[WIP] Air Layer

[AkbarGulag]

Just to keep everyone in the loop, an air layer with a massively reduced frequency has been achieved. But it's merely the start. The team is at the point where we will shortly be able to say 'Cake', whenever we need to do something.

To those that like historical accuracy, plane allocation dates have been changed to reflect their actual service entry and to a lesser extent availability by those dates.

Anyway, we have said to much already. Many changes.

By the looks this will initially be made for only SH4+1.4 patch and thats great news for those who run fairly clean versions (i.e not one of the major mods or mods altering how the planes work). That said, as a person who runs major MODS myself, I would imagine something to be compatable with others would follow.

[DrBeast]

Sounds promising. Keep it up!

[AVGWarhawk]

An area that is in dire need of work. Looking forward to this.

[Defiance]

Bravo Guys

Hope it goes to plan for you while creating

Have fun

Ciao

Def

[tater]

As you know (I'm sure) the way to change the ranges is to change them for the planes.

"BP-clone" planes and make variants for different purposes, IMO.

I made VERY short ranged versions for carriers since a CAP flies over the fleet, not at the max range of the plane.

Ditto for airfield CAPs.

The only plans you'd expect to see far from home would be patrol aircraft, or planes flying somewhere to attack it (or CAP farther from home).

The ideal solution would probably be a mix between using the airbases (limiting you to the crappy "airstrike" stuff) and adding some campaign layers with the planes following waypoints (use random groups). Some might be strike groups (say from Rabaul to Guadalcanal, or later to Sunlight, Munda, Ondonga, etc). Such groups I would actually have unarmed, except for maybe a plane or two so they don't all unrealistically abandon their mission to attack a speck in the ocean.

I tried to no avail to get the ACE program to make radial patterns, looks like they need to be done by hand for that.

I have a mod out there someplace that makes som variant plane with short range, and I think the airbases are published WIP, too. Take all you need.

[LukeFF]

Whatever you guys do, if you can, PLEASE try to get rid of the multi-engine aircraft (Mavis, Betty, Emily, Q1W) that patrol together in pairs. They simply did not patrol this way.

[CaptainHaplo]

Thanks Tater. We were hoping for a way to limit all the various planes - regardless of range - to one specific search radius. Not sure its possible. Thanks though!

[AkbarGulag]

So you know Tater, we decided that maximum ranges of aircraft as seen in things like Wiki-pedia are generally for an unloaded plane. It's a different story to load a plane full of bomb and charges then fly 2500km thus, planes with weapons will have less range than planes that search.

As far as the Zero fighter is concerned, I really don't think you would ever have seen this more than several hundred Kilometres for an airfield. And the game does not require fighter escorts for bombing historic land targets. I think a range of about 300-400km is ample for those. (even though it's range was far greater)

A lot of what you mentioned is between our teeth right now.

As to cloning the planes and bases, we wil not be using any of the traditional airbases and all planes used in our alpha tests are clones.

Your right about the airfields and placement also, it's pretty much going to have to be done by hand.

And Luke, I still don't know how the game decides these things should fly in pairs, for example. Even if I give a base, say, two sqaudrons with for example 20 planes each, it will still send individual planes. But if I assisgn 2 planes to a squadron, it may patrol with them both The only way around this would be to create a lot more airbases... We are going to have to find some balance here on what is actually able to be done and what will take far to long and be far to complicated.