Couple of questions regarding air units

[Alycidon]

Hiya,

Quick couple of questions about things I've previously read on the forum but now can't find them.

First relates to air wings. I seem to recall reading that only 6 same type wings will be able to participate in missions at any one time, making it pointless basing more than 6 wings there. I can't remember if this was in respect of wings at an airbase or within a zone but I think it was relating to air superiority missions. Does anyone know?

The second question - I've read about 'over stacking' CV's with aircraft. How do you do this and what's the optimal number of aircraft if you do?

Thanks for any replies in advance

 

[Bryartuck]

1. Not sure, but i vaguely remember seeing something like that as well. If it exists it is a limitation on the air zone.

2. There is a doctrine on the right side of the Base Strike tree that reduces the penalty for overcrowding your carriers. It basically allows you to carry about 50% more planes than your deck space indicates. You can overcrowd without that, or go over that limit with the doctrine, but you will start taking penalties to your sortie efficiency.

 

[treaftis]

Check out the guide at https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzLOehWwWQepZ3dKU2M2amxGbE0 its got tons of good info from the community.

 

[browd]

2. There is a doctrine on the right side of the Base Strike tree that reduces the penalty for overcrowding your carriers. It basically allows you to carry about 50% more planes than your deck space indicates. You can overcrowd without that, or go over that limit with the doctrine, but you will start taking penalties to your sortie efficiency.

The Massed Strikes doctrine reduces the overcrowding penalty to mission efficiency from -2% to -1%. So, if you have a carrier that has a capacity of 100 (just to make the math easy), and put 105 planes on that carrier, the overall air wing's mission efficiency would be 90% (-10%) by default, but 95% (-5%) with Massed Strikes. Of course you can overstuff the carrier at the cost of further reductions in mission efficiency. To use the +50% example above, +50% planes would result in mission efficiency of about 50% (with Massed Strikes; it would be roughly 0% without Massed Strikes), but you've got 150% planes available to do battle, so....

 

[Dalwin]

The limitation is 6 wings per air zone on an air superiority mission. having more than 6 is not entirely useless since casualties will sometimes cause some wings to need rest.

There are also technically a limit on number of wings for the other aircraft types but the numbers are so high that no one is ever realistically going to run into them.

For carriers there are some techs that allow you a certain percentage of over stacking without penalty. If you look at your fleet summary (icon in upper right) at the top of the resulting table in the upper left you will see this stat and others. If I recall correctly what over stacking allows is not to directly get more planes into battle, at least at first. However, since the bug that allowed carriers to replenish planes in the middle of a battle has been fixed, those extra planes can be used so that your subsequent sorties during the same battle are not under strength.

Regardless of exactly how that situation works, here is how you set a carrier to be over stacked. First you have to have the carrier not be part of an active mission, either in port or just sitting still in a sea zone. This will show an icon just like the ones that mark airfields on the map. You then get to adjust the size of the wings aboard the carrier just as you do with any other airfield.