Enemy chasing you down to your home...

[PaladinX]

1 hour ago, Zeev said:

I stopped playing career too, but you have dozens of hand crafted single player missions and campaigns. 

 

But AI behaviour is not a question of the single player mode. Its a question of AI behaviour, no matter in what kind of mission or campaign.

[dburne]

1 hour ago, Zeev said:

But if you pick a home airfield that is far from the border then the missions will be x2 times longer.

 

They oftentimes follow me home even when distance is long.

[Ram399]

One peculiarity I have noticed over the ~400 hours I've sunk into career mode is that certain hostile fighters do seem to have varying rules of engagement so to speak.

While they can, and will, regularly pursue you and your flight all the way back to your home base, this generally only happens (at least to me) when that particular flight of fighters was dispatched with the express purpose of intercepting your own flight.

Hostile AI fighters who are on an escort or ground attack mission for example will not break off too far from their friendly ground attackers/enemy target to pursue running friendlies, whereas AI fighters which are scrambled from enemy airfields will pursue you to the ends of the Earth.

This is easily testable as a German pilot in Kuban, simply fly anywhere into the close visual range of Gelendzhik and the odds are good that a flight of 3 Soviet fighters will be seen scrambling to take off and engage you- and, since you are their primary objective and the AI has laser vision, it doesn't matter how far you run.  They will find you.

My general method of dealing with them currently in my JG 52 career is to effectively act as a rearguard when my flight comes in for landings at Anapa.
1 Player Bf-109 G4 vs 3 AI Yak-7s/1s isn't too hard of a matchup assuming you have enough ammo left, and all you really have to do is survive by hugging the mountains and coast until your flight is done landing and you can drag them across the AA over and over again.

An alternative solution is to just not go anywhere near Gelendzhik lol.

As for enemy air patrols which are encountered in random areas of the map, I can't say that I have noticed any particular pattern in how they engage fleeing targets- though generally any engagement I find myself in with the AI ends when one side no longer exists, they have chased me all the way home in a few instances.

If you play on the Dense setting you often encounter friendly air patrols over the frontlines however, and these flights are generally extremely aggressive and very effective tools for losing tails.  Whenever you fly out on a mission you can hear them report on the radio once you come within spawning distance, so I like to remember their patrol areas and use them as an item of last resort should the entire VVS show up.  This is exceedingly easy in Kuban as the front is not very wide at all, but a bit harder in the other campaigns.

It would definitely be nice if our own fields could have a response to incursions other than blaring the siren and blasting flak however, it makes no sense that the German fighter HQ at Kuban has a complete lack of air patrols or fighters on standby to scramble whenever hostile aircraft approach- though its probably fun for the groundcrew to watch the one-sided furball when a flight of 12 A-20s rolls up with 10 escorting Yaks which then get reinforced by an additional flight of 6 P-39s while your 8 Bf-109s do all they can to survive.

All in all, I personally love the career mode, and spend most of my time there, though I will admit to being extraordinarily frustrated at times.
I won't say this endless chase is some sort of feature, as the AI should recognize when a pursuit is a lost cause, but it doesn't particularly bother me and I consider it part of the challenge- the air combat on the Eastern Front was particularly brutal after all, no mercy, and I regularly find myself chasing enemy aircraft back to their bases as well.
The AI does need work- but everyone already knew that.

Pic related is an AI Yak pilot named Boris who chased me from Gelendzhik to Kerch while my flight was landing at Anapa, and then all the way back to home, only to have his wing blown off by a lucky flak shell.

[AlpaTypeg666]

18 minutes ago, Ram399 said:

It would definitely be nice if our own fields could have a response to incursions other than blaring the siren and blasting flak however, it makes no sense that the German fighter HQ at Kuban has a complete lack of air patrols or fighters on standby to scramble whenever hostile aircraft approach- though its probably fun for the groundcrew to watch the one-sided furball when a flight of 12 A-20s rolls up with 10 escorting Yaks which then get reinforced by an additional flight of 6 P-39s while your 8 Bf-109s do all they can to survive.

In my experience they do all what they can to land (actuly to get killed trying to land). ?

[Ram399]

2 minutes ago, AlpaTypeg666 said:

In my experience they do all what they can to land (actuly to get killed trying to land). ?

Once the landing ritual has begun it can be stopped by no mortal force, the sacrament of the of base to final turn is integral to the AI's religion.

You can prevent it however if you're the acting flight lead and issue a patrol area order prior to the AI entering the pattern, which is what I generally use in instances where the enemy attacks/flies right over our home base on intercept missions.

[dburne]

1 minute ago, Ram399 said:

Once the landing ritual has begun it can be stopped by no mortal force, the sacrament of the of base to final turn is integral to the AI's religion.

You can prevent it however if you're the acting flight lead and issue a patrol area order prior to the AI entering the pattern, which is what I generally use in instances where the enemy attacks/flies right over our home base on intercept missions.

 

Yep once AI commence landing procedure they can not be changed, they have stopped listening to orders.

This really should be changed. Too often attacks happen as we are setting up to land and the human player is left on his own.

[blitze]

Would also be nice for a radio "Help" call.  Maybe in the way that this over rides the flight's current goal and gets them paying attention to what is happening to you, the player. When not a flight leader, trying to get your flight to stick on track with their mission or to break off landing and defend themselves is impossible.

 

Nothing like being the last of a flight in an escort and to have the rest of the flight engage other enemies leaving the planes being escorted open to attack. As flight leader you can command them to get back on mission but as a flight wingman, you are helpless.

[Ram399]

2 minutes ago, blitze said:

but as a flight wingman, you are helpless.

An improvement on radio communication overall would be exceedingly welcome.
1946 had the flights organized on a more historical basis into Schwarms and Rottes, so that as a leader of a subflight or pair you could help direct the overall engagement.
Plus there was also a request help option as well, its an aspect of 1946 that has continued to outshine subsequent releases.

[JohnBrownStan]

On 11/15/2019 at 1:40 AM, PaladinX said:

Fellow pilots,

currently i am playing my first career (BF-109 F, Stalingrad, August 42).

The last mission was to bomb a river crossing activity, my squad was loaded with 250 & 50 kg bombs.

We took off and half way to the target, around 20 enemy fighters appeared and attacked us.

My squad emergency dropped all bombs and fought (4 vs 20) for a while.

Then i got hit and my cooling system was damaged. Ok, go home was my idea. My wingmen were already shut down.

So, i took the shortest path to my home base - with 5 enemy fighters chasing me.

In the area of my base, the flak returned fire, with no success.

My engine was at the end, i tried to land...and then one shot me down. THEN they flew home.

 

So any ideas what would be the correct way to end such a mission?

What can i do to return to my base without half of the russian airforce flying with me, fearing no consequences and bringing my mission to a sad end?

 

 

I would say your mistake was engaging in the first place. 4 vs 20 is a bad idea. You should have run, and in a 109 without damage you would have probably gotten away.

[Sublime]

I must say this only.has happened to me once in the last several months.  This used to be very common for me a year ago.

[PaladinX]

52 minutes ago, JohnBrownStan said:

 

I would say your mistake was engaging in the first place. 4 vs 20 is a bad idea. You should have run, and in a 109 without damage you would have probably gotten away.

Funny guy.

Happens every time. They see us and attack as and follow us. Every mission when i see an enemy, turn around and go home? Nice game.

[Ram399]

46 minutes ago, PaladinX said:

Happens every time.

If you consistently encounter 20+ hostile fighters while flying in a flight of four, you have the difficulty set too high.
The autogenerated career missions try to match the amount of resistance you will encounter based off of the size of your flight (with some variation based off of frontline activity density).
Setting the difficulty to hard with frontline activity on dense will generally result in extremely one-sided engagements with as many as three times the number of your own aircraft.

Personally I like activity so I keep the frontlines set to dense, but in order to keep things somewhat more accurate historically I manipulate the difficulty throughout the campaigns.
From a German perspective, I play Moscow on easy, as the VVS was at that time still recovering from Op Barbarossa with less aircraft and poorer training.
I then up that to moderate at Stalingrad so as to achieve a rough parity between friendly and hostile aircraft, which is continued into Kuban at least until the very end when the Luftwaffe begins to be overwhelmed.  Bodenplatte, naturally, is hard the entire way through as the Western Allies outnumbered the Luftwaffe practically by an order of magnitude.

If you're somehow encountering that many enemy fighters on easy mode with scattered density then something is very wrong with your game.

For example, this is the after action report of a Kuban intercept mission (an extraordinarily successful one) with the settings at hard difficulty and dense activity.  I had a flight of 6 Bf-109s.

Edited March 6, 2020 by Ram399
Correction: A flight of 6 Bf-109s

[LukeFF]

8 hours ago, Feathered_IV said:

I do wish the people in charge of this stuff would spend more time thinking about actual gameplay for paying customers, rather than obsessing over spread sheets of the order of battle for different units.

 

Oh, the hyperbole...

 

The people who "obsess over spreadsheets" aren't the same people coding AI behavior. For as long as you've been around, you should know that by now. If the recent past is anything to go by (and I believe it is), AI problems like the enemy following the player halfway across the map will be addressed.

Edited March 6, 2020 by LukeFF

[PaladinX]

Did the patch 4.005 adress this issue?

Unfortunately i can not test it by my own at the moment.

[Charlo-VR]

I doubt this AI behavior has been changed in this patch but perhaps we’ll find out during our next career flights.  Another technique that I have used when out of ammo and on my side of the lines is simply to bail out.  In the game I’ve never been shot at while under canopy.

[Donik]

10 hours ago, PaladinX said:

Did the patch 4.005 adress this issue?

 

No

Had 3 rats follow me nearly all the way back to airfield at about 3k distance in my 109 E career.

[VampireNZ]

Have had 4 Bf's follow me back to my home base, so just circled overhead pulling into any attack they might line up, and watched as my friendly ground fire popped them all one by one, was pretty funny ?

[Willy__]

23 hours ago, Charlo-VR said:

I doubt this AI behavior has been changed in this patch but perhaps we’ll find out during our next career flights.

 

Its been like that since the release. It was tweaked a little bit along the time, but overall the career is still unplayable for me and a lot of people for that reason. If I want to enjoy some random generated stuff with the ai, tracking kills, sorties and whatnot I fire up the old il2-1946.

 

I remember one funny patch where the ai "unlearned" how to fly, you just had to dive near the ground to make them all crash lol

Edited April 9, 2020 by Willy__

[Burdokva]

On 3/6/2020 at 7:17 PM, Ram399 said:

If you consistently encounter 20+ hostile fighters while flying in a flight of four, you have the difficulty set too high.
The autogenerated career missions try to match the amount of resistance you will encounter based off of the size of your flight (with some variation based off of frontline activity density).
Setting the difficulty to hard with frontline activity on dense will generally result in extremely one-sided engagements with as many as three times the number of your own aircraft.

Personally I like activity so I keep the frontlines set to dense, but in order to keep things somewhat more accurate historically I manipulate the difficulty throughout the campaigns.
From a German perspective, I play Moscow on easy, as the VVS was at that time still recovering from Op Barbarossa with less aircraft and poorer training.
I then up that to moderate at Stalingrad so as to achieve a rough parity between friendly and hostile aircraft, which is continued into Kuban at least until the very end when the Luftwaffe begins to be overwhelmed.  Bodenplatte, naturally, is hard the entire way through as the Western Allies outnumbered the Luftwaffe practically by an order of magnitude.

If you're somehow encountering that many enemy fighters on easy mode with scattered density then something is very wrong with your game.

For example, this is the after action report of a Kuban intercept mission (an extraordinarily successful one) with the settings at hard difficulty and dense activity.  I had a flight of 6 Bf-109s.

 

I always thought that the difficulty level control the chance modifiers to encounter Veteran/Ace AI rather than enemy numbers.. very interesting, I might go with moderate difficulty and dense instead of the usual medium density/hard difficulty I play at.

[Ram399]

5 hours ago, Burdokva said:

I always thought that the difficulty level control the chance modifiers to encounter Veteran/Ace AI rather than enemy numbers.

The difficulty setting does also influence the skill of AI pilots- for both your own side as well as the enemy.

Though I'm not certain on the exact levels, I seem to remember reading that on easy difficulty the hostile AI aircraft you encounter will be rookie/average while friendlies not from your own flight will be standard/veteran.

This scales up as you go through the difficulty levels, to the point that by hard difficulty the enemy will be veteran/ace while friendly encountered aircraft will be rookie/average.
As a result I like to favor moderate difficulty as a sort of sweet spot where AI numbers and skill all converge.

At no point does the difficulty affect the skill of your own squadron's pilots however, as that remains constant and scales off of the individual pilot's overall rank and experience level.
I've yet to pin down exactly at what point they reach the ace tier, though I think their skill might just move upwards accordingly whenever they get promoted through the 5 ranks.

Though it can be infuriatingly tedious to cultivate and protect them, reaching a point where your unit has a solid number of reliable high skill pilots can actually make the career much more bearable- particularly on higher difficulties.

As of currently my aforementioned Kuban campaign has two AI pilots above the century mark (168 and 109 respectively), one in the low 90s, and several ranging from the mid 50s to the high 20s.  As a result we've become far more effective than any AI formation I've yet seen in career mode, and I am very much overly proud of them- it certainly helps with the JG 52. immersion to have actual experten.

[LukeFF]

5 hours ago, Burdokva said:

I always thought that the difficulty level control the chance modifiers to encounter Veteran/Ace AI rather than enemy numbers.. very interesting, I might go with moderate difficulty and dense instead of the usual medium density/hard difficulty I play at.

 

The difficulty level affects the following things:

• The skill level of friendly and enemy flights
• The skill level and density of AA guns
• The number of friendly and enemy bomber/ground attack escorts

[Stoopy]

On 3/6/2020 at 9:45 AM, Ram399 said:

Once the landing ritual has begun it can be stopped by no mortal force, the sacrament of the of base to final turn is integral to the AI's religion.

 

I like this.  Can I get an Amen crossing over the threshhold?  ?

 

 

[SJ_Butcher]

This is war and you want flowers? Real life pilots faced this much worse, if you don't like that lower the difficult

[LukeFF]

2 hours ago, SJ_Butcher said:

This is war and you want flowers? Real life pilots faced this much worse, if you don't like that lower the difficult

 

Umm, no they did not. It was not standard practice at all to chase an enemy, fangs out, deep into enemy territory trying to get that elusive kill. 

[Yogiflight]

1 hour ago, LukeFF said:

3 hours ago, SJ_Butcher said:

This is war and you want flowers? Real life pilots faced this much worse, if you don't like that lower the difficult

 

Umm, no they did not. It was not standard practice at all to chase an enemy, fangs out, deep into enemy territory trying to get that elusive kill. 

Absolutely, especially, as IRL, enemy might get some fighters in the air, when you fly over their territory, to keep you from return to your base.

[41Sqn_Skipper]

Actually, for me this issue is the biggest problem in career mode. Not sure if this is caused by AI or generated mission logic. It also may depend on the airplane: I usually face Fw 190 A8, which has plenty of ammo. So even after a long dogfight they have no reason to RTB. 

 

[Retrofly]

I did manage to get a 109 to stop chasing me yesterday, once he got to about 4k away he turned and went home.

 

I dont know what the logic is to give up chase but it seems "being over enemy territory" isn't one of them. I normally have to drag them back to base and hope the AA shoots them down.

[Jade_Monkey]

On 4/8/2020 at 11:47 AM, Charlo-VR said:

 

Is it because the mission uses the Attack mcu instead of attack area?

 

If that is the case the fix should relatively simple by just swapping those in the mission generator logic.

 

Edit: didnt mean to quote your post.

Edited April 10, 2020 by Jade_Monkey

[E69_Qpassa_VR]

Some humans do it too , eh @neumuller

[41Sqn_Skipper]

3 hours ago, Jade_Monkey said:

Is it because the mission uses the Attack mcu instead of attack area?

 

If that is the case the fix should relatively simple by just swapping those in the mission generator logic.

 

Edit: didnt mean to quote your post.

 

Is there a way to test if this would stop AI from chasing? Maybe manually edit a generated mission to use Attack area?

[Jade_Monkey]

5 minutes ago, 41Sqn_Banks said:

Is there a way to test if this would stop AI from chasing? Maybe manually edit a generated mission to use Attack area?

 

In the ME attack area indicates the area (radius) in which they attack you. You can reasonably set it to 9Km, and if you exit then they turn back to patrol the area. 

 

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Jade_Monkey

[falle96]

I actually had a flight of 110s attack my airbase in career today. Some of my squadronmates broke away from landing, but others didn't. Interestingly, my squadron CO, who had already landed, took back off again in order to get into the fight.

[Gambit21]

2 hours ago, 41Sqn_Banks said:

 

Is there a way to test if this would stop AI from chasing? Maybe manually edit a generated mission to use Attack area?

 

There's a few ways to do it, Monkey pointed out one way, using a "Force Complete" MCU/logic tied to a trigger/mission condition is yet another.

However doing these things when manually creating a mission is one thing, and not the same thing as telling the generator to do it.

 I gather that quite a bit of work/time is involved in changing how/what logic is generated for the career. I'm guessing we'll see adjustments over time.

[Yogiflight]

5 hours ago, FarflungWanderer said:

I actually had a flight of 110s attack my airbase in career today. Some of my squadronmates broke away from landing, but others didn't. Interestingly, my squadron CO, who had already landed, took back off again in order to get into the fight.

I did experience this as well in the past, this is very cool to see, but, unfortunately, it is very rare.

[anwhitmore]

They are still doing it. Enemy AI target the player solely, completely ignore the target bombers and friendly AI and go hell bent to kill the player. This is becoming a joke and ruins the career play completely.

 

1C ... Please ... just get on and FIX IT! 

 

[-DED-Rapidus]

@anwhitmore, we need a track, the problem itself is known and is in the queue for correction, but additional information for analysis will also be useful.

[Vortice]

I have noticed in several recent careers that after fighting with the enemy and then landing on my home airfield the remaining bandits in the area will repeatedly attempt to strafe me while I am parked up on the ground.

 

They will ignore every other friendly plane in the air and every other parked aircraft on the airfield, but instead concentrate solely on my aircraft.

 

I don't currently have any webspace where I can upload a *.trk file to demonstrate this to you, but it happened again as recently as today. It's somewhat unrealistic behaviour I think, and it detracts from the overall enjoyment of the game.

 

@-DED-Rapidus

 

I have a *.trk file of this happening, but it is sized 430Mb, so how can I send it to you?

Edited April 6, 2021 by Vortice

[LukeFF]

9 hours ago, Vortice said:

I have a *.trk file of this happening, but it is sized 430Mb, so how can I send it to you?

 

You can always create a free Dropbox account and then link to the file here.

[Vortice]

Moved and merged huh? Sneaky sneaky.

Edited May 3, 2021 by Vortice

[anwhitmore]

On 4/3/2021 at 12:02 AM, -DED-Rapidus said:

@anwhitmore, we need a track, the problem itself is known and is in the queue for correction, but additional information for analysis will also be useful.

 

I assume you mean to record a flight track using the Recorder (Ctrl-R)... OK, I will