Stacking Penalty vs Leader Experience

[inselkammer]

i have just build up a airforce as germany with around 50 figthers for the air battle against the USA over the canal. now my problem is that the leaders of figthers usually gain experience very slowly so its difficult to get a decent air marshall.

so my question is. in an airfight between, lets say 20 fighters each, who performes better: the major with experience level 4 or the airmarshall with experience level 1 ?

 

[Umpa Lumpa]

Im fairly sure air commander skills only add 2% combat bonus per level whereas land commanders add 5% per level so id say the air marshall would be better.

 

[Pal]

Im fairly sure air commander skills only add 2% combat bonus per level whereas land commanders add 5% per level so id say the air marshall would be better.

Yes. But why not have both? Your air units are limited to four squadrons anyway, so you could have two groups commanded by an MjG and one commanded by an air marshal. All three leaders would gain experience, while there would still be no OCL penalty.

Btw, it is NOT stacking penalty, but over-command-limit penalty. The two are absolutely different and should not be confudes in forum discussions.

 

[unmerged(42723)]

now my problem is that the leaders of figthers usually gain experience very slowly so its difficult to get a decent air marshall.

If you don't mind the gameyness, send some fighter leaders to do ground attack or interdiction missions early to get xp.

 

[son of liberty]

If you don't mind the gameyness, send some fighter leaders to do ground attack or interdiction missions early to get xp.

Why is strafing the enemy gamey?

 

[unmerged(42723)]

It's not neccessarily, but IMO it is in certain situations like when you're attacking a single enemy div for ages for no other purpose than to gain xp. And yes, I sometimes do it myself

 

[Tornadoli]

It's not neccessarily, but IMO it is in certain situations like when you're attacking a single enemy div for ages for no other purpose than to gain xp. And yes, I sometimes do it myself

What's gamey about that? Gamey is when you do something in the game that's not realistic in real life. But sending a fighter against an enemy division WOULD increase their experience... Target Practice after all.

 

[unmerged(42723)]

What's gamey about that? Gamey is when you do something in the game that's not realistic in real life. But sending a fighter against an enemy division WOULD increase their experience

Not for air combat (or only to the extent they gain xp here for flying and fighting which is certainly not totally useless, but it's not the same as what they do when fighting other air units)

 

[Red Ant]

I think it is gamey (or at least silly) that a commander would gain TONS of actual air combat experience just from ground pounding. IMO there should be 2 types of experience for air force commanders: air-to-air experience and air-to-ground experience as they're totally different.

 

[Tornadoli]

I think it is gamey (or at least silly) that a commander would gain TONS of actual air combat experience just from ground pounding. IMO there should be 2 types of experience for air force commanders: air-to-air experience and air-to-ground experience as they're totally different.

That's a good idea. But just saying it's gamey to gain experience from air-to-ground is silly.

 

[Pal]

But just saying it's gamey to gain experience from air-to-ground is silly.

The gamey thing is that a fighter in the early war has close to no soft attack, so it won't do actual damage to the ground unit. So sending it on said mission serves no pupose than accumulating experience for the leader and the aircraft crew, which makes it much better at air-to-air combat.

Now the fun part starts: If you were to only accumulate experience by the same mission type which you aim to improve your skills in (as is true for all other units), i.e. air superiority, you would get less experience (battles are typically much shorter and also few and far between) which would then be further lowered by the reinforcements (usually you take a lot more damage in dogfights compared to ground attacks, especially pre-armageddon).

So sending all your interceptors and fighters on ground attack or interdiction missions during China/Poland/France in order to make them better at dogfighting in Soviet Russia is clearly abusing the shortcomings of the game engine and thus "gamey".

EDIT: The Armageddon expansion somewhat offsets this as it introduced much higher losses for air-to-ground combat, so your fighters will typically be hurt badly, which is more realistic.

 

[unmerged(3221)]

The most significant experience in the game for air is for unit experience, not for air leaders. If you want to really boost air performance, do a lot of interdiction or ground attack with your fighters or interceptors [along with your bombers]. After getting a couple of experience stars, click on an air battle or air ground battle and look at the unit experience modifiers which are really huge compared with air commander skill. Unit experience is cut in half, so a 44% unit experience is worth 22% in combat effectiveness, which is as good as a skill 6 superior tactician air commander. And 44% unit experience is a comparatively low number after a lot of interdicition or ground attack missions.

 

[unmerged(129995)]

it's insane how good high-experience air units are against ground. in arma (scenario) i had 4 wings of 4 tacs all at 4-5 stars by 1938 they could annhilate entire enemy corps on their own...and then there's their commanders all with skill 5+ from same...imagine that with turbojet tacs.

 

[inselkammer]

but actually this isnt that unhistorical. the stukas, espacially at the beginning of barbarossa, have inflicted huge losses on the red army. the same with the american bombers in the battle of the bulge e.g.

 

[Mjarr]

I think it is gamey (or at least silly) that a commander would gain TONS of actual air combat experience just from ground pounding.

Not entirely. Even though it is valid point that it does not give you real air combat experience, it does give you flight hours + spotting experience.

Spotting unit from airbourne is not that easy. Spotting ground units would also give you some practise how to pay attension to surrounding area which would mean benefit even in air-to-air combat. Spotting your target well enough can be greater advatange than having your entire flight full of combat aces (in terms of kills) with not-so-good spotting experience.

Also, it gives the commander some practical experiences how to command while flying and so on. No matter how well you're trained or how skilled you are, having no idea what you're doing can be fatal in combat.

so your fighters will typically be hurt badly, which is more realistic.

Depends on the target. Unprotected (in terms of AA) soft column can be destroyed even with machineguns from airbourne without any real threat, considering that you can be strafing with 400km\h+ speeds from above, or even slightly protected convoy is still fairly vulnerable if the SPAA vehicles are knocked out, and spotting a vehicle where tracers are flying from is fairly easy.

If it's fixed AA, then it's another story. You might be able to do some high speed low-level sweep around the area but the odds are, you're going to get hit enough to be forced to return to base which would possibly result in irreparable loss. Or crash land. Or simply go down