Ideas for making Bomber/Attack planes in SP more satisfying

[JG4_Sputnik]

I've played now about 70 full real missions in SP with Pat Willsons Campaign Generator.

Most of them with fighters, even though I'm more of a Bomber/Attack plane guy.

The main reason is, that flying for example the Stuka in SP is just not that great. 

 

The tree main reasons are:

 

1. Enemy fighters keep to attack you even though they are already badly damaged, and they chase you until either he or you drops dead.

 

2. It's impossible to coordinate defense formations.

 

3. It seems that the enemy tends to attack the player controlled plane.

 

 

 

I don't know if any of these points are settings that could be changed in the Pat Willson Campaign Generator (especially the first) so I assume they are "problems" in the game. Correct me if I'm wrong. One thing though is clearly PWCG's "fault" is that you alsmost have zero fighter cover.

 

Possible solutions could be:

 

1. Teach the AI the "will to survive" and put it above the "I want to get a medal" impulse.

 

2. Give us more options for formations: a "Dense defense formation" would be a blast. At the moment a single Yak can easily upset and "destroy" a formation of 8 Stukas. Would they all stick together and concentrate defense fire -- not so much.

 

3. Well if it is true and not biased then at least randomize it.

 

 

Do you have similar experience and/or solutions for making Bombers more satisfying to fly in SP?

Cheers

 

[Yogiflight]

I can absolutely confirm number 1 and 2. With number 3 I have different experiences. There are missions in which it is as you stated, but there are also missions in which I can do what ever I want, the enemy fighters simply ignore me. I had missions in PWCG, where the russian fighters passed me in about 10m distance to attack an aircraft in front of me, and didn't even care about my firing at them. So the behaviour is quite different, but really strange.

[Finkeren]

Fighters attacking escorted bombers/attack aircraft should really only perform one attack and then break off or engage the escort. The risk of keeping on pressing attacks home on the bombers is way to great with enemy fighters around. 

 

When I fly escort missions, I very often see 2 - 3 enemy fighters lining up to attack the bombers, allowing me to swoop in behind them and shoot them down with ease. if there was a way to prevent this behavior, it would make bombing missions safer, having fighter cover be more effective and loss rates more realistic.

[Blutaar]

My experience is, when i fly SP camapign and go for a ground attack mission, i end up shot down most of the time because the enemy seems to be allways ace ai while my ai are on the lowest level and the enemies are in much higher numbers after a short time. Also the usually 4 enemy fighters circling over the target area are allways go on a headon on me and i have to shoot one down if i want to succesfully attack my target. But even with just 3 enemy fighters most of the mission ends with me shot to pieces because my own ecsort cant handle 3 enemy fighters while there will always spawn a minimum of 4 additional enemy fighters shortly after reaching the target area. This is so frustrating, in one mission yesterday i, as a fw190 equiped for attack artillery mission with just the extra MGFFs, i had to shot down 8 fighters before i could do the mission targets. There where 12 enemy fighters spawned in roughly 15 minutes against me in 2 Fw190s and 4 MC.202s as a escort, 4 circling over the target area at the beginning and 2x a 4 ship fighter spawn near the target area. This is just ridiculous. If i choose a ground attack mission, i really dont want to fight enemy fighters. I wanna do ground stuff without getting outnumbered all the time because my own escort is just bad and if they spot a enemy flight while on the way in to the target area, i end up being alone with my some times 2 Bf110s or P40s.

I like the campaign (random mission generater) for what it is and i really would enjoy it if i could do ground stuff without the frustration part. Hell, even escort and intercept missions do have not as much enemy fighters like ground attack missions most of the time. Another example is airfield attacks, 4 enemy fighters in the sky and additional 4 fighters spawning on the ground while i attack with 2x BF110s and 2x MC.202s, its just aweful.

 

I really hope that the new campaign system will do a better job in creating such missions. Im really tired of it, so i would like to see much less enemy fighters in ground attack missions overall and removing of the circling fighters over the target area and more/better escorts. We sp guys all know that the ai prefers the player plane especially when the player comes first into the ai bubble of awarenes and detection and they will focus even when they chased by friendlys.

[JG4_Sputnik]

Yeah. As if for now, it almost makes no sense to fly Bomber/Attacker in SP - here and there you'll get a lucky mission but for the most part it is a really frustrating experience. 

 

What frustrates me the most is, that I think it is not so much work for the devs to "fix" it - I don't think you have to program a new mechanic into the game rather than just alter what is already there. New AI commands for example as I've already stated. It just can not be that a single fighter can mess up your whole mission. An Bomber missions tend to be much longer than fighter missions, so when you reach your goal after 30mins and get knocked out of the sky by a suicidal fighter then it just sucks.

 

I really really hope that the new SP campaign will address that stuff, since the game leaves out all the Bomber guys which is a real waste for the beautiful Bomber models we have.

[Feathered_IV]

Better scoring would go a long way to improving the experience.  A damaged tank, ship or aircraft for example doesn't get recorded well, and scores matter.  Ask any pilot, gunner, bombardier or intelligence officer.

[Guest deleted@30725]

I'm not sure about the AI as pointed out in no 3. I did an 8 vs 8 fighter quick mission mission yesterday and flew through enemy AI. I did not find the enemy on my tail stayed forever and did break off / give up / got lost. I found some AI would give up when being chased for a long period of time with apparently no damage, give up and crash the ground like a real player might.

 

1 and 2 certainly agree there.

[Blutaar]

I have another example, me with another 3 BF110s with 2 MC.202s as escort on a artillery attack mission vs. 18 enemy fighters spawned in the whole mission and only 2 additional friendly MC.202s. Over the target area we got the usual 4 fighters waiting for me, after a short time another 4 fighters spawned 5 km away from the target area and shortly after another 4, all Yak1s. I dont know how i survived, i had 2 airkills and 4 groundkills, one enigne got destroyed and i did make it to the exit point where 4 Lagg3s are spawned with 2 MC.202s in front of them. Near the home airfield was another enemy spawn, this time 2 Yak1s and 3 Pe2 bombers. It sounds crazy i know but i looked at the gen.mission file, it was that crazy. Of course i hit the esc button after the 4 Lagg3s started to follow me from high above. :o

 

It looks like that most, if not all the ground attack missions, use the same layout, 4 fighters over the target area, 4 aditional fighters ca 5km away from the target area after 10minutes and another 4 fighters at over 10km away from the target area. Then there is some random spawns over the exit point and another random spawn for a bomber/attacker flight with escort. This is to much for a ground attack mission and with the AIs ability to detect you from far away this ends up in frustration on the playerside. I wish we had more realistic missions and more variation, enemy planes should spawn on near airfields and not in the sky and the mission goal needs to change, if i only be able to do one attackrun, it should count as a mission accomplished even when not hitting all targets. Some times it is ok to have strong opposition but not all the time and not with insufficient numbers on the own side with just bad AI fighters who cant protect you as an attacker. The enemy spawns much faster than the escort can shoot them down and this leads to all allied planes get killed most of the time.

[InProgress]

What i hate is that AI in stuka can't hit anything, they drop bombs soooo bad that in real life they would be considered traitors. They always miss so bad, they don't seem to care about objective, they drop all bombs somewhere and miss..

 

Worst is with tanks, missions says to destroy at least 4 tanks and you how the hell are you suppose to do it on your own (with bombs).

 

This is my biggest problem with bombers in SP, I only played stuka but they can't hit anything.

 

Remember mission in campaign that we were suppose to destroy artillery behind wolga, and I was the only one who destroyed anything.

 

So yea, maybe having commands to tell them exactly what they should attack and how would do the job, for example: dive attack -> 2500m -> enemy tanks

 

And they should be more accurate, doing all the job for ai just feels bad. I don't want to be super hero, just want to take part in mission as regular pilot.

 

It would be so nice to dive in formation and drop bombs one by one while everyone has siren on :3

 

When I fly escort missions, I very often see 2 - 3 enemy fighters lining up to attack the bombers, allowing me to swoop in behind them and shoot them down with ease. if there was a way to prevent this behavior, it would make bombing missions safer, having fighter cover be more effective and loss rates more realistic.

When I fly ju52 my escort never cares about enemy on my tail, they alway attack 1 of them together while other one is always behind me, shoots and fly away and then comes back to do it again.. while ai escort does not seem to care

 

And you can't give escort commands I think, so you can't tell them to cover you.

Edited September 3, 2017 by InProgress

[csThor]

IMO the first step before even looking at AI changes is to utterly eradicate the faulty mindset of "having to meet enemy fighter opposition every single time". Yes, we're flying what is essentially a highly condensed version of a real air campaign, but looking at a few historical facts makes the appearance of enemy fighters to oppose a player's bomber flight (regardless whether he flies a german or soviet aircraft) look not only supremely frustrating (because of the single-minded thickheadedness the OP described) but also utterly unrealistic and unhistorical.

 

1.) As with all aircraft fighters were limited in numbers and not available at each and every point of a front at all times. As such they will be concentrated where it matters - in the Schwerpunkt​ as the german military science calls it. Which, in turn, also can mean that sectors of lesser importance may not be covered at all or at least with much less density. The BoX series is not depicting a time when soviet or allied air forces numbered in the thousands.

 

2.) In any case the enemy has to take notice of a bomber mission taking place. Since we don't have any of the densely packed radar systems with their overlapping coverage the ETO is known for that means an HQ has to be informed of the mission taking place and that can only happen through ground-based observers sighting it. That also depends on a working network of air observation posts (with qualified personnel) and a working communication network (either telephone or radio based). In that case, assuming the information actually reaches the responsible HQ and that it can be used, fighters would be scrambled. I do not know how much the VVS was actually doing such ground-based directing at the stage of the war BoX simulates but this is pretty much what happened on the german side all the time.

 

3.) The other potential chance to encounter enemy fighters is through coincidence - namely by running across them as they're doing a sweep or maybe they're actually protecting a target nearby or even the one the player is tasked to strike. For the Luftwaffe that situation would certainly end in an interception, for the VVS that is not necessarily the case. Especially if the fighters are to protect a target not being attacked by the bombers they'd not engage (they'd certainly report their presence, though), but the doctrine of the VVS disallowed the initiative expected from german fighter pilots and tightly chained the fighters to specific mission tasks, objects and orders. A great many german aircraft got away by flying far away enough from the object the soviet fighters were defending as they would not be allowed to pursue the german aircraft lest it could open their "mission goal" to another attack. 

 

A good campaign engine - and in fact a good basic mission design - will have to take such nuances into account and use them to create a believable and living environment, mostly by having other non-player-related flights doing "their thing" when and if one stumbles across their path. But having enemy fighters rise each and every time one flies a mission and have them meet you at the right altitude and right place every time? That's not realistic. And even if scrambled they may be simply too late to climb to altitude for an interception. That, too, happened often enough.

Edited September 3, 2017 by csThor

[InProgress]

@up

Agree, and hope for it. It's not gonna be fun to fly hs129 to help your guys on the ground just to get enemy fighters always behind you. You don't even have a chance against them in thet things, it would be all up to escort.

 

Also not every bomber mission should get cover. If it's something on the flank of Stalingrad, where is small activity but guys called for Luftwaffe assistance then it could be easy job to bombs some ground units and come back, no need to waste fighters on mission like this.

 

I also feel like aaa guns are too strong, I read that russians did not shoot at diving stukas because it was almost impossible to hit (while in game it seems like it's most easy to hit stuka) they were focusing fire at moment when they were starting dive or ending (and this was way more dangerous for stuka pilots)

 

In bos most deaths from aaa is during dive for me.

 

Idk how this works but seems like aaa guns get 100% hit chance if you are flying in straight line, which diving kind of is and this must be why aaa guns can hit you so easly.

Edited September 3, 2017 by InProgress