PWCG AAA QoL suggestions

[Stonehouse]

@PatrickAWlson

 

Hi Pat,

I've been doing a significant revamp of the AAA mod lately and while testing using QMB and EMG missions came across a few things that I think would transfer to PWCG as quality-of-life enhancements. If you are doing any of these already, apologies and please ignore that item. All are applicable to stock and the experience given using my AAA mod equally. Hopefully you might consider implementing some or all of them if they are possible. Apologies in advance for the long post too.

 

Some background first.

 

Both QMB and EMG missions create a single style of activation trigger and attack area MCU for AAA at a location and set these for 5-6000m or thereabouts. Deactivation radius in EMG is about 5500-6500m or thereabouts. I think QMB is much the same. As best I have seen the orientation of the guns is either random or very poor and often the opposite facing to the direction of threat. As best I have observed neither EMG or QMB use correct battery compositions. The tendency is to place 1 or 2 heavy flak units plus 3-4 light. Here I am not talking about a need to put down a flak regiment but simply the smallest group of units historically deployed should be used if AAA is placed.

 

An example, minimal German flak defenses - if using heavy flak - was a single battery of either 4 or 6 guns plus at least 2 light AAA guns for close in protection.

 

Quoting from a 1943 US military intelligence reference I have a mixed German battalion for late 1943 used for rear area protection such as an airfield or supply dump according to doctrine was:

A real-life example Abbeville in Oct 1943 had a 6-gun battery and two 4-gun batteries with 21 light flak positions within 3000m of the centre of the airfield.

 

Anyway, my point is that the smallest flak composition for German use was 4-6 heavy guns plus 2 light flak positions.

 

All heavy flak guns in game have a range of 10000m or more. This is much more than the activation and attack area range given by QMB and EMG. I have checked in stock that setting the activation radius and attack area MCU to 10000m does result in heavy flak engaging targets out as far as the MCU range or gun max range whichever is lower.

 

So, considering the above my hoped for quality-of-life suggestions are:

• If placing flak use a valid composition of units. If built at the lowest granularity, then placing multiple groups of the lowest valid composition would allow heavier defenses to be built in a more historically accurate and believable way. This particularly translates into what the player experiences in their aircraft. Using a valid composition will result in a realistic depiction of density of defensive fire. See here for an example mission https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/74938-aaa-mod/?do=findComment&comment=1268651 that illustrates the difference when using 10000m activation and attack area and accurate composition. All these missions on the link work in the stock game. The original EMG generated mission had 2 flak 37s with a searchlight and 2 flak 38s (20mm guns) for each flak 37 position. I altered these missions (with a lot of pain) and used them as missions to test the latest beta of the AAA mod and wanted to use a realistic heavy AAA battery and realistic engagement ranges.
• Orientate the guns towards the expected direction of enemy approach. I guess from PWCGs viewpoint this would be the direction to the nearest enemy airfield or front-line section. This makes a huge difference to the heavy flak defenses. If they have to rotate through 180 degrees as they often do now with a 6000m activation range, they often do not get to fire until the aircraft are overhead.  Note that the spotter bot attached to heavy flak guns has a 25000m range so they should be realistically able to spot approaching aircraft in time to ensure that the gun is pointing correctly well before the aircraft gets to them unless the aircraft was very low. If you take radar and observers making up the air defense network used by the Allies and Axis it would be fairly hard for an aircraft to sneak up unless very low level.
• Put heavy and light flak and perhaps searchlights on separate style activation/deactivation triggers and attack area MCUs with a range/radius value suitable for the gun range.
• Add a campaign parameter for heavy and light AAA that allows the user to set the range used for activation radius and the attack area radius. I would suggest a default of 10000m for heavy flak and 6000m for light. Searchlights could probably recycle the heavy flak setting to avoid an additional parameter for them. I'm suggesting parameters as I realise there are possible performance impacts to larger radii. I've noticed with QMB and EMG it would be possible to "game" the poor orientation of the heavy guns combined with the activation and deactivation range. That is, flying into and out of the spawn/despawn/spawn range will mean that the gun has to grind through a long rotation again when it respawns. Making the activation and attack range larger avoids some of this issue if correctly setting the orientation is not possible programmatically as the guns have more time to orientate at the target.
• Retesting the stock AAA to get a baseline for my mod work I saw that low skill heavy AAA is quite pathetic. The crew will alter elevation between each shot to such a degree it is almost like they are making the barrel do a dance. 40-50 degree variances. So even for stock I believe it would be a good QoL improvement to add a campaign parameter to allow AAA skills low, normal, high and random to be chosen. If random was selected, then my preference would be that it was a random allocation of low or normal or high for each individual gun placed in each mission rather than a random skill selection for the whole campaign. I think this random setting would make campaign flying much more interesting. My understanding is that you are defaulting AAA skill to low at present. Probably it would be good to have either only heavy AAA affected by this setting or have a separate setting for heavy and light AAA that could be set independently. I make this point because testing the mod indicates that the high ROF of light AAA allows even low skill crews to get hits.

 

Thank you for taking the time to read through if you got this far. 

Edited May 2, 2023 by Stonehouse