Why do Career Mode missions drop after 2 months

[Ram399]

A whole thread might be a bit overkill for this question, but I couldn't find anywhere else really fitting to ask.

In short, I'm curious if theres any basis for the number of missions a squadron might fly in a single day across the career modes.
As I've spent far more hours than I'm willing to admit flying in the career mode, I've noticed that while the career speed setting affects the number of days the player's unit has flight operations, the number of flights flown on a given day when there are operations generally sticks to a set number.

However, in every career I have flown (generally on realistic speed) this number starts rather high around 3 to 4 sorties per day, before dropping to 2 sorties per day at some point and continuing as such until the end.

In Moscow we started with 3 sorties per day, before dropping to 2 around late November which continued until January when JG 52 left the theater.
And then in Stalingrad we started with 3 sorties before JG 52 was transferred south in the beginning of September, and then returned in December with 2 sorties per day again.

I can understand the number of sorties flown might vary based off of overall activity in the theater, but for whatever reason this decrease never seems to be explained or reversed.

Two missions per day makes sense for units such as bomber groups and the like. 
But with the relatively recent jump up in squadron size, dividing 2 sorties per day between 18 fighter pilots means a number of them rarely see combat.

This drop occurred most recently in my JG 52  Kuban career between June 18th, 1943 and June 19th, 1943 (Exactly 2 months after the career started on April 18th).
For every day prior to June 19th we had been flying 4 sorties per day, and the sudden drop off in flights after 2 months of 4 sorties per day has been somewhat of a let down to say the least.
JG 52 is the only fighter wing on the peninsula after all, it would make more sense if we were extremely overtaxed rather then having a mere half our pilots go up on any given day.

Has anyone else noticed an issue along this line?
I'm not sure if its a weird bug or if its actually intended to be this way, either way some clarification would be appreciated.

June 18th:

Spoiler

June 19th:

Spoiler

 

[LukeFF]

It's mainly a design thing. I've tried to strike a balance between giving the player multiple missions to fly per day, versus giving them too many and making it feel like a slog. In general, 2 missions for squadrons per day is the norm, with a few exceptions (Soviet bomber squadrons, by virtue of their size, fly a max of one mission a day). 

Edited June 20, 2020 by LukeFF

[dburne]

Interesting, last time I was flying Career in my Spit Mk IX whilst some days it would start out showing me assigned to two missions that day, after flying the first my name 

always dropped off the second. In effect all I ever got to fly was one per day.

[Ram399]

2 hours ago, LukeFF said:

I've tried to strike a balance between giving the player multiple missions to fly per day, versus giving them too many and making it feel like a slog.

 

Understood, I'm inclined to agree in the sense that flying 2 missions per day as the player is a fairly good benchmark- and as a unit CO I generally put myself on 2 sorties per day in most cases.

Having just done some cursory testing I see that fighters now start career phases off flying 2 sorties per day, I assume this change was made in the most recent update and I mistook it for some kind of scheduled shift in the career itself by mistake.   My bad.

I entirely understand the Soviet bomber groups flying a single sortie per day, as they fly in large groups and their overall unit size of 12 men fits that margin well, and in the past when the fighter squadrons consisted of only 12 men flying 2 sorties per day was a rather good fit.

As of now though with fighter units being 16 men at full strength, I can't really divide my squadron into two flights of 8 for a given day.

I'm definitely somewhat unusual in this sense, some might say obsessive, but when flying in the career mode I like to focus on the unit overall and my AI pilots rather than myself.
(To the degree that each time one of them dies in combat I write out a detailed casualty report and keep logs of major engagements and actions- yes its extremely nerdy, but what else is a bored history major/pilot supposed to do in quarantine)

Under the system where 4 sorties were flown per day with an overall unit size of 18, I effectively operated a quasi-historical staffel system where my unit was divided into 2 sub flights and a smaller command flight, with each sub flight flying 2 sorties per day, and the command flight supplementing them when necessary.
 

Here's an illustration of how much time I have on my hands:

Spoiler

The end result of this system was that I, along a few other select pilots, flew twice a day, while every other pilot in the unit would hypothetically go up at least once per day- and I had far more variety in the missions which I chose to participate in.
With the reduction in the number of sorties per day down to 2, this system and the unit size in general has just become rather overkill- and while the new unit size of 16 helps this somewhat I think it would honestly be better served by just reverting back to 12.   Otherwise as things are currently, I have a number of Feldwebels who pretty much sit around not doing anything as I consistently favor my more experienced pilots for each flight.

Naturally this system is dependent on the player being the CO in order to effectively organize, but as dburne said, when not flying as the CO theres a chance that the player will get even less participation.

I don't mean to sound overly petty and be one of the people who go complaining about every little change, but I can definitely say I preferred the earlier build with 4 sorties per day.

Historically speaking, most fighter units in WW2 flew far more than 4 sorties in a given day, with single Luftwaffe pilots in particular often going up several times in a day.
While I can admit that its plainly not practical to have so many flights in a day, I can't help but feel that the realistic speed setting should maybe reflect this a bit more.

It might be a bit to ask for, but if an additional setting could be created pertaining to the number of missions flown each day separate from the overall career speed setting I would be eternally grateful.

[US63_SpadLivesMatter]

Sometimes you squad is just running low on aircraft too.

[busdriver]

5 hours ago, Ram399 said:

Two missions per day makes sense for units such as bomber groups and the like. 
But with the relatively recent jump up in squadron size, dividing 2 sorties per day between 18 fighter pilots means a number of them rarely see combat.

 

2 hours ago, Ram399 said:

I entirely understand the Soviet bomber groups flying a single sortie per day, as they fly in large groups and their overall unit size of 12 men fits that margin well, and in the past when the fighter squadrons consisted of only 12 men flying 2 sorties per day was a rather good fit.

 

Respectfully...you keep using missions per day and sorties per day as if they are the interchangeable. It is a fairly common misunderstanding. But they are not interchangeable. Missions are those different tasks flown by a variable number of airplanes/pilots assigned to perform that task. A sortie is an individual airplane taking off to perform that mission. Suppose the game assigns 8 airplanes to perform the mission task. That means 8 sorties. If Lt Elmo Bowlogritz ground loops on takeoff into a ditch and the other 7 planes fly the mission...that's 7 sorties on 1 mission, Bowlogritz doesn't count since he didn't get airborne. That's how it works IRL. 

 

My SP career experience typically has my squadron sends out 2 missions per day. The each mission might be a two-ship (2 sorties) on a free hunt up to an eight-ship (8 sorties) doing something else. The fewest sorties per day I routinely see is 8 and the most sorties is 16...for 2 missions. 

 

 

[Ram399]

37 minutes ago, busdriver said:

Respectfully...you keep using missions per day and sorties per day as if they are the interchangeable.

Huh, I always thought the definition in aviation was the same as it was when referring to infantry.
I'll remember that lol.

So, with the reduction in missions my unit has gone from flying an average of 16-24 sorties per day to around just 8 to 12.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

Both the amount of missions per day and the days on which missions can be flown are defined in the career config files, for any arbitrary period during a campaign (this can be as short as a single day). Now some of this is balancing to keep the career fun, as LukeFF says, but historicity also seems to play a role, as well as aircraft type and other things. Bombers generally only get one sortie per day (or night) in my experience, and periods of busy air activity seem to have more sorties. For instance, in the Bodenplatte career, the Germans have only a limited amount of days where sorties are flown at all, and these days often have only one or two missions. The Allies not only fly on more days, but if they fly it's also more missions (there are no days with only a single Allied mission). This difference between the Allies and Axis is of course entirely historical.

Edited June 21, 2020 by AEthelraedUnraed

[Ram399]

On 6/21/2020 at 5:39 AM, AEthelraedUnraed said:

career config files

Out of curiosity, do you know where one might find those files?

[AEthelraedUnraed]

Yes, I do ?

 

 

 

And to answer the underlying question as well, it's data\scg\[career num]\squadrons.cfg and data\scg\scripts\[career num]squadrons.cfg. The one in the scripts directory is used when starting a new career; IIRC the one in the [career num] dir is used for the generation of missions itself. They're identical copies of one another.

 

[career num] IDs:

13: Moscow

14: Stalingrad

15: Kuban

18: Bodenplatte

The other ones are various quick mission configurations.

[Ram399]

4 hours ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

15: Kuban

I might be missing something entirely here, but for whatever reason my scg folder is missing only the number 15 career ID for Kuban- it just skips from 14 up to 16.
All the others are present however, which is rather odd.

Any idea why this might be?

Edit: just found it, I had to extract the Missions GTP and that got it to appear for some reason.

Edited June 24, 2020 by Ram399
Found it

[AEthelraedUnraed]

12 hours ago, Ram399 said:

Edit: just found it, I had to extract the Missions GTP and that got it to appear for some reason.

Yes, some files are not in the .gtp package you'd expect them to be. Not just the career files but anything. Most of it makes sense, but occasionally there's the odd file that didn't fit within a certain file size limit or whatever and that's placed somewhere else entirely. My solution is usually to just extract them all in order of decreasing likelyhood, until I've got the files I need.

[Ram399]

After a bit of tinkering and verifying the game cache like 8 times I have managed to alter the number of missions per day as well as the number of pilots in the unit if anyone is interested.
I'm about the furthest thing from a mod maker and haven't written any code since I took comp sci back in high school but its fairly easy.

Along the way I stumbled into the asset files for the autogenerated pilot photos though, and I was not prepared for this nightmare fuel:

Spoiler