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Separate aircraft construction from pilots/aircrew training

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Currently when I build an air unit I'm am building the actual aircraft + pilots + ground crew + the various support facilities required. On top of this I spend generic manpower points. The problem is that this over simplifies the pilots component while under-counting the total personnel required. (It's only 1 manpower point for a fighter unit) Pilot training is very specialized and dedicated schools were set up to train air crew. The loss of experienced air crew could not quickly be replaced. Significant numbers of German air crew were lost over England both killed and captured and this hindered the German airforce more than the loss of aircraft. Late in the war there were thousands of German fighter aircraft built but not flown because of shortages of pilots and fuel. French aircraft manufacturers built hundreds of aircraft up to May 1940 that were never flown. It seems the build cost for aircraft should be a bit lower and pilot/aircrew training added to create a separate pool. Air losses over enemy territory would reduce the pilot pool more than losses over friendly territory. More generic manpower should be required to fill the non air crew roles in an airforce. Late in the war thousands of German groundcrew were conscripted into ground units (the over-equiped but poorly trained Luftwaffe Divisions) to replace losses on the eastern front.

So:
1. Add air training schools by allowing pilot training. Implement similarly to the convoy construction option.
2. Each air unit would require 1 pilot point. A pilot point mans an air unit at 100% readiness.
3. An air unit reduced to 50% aircraft after combat over enemy/sea territory would lose, say, 40% of the pilots (allowing for stragglers returning by various means)
4. An air unit reduced to 50% aircraft after combat over friendly territory would lose, say, 15% of the pilots.
5. Air unit construction costs are reduced slightly.
6. Air units are created by building individual aircraft into a pool which is reduced when the air unit is activated. similar to the new clues about tank production. Each air unit uses 100 aircraft to be full strength.
7. An air unit also requires 4 generic manpower points which is recovered if the air unit is disbanded. It is not lost by air combat. It is lost if the air unit is overrun on the ground by land units. It would need to be replaced before the air unit is functional again. The generic manpower suffers attrition normally.
8. The efficiency of air crew training would be a research item. This then allows the huge efforts done by the USA to man their air fleets to be modeled better.

Specialist training could be extended to naval and tank crew but air crew is the most important.
 
That's not a bad idea for air/navy, although I'd skip the tank crew (the micromanagement for that would be hell).

EDIT: It'd also be good to take into consideration flight schools and such, as they'd require personal in the form of staff and teachers.
 
Actually someone had made this request long ago too.

Separation of Tanks and Crews i.e. Crews produced as infantry and then motorised instantly or mechnaised/Armored with a short training schedule.
Crews trained as pilots and then transferred to Bombers/Fighters with a short training.
etc.

Will be better and historical. In-case you have shortage of trucks or tanks, those infantry can be put on foot to fight, instead of resting at Berlin!! (though that is a waste of their experience)
 
I really really like the idea of aircrews since it played a big role in WW2 but I would say trained manpower for everything else would be enough. Everything else would be overkill.
 
I like it.
Similar to officers you get pilots. Than your effectivness level depends on percentage of pilots you have. This can represent the different training level of US and japanese pilots at the end of the war.
 
Pilot/aircrew training would also be affected by the length of training provided just like the normal manpower training setting. The highest level pilot training should take many months but produce better pilots. When desperate a country can reduce training time for more pilots faster but less effective ones. This would reflect ww2 in Germany and Japan.
 
Great idea. In the Battle of Britain training new air crews was probably more important than producing actual planes. The amount of highly trained air crews that the Germans lost in that battle meant that the luftwaffe was never really able to recover. Meanwhile the british struggled with having far less experienced airmen that germany, meaning that it had to throw fresh recruits against the luftwaffe. But fighting over home territory meant that the raf could recover more of these air crews. Maybe that could be something else that could be implemented? A percentage of air crews being recovered from lost aircraft?
 
tommylotto said:
Just make them use officers (instead of MP) for pilots so that it is a drain on leadership points.
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The reason you want them separate is for example Germany ( that trains expert tank crews/officers ) should not automatically get equally good sailors for the Navy (because this is a new area for them). They need to invest time and resources to train their navy personell.

Same argument with say Japan and their tank crews, just because they had lots of naval academies and good naval officers they should not automatically have expert trained armor crew/officers.
 
Pop could be done in a somewhat similar way to Victoria 2. You have your "general pop" pool, from which you train soldiers, officers, pilots, navy and tank crew. Though you'd have much more control over it than you do in Vicky.
 
While I'm not sure how to track/differ quality per say, the fact that we have equipment pools would in theory allow the game to track a near endless amount of man & equipment. So on the equipment side, you'd track M4 andP-51 pools, but in men...you could track NCO, Pilots, Commandos, Infantry, etc.

...but I have no idea how you could easily and meaningfully separate a nation's skill with that equipment.
 
Alex_brunius said:
The reason you want them separate is for example Germany ( that trains expert tank crews/officers ) should not automatically get equally good sailors for the Navy (because this is a new area for them). They need to invest time and resources to train their navy personell.

Same argument with say Japan and their tank crews, just because they had lots of naval academies and good naval officers they should not automatically have expert trained armor crew/officers.
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German Naval leadership wasn't really that bad? or was it? i never thought so, officers like Lutjens, Ciliax, Raeder were certainly good ones at the upper level.
And the U-Boat armed churned out a lot of aces esp. in 1939-1942 period. It never had a shortage of good men or officers, just that technology on allied side (read :long range escorts and airplanes) destroyed them. Also it delayed introduction of 'snorkel' and other such technical aspects, but overall Doenitz and his boys esp. first half of the war fought a good fight.
 
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shri said:
German Naval leadership wasn't really that bad? or was it? i never thought so, officers like Lutjens, Ciliax, Raeder were certainly good ones at the upper level. And the U-Boat armed churned out a lot of aces esp. in 1939-1942 period. It never had a shortage of good men or officers, just that technology on allied side (read :long range escorts and airplanes) destroyed them. Also it delayed introduction of 'snorkel' and other such technical aspects, but overall Doenitz and his boys esp. first half of the war fought a good fight.
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It was not that bad, but it was just as big of an limitation for how quickly they could expand the Kriegsmarine that their lack of naval yards to build capital ships in was.

Even if we say that they somehow could have built 10 battleships and 10 carriers until 1941 like we can in HoI3...

They would have been forced to crew them with really badly trained crew and clueless fresh recruits.
You simply cannot just wave your hand and have 100'000 skilled naval academy graduates appear out of thin air! Those things take decades of tradition to build up the kind of training facilities and knowledge that UK, USA and Japan had.

Note that I'm talking more of the training of crews/specialists then the training of a few top officers here. But it's basically a similar situation with specialists like pilots and tank drivers/crew as well.


Especially the war in the pacific motivates more detail in this area due to how the fuel shortage in Japan near the end of the war forced them to have basically a non-existent training program compared to hundreds of flight hours for the US pilots. Japan had plenty of pretty decent aircraft to fly in, but even with identical aircraft they would probably have had a loss ratio of 5:1 simply due to skill and training level ( and the historical levels IIRC were worse then 10:1 ).
 
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Alex_brunius said:
It was not that bad, but it was just as big of an limitation for how quickly they could expand the Kriegsmarine that their lack of naval yards to build capital ships in was.

Even if we say that they somehow could have built 10 battleships and 10 carriers until 1941 like we can in HoI3...

They would have been forced to crew them with really badly trained crew and clueless fresh recruits.
You simply cannot just wave your hand and have 100'000 skilled naval academy graduates appear out of thin air! Those things take decades of tradition to build up the kind of training facilities and knowledge that UK, USA and Japan had.

Note that I'm talking more of the training of crews/specialists then the training of a few top officers here. But it's basically a similar situation with specialists like pilots and tank drivers/crew as well.
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Well, i agree; i guess LOTHOS made or was making a mod for HOI3 which would limit ship building of not only Germany but most powers of the world.
Ideally Capital Ships should be able to be built (Aircraft Carrier, Battleship, Battle cruiser and even Heavy Cruiser and also SUBS) only by top 7-8 powers.
Rest should be buying it .
Only DD and Transport and most a few light cruisers is the fleet of most nations.

Maybe Aircraft Carrier can have a long research process with USA, JAPAN and UK the only ones having it in 1936 and rest will take 4-5 years of intense research to build the basic model.

But battleships, battle cruisers- Germans should be able to build simply because the Kaiser's Navy was the 2nd largest/3rd largest in 1914, so there was a semblance of tradition. Same for U-Boats.

P.S.: i know research is already needed, but a player can do it too easily in normal HOI3 game, dockyards, dry docks and training should be modeled more deeply for carrier operations.
 
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Japan had some of the best trained pilots (especially naval) at the beginning of the Second World War. Their problem was they tended to use those pilots until they were killed in combat. The US, on the other hand, rotated pilots back to the States into training positions. This allowed the trainees access to pilots with recent operational experience. Some of the best trained US pilots were the Tuskegee pilots, as they were kept out of combat because they were black. When they finally did make it into combat, they had a reputation of never losing a bomber to enemy fighters. The British Air Commonwealth Air Training program turned out thousands of aircrew, making a vital contribution that kept the RAF, RCAF and RAAF bombers in the sky over Germany, and the Tactical air forces that disrupted German movement in France. The Germans also had an extensive training program before the war, based on flying and glider clubs.
 
battlemac007 said:
Japan had some of the best trained pilots (especially naval) at the beginning of the Second World War. Their problem was they tended to use those pilots until they were killed in combat. The US, on the other hand, rotated pilots back to the States into training positions. This allowed the trainees access to pilots with recent operational experience. Some of the best trained US pilots were the Tuskegee pilots, as they were kept out of combat because they were black. When they finally did make it into combat, they had a reputation of never losing a bomber to enemy fighters. The British Air Commonwealth Air Training program turned out thousands of aircrew, making a vital contribution that kept the RAF, RCAF and RAAF bombers in the sky over Germany, and the Tactical air forces that disrupted German movement in France. The Germans also had an extensive training program before the war, based on flying and glider clubs.
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This was a problem for both Germany and Japan. If you look at the numbers, the best Japanese and (especially) German pilots had way more kills than any of their Allied rivals. But that's because the Allies generally realized that, while it's great to have an ace pilot who can kill 100 planes over his career, it's even better to have 20 pilots who each destroy 10 planes. The Axis also had the aforementioned issues with fuel shortage limiting how much time you can train, and of course late war the Japanese essentially gave up on the whole "training" thing and switched to kamikazes (who required far less training).

But that's one reason why brilliant pilots and tacticians like John Thach only ended up with a relative handful of kills, because the Allies decided "someone who can design a tactic that reliably allows slower planes to beat more maneuverable ones, even when outnumbered, is probably more useful developing more new tactics rather than risking his life on the frontlines."
 
It is not as simple.
For Eg: British faced shortages of Pilots in Battle of Britain for fighters due to the tendency of RAF to have even Admin and other non-essential stuff manned by only pilots.

Luftwaffe prepared for a short war of 2-3 years, hence; after getting a lot of pilots trained in pre-war years and then getting them experience in Spain, they did not scale up the training that was required. Also as rightly pointed out- Japan and Germany ran out of oil by 1943 and hence, had to use their old experience pilots till death as newer pilots were barely getting 100 hours of training compared to the pre-war 200+ hours they were getting.
 
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