Wingmen management

[ShugNinx]

Hello !

 

I've reached the point in Career Mode where I fly n°1 (or can decide to fly any other position in any given flight), and I'm still puzzled by the organization in flight.

 

For instance, let's say I take off with 5 mates with Spitfires (6 total) : 

- as flight leader, n°2 is supposed to be my dedicated wingman and cover my six ?

- n°3 is next, commanding n°4 ?

- same with n°5 & 6 ?

Or is it organized in two groups of 3 ?

 

I usually set myself as n°1, then a rookie as n°2, a ranked officer as n°3 with a less ranked pilot as n°4 etc. but my wingman usually do anything but follow my orders and everybody seems to engage any target at will when our path crosses an enemy group...

 

Did you guys find any way to handle your squad properly and minimize casualties ? 

[unreasonable]

I am afraid that this is not an area that BoX handles at all well. In this respect it is more of a cat herding simulation.

 

I suspect that if you take off as a group you will all be in one formation: you can try to use the V formation or echelon formations to check that, but you have to be patient and fly straight and slow to let them form up.  

 

They do tend to go off after enemy planes (without telling you or alerting you): try the "Cover me" or "Do like I do" commands. Commands affect all the aircraft in your formation unless (I think) they have some priority like RTB because heavily damaged or very close to an enemy.

 

Best advice is not to get too emotionally attached to your wingmen.....

[Yogiflight]

As unreasonable stated there is no such organization in BOX. For example, when n°1 crashes, n°2 leads the flight. But IRL it is like you pointed out, n°2 is the wingman of n°1, and therefore a low rank, who never would be the leader of the flight. And in the game there is no dividing the flight in two or three pairs. It is one flight during cruising and several single aircrafts in airfights, or sometimes all together on one enemy.

One thing you should be careful with, is the command RTB, because then your flight will do only this, not caring for enemies, and no chance for you to give them any further commands, they won't hear them anymore.

[LukeFF]

Proper wingman commands, formations, and radio procedures are all things that need a lot of attention, because what we have now is largely a hold over from ROF. Hopefully Bodenplatte can address these issues.

[danielprates]

Seconded.

 

Also,  I think there should be more commands,  but not only that: the other planes should really obey the commands given. As it is now,  all missions have more or less a script and planes will carry on a scripted sequence of actions. Your orders kinda make no difference in their actions.

 

A simple "rejoin" command that the other planes actually obeyed would already be a great improvement.

 

[MaxTurn]

That was one thing that bothered me about the old IL-2.   I think in MS Combat in the Pacific (or whatever it was named -- remember having to write batch programs to boot your sim under DOS??) you could tell your wing man to break right or break left.  That was really helpful because you could essentially try to turn into your wing man like in a Thatch Weave.

[Barkhorn1x]

On 5/4/2018 at 1:04 PM, LukeFF said:

Proper wingman commands, formations, and radio procedures are all things that need a lot of attention, because what we have now is largely a hold over from ROF. Hopefully Bodenplatte can address these issues.

I thought it was just me.  Glad to see I'm not alone.  The devs should do a port of the old Il-2 comms system as we all know it and it works.  No reason to re-invent the wheel here.

[ShugNinx]

Thanks for all your replies, glad to see I'm not the only one struggling. Let's hope it'll be improved over time.

 

On 04/05/2018 at 5:37 PM, unreasonable said:

Best advice is not to get too emotionally attached to your wingmen.....

 

I don't, but can't help with this bad feeling when landing back alone to the airfield.

[dburne]

2 hours ago, Barkhorn1x said:

I thought it was just me.  Glad to see I'm not alone.  The devs should do a port of the old Il-2 comms system as we all know it and it works.  No reason to re-invent the wheel here.

 

 I would imagine it would be much easier for them to make improvements on the current wingmen comms system that try to install a whole new system. Old IL-2 is a completely different game from BoX.

 

Hopefully now especially with the new Career Mode, that will get some attention.

[sniperton]

4 hours ago, dburne said:

 I would imagine it would be much easier for them to make improvements on the current wingmen comms system that try to install a whole new system. Old IL-2 is a completely different game from BoX.

Sure, but solutions to the problem and the logic behind already exist and meet expectations, so I really don't see the reason why to re-invent the wheel just because 'BoX is a different game'. Different engine, but still the same franchise.

Edited May 6, 2018 by sniperton

[UFA_Bagel]

On 5/6/2018 at 11:05 PM, sniperton said:

Sure, but solutions to the problem and the logic behind already exist and meet expectations, so I really don't see the reason why to re-invent the wheel just because 'BoX is a different game'. Different engine, but still the same franchise.

Totally agree. I don’t understand why they can not study the old code and reimplement the high-level logic. It’s a very weird thing that there’s no pairs and it’s just a leader and their 3-7 wingmen. And it’s still so in 2020.  Breaks the immersion for me. Did they lose IP rights? I assume even the existing system may be relatively easy modified to become just more hierarchical and nested. For me it’s more important than AI fight skills that is more difficult to program.

Edited June 21, 2020 by 159BAG_elegz

[Guest deleted@210880]

An interesting old thread. The issue hasn't improved at all despite the hopes expressed in the thread... Hope it will have by 2022....

 

 

[I./JG52_Woutwocampe]

Puzzling that this was never improved. Games from the 90s like European air war had better formation/in-flight orders system. Your squadron is just a mess with huge casualties most of the time.

 

'Number one, enemy on your six!'

 

How hard is it really?

[Yardstick]

Having flown a lot of CloD over the past few days (actually the first time in 9 years of owning it that I have stuck with it for more than a few hours), the formation AI, whilst far for perfect, is significantly better than GBs.  The command menus will be familiar to anyone who has flow the original IL-2 and wingmen actually call out bandits and stay in position through a fight.  I haven't flown it enough to get a feel for whether they do anything useful in that position but at the very least I've had a couple of occasions when its been my wingman has been shot down by an attacker rather than me - so at worst they are an effective decoy. 

 

GB just degenerates into a free for all when you make contact with the enemy and most of the time your flight has silently buggered off long before you ever see an enemy aircraft. 

[sevenless]

Maybe due to the fact that for a long time they had no AI programmer they didn´t bother with this at all. Hopefully a usefull command structure system of Rotte (2 planes) and Schwarm (2xRotte = 4 planes) can get implemented in the future. It is long overdue, so to speak. IL-2 1946 could be used as a blueprint for wingman commands. 

Edited June 24, 2020 by sevenless

[easterling77]

On 6/24/2020 at 8:53 PM, sevenless said:

Maybe due to the fact that for a long time they had no AI programmer they didn´t bother with this at all. Hopefully a usefull command structure system of Rotte (2 planes) and Schwarm (2xRotte = 4 planes) can get implemented in the future. It is long overdue, so to speak. IL-2 1946 could be used as a blueprint for wingman commands. 

your hitting the point.

We need more proper command-tools for flights.

 

It's often so frustrating to see your mindless wingmen circling around and getting shot by the enemy. Or even more horrible, flying straight over longe periods while beeing shot to pieces.

 

Sometimes i get the feeling in career mode, that the enemy AI is much more competend than the AI of the wingmen. 

With so few command-options it seems nearly impossible to me to get a realistic chance to get my flight to an effctive unit. (Most of the time - i get kills and my wingmen are allready dead)

 

I'm hoping so much for proper improvments in AI-behavior and Command-Controls by the Devs.

 

Allmost every time in the outclast faction is kind of boring and kills lot of fun in this sim

Edited June 27, 2020 by easterling77

[Yogiflight]

18 minutes ago, easterling77 said:

Or even more horrible, flying straight over longe periods while beeing shot to pieces.

Until you try to help them, which will make them fly a hard turn into your direction, to make sure you don't get the easy kill. Once you go out to prepare a new attack, they again exercise flying straight.

22 minutes ago, easterling77 said:

With so few command-options it seems nearly impossible to me to get a realistic chance to get my flight to an effctive unit.

This is why I am not really interested to fly as flightleader. You are not leading, anyway. You bring them to the enemy, where they do, what they want.

But, unfortunately the Devs don't seem to be very interested to make some improvements here. BOBP, with the implementation of additional radio callouts (British and American voices) would have been a good chance to make some overworking, but unfortunately this chance was passed.

[dburne]

4 minutes ago, Yogiflight said:

Until you try to help them, which will make them fly a hard turn into your direction, to make sure you don't get the easy kill. Once you go out to prepare a new attack, they again exercise flying straight.

This is why I am not really interested to fly as flightleader. You are not leading, anyway. You bring them to the enemy, where they do, what they want.

But, unfortunately the Devs don't seem to be very interested to make some improvements here. BOBP, with the implementation of additional radio callouts (British and American voices) would have been a good chance to make some overworking, but unfortunately this chance was passed.

 

Yeah I have been avoiding flying as leader any more best I can as well.