4.12.2 de-bugging

[Pursuivant]

AI fighter routines to attack heavy bombers seem badly flawed.

Fighters forgo effective and relatively safe head-on or high-side deflection shots in favor of suicidal tail-chases against U.S. heavy bombers.

Fighters equipped with "schrage-musik" style weapons don't take advantage of them, which makes it pointless to design bomber intercept missions for the Ki-45.

Fighters don't attack stragglers or "tail end Charlies" (the last and outermost plane in the formation), instead choosing to go for the #2 or #3 plane in the flight. If the bombers are in a "vic" formation, this means that a fighter taking a shot from behind the target is exposed to the defensive firepower of the entire formation!

Fighters will fly in between two "vics" of bombers when making stern chase attacks, so that they take fire from the front guns of the vic behind them and from the rear guns of the vic ahead of them.

Fighters always attack bomber formations individually, rather than than coordinating their attacks to split defensive firepower.

Fighters will follow an obviously crippled bomber all the way down to the deck, ignoring the other bombers in the formation. This effectively takes them out of the fight.

And this is for ACE AI!

On the other side:

At least in QMB, heavy and medium bombers don't appear in "defensive box" formations. Instead, they fly in the standard vic formations used by light bombers and dive bombers. This might be an artifact of the QMB, but Uber-demon's mission builder makes it very easy to assign different formations to particular groups of planes.

In QMB, bombers will break up their formations when they turn and not regain them for several minutes. This makes them much easier targets for fighters. This might be an artifact of the relatively short distances between waypoints.

(As a related issue, why have landing waypoints in the QMB? Would it be possible to just have AI planes that fly from one edge of the map to the other, possibly turning to bomb some location on the map?)

U.S. bombers seem to catch fire and/or break apart very quickly. While a 20-30 mm cannon shell could easily start a huge fire if it blew apart a fuel tank, it seems a bit unrealistic for even 2-3 hits to blow off the entire wing of a heavy bomber. And, while massive fires could burn through a wing fairly quickly, I'm not sure that the fire from a single fuel tank could do it quite as quickly as depicted in the game. (Keep in mind that the spectacular pictures of B-17 and B-24 plunging to earth with missing wings and with massive fires were mostly due to direct flak hits and/or wings pulling off due to excessive G forces.)

Bombers seem to make no attempt to control fires. Since IL2 can't model shutting off fuel tanks or switching fuel from damaged tanks, it seems to me that fire suppression systems on heavy bombers should have a slightly better chance of working than they did historically, and that there should be some method of using "fire extinguishers" to suppress fuel fires as well as engine fires.

I'm still dreaming of a QMB mission where I could quickly set up an immersive intercept mission by Axis fighters against Allied heavy bombers.

In a head-to-head daylight intercept situation, I'd love to see:

1) Fighters take diving or level head-on attacks against the lead bomber in the lead formation.

2) Against loosely formed formations, possibly taking additional shots at planes in trailing formations as they continue.

3) Climb or dive to out of range of the bombers guns. Look for stragglers.

4) Detail some members of the flight to attack cripples (using coordinated high-side or head on-attacks).

5) The rest of the flight/squadron turns, gets ahead of the bombers and turns to make new head-on or high side attacks. With some planes in the squadron making right and left high-side attacks while others make head-on attacks.

6) Repeat as necessary.