Spot on there XabbaRus, totally agree with you.
In the Battle of Britain, the Germans were constantly being told at their pre-mission briefings that the RAF were down to their 'last fifty Spitfires', because of the Luftwaffe's appallingly bad intelligence. And the RAF had based its requirements on believing the reported numbers of German aircraft they were going to face, the figure for which was greatly exaggerated pre-war by the Nazis in the first place.
So that's a case of your own propaganda working against you, and certainly a case of not knowing the enemy's disposition affecting the outcome of a battle.
Unfortunately the 'success' of a mission is something which is tricky to design when you are talking about criteria in a computer program which has to 'tick certain boxes' to allow you to proceed, as anyone who's ever done any mission designing will know, with very often some limits on 'triggers' in the sim. I'm certainly hoping that the forthcoming Battle of Britain and Flying Tigers sims are going to concentrate on making this aspect the impressive part, rather than simply going for eye-candy (as a lot of recent releases have done).
I'm all for making a fun 'game' where you get to shoot stuff down and have cool battles of course, but the reality is that each RAF pilot shooting down an average of less than two German planes was enough to secure victory in the Battle of Britain, so just making it through a campaign with your squadron in one piece is often enough to win the day. As someone once said, 'wars are won by the side that screws up less'!
Chock