building forts & airfields...

[unmerged(19484)]

1st the definition of an HOI air unit is about 100 planes - so you will need more then one (!) truck for the ground crews !

when you just make a short rebasing trip with a 12er stack of strategic bombers we talk about ~ 12 x 100 x 7 (pilot, co, tail-gunner, and ~ 4 more men on the guns) 8400 men for the aircrews...

...ok and what do you think how many ground-crews you will need for refueling, repairing, reloading 1200 planes ?

...AFAIK an averager STR bomber has 4t payload: means you have to bring in 4800 tons of bombs for one attack ~ at least 120 trucks ...

...and don't forget the truck for the fuel ! :rofl:


and in HOI you can even make a quick rebase stop in the middle of nowhere !

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I think you forgot about your original post, and the current argument... This is about a level 1 airbase, which, from your original post, can only support fighters, so your STR bombers ex above is irrelevant. I think supporting a single fighter unit with a level 1 airfield is a great idea, and I also think it should take much quicker than 30 days. You'd have to build up those airbases with more equiptment / infrastructure.

I also thought an HOI air unit was more like 20 aircraft, not 100.

I also REALLY like the idea of a provs infrastructure being the determining factor to airbase size. It makes a lot of sense.

 

[unmerged(17541)]

I think you forgot about your original post, and the current argument... This is about a level 1 airbase, which, from your original post, can only support fighters, so your STR bombers ex above is irrelevant. I think supporting a single fighter unit with a level 1 airfield is a great idea, and I also think it should take much quicker than 30 days. You'd have to build up those airbases with more equiptment / infrastructure.

I also thought an HOI air unit was more like 20 aircraft, not 100.

I also REALLY like the idea of a provs infrastructure being the determining factor to airbase size. It makes a lot of sense.

...I took the STRAT for a better explaination of the logistical problem...-...but you are right - in case of a level 1 airfield we talk about interceptors...


...but still about 100 interceptors per unit (AFAIK a HOI unit represents 100 planes) - so an air-marshal could operate (refuel and reammunition - not repair > level 3) with 1200 interceptors from a level 1 airstrip build in 30 days !

...the problem is that in an earlier discussion - someone stated that the AI couldln't handle a rule like: "34 INFRA = max. 3 air units allowed"


...so I agree that you could make an airstrip operable for 20 or even 100 planes in an european 50 INFRA province in a few days...

...but this would also allow to make an airstrip operable for 1200 planes in an african 10 INFRA / 1 IC jungle province in a few days without any penalty as long as you have an intact land connection...

...so I think ~ 30 days would be an average build time for a level 1 airfield abstracted in a way that you doesn't differ where you build one and how many planes will be based there !


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[unmerged(30686)]

Air reconnaissances should be tied to the air units, not to airflieds IMO. The better fields could enhance the recon abilities though.

The trouble is moving air units around for recon doesn't really sit with a division level game.

It's artificial to have to conduct recon with squadrons

IMHO - Tying recon and some low interception capability is good.

The idea has legs

 

[MaximusII]

Maybe it should depend on the total IC and Infra in the province, let say in Berlin you could build an airstrip in about one day, but in Greenland it should take about an 100days...Ok not maybe 100days but you get the point...

And maybe also the amount of troops stationed in the province... Like if you have 12divisions (Infantry for examlpe) in Berlin you should be able of building the province in a matter of game hours...

 

[unmerged(24708)]

airfields

Usually in europe, you needed only a straight patch of land for your propelled airplanes to land and take off.

But basing planes in mountain / jungle isn't. remember guadalcanal.

So I think it should be terrain.

Building airfields is for me too close to micro management, and i am against that. However. Supplies. supplies supplies. I think you should be able to build supply dumps, were you can stockup on supplies (e.g. reorganize) much faster, as well as draw your supplies from instead of a far off national province. Like the ardennes offensive, if the germans had just found that supply dump with 1 million gallons of fueld, perhaps their tanks would have had to stop because they ran out of fuel. Land based convoys(trucks).

anyway my couple of cents

 

[unmerged(30686)]

Building airfields is for me too close to micro management, and i am against that.

Yes me 2, but I am hoping that we wont actually have to drive the bulldozer. I am hoping that SilverDragon's idea is a way of reducing micro-management, particularly of aerial searching and aircraft patrols.

 

[unmerged(17541)]

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...this suggestion should decrease micro !

...you only have one option more what to build in a province...


other gameplay changes:

- you can only base your air-units in a few provinces...

- you have to plan ahead where you want to base your planes...

- after landing operation you need to conquer airfields to bring your heavier planes closer to the front-line...

- with high level airports you won't have to care about recon and some minor interceptor defense...

- you don't have to care to put an division and a leader and keep them in supply for every of your X coastal fortifications...

- you have a chance not to get completely surprised by naval invasions...


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[unmerged(30686)]

I like it. It seems to reduce complexity but at the same time increase realism. WTG

 

[unmerged(32053)]

SilverDragon 72

Two things left:

1) Nobody ever supposed the emergency airstrips to base 12 division Air Army. The emergency thing means that your planes which were damaged or run out of fuel could use it as place to land for refuel/repair. Second purpose - support of small scale operations in case of emergency (main airfields destroyed or your side urgently needs the forward base). So emergency airstrips cant "base" more than one or two airdivisions.

2) You get confused by single airfield icon (in game). There is an airfield system in real life. Typical airfield was supposed to accomodate our in game 100 plane airdivision and nothing more. So, one in game icon = lots of airfields in real life.

So, in matter of days (1-3) you can organise some short (500-600 meters) emergency airstrips or use province road system to operate 1-2 air divisions of interceptors. In matter of weeks (30+ days) you can organise the whole airfield system (1500-1800 meters strips) for one or two Air Armies fully capable of supporting its operations (from interceptors to heavy bombers). Its just a real life experience.

OK. Now lets have some fun .

1st the definition of an HOI air unit is about 100 planes - so you will need more then one (!) truck for the ground crews !
Even light interceptor (FW190, La-5) able to carry one technician aboard. And you can use one truck more than once . But, one division is just a nine or so squadrons. 1 truck for squadron, 9 for an airdivision.

when you just make a short rebasing trip with a 12er stack of strategic bombers
Yeah, sure, just short rebasing of the 8th Air Force bomber groups .

we talk about ~ 12 x 100 x 7 (pilot, co, tail-gunner, and ~ 4 more men on the guns) 8400 men for the aircrews...
Less than motorised division... And all aircrews will fly in its group planes .

...ok and what do you think how many ground-crews you will need for refueling, repairing, reloading 1200 planes ?
Lets say 90.000 men for all the things you've mentioned and not . Most of the ground crew will fly in the bombers. All other will use transport planes.

...AFAIK an averager STR bomber has 4t payload: means you have to bring in 4800 tons of bombs for one attack ~ at least 120 trucks ...
On typical missions the load was 4000-5000 pounds over operating ranges of 1400 miles. Its B-17. But OK. Lets say 120 trucks. Typical german armored division has more than 2000 of trucks . Looks like the whole 8th Air Force will be supplied by trucks, requisited from a medium transport company .

...and don't forget the truck for the fuel !
Sure .

and in HOI you can even make a quick rebase stop in the middle of nowhere !
This is not good . But possible for small units.

 

[unmerged(18788)]

Recon planes couldn't be attached to airfields so that you can get first-handed info about ennemy troops in adjacent provinces? (e.g. level 1 airfield, 1 ennemy province shown, level 2, 2 provinces or 2nd line, ...). Recon planes available at x planes/day, so that you can destroy all in an air raid. Also, airfields could be bombed by ennemy without the presence of any air division (just recon planes and the airstrip itself).

 

[unmerged(17541)]

Recon planes couldn't be attached to airfields so that you can get first-handed info about ennemy troops in adjacent provinces? (e.g. level 1 airfield, 1 ennemy province shown, level 2, 2 provinces or 2nd line, ...). Recon planes available at x planes/day, so that you can destroy all in an air raid. Also, airfields could be bombed by ennemy without the presence of any air division (just recon planes and the airstrip itself).

it should be definietly possible to damage installation like:

- harbours (if they will have different levels - what would be really nice)
- forts
- airfields

....temporarily with strategic or tactical air strikes (or naval or land based ART attacks if range will be fully implemented)


so you could give installation levels one decimal place (4.0 for an undamaged level 4 airfield) getting hit by an airraid this would be reduced to e.g. 2.3 (everything below level x.5 counts as an installation level x) so this airfield could only be used as an level 2 airfield...

...installations should have an automatic regeneration rate of maybe 0.2 or 0.3 points per day...

...this would allow to temporarily close airfields or at least reduce possible operations...

tied units like recons and interceptor defense would automatically be unavailable if the airport level drops...

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[larlin]

as stated before the planes in HoI is managed at a much grander scale then one single airfield...

so it should be build/expand airfield network...

what I would like to see then is that you base airplanes as it is now (kind of) but that those planes will make auto intercept missions over atleast the closest areas some thing like the large regions in Vic... So maybe you should only be able to build airfield networks at this larger scale...

I think this would help the pacific problems as you can tie a couple of Islands togheter in a region and thus make it possible to spread the planes out more...

This would give abit more flexibilety on how many planes you could place in each area...

And to get it depend on infra that I would like =) But then we would need some way to expand the infranetwork to "unindustrialized" areas but that is another issue...

larlin

 

[unmerged(12244)]

it should be definietly possible to damage installation like:

- harbours (if they will have different levels - what would be really nice)
- forts
- airfields

....temporarily with strategic or tactical air strikes (or naval or land based ART attacks if range will be fully implemented)


so you could give installation levels one decimal place (4.0 for an undamaged level 4 airfield) getting hit by an airraid this would be reduced to e.g. 2.3 (everything below level x.5 counts as an installation level x) so this airfield could only be used as an level 2 airfield...

...installations should have an automatic regeneration rate of maybe 0.2 or 0.3 points per day...

...this would allow to temporarily close airfields or at least reduce possible operations...

tied units like recons and interceptor defense would automatically be unavailable if the airport level drops...

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It should also be possible to damage Flak,reducing the lvl. of flak in that province. maybe harder and harder when the anti air are few but definately possible. If we flied 100 sorties over the same province we would sure as hell notice where heavy flak was coming from and react to it. We might not terminate all flak as this seems rather hard in reality but definately reduce it.

 

[unmerged(17541)]

It should also be possible to damage Flak,reducing the lvl. of flak in that province. maybe harder and harder when the anti air are few but definately possible. If we flied 100 sorties over the same province we would sure as hell notice where heavy flak was coming from and react to it. We might not terminate all flak as this seems rather hard in reality but definately reduce it.

...first had AA in the list above - but I took it out cause AA are small or even mobile installations, and AFAIK AA installations (besides radar) never were a primary target in WWII...

...in WWII there were no "wild weasel" sorties nor HARM or any other guided weapons that would allow a good hit rate - so reducing the AA on an abstracted province level for even 20% would mean an extensive carpet bombing - strategically not worth the effort for the not very effective AA installation in WWII from my point of view !


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[unmerged(12244)]

...first had AA in the list above - but I took it out cause AA are small or even mobile installations, and AFAIK AA installations (besides radar) never were a primary target in WWII...

...in WWII there were no "wild weasel" sorties nor HARM or any other guided weapons that would allow a good hit rate - so reducing the AA on an abstracted province level for even 20% would mean an extensive carpet bombing - strategically not worth the effort for the not very effective AA installation in WWII from my point of view !


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Think market garden where the allies bombed certain sites for days just because they thought the germans had so heavy flak there. Ok this was a missunderstanding but eventually lead to the fact that the allied jumped to far from the objectives because of fear of running into german AA.
What this lead to we all know so i would say AA can have a strategic importance. And think that it should be possible to reduce flak by 20% if you fly by a province every week for a year i think you would have a pretty good idea where all the flak was coming from, enough to reduce it by 20 % atleast.

 

[unmerged(28147)]

fortifications should get more abstracted - airfields should be in...


building improving forts and airfields should have the following additoinal effects:


when building fortifications they should always have automatically one INF unit(Agreed, they should at least have some sort of Garrison, though an additional cost to garrison it should be a small amount of manpower. I also don't like how HOI had seperation between Land and sea forts, in reality when you fortify some place you fortify it against every conceived attack, thus you would fortify a coastal provice against sea attacks alone only if it were an island unreachable by small boats or a land bridge of some sort. If it has a connecting land province then you would fortify against both lines of attack.)

- increasing fort level quality / equipment / STR & ORG of this INF unit increases also...(Agreed, and again increasing the Garrison should cost manpower, or a possibility is that you have to build a garrison seperate from the fort, though packaging it into one option is more sensible.)

- this basic defense unit will always stay in fort - means can't be moved, upgraded, disbanded, reinforced or completely destroyed(I disagree on the last point here, if the fort were to fall then the survivors would either surrender, commit suicide or be killed by the attackers.)

- and will get automatically but slowly reinforcements (3 STR per day)

- coastal forts should have an increasing chance to detect sea-based invasions (based on level of fort)(I agree on this, and they should also have at least some minimal effect on ships/convoys transiting through the adjacent sea zone.)


- airfield level - effects - build-time: (60 or 90 days build-time per level)I agree wholeheartedly that airfields should be built, at least permanent ones, though one of the key design factors presented to aircraft engineers back then was to be able to land the plane on a barely improved corn field or other large open space. So maybe as planes get more advanced the newer designs can't land on unimproved provinces.)

1 - fighters & dive can start and land - 30 days

2 - fighters & dive regain ORG when landed - 30 days

3 - fighters & dive regain STR when landed & TAC and Naval can start and land - 45 days

4 - automatic air recon in 50 miles range & TAC and Naval regain ORG when landed - 45 days

5 - Strategic & Transport can start and land & TAC and Naval regain STR when landed - 60 days

6 - automatic air recon in 100 miles range & Strategic & Transport regain ORG when landed - 60 days

7 - free automatic interceptor defense (see fortifications) - Strategic & Transport regain STR when landed - 90 days

8 - automatic air recon in 200 miles - 90 days

9 - Transport can start para ops & free imp. automatic interceptor defense - 120 days

10 - automatic air recon in 250 miles & free adv. automatic interceptor defense - 120 days(Actually there should be a seperate building for this, maybe a radar station, or intelligence station. These would improve your chances of detecting enemy formations. Though for starters there should be limitations on where they can be built. Like at the very beginning only intelligence can be built in the capital of the country.)

 

[unmerged(17541)]

- increasing fort level quality / equipment / STR & ORG of this INF unit increases also...(Agreed, and again increasing the Garrison should cost manpower, or a possibility is that you have to build a garrison seperate from the fort, though packaging it into one option is more sensible.)

...absolutely agree that every fort level should cost MP

- this basic defense unit will always stay in fort - means can't be moved, upgraded, disbanded, reinforced or completely destroyed(I disagree on the last point here, if the fort were to fall then the survivors would either surrender, commit suicide or be killed by the attackers.)

ok - this was a little bit unclear: what I mean is that the garrison could go to 0 STR - but shouldn't be completely destroyed they will automatically regain STR and ORG (at min. MP costs) - but if the province falls to the enemy forces you will loose the fort and the garrison and the enemy will start to garrison the fort!

10 - automatic air recon in 250 miles & free adv. automatic interceptor defense - 120 days(Actually there should be a seperate building for this, maybe a radar station, or intelligence station. These would improve your chances of detecting enemy formations. Though for starters there should be limitations on where they can be built. Like at the very beginning only intelligence can be built in the capital of the country.)

I made the assumption that a province with level 10 airfield installations will have radar stations and maybe even some kind of intelligence installations...


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[Oscu]

.....
when building fortifications they should always have automatically one INF unit(Agreed, they should at least have some sort of Garrison, though an additional cost to garrison it should be a small amount of manpower. I also don't like how HOI had seperation between Land and sea forts, in reality when you fortify some place you fortify it against every conceived attack, thus you would fortify a coastal provice against sea attacks alone only if it were an island unreachable by small boats or a land bridge of some sort. If it has a connecting land province then you would fortify against both lines of attack.)

No, not quite. Singapore was heavily fortified aganist naval attack, but had little or no fortifications aganist land attacks (mainly because land attack was considered impossible to carry out through the jungle).

Weaponry used in different type of fortications vary quite a lot. Coastal fortresses had huge guns that would have been of little worth aganist land targets...or atleast could be done with lighter guns. Weapon mounts, target areas, detection equipment and fire control systems are different.

AFAIK fortresses on french coast were not heavily fortified aganist land attacks and Tobruk had little in a way of coastal fortress (not sure though).

Your basic MG bunker is pretty much the same, but has little effect aganist battleships. And just the reminder of what the brits did aganist chinese in opium wars: Since their guns had longer range brits bombarded chinese fortresses to pieces (as well as their ships) and chinese could not return fire.

 

[unmerged(17541)]

Your basic MG bunker is pretty much the same, but has little effect aganist battleships. And just the reminder of what the brits did aganist chinese in opium wars: Since their guns had longer range brits bombarded chinese fortresses to pieces (as well as their ships) and chinese could not return fire.

...your absolutely right - only problem is that coastal fortification don't damage ships in HOI !


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[unmerged(32053)]

Its nice to fight micromanagment but not by such ahistorical things... It took only 12 (twelve) days to get the AAA batallions over Channel and set them up. With all equipment including SCR-584 radars... Guys, all those 45-120 days periods - its just impossible.