Exactly how does one do an extensive air attack?
 

I once saw the japs doing a continual air attack on an american TF in range of the enemy. I've seen black lines leading up from carriers (I am guessing something that's not suppose to show ingame)

So..If I stick a carrier or 2 in a mission (does a seaplane tender cause more seaplanes to occour?) What exactly must I do to get copius ammounts of planes on a target?

Good question
 

I'm trying to make a mission that recreates Operation Ten-Go. The mission where the Yamato with a LC and 8 DDs sails forth to glorious (or pointless, depending on your take on things) destruction under the guns, bombs, and torpedoes of 300 American aircraft. This is my first real mission, and I've run into some hitches.
I can't just copy and paste enough aircraft at varying ranges to arrive at various times and sink the Yamato. It seems you can only have so many aircraft on the mission map at one time. Besides, too many aircraft makes the mission too Processor Intensive. I'm playing ROTFS, and the Yamato is INCREDIBLY tough. Yamato plus escorts shrug off bomb hits and strafing, torpedoes usually miss, and my planes get wiped out. I got sick of watching the US die, so, for fun, I stuck in 3 Iowa's crossing the Japanese T at long range just to watch the Japs get hosed. I watched dumbfounded as the Yamato's escorts blew up and sank, but the Yamato herself steamed right up to and through the picket line of American BB's--all the while enduring a literal storm of shells. She passed through the line and commenced to sail out of range the other way. Her superstructure was aflame and her rear main turret was out, other than that, she seemed in good shape.
It's going to take a lot of planes to sink that ship. Maybe not 300. Anyway, to keep my planes from getting slaughtered, I need for them to arrive on target, make a few passes, then break off and dissappear at their last waypoint. Then I need successive waves spawning and arriving and doing the same thing--wave of TB's, wave of DB's, wave of rocket armed Corsairs, wave upon wave. That would be a lot like reality. Haven't figured out how to do it yet, and the Manual is no help at all. Haven't found a tutorial that deals with this either.

Have you tried several "Random Generated Groups". Set the planes to elite and make sure you add a loadout before you add them to the group. The minimum time is 1 hour, so if you made 10 groups you would have planes attacking every 6 minutes. Just set the start time of each group 6 minutes apart so they don't all start at the same time and end up with too many planes in the air at once.
By using Random Generated Groups they respawn automatically so you don't have to copy/paste a million planes all over the place. Just make sure your sub is at least 20 miles from the spawn point or should not spawn.

Peabody

Thanks Peabody, that sounds like the ticket. I am having a problem with airplane, and ship loadouts however. Some planes/ships I can specify a loadout, but a lot of them I can't--option is grayed out.

Maybe it is something in the mod you are using, all the planes should have loadouts available. You said ships/planes, all planes should have loadouts. The ships should only allow cargo on cargo ships, troop transports,tankers, and so on but the Warships don't have any loadouts or cargo.

Peabody

Loadouts, RGG
 

Might be FOTRS. Certain planes, well, most fighter/ground attack planes the loadouts are grayed, but they come stock with rockets and bombs. The P-51 has a Basic and a Fighter option. Assume Basic is Ground Attack and Fighter is a clean configuration. Guess as they tweak the mod, the options will be expanded.

The Random Group thing worked very well after I figured it out. Strange thing though. The historical date of the mission 4/7/45 will not work with the RGG. Groups will not spawn when the day is set to 7. Gave me fits finding the problem. When I set the day to 1, the groups started spawning. So my mission works, it just happens six days early.

It's awesome though. I watch it over and over like a movie. Thirty Dive Bombers arrive and pound the Japs. Then a group of Corsairs and Wildcats strafe 'em. Then the Torpedo Bombers arrive and things get serious for the Japanese, ships start blowing up, the Yamato takes hits and lists, ships water, loses speed. Rinse, repeat as necessary. Wave upon wave until every last Jap ship is a burning, sinking hulk. It's fun to use the external camera and watch the action from aboard the Jap ships, as if you were a crew member. It is intense. A hail of bullets and rockets from every direction, nowhere on deck to hide. Geysers of spray shooting up from near misses from bombs. It makes me want to crawl under something and hide until it's all over.

I mean, like, CRAZY JACK.

I could make it much more historically accurate, although to do so will take some balancing. The mission would take around two hours. My Yamato is sinking much faster than that--maybe half an hour, maybe 45 minutes, depending on events. It's been difficult to find information on the exact composition of the American Fighter\Bomber groups. There are some good time-line sites. Haven't been able to find the exact disposition of the Japanese Task force. I know generally that the CL Yahagi was leading the Yamato, and the 7 DD's were arrayed in a circle around them, all ships about 1500 m apart. But I don't know where the Hamakazi was relative to the Hatsushimo, etc. Some units are missing from the game, although there are enough to approximate. For instance, the Curtiss
Helldiver I have in game is a Torpedo Bomber, whereas the Curtiss Helldiver that attacked Yamato in the first wave was a Dive Bomber. So I use Dauntless Dive Bombers instead. My forces take much heavier casualties than we did in reality. The US lost 10 aircraft, according to one source. In my mission US aircraft explode like fireworks. On every pass a US plane bursts aflame. The Torpedo Bombers get it the worst, coming in low and relatively slow, whole formations are decimated by AA, although they do, by far, the greatest damage. It's sick to watch a Destroyer get hit by 8 torpedos, explode, break in half, sink. By the end, I think I average a loss of 50+ aircraft. The Destroyers claim most of them. They are lethal vs. planes.

Glad you have it working. The reason all the planes have loadouts in the stock game is because the planes will not engage each other. So they added bombs and torps to all the planes since fighters will not attack other planes.
The date of 7 should have nothing to do with it, you may have something wrong that is preventing them from working.

Peabody

Might be FOTRS again somehow. With the mod enabled, I had to copy and paste a couple of files from the Data folder to the mod to get the Editor to open up and run.

Been tweaking the mission. At first I had Dive Bombers and Attack planes together in a group, but since I can only give one waypoint to the group, that was restricting my fighters' speed and making them more vulnerable. Now I have one initial wave of Dauntless DBs, then for the rest of the hour successive waves of Fighters with bombs and rockets. The fighters are dive bombers too, after all. They drop bombs, then strafe and rocket, then the survivors break off. Works very well.
I neet to tone everything back to try to make things last longer. There is a constant fighter presence to keep the action going and four waves of TBs at 10 min. intervals which results, after 30 mins. or so, in the Yamato dead in the water with most of its escorts sunk, maybe one or two remaining, but heavily damaged. There is a brief lull, then the final wave arrives. More fighters and a devastating TB attack and it's sayonara Task Force Ten-Go.
It's impossible to make it true-to-life of course. In order for the game to be "fun" it diverges from reality in countless ways. The Yamato is both more vulnerable and far tougher than its real world counterpart, depending on what is attacking it. Battleships can pound it until the cows come home with little effect. Planes are somewhat more potent against it. Fighters, Dive Bombers, and Torpedo Bombers are far more accurate than they were in reality. In an interview, a Yamato survivor said the Americans attacked in groups of about 30. So 30 Curtiss Dive Bombers in the first wave. Out of those 30, according to Wikipedia, two bombs hit. In-game, 30 DBs are liable to very nearly sink Yamato in 15 seconds. In the first attack, one torpedo hit Yamato. In game, a wave of 8 TBs, if they all attack Yamato, will probably hit Yamato 8 times. At least 6 torpedoes will hit. Yamato can survive 6, or even 8, torpedo hits, but she is left dead in the water, hanging by a thread. To have Yamato survive for 2 hrs, I will have to dribble in my planes in groups of 4 (2?) which is hardly realistic, and with all the AA concentrated on a small group, the planes will all be shot down.
So...there's only so much one can do.
But it's fun.

A couple of comments:

1. You say you have to copy some files from the data folder to the MOD folder? Does FOTRS delete some files? One very important step, You MUST enable the FOTRS MOD BEFORE you open the mission editor or else it will not know about the planes that FOTRS adds to the game.

2. To make your ship last longer make some of the planes elite and put in some Novice and Poor so you will have planes but they won't do much damage. Another idea is to add some planes with just the "basic" loadout which means they won't have any bombs so again you will have the 30 planes but only a couple will do damage.

If you could post this somewhere that I could download it, I may be able to figure out the date problem, it shouldn't be happening. Did you try running it in the mission editor to see if they spawn?

Peabody

Yeah, I had the mod enabled. Maybe I'm remembering wrong. Maybe I had to paste the files from the mod to the Data folder. Anyway, there was something in the mod that did not install to the right place, the editor gave me a warning that it couldn't find the file,and I had to paste a couple of files to get the Editor working.

I have used the Simulator to check on how things proceed. When the day was set to 7, nothing happened. I seem to remember that if I set time compression way high then after a LONG time they would start spawning.

I have played with the crew ratings some. I tried making them merely Competent, then Novice in an effort to make them less aggressive so they wouldn't make multiple passes and get shot down. Even on Novice, the torpedo bombers, if they fail to launch their ordnance on the first pass, will turn around and attack again. Alone, if necessary. Maybe I'll try Poor.

I can't make my Hellcats and Corsairs Basic Loadout. The option is grayed out. I could do it with Buffalo's and Mustangs, but, so far as I know right now, they were not included in the attack on Ten-Go.

Maybe I can upload the mission to my Profile Page here somehow. If not, guess it's time to get a Filefront page. Anything but Rapidshare. I'd rather upload to "I Love Hitler.com" than use Rapidshare.

Ok, here is the latest version of the mission.

http://www.filefront.com/15640847/TenGoA.rar

By the way, haven't said so yet, but thank you for your help. It's been invaluable.

Oh, and here's a question for you. Do Aircraft Carriers spawn aircraft? If not, what are they good for. If so, what is their behavior? Will a CV within plane range of a high value target launch against that target? Do you have to have a Recon Plane in contact with the target, or another ship?

You are welcome, glad to help when I can.

Here is something you may want to try for your mission that I didn't think of before. If you set the planes for the 7th and the spawn rate for 24 hours, they may not spawn until 24 hours later. In other words they would spawn on the 8th, 24 hours after the set date. So try setting them for the 6th and see if it works for you.

I will try to get FOTRS and check the mission, since most of the planes are not in the stock game.

I have not actually tested it, but I do notice a LOT more aircraft when I am near a Task Force containing a Carrier. So I think they do spawn aircraft, but I think they fly a random pattern and attack if they happen to encounter you. I don't think they launch aircraft specifically to attack another ship. I think they just have aircraft in the air around them just like an airbase would send out planes in the game. An airbase just has an area they cover with their aircraft, they don't launch when a ship approaches. At least I think that is how it works in the game.

Peabody

No, I'm sure I had the respawn rate set to 1. I checked that over and over. Then, testing the problem, I set the date to day 1 and ran the Simulator. Aircraft spawned. Then I set it to day 7 and ran the Simulator. Aircraft did not spawn. So, there you have it.

Sorry to make you download 700 mb just to try my mission. But I'm confident you won't regret downloading FOTRS.

What I need you to do is set the date like you did before to 7 and send me the mission that does NOT work. I can look at the one that works, but it will not help me figure out what the problem is. I need to see the one that does not work to figure out what is wrong.

Peabody

Will do. But why not just use your Editor and set the day to 7? It will be the exact same as the one I upload to Filefront. Anyway, uploading.

Afraid it might be a moot point. I just changed the file in preparation to upload it, and ran the simulator with the day set to 7 and the planes spawned no problem. Now I don't know what to think. There are a lot of things I could have got wrong and fixed in the process of refining the mission. I am relatively new to mission building, and at the time I started making the mission, I was experimenting with the RGG for the first time. Still, I swear that the planes wouldn't spawn, then I changed the day and it started working. Anyway, I'm afraid we are not going to be able to reproduce the "non-spawning". 'Cause now they do.

Wait a minute, I still have an old version of the mission that might not work. Let me see about that one. Nope, that one works too, and now I think I know why.

I was having some problems with the editor having a conflict with my Vista settings. At first I got no error messages, but was having some trouble with graphics corruption with certain editor functions. Setting waypoints, I would get a large, blotchy box with my waypoint in it looking like a smear. After setting the waypoint, it looked normal. I had the same issue with the distance measuring tool. So I started messing with the program's compatibility settings. I tried running the program in 256 colors--that fixed the issue, but was hardly satisfactory as my whole desktop looked like crap. I tried running as an administrator, etc. Finally I got a message from Vista saying that Editor was incompatible with some elements of Aero, the Vista theme I was using, and that those features would now be turned off while the program was in use. Since then, no problems with the Editor. And now the dates work as well. So. There is the answer. The Editor is not compatible with more advanced Vista desktop themes, but it works fine with the basic one.