Bomber AI climbs away by itself

[Nolly]

Hi all,

 

Im working on a mission with a flight of 6 bombers, with the player as the lead (He111s)

 

Im having an issue where at random intervals, (but i think at waypoints) some or all of the flight will start to ignore orders and go into a full climb on their current heading.

this typically means i reach the target alone and get smashed by flak and fighters.

 

This has made testing everything else hard.

 

Any ideas?

 

I have tried:

 - deleting the offenders and replacing them with fresh in the editor.

 - ensuring all WPs are object linked

- increasing skill level to high

 

to no avail.

 

thanks

 

 

 

Campaign Mission 6 - Terrorangriff.zip

[Jaegermeister]

Yeah, I'm guessing it's planes number 5 and 6. There are some issues with some of the planes flying in formation correctly. Hopefully it will be fixed soon, I know it's been discussed in other threads before. 

 

It's not just you. 

[dbuile]

Regarding current bomber formation issues, I'm guessing it's related to altitude.  I didn't experience issues with He 111 career missions with 1500m alt waypoints, but did with the first mission at 2000m.  Looks like you have waypoints at 2700m, correct?

I, too, hope the issue/fix is prioritized.

[Nolly]

Thanks

Edited December 7, 2022 by Nolly

[Gambit21]

On 12/6/2022 at 8:07 AM, dbuile said:

Regarding current bomber formation issues, I'm guessing it's related to altitude.  I didn't experience issues with He 111 career missions with 1500m alt waypoints, but did with the first mission at 2000m.  Looks like you have waypoints at 2700m, correct?

I, too, hope the issue/fix is prioritized.

It’s bugged logic, not related to altitude.

[357th_KW]

On 12/14/2022 at 10:30 AM, Gambit21 said:

It’s bugged logic, not related to altitude.

Is there any more detail available on this issue?  I’ve been trying to build a large formation of bombers by using many formations of 3 flying alongside each other - it works for a while (sometimes 30 minutes or so), but sooner or later one or more of these small formations breaks up, or flys off in a random direction, or changes speed etc.  Oddly, a number of the other formations will continue working normally.  Using bigger formations seems to result in them acting up much sooner.

 

 Would it be better to simply not use formations and route each aircraft?  Or to break and rebuild the formation every few minutes?  Has anyone tried anything like this, or found any other tricks to work around this issue?  I really want to keep the bombers in a reasonably tight group, both for the aesthetic and for concentration of defensive fire.

[Gambit21]

11 minutes ago, 357th_KW said:

Is there any more detail available on this issue?  I’ve been trying to build a large formation of bombers by using many formations of 3 flying alongside each other - it works for a while (sometimes 30 minutes or so), but sooner or later one or more of these small formations breaks up, or flys off in a random direction, or changes speed etc.  Oddly, a number of the other formations will continue working normally.  Using bigger formations seems to result in them acting up much sooner.

 

 Would it be better to simply not use formations and route each aircraft?  Or to break and rebuild the formation every few minutes?  Has anyone tried anything like this, or found any other tricks to work around this issue?  I really want to keep the bombers in a reasonably tight group, both for the aesthetic and for concentration of defensive fire.

I gave up trying to deal with it - I have better ways to spend my time. I’m done…It’s ridiculous.

 

 

 

 

 

That said I thought it was dealt with last update…but maybe not.

[Hinterseer]

i think there are working on it again

 

[357th_KW]

That’s great news - I did some additional testing last night where I built an 18 plane B-26 formation, but with no formation command.  I built one, setup a waypoint etc and then copied and pasted those, so I had 18 identical aircraft and waypoints, all within 50-150 meters of each other laterally.  I added some very small vertical offsets so that none would collide.  What I found was that over a 30 minute run, about half of them would follow their orders to near perfection, but the other half would vary their speed significantly - over the 30 minutes some of them were as much as 2.5km behind, while others had gone from the back of the group and worked their way to the front by 500+ meters.  What was especially interesting was that when I ran the same test mission again after verifying that I hadn’t somehow changed the speeds on the individual waypoints, I got the exact same results the next time - the lagging planes were the same ones as last time.

 

I’ll put together an additional bug report to add in there.

[IckyATLAS]

On 2/23/2023 at 7:53 PM, 357th_KW said:

Is there any more detail available on this issue?  I’ve been trying to build a large formation of bombers by using many formations of 3 flying alongside each other - it works for a while (sometimes 30 minutes or so), but sooner or later one or more of these small formations breaks up, or flys off in a random direction, or changes speed etc.  Oddly, a number of the other formations will continue working normally.  Using bigger formations seems to result in them acting up much sooner.

 

 Would it be better to simply not use formations and route each aircraft?  Or to break and rebuild the formation every few minutes?  Has anyone tried anything like this, or found any other tricks to work around this issue?  I really want to keep the bombers in a reasonably tight group, both for the aesthetic and for concentration of defensive fire.

I made fly such formation made of smaller formation with large number of bombers. It works but this means tedious trajectory and speed planning. You have to take care about bomb loads. If the bomb loads are different say with bombs on wings or not etc. the speeds will change and so it will be difficult to keep the various flights grouped. The worst is flights with mixed bomber types, say B25, A20, B26, and that is really not manageable. So have the same bomber and identical ordnance load. Try also to have same formation types. This is not critical but later in steep turns it may create some chaos.

 

Then you have to consider that planes in a given flight as they fly they do move slowly around their trajectory. So be careful to have enough space between each flight otherwise you can have weird reactions to avoid a possible collision between planes. Once all this is done you can very well handle a large formation (40, 50 ,60 here you need a stellar CPU and have time dilation effects) of bombers flying in concert spread up horizontally and vertically. The problem may appear the moment you have turns, not slight but real turns. Here it can become tricky as each flight (say 5 planes per flight or even 7) the moment it starts a real turn it will spread out as each plane in the turn will avoid collision with the other plane as the turns are different for each plane. The more steep the turn is the more the planes may spread and move one relative to the other. During the turn the planes If you have many flights and space is not enough once they start spreading all around they may also start to avoid collisions between planes of different flights. If you have mixed geometry of formations than each geometry spreads a different way which makes things more complex. Also better have multiple small turns that one steep turn. It is the AI who manages the way the planes of a same flight will move during a turn. The more planes in the same flight and the more chaotic are the plane motions and the time it takes for them to regain a steady formation pattern. In steep turns collisions between them may happen. This to say that you need a lot of space between fights horizontally and vertically. In short very tight formations of multiple flights are difficult to do. 

 

Then comes the problem when your BIG bomber formation starts encountering the enemy, either flack or enemy fighters. If it is only flack it is easier to handle. All the flights waypoint must be set with Priority to High. This means that the pilot will fly the bomber completely oblivious with what happens around until it reaches the set waypoint. This means also that the whole bomber formation will go through the flack wall of fire and will do no evasive action that will completely ruin the formation. This is realistic at this point. The problem is planes getting hit and going down in flames through the whole bomber box, maybe colliding with other planes etc. This is something that is handled by AI and you can do nothing about it and can indeed create some chaos in the formation but it is also realistic up to this point.

 

The main problem is if you have enemy fighters. Here unfortunately the AI of this game is completely messed up. The Priority when set to High will shut down the gunners of the bomber. This means that the formation will fly in order and enemy fighters will zip through the formation in a realistic way but no gunner will fire at them. If you set the priority to Medium then the Leader pilot of a flight being attacked will take evasive action, but this evasive action will be followed by his wingmen and this can create chaos in the formation as other planes may start trying to avoid possible collisions. In counterpart the gunners of the attacked plane will fire against the attacking plane. 

 

If the waypoint Priority is set to Low, then the bombers will attack all the fighters, take evasive actions as they please and it will be a generalized chaos of bomber flights moving in unpredictable way and firing at will on all enemy targets at range even if they are not directly attacked. Only when no more enemy is detectable around the bomber group, the various flights may regain their position in the trajectory but at this point you will have a global formation that can be anything and will never regain its original geometry.

 

In this editor you cannot make a flight of flights or say connect a flight Leader to another flight Leader so as to have a global leader leading a group of flights.

But the main drawback is to have the Gunners behavior same as the pilot behavior and not separate this two entities which are and act differently. For AI no difference between a Gunner and a Pilot for a given plane in terms of behavior. And having gunners silent during fighter attack is completely unrealistic except if they are all presumed dead which too is completely unrealistic. And the Devs even after having alerted them multiple times did just nothing to solve this issue and I am afraid now the case is closed and we have to live with it.

 

 

 

 

[jollyjack]

On 12/6/2022 at 1:22 PM, Jaegermeister said:

Yeah, I'm guessing it's planes number 5 and 6. There are some issues with some of the planes flying in formation correctly. Hopefully it will be fixed soon, I know it's been discussed in other threads before. 

 

It's not just you. 

You saved my day;

i could not get a flight of 5 HP400 bombers to behave. Number 1 keeps crashing in to the ground, and with another setup they won't listen to waypoint 3.

Start turning back; indeed what Icky sayz ... enemy fighters might influence that in setup 2.

Edited March 6, 2023 by jollyjack