Career Mode AI Pilot Awards

[LukeFF]

12 hours ago, Ram399 said:

If anyone has some ideas on what might be up please let me know.

 

Not sure, but as the one who set up the award requirements, I can tell you the current parameters are (for the Eastern Front):

 

Honor Goblet: 20 air kills, 12 tank kills, or 100 missions completed

German Cross in Gold: 30 air kills, 20 tank kills, or 150 missions completed

KC: 50 air kills, 30 tank kills, or 250 missions completed

KC with Oak Leaves: 100 air kills, 60 tank kills, or 500 missions completed

 

(The tank kill requirement is ~60% of the air kill requirement, and the mission completed requirement is 5x the number of air kills).

Edited August 4, 2020 by LukeFF

[Ram399]

21 hours ago, LukeFF said:

KC: 50 air kills, 30 tank kills, or 250 missions completed

Thanks for the help Luke, I'm planning to try creating an alternate career as a test to see if the award parameters still apply to the player properly.
I'll let you know if I find anything else that seems out of whack.

 

21 hours ago, [SKY]BigB said:

You should do a full fledged AAR with your unit.

To be honest I don't know if I have the dedication to write out an entire narrative for the three year career thus far, however I have written out a couple of short stories in my free time about incidents which have occurred in the career.

Here's a brief excerpt of one from Weizsacker's point of view west of Moscow in October 1941.

Spoiler

Thursday Evening

October 16^th, 1941

Oberleutnant Christian von Weizsacker

 

            He felt the gust coming before it swept over him, the slightest nudge of the ailerons betraying its presence through the stick in his hand.  It was corrected unthinkingly, a slight roll to the right, a bit of pressure on his right foot- his limbs moving of their own accord. 

Too close, his left hand drew backwards just a centimeter, pulling the throttle along with it.

His eyes ducked down for only a second: manifold pressure set at 0.7 ATA, RPM stable at 1800, temperature in the green, the DB 601 inverted V12 purred contentedly in the cool autumn air.

                

 

His gaze returned to the outside, inspecting the spacing for a brief moment as the four Bf-109 Fs floated over the breeze.

The Finger-Four remained unbroken- the black stenciled one of his Staffelkapitän, Hauptmann Jens Weber, holding steady at the proper distance off of his one o’ clock.

 

In his peripheral vision to his three o’ clock the second Bf-109 rolled gracefully with the wind, the black five of Leutnant Ludwig Kramer holding easily off of Weber’s right wing.

 

His gaze traversed left, scanning the airspace ahead of him before settling on the fighter tucked in close off of his seven o’ clock.

The Messerschmitt marked black seven rocked slightly, drifting upwards to the left before settling back down in its proper place.

The pilot, one Oberfeldwebel Radulf Mertzer, glanced upwards to meet his eyes.

He gave a curt nod which the Oberfeldwebel reciprocated before returning to his scan.

 

The drab browns of the Russian countryside glowed a burnt orange in the mid October evening.  2000 meters below him the thick mud of the Rasputitsa collected falling leaves with all the vigor of flypaper, while the steadily growing cumulus clouds above promised fresh reinforcements to the unending muck before long.

 

He focused once more on the distant eastern horizon, taking comfort in the setting sun’s protective glare as it descended in the western sky far behind him.

The airspace ahead was clear save for a cluster of four dots half a kilometer off his nose.
The lead element of the Staffel remained motionless in his sight picture, with four Bf-109s in a formation mirroring his own as they forged their way northeast.

Spaced half a kilometer behind him was the rearguard, another set of four Messers no doubt moving in the same fashion.

 

The full fighting strength of the 5th Staffel, II Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 52, hung low in the skies west of Moscow, a mixture of twelve Bf-109 F2s and F4s cruising steadily at 300 kilometers per hour- far below their usual speed, and weaving in a gentle S pattern so as to keep pace with the cluster of three Ju-52 cargo aircraft flying under the shelter of their guns.

 

Loaded on board the large trimotor transports were a small crowd of ground personnel: mechanics and orderlies, logistics officers and command staff- packed in with crates of spare parts and piled toolkits- along with drums of fuel, ammunition, and other miscellaneous resources.

 

All the amenities required to keep the Bf-109s above them in the proper condition to fly and fight.

 

The process of moving their base of operations was an intimately familiar one to the officers and enlisted men of JG 52 by now.

Over the preceding four months of Operation Barbarossa they had barely had enough time to unload the transports before it was time to move again, as the rapid rate of the Blitzkrieg advance made settling into each subsequently crude airfield all but impossible.

 

They had rarely flown out of the same base for more than a few days in the month of July, with the frontline receding further east with each passing hour.  That had steadily changed however, by the end of August the figure had increased to maybe a week per field, and then by September up to almost a month.

 

Operation Barbarossa had started at a sprint, slipped into a run, slumped into a jog, fallen into a walk, and then steadily collapsed into a crawl.

 

Over the course of September, the front had been consolidated however, and following the utter destruction of a massive Soviet kessel which had been encircled at Vyazma, Army Group Center was once again poised to resume its drive towards Moscow.

 

The 1^st and 2^nd Gruppen of JG 52 had spent September supporting the operations necessary to close the Vyazma pocket while operating out of the Dugino airstrip north of the kessel, and now they too were shifting their attentions back to the east.

 

With the commencement of Operation Typhoon on October 3^rd the advance on Moscow had resumed with a pincer movement to the north and south, with the unit once again providing aircover for the advancing Panzer forces as they drove east.

Only a few days later on October 17^th, the 2^nd Gruppe received the news that they would moving northeast to support the armored spearhead of the 3^rd Panzer Army at the newly captured city of Kalinin.

The orders had been met with excitement, the men had become accustomed to the constant movement of the advance, and their month long stay at Dugino over nearly all of September had left the unit restless.

 

So, it was with great enthusiasm that they had packed up the operations at Dugino, loading the Ju-52s overnight in preparation for the transition flights on the morning of the 18^th. 

They would have the distinction of being the first Gruppen to move east from the field, and the Gruppenstab had departed with the 4^th Staffel at the crack of dawn.

 

The 6^th Staffel had then made their move shortly after, but a bout of inclement weather had prevented the 5^th Staffel from immediately following.

It had passed by the late afternoon however, and at 1730 the 5^th Staffel departed from the Dugino airstrip for what would hopefully be the last time.

Now cruising over the barren fields west of Moscow, they approached the mobile frontline once more.

 

            Looking down over his left wing he traced the course of the Volga river upstream as it snaked northeast roughly parallel to their course, as a highly visible landmark the Volga was an often-used waypoint, and as luck would have it their destination lied just off of the southern bank of the river. 

Their new home field was to be the Migalovo airfield on the southwestern outskirts of Kalinin, a decently sized city by Soviet standards, it straddled the Volga only 160 kilometers northwest of Moscow.

 

He leaned to the right, reading the time off of the clock nestled half behind the gunsight’s cheek rest, working the minutes backwards in his head.

They had reached the top of climb over the village of Zubtsov at 1806, on a direct course straight towards Migalovo at 300 kilometers per hour- adjusted via weaving to around 180 kilometers per hour so as to keep pace with the Ju-52s.  The estimated time en route was roughly thirty minutes, making their hypothetical time of arrival 1836- it was now 1829.

Their destination would soon be in sight.

 

Behind the formation the sun was steadily falling, twilight was not far off, the early sunset being indicative of the approaching winter.

For some reason the thought filled him with dread- he had never liked the cold.

He shook himself out of his thoughts and returned to scanning the airspace.

 

Far ahead of the formation a bright white light appeared, the flare arcing out suddenly from the leading plane of the first flight.

The voice of the deputy Staffelführer, Hauptmann Hartmut Goldberg, crackled briefly onto the radio.

“Lead element has the field in sight, out.”

This close to the front the less radio communication the better, lest the enemy be listening in.

He looked far ahead in the steadily fading orange light, following the line of the muddy Volga to the northeast once again until it disappeared into a ruddy blotch of red bricks in the distance.

An out of place collection of paved roads and stone buildings staining the now maroon colored countryside.

 

The city of Kalinin quickly loomed closer, fading in from the unfocused blur that was the distant steppe horizon.

He had seen a number of war-torn cities since the fighting began in 1939, having flown over almost all of them, yet at first glance he thought that none had looked as abjectly miserable as Kalinin.

Not even Paris had looked so depressed on the eve of occupation.

 

Bisected by the Volga, the city appeared to have a mud colored scar which some drunk doctor had tried to vainly stitch together with bombed out bridges.

Evidence of fighting was plain to see, scattered craters pockmarked the fields surrounding the town, and a number of apartment blocks had completely collapsed.

Not a single light shone out of the houses in the growing darkness, and the streets appeared deserted save for the abandoned trolley cars.

On the northern edge of the city a tall smoke plume rose from a burning foundry, staining the air as the winds blew it to the west.

 

A second flare appeared, this time a green one, flashing upwards from the ground.

He focused in on its origin point, the central control tower of the Migalovo Airfield,

Most airfields in Russia were just that: cleared fields deemed smooth enough for landings, prone to treacherous flooding and unseen rocks.

 

If one was lucky, they might find a crude airstrip here and there, coarse dirt smoothed out and compacted into a passable surface for a runway.

The field at Dugino had been luxurious in the fact that it boasted two dirt runways conjoined at an acute angle and supplemented by an actual control tower- something near unheard of in the Russian countryside.

 

Kalinin was not the countryside however, and Migalovo was a miracle of construction by comparison.

Boasting two paved runways, easily double the length and width of Dugino’s, laid out at nearly right angles to each other, with a whopping three fully enclosed control towers- and even a VOR station, it was like moving from a back alley to Versailles.

Well-built fighter shells lined the concrete taxiways, and low stone buildings promised solid lodgings.  Maybe the operations here wouldn’t be so bad.

 

A third green flare streaked upwards into the now purple eastern sky, and a new voice broke onto the radio.

“Eagle Flight, Magnolia, clear for Migalovo landing approach- Swan, cleared to land straight in at Kalinin.”

Just a bit ahead now the lead element descended into a landing pattern over the airfield.

As it turned out, the city of Kalinin was home to more than one airfield.

While the fighters were to be based out of the dedicated and paved Migalovo airfield to the southwest of the city, the Ju-52s and their carried supplies were to land and be offloaded at the Kalinin aerodrome.  The aerodrome was a far more standard flat and empty field to the southeast of the city, bordering the highway and railway for ease of transportation- though in Soviet terms a highway really just meant a wider than usual dirt road, certainly nothing even remotely like the Autobahn.

It would be another soft field landing for the trimotors it seemed.

 

Below the flight, the formation of Ju-52 shifted their course accordingly straight in towards the aerodrome, moving to land as a unit on the wide field into the northeastern wind.

The Messer to his one o’ clock waggled his wings, and he made eye contact with Staffelkapitän Weber. 

The Hauptmann gestured forwards towards the aerodrome and then spun his hand, their Schwarm would provide cover for the transports while the rest of the flight landed.

 

This was going to take a while.

 

Edited August 5, 2020 by Ram399

[Nic727]

On 9/19/2019 at 4:01 AM, InProgress said:

Problem is, every AI pilot gets pro stats in every category. If you start ju52 campaign, you see all of them with bunch air kills, ships, buildings etc. like that ju52 pilot dropped cargo on building and it collapsed. It's a small detail but would be nice to get it improved one day. Fighter pilots getting more air kills, bombers ground kills. Now everyone gets everything.

Lol. The only thing my AI are doing is not following my orders and going out of range for 30 minutes and come back. They got 20 sorties and 0-1 kill.