some ideas for PWCG: scrambling AI/resource tracking

[anfieldroad]

Hey Patrick,

 

I don't recall this being part of RoF PWCG, but can it be done?  That would make it so much more awesome if enemy airfields could spawn an AI fighter flight that appears, starts up, taxis to the runway and takes off to intercept any aircraft that go within a radius of their airfield.  You could then bounce them as they take off.

 

Another thing would be resource tracking/resupply.  Your airfield only has a certain amount of aircraft and munitions and if you lose aircraft and use up bombs etc then you will have to say, fall back to a different aircraft (i.e. your campaign might be using BF109G2s but then you run out and end up flying the older BF109F4s until they run out.  

 

If you run out then you either have to wait until a resupply happens (could be once a week or something) and then no missions get generated plus everytime you generate a mission you could throw in a chance that your airfield gets attacked.  Normally where it would throw up a scramble mission (haven't seen one in BoS PWCG yet but they were in RoF PWCG) instead because you have no aircraft to defend it pilots get killed/injured on the ground and supplies get destroyed.

 

You could also have resupply escort missions where a JU52 does an air start and you have to escort it to your base.

 

Also, how about having a limited amount of pilot replacements.  At the moment it seems as if when someone dies or is captured a replacement appears straight away.  How about a delay before they appear and possibilities that no replacements are found.

 

In many of these scenarios you could find your squadron gets decomissioned due to lack of pilots/aircraft/supplies and you get a forced transfer to another squadron.

 

If PWCG can track all this info then the campaign becomes a lot more interesting and realistic.

Another suggestion, from a software development point of view, have you considered doing the campaigns in a database format of some kind rather than text?  Some windows equivalent of something like berkeley DB (sorry I'm a linux guy hehehe).

[PatrickAWlson]

It would add an element to the game but I really don't think it would add to realism.  I would take thousands of lines of code to emulate logistics across the front and the net result would be about the same as what you have now: rapid replacement of pilots and aircraft but with significantly reduced quality of pilots due to losses.

 

In WWI pilots were replaced in a matter of a couple of days, sometimes the next day.  Not as sure about WWII but I suspect it was similar.  This is why replacement happens by the next mission.  What does happen in PWCG is that the new pilot is usually lower rank and almost always a novice that has to be worked up, also like it was in real life.  If you take losses you will be flying with a bunch of novices instead of better quality pilots.  

 

Aircraft and ordnance were also generally not a problem.  I have never heard of a lack of bombs, bullets or even planes.  Lack of fuel hampered German operations late in the war but that's about it in terms of material shortages.  It was really all about the best pilots getting killed over time.

 

Ju52 missions might be an outcome but that would not necessarily be realistic.  Resupply was carried out by rail.  Aircraft were flown in on ferry flights, often by the replacement pilot. Transport aircraft would never be used as a primary source of resupply.

 

I have thought of moving everything to a database, but I have not done so for several reasons.  The biggest is that my code base requires no external resources - not even Apache libraries.  It is pure out of the box Java.  You can drop it into Eclipse and it builds immediately.  That solves a lot of packaging headaches.  The text format is also nice because it allows others to easily contribute.  I have had several aces and hundreds of skin records contributed by others for RoF.  User contributions have not really taken off for BoS but the capability is there.

 

I do have scrambles implemented for some scenarios like airfield attack or airfield overflight.  The planes don't take off, they start in the air over the field at low altitude.  

 

Appreciate the input and I'm sorry to disappoint.  This has been asked before and I have never done it because the return on investment (my time ) is not there.