Axis turn 1 guide

[Farfarer61]

I have stopped airfield bombing on T1 altogether and do no GS. Put AA units in your mobile formations. When you have enough AP move LW Flak regiments into each mobile HQ and hope your opponent likes to interdict. Set intercept to max.

[No idea]

ORIGINAL: Schattensand

Nowadays you do it more like this

1) Setting to fly first turn to 5 or 10%
Ground support to 0%
Ground support escort to 300% highest possible
General ground support to yes
2)Take a look at your fighter force or airforce in general
3)There are 5 or 6 airfilds rather far away a) from the front and b) from their headquarters. Move the units more to the front or the HQ to the units, at least bring the units in 5 hex distant to HQ.
4)Scout the map and the frontnear airfields till info everywhere is visible.
5)Start with the ground attack, usually in the north.
While your infantry advances your fighters will turtle shot the red air force. If you came close to an airfield stop your advance and move on in direction or sector of an other airfield. Do this over the whole map. Direct your advance to a point that you can overrun all frontnear airfields , but dont do it right now. Do all possible infantry fighting before overrunning any airfield.
6)Take annother look at your fighter force. You have shot down 500 to 700 sov airplanes right now for only few losses.
7)Now start the airfield bombing, setting both on 100 or above. Start with the frontnear airports, use Do117, Ju87, Me 110 and Me 109, simply all what is not He 111 or Ju 88. Do all out attacks.
If you click on an Tac bomber airfield you will have them on the screen together with all fighters in range.
Bomb only if the prey is plentyful and use all what you have. Some of the sov airfields only have halve of the original aircraft on duty by now. These you devastate normally in one single blow.
Repeat that with all airfields you can reach by tac bombers, Do 117 and the fighters.
8)If an airfild is down to 20 or 30 planes it is no more an good target. So the next part is overrun that airfields.
9) Now move if you can your fighters over the former border, not more than 5 hexes so, but still in command range, Cr is very important.
10) Now its time for your high altitude bombers, they should not have a single mile flown by now.
Pick the red airfields that you can reach with escort fighters first. If the target is 150 to 300 plane strong one again do all out attacks.
The open field airports are generally a better target, that those in citys, may be even dislodge city airports by overrunning first.
11) Now take the middle range away airfields, prefer the Bomber fields, that you can reach with your escort fighters. Prefer the fields your Panzers will overrun later.
12) Do the bombing in Kishinev and whatever you can reach fron Rumanian soil, till no flying mile is more availible.
13) Overun the airfilds with your tanks as it comes.
14) Refuel some panzercorps, a little is possible even in first turn.
15) Look at your commanders screen and to the death toll. Experience is high, Moral is high, even Ju87 should still have not less than 75 moral. If you do less than 3500 sov plane after first turn is over you still can make it better.

OR if that is to much detail play for you and you prefer lightning airstrike first tactik at least place your airfields in command range befor flying, so that your " My Ju87 are so useless, moral is downs to 40, sniff" days are over. That Ju 87 are later in game turn 2+ passable night bombers btw.

Enough for today

I have tried it and the soviets get far less casualties (around 2900 vs almost 4000) and I get more (135 vs 56). Oh, and, I dont know why, my fighter units get almost as many casualties as the soviet ones when they fight each other in ground support battles.

I guess some things have changed how air warfare works since you wrote that post.

[mogami]

Hi, I think most of the advice is obsolete. I really don't like "don't fly recon because you know where there at from playing before" Fly the recon any way.

[56ajax]

I think some of the advice is still ok. I will give it a go under 1.08.08 beta and see what happens. In the meantime I can tell

1.Moving an airbase uses up aircraft Travel; moving by rail uses substantially less (up to 75% less) travel than moving by road.
2. German AI destroys approx 2000 russian aircraft in T1
3. Some claim they can destroy up to 5000 aircraft in T1 by moving airbases, hitting airfields with Tac Bombers, then using long range etc.
4. The Russians have large numbers of spare aircraft in their Pool so replenishment should come reasonably quickly.
5. The Russian aircraft that will do you some damage are the IL2 and the SUs, especially down South, so bomb them into dust.
6. If you can take out the more modern airframes as they cost more to build.

[chaos45]

what the bombing of the soviet airforce does tho is it crushes experience and morale...which helps to keep the soviet airforce from affecting the battle in the early turns much.

[56ajax]

Well it certainly crushes Morale which has dropped between 10 and 35 points depending on the unit but Experience seems to be down about 5 points (so far in my incomplete analysis)

[Juergen069]

I have a possibly noob question. I just noticed while setting up on turn 1, that many of the German Divisions do not have commanders at all. Can you assign Divisional Commanders or do you not need them? Is this also something you can fix in the editor? Thanks for any info.

[821Bobo]

No, commanders can be assigned only to corps level(and only to HQ units) and above.

[Juergen069]

Ah, thanks for that. That makes sense.

[Neogodhobo]

Would be great to be able to assign divisional and Regiments commanders.

[Chris21wen]

ORIGINAL: Neogodhobo

Would be great to be able to assign divisional and Regiments commanders.

Not saying it wouldn't, but it would increase the complexity of the game not to mention the leader Database requirements and everything associated with it. Do they do that in WitW, can't remember?

[Beria]

The WitE1.0 data set is actually set up to have divisional and lower level commanders - and you can see some of them in the scenario data even if they are not used by the program. See tm.asp?m=4437854

[Crackaces]

ORIGINAL: 56ajax

I think some of the advice is still ok. I will give it a go under 1.08.08 beta and see what happens. In the meantime I can tell

1.Moving an airbase uses up aircraft Travel; moving by rail uses substantially less (up to 75% less) travel than moving by road.
2. German AI destroys approx 2000 russian aircraft in T1
3. Some claim they can destroy up to 5000 aircraft in T1 by moving airbases, hitting airfields with Tac Bombers, then using long range etc.
4. The Russians have large numbers of spare aircraft in their Pool so replenishment should come reasonably quickly.
5. The Russian aircraft that will do you some damage are the IL2 and the SUs, especially down South, so bomb them into dust.
6. If you can take out the more modern airframes as they cost more to build.

Just to say the Kabuki Dance uses up no airmiles to move an airbase [8D] See "They crossed over the border" or 8MP AAR's

[Dinglir]

ORIGINAL: 56ajax
3. Some claim they can destroy up to 5000 aircraft in T1 by moving airbases, hitting airfields with Tac Bombers, then using long range etc.

Attached is the Turn one Air kill report from my current game with SparkleyTits (it ended up at 5691 kills).

I certainly did not do a thorough analysis of the options before I started (I even had one Gruppe with Stuka left unused at the end of the turn). I would estimate that 6.000 is not unreachable.

More on that once we get to the AAR (currently doing turn three, will release when turn 5 is done).

[HardLuckYetAgain]

ORIGINAL: Dinglir

ORIGINAL: 56ajax
3. Some claim they can destroy up to 5000 aircraft in T1 by moving airbases, hitting airfields with Tac Bombers, then using long range etc.

Attached is the Turn one Air kill report from my current game with SparkleyTits (it ended up at 5691 kills).

I certainly did not do a thorough analysis of the options before I started (I even had one Gruppe with Stuka left unused at the end of the turn). I would estimate that 6.000 is not unreachable.

More on that once we get to the AAR (currently doing turn three, will release when turn 5 is done).

6,000+ has already been reached and exceeded in a games already. So you Sir are 100% correct.

[Balou]

What air doctrine settings ?

[Colbert]

done manually so air doctrine settings make no difference

[schmolywar]

Can we clear the air on this in 2019? Can anyone tell me exactly how they manage to destroy over 5k planes on turn?
There are too many AARs to navigate to find this info. Thanks!

[joelmar]

tm.asp?m=4129604

And I also add those extra explanations about Kabuki and air war management that is a big must read, from Telemecus Air war expert #1, it spans a couple of posts:

fb.asp?m=4609762

[Warofthe2ndWorld]

Just out of curiosity, when an airfield is attacked by either side, what does a colon and the two numbers on each side for a certain aircraft mean? (E.g. 12 : 15 IL-2)