Well, the source of info I am going by is Donitz's own book, which I am slowly reading, and he has made little mention on the effectiveness of airborne units.

This seems to be part of the AI's coding and I'm not sure there's much I can do about it. Soon I'll release a version that removes the bombs from the fighters in the early war so all they will do is strafe but I've noticed that what's happening with the ships happens with the planes.

Once they spot you they might stick around forever just doing circles, sometimes strafing where you'd last been spotted by them. I've been going over what parts of the AI code they put in sh5 that we can change(this is new.. didn't get to play with this so easily in sh3/4) and the only thing I can figure out that's going wrong is that their never losing contact. It may be that there's a default wait time between when they last had contact with you and decide they have no contact now, but there is a setting for that in sim.cfg but didn't seem to make a difference.

I know many want realism and in the long run that's what i'm working towards but for now I'm trying to figure out why the AI does what it does and correct things as best I can.

If anyone uses the mod can you plz give me a brief report about the damage the guns do. Many of the stock settings were setup for these planes never attacking so I may have some plane tweaks to do.

MAJOR UPDATE :)

All planes are done. I used info from the internet to determine if they were a fighter only or had bombs also. Made a few personal choices knowing that the way the code works if your spotted by a plane they will send more to your location.

Given the discussion in the thread I decided that since most of the airbases in Britain only sent out hurricanes that one type would attack and the other type wouldn't . I thought this would be a decent compromise because your never going to know which is which.

Stay on guard :)

Good to hear your cleared for take off !:D

oh, I was going to add in that it can depend which way they are coming from if they would attack also.
Fighters flying escort latter on would save ammo on the way out, then use it , and if anything was left on the way back they would and did attack targets of opportunity.
Same with Bombers, if for some reason they had left over ordnance they would take pop shots at anything German.

Unfortunately there's no way to model that with sh5. Once the plane takes off it's either going to attack or it's not :nope:

As others have said, this basically fixes a bug that's not a bug.

There's nothing wrong with the planes in SH5 -- when they're told to attack you, they're more than happy to do so. Load up the Pedestal historical mission, and try to make it to the enemy convoy on the surface. Even if you stick close to the Italian task force and its two battleships, you're bound to take a pounding from their bombs and strafing.

I appreciate the effort, and I was annoyed by the planes at first, too, but after realizing they're meant to be that way, I'm sticking with things as they are.

Historical missions are different. They can be set so the planes attack. No need for my mod for that.

When planes are from an airbase they will only use the default and in stock that means only a select few will attack. That's where my mod comes in.

Hi wamphyri,

my damage report about cannons:
Just started 1939 campaign and I was strafed 2x by a fighter (Hurricane?) at british east coast: Hull down to 48% - minor damage to periscopes.

I think cannon fire is *very* effective - maybe too effective. Hull damage by MG fire should be decreased if possible. 2WO was injured during the attack, that was realistic.

I'm very afraid of planes now!

So you're saying that all planes behave this way, even later on? So that if I'm spotted by planes carrying rockets or bombs in '43, chances are they'll just drift by? I certainly see the need for a mod if that's the case.

If a plane has bombs even in '39 it'll attack. But only 5 planes have bombs and it'd be rare for you to encounter them. This holds true for the entire war, only a few airbases spawn planes that will attack. The rest of the planes will just fly by, reporting your position for more planes to come and just fly by.

Thx georg. I have a hunch that since only some planes in the stock game were meant to attack that they didn't care what damage they did. Working on the damage is my next major project

Since you've been testing these a lot, have you managed them to do torpedo attacks? I've been loading them with torpedoes but all they come up ingame is with bombs.

No torpedoes yet I'm afraid. They are in the game files, and have been since sh3. I'm guessing the devs couldn't get they to work properly even after all this time. I suspect that with the way the code works they'd just be dropped in the ocean and that was it. No drop then they'd run to target. I plan on playing with this one also but since it was part of the last 2 games I won't hold my breath.

Well the AI script contains TorpedoAttacks, so there is hope :DL
But they don't even load up with torpedoes in game right? Only bomb models show instead of the torpedoes..

An interesting question that I wasn't sure on. So I tested it. I put torpedoes on planes and the planes show up with torpedoes attached but they don't attack at all. I thought they should at least strafe me but they didn't do anything with torpedoes attached to them. I removed the torpedoes and put bombs and they would attack again like normal (well I used bombdummy but if you don't know what that means then assume I put bombs).

As you said the AI script has torpedo attack stuff in it but I assume something wasn't working right so the dev's shelved it. I'll keep looking into it but i'm not sure if there's anything I can do to fix it. My best guess is that the planes would drop the torpedo like a bomb and the torpedo acted like one.. ie it'd explode when it hit the water or would just sit there and not run straight like it should have.