I see no need to set doctrines as settings can be changed in advance settings.

[Chuske]

Yes you can set everything in advanced that you can in doctrine but doctrine is applied to all new ADs of that type so you set the doctrine to the most common settings you want saving you having to change as much in each AD. Doctrine is best viewed as a time saving feature or template

So using doctrine is preference thing. Do you need to use it? No, not at all but using it may save you some clicking in setting your ADs

A example might be you want all your 8th AF city bombing ADs to be at 25000ft and be medium intensity. If you set doctrine to 25000ft and medium intensity then all new city bombing ADs created for 8AF will be preset with those settings.

[ckacres]

Thanks Jonboym. Fantastic game and an overwhelming one at that. This and the other Tutorial you have made impart a lot of light on the subject matter at hand.

[bairdlander2]

Another tip I find helpful.When manually choosing AG's for AD,open the CR to view morale,fatigue etc.I was previously clicking on the airgroup itself and viewing the detail screen,CR is easier as you can view several AG's at once,rahter than one at a time.

[ElvisDaKing]

Which altitude are you setting your Air Ground mission ?

Especially for planes armed with rockets, shouldn't you fly very low altitude for better effect ?

[szmike]

Is it normal for morale to plummet when conducting ground attack/ground support missions?

1 week of attacks and 2 weeks of recovery is common for my squadrons regardless of altitude or number of raids per day. Even level bombers on high (about 20k) altitude are affected.