Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: Nefarious on January 15, 2020, 07:25:32 AM
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In advance of the February 1st Fortress Europe, we are hosting a test of the event in SEA 1 this Saturday at 10:00PM EST.
All players are welcome, Allied Bombers and Escort as well as German Interceptors.
The purpose of the test is to Special Events AI bomber formations created by CaptTrips. The bomber formation is 36 Bombers with gunner medium gunner lethality setting (7). They will travel on a predetermined course at 150mph IAS/216mph TAS @ 22K FEET. They will drop on the Cologne Fuel Refinery in 10.8.8. Please refer to the map for info. Fighter spawns will close at T+90. If Allied bomber pilots are killed they may launch fighters while flight is open.
Players will not populate the mission, instead they will take their own 3-ship formation and join on the AI formation.
The mission for most will last about 2 hours. The AI bombers strike the target about T+57 and are close, but not quite Feet Dry back to England at T+120.
BOMBERS - B-17G - 50% FUEL - Launch from A4 EAST AIRSPAWN - Form up on AI B-17 Combat Box and follow to Cologne to attack fuel Refinery. (10.8.8)
ESCORT - P-38J, P-47D-25 - P-51D - 75% + DT - Launch from A4 EAST AIRSPAWN -OR- A6 EAST AIRSPAWN - Escort or Sweep for Bombers to Cologne.
LUFTWAFFE - Bf 109K-4, Fw 190A-8, Fw 190D-9, Me 410 - Launch from A61 AIRSPAWNS - Destroy American Bombers.
(http://www.ahevents.net/images/stories/sops_images/Nefarious/FORTRESS/COLOGNETEST.jpg)
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I will plan on dropping by, baring anything comes up this weekend. Bomber Pilots, lets take to the skies. :rock
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Too late for this bomber stick
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Chance to fly German and look for bombers, rock on
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I'll try and make it. I'll take a pony.
I'll be out at my land trying to connect with a cell phone hotspot. It might work. ;)
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Add the G14
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Add the G14
ok..will do.
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psst…. give dem any Jermen plane. Wees like to shoot dem all down. :devil
writ by unnone bommer pileit.
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Can downed allied pilots join as gunners?
I always get killed quick. ;)
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ok..will do.
Thank you,
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Can downed allied pilots join as gunners?
I always get killed quick. ;)
Yes. Also, Flight will be open the entire event. You can air spawn fighters from A6 (Allied) and A61 (Axis)
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Pro Tip: It doesn't work well to attack these formations solo. Don't ask me how I found that out. ;)
(https://www.dropbox.com/s/uq672cnf57q1lab/fortress.png?raw=1)
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Teamwork is vital in combat. It give the enemy someone else to shoot at. ;)
(https://www.dropbox.com/s/zbwmbdwt8d9qmsx/friends.png?raw=1)
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:aok
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tonight!
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Dear Luftwobbles,
That's a very nice little fuel factory you got there.
It'd be an awful shame if anything bad were to happen to it.
Just sayin.
:salute
(https://www.dropbox.com/s/fhqt1qyth41uy16/fuel.png?raw=1)
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I shall be there. However, if not allowed to be B17 mission then I shall have to leave.
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I shall be there. However, if not allowed to be B17 mission then I shall have to leave.
I believe he meant players won't populate the AI mission. If you want to fly a 3 plane buff formation you are welcome to launch the A4 East airspawn and form your buffs up with the AI formation. If fact, we WANT human buffs to form up the the AI. The AI just provides the base structure the humans will form around.
See you up there!
:salute
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I shall be there. However, if not allowed to be B17 mission then I shall have to leave.
no one will be turned away.
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It was Schweinfurt. :rofl
Though with only 4 escorts against 21 interceptors they got closer than I thought they would. ;)
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https://ahevents.net/index.php/event-logs
Logs are here under Fortress Europe.
AI bombers shot down 12 Luftwaffe. Not too bad.
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It shows the power of escorts. They kept the formation intact until the escorts were gone. Going to be a good one next week. With a full compliment of escorts it will be a different outcome. I was shot down by bombers and one escort. :salute
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It shows the power of escorts. They kept the formation intact until the escorts were gone. Going to be a good one next week. With a full compliment of escorts it will be a different outcome. I was shot down by bombers and one escort. :salute
Did you feel the AI gunnery was too easy or too hard?
:salute
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Did you feel the AI gunnery was too easy or too hard?
I think it depends on the overall mission goal. If you are setting up a scenario where escorts are required to manage fuel, be relieved, etc., I think the bomber guns were fine. You really did have to be cautious of your approaches. However, the biggest concern was definitely the escorting fighters. Once they were stripped off and/or destroyed, it really did become a bit of a turkey shoot. It seems like it doesn't really take a lot to get a plane to fall out of formation, perhaps just a control surface loss.
I can definitely see the potential.
Icons were a definite pain and had to be shut off on initial attack runs which made it kind of tough.
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Thanks for the feedback. :aok
I guess the question is how close did we replicate a formation of human AH bomber pilots. So I'd divide the issues between what would have been the same with a 36 bomber formation of humans, and which were particularly introduced by the AI.
I think it depends on the overall mission goal. If you are setting up a scenario where escorts are required to manage fuel, be relieved, etc., I think the bomber guns were fine. You really did have to be cautious of your approaches. However, the biggest concern was definitely the escorting fighters. Once they were stripped off and/or destroyed, it really did become a bit of a turkey shoot.
Did that feel different that if it had been human bombers? The closest analog I had recent experience with was flying with Ditto and his boys in the Bavaria scenario hunting bombers in FW190D-9.
We were definitely more concerned with escorts than the bomber gunners. We intercepted one formation that had rolled the dice tried a run without escorts. It was shooting fish in a barrel. :t
It seems like it doesn't really take a lot to get a plane to fall out of formation, perhaps just a control surface loss.
That might be an advantage of a human pilot. I think the AI may not be as good as compensating for a damaged plane as well. THere might be a variable that can be tweaked to help with that, but that may be a core limitation. Maybe the defensive gunnery should be nudged up just a tad to compensate for th AI's inability to hold formations with damage.
Icons were a definite pain and had to be shut off on initial attack runs which made it kind of tough.
That is really an issue attacking any large formation in AH. I had the same problem in the Bavaria scenario. I had icons mapped to a joystick button so I could turn them off right before I got withing guns range so I could concentrate on lining up a target. The only thing the AI contributes here is we are just able to build larger formations of AI than we often can achieve with humans only. But that is the whole point of what we are doing. So this one is unavoidable but at least controllable by the attacking player.
I can definitely see the potential.
I agree. I realize there is a lot of old school bias against it, but I think there are a lot of possibilities to enhance and augment events to achieve scales that we simply couldn't with the current player numbers. Ideally, we would simply have 1000 human players in a scenario and no need for AI augmentation. Until we get back up to those numbers....and if Hitech someday adds ships and vehicles there are some really interesting oppertunities.
Thanks again for helping us try it out and providing some feedback. It's a learning process. I can't wait to try it again with adequate escort coverage. :D
:salute
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Did you feel the AI gunnery was too easy or too hard?
:salute
It was very difficult to tell because I was also being shot at by the escorts and player controlled bombers.
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I can see how the icons would be annoying. Definitely don't have as much with the formations but I understand the issues surrounding formations.
I think the two most noticeable differences are/will be the speed at which bombers fly, and the fact that they will always stay together no matter what.
Even in scenarios, bombers cruising at 250 made it difficult for attackers to have more than 1-2 runs (especially in earlier war birds like the A8 or G6/G14). Likewise, once the escorts turned once or twice, it took them ages to get caught back up as well.
The Axis could usually count on killing a lot of bombers on their way home as they got spread out and stuff.
I could not participate in the test, but I was curious if there is any sort of delay in the AI gunning? Or more so how the targeting system works...does the bomber just attack the closest thing to it? If a plane is 400 underneath, and a second plane enters the bomber's six o'clock, does the bomber shoot at both, or does it instantly start shooting at the closer plane? These kinds of things may be frustrating to players (the instant robotic nature of it as opposed to the time it would take a human to jump gun positions and retrain the guns) but can be compensated by lowering lethality if necessary.
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It was very difficult to tell because I was also being shot at by the escorts and player controlled bombers.
The mission can be loaded in a Custom Player Arena.
Simply load the Rhinland Terrain in a Custom Arena, then go to Staged Missions, the mission should be in the list of Staged Missions. Select the mission and hit load.
Now, you can switch some England fields up to Axis and launch from A4 or A6 to make it quicker to find them.
Then start the mission, it will prompt you on when or delay. After it launches, roll from A4 or A6, and have at it.
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My personal experience by myself during testing was, Frontal attacks were usually not fired upon.
At the current setting of 7, I didn't survive any Stern Attacks.
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I can see how the icons would be annoying. Definitely don't have as much with the formations but I understand the issues surrounding formations.
Maybe someday Hitech can add a no AI icons mode. That would thin out the icon cloud and at the same time identify AI vs human. If the formation was thinned out and only AI, you could switch back to normal icon mode.
I think the two most noticeable differences are/will be the speed at which bombers fly, and the fact that they will always stay together no matter what.
Happily that is totally within our control. The scenario designers just have to figure out the sweet spot between historiality/whats fun for the defenders/whats fun for the attackers.
It's an easy tweak.
I could not participate in the test, but I was curious if there is any sort of delay in the AI gunning? Or more so how the targeting system works...does the bomber just attack the closest thing to it? If a plane is 400 underneath, and a second plane enters the bomber's six o'clock, does the bomber shoot at both, or does it instantly start shooting at the closer plane? These kinds of things may be frustrating to players (the instant robotic nature of it as opposed to the time it would take a human to jump gun positions and retrain the guns) but can be compensated by lowering lethality if necessary.
The AI defensive gunnery is largely out of my control. The only variable I have to tweak controls the angle of the bullet dispersion cone in degrees. The range goes from 0-15. Zero is laser beam tight, 15 is scattershot. The test we ran was set at 7. You can also specify a min-max and the AI will randomly be assign an ability with that range probablistically.
:salute
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The mission can be loaded in a Custom Player Arena.
Simply load the Rhinland Terrain in a Custom Arena, then go to Staged Missions, the mission should be in the list of Staged Missions. Select the mission and hit load.
Now, you can switch some England fields up to Axis and launch from A4 or A6 to make it quicker to find them.
Then start the mission, it will prompt you on when or delay. After it launches, roll from A4 or A6, and have at it.
When I get home tonight I can create a simple offine mission with the same settings we used and a LW spawn nice and close to the formation for easy quick testing.
Of course, it shouldn't be too easy for an individual attacker to approach a formation. In an event the defensive fire is being slit between multiple attackers.
Note, when we had the initial hard gunnery settings, I was definitley getting shredded on HO passes. Suprisingly so. I had to limit myself to high angle diving 10-2 clk attacks.
It's a learning process. ;)
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When I get home tonight I can create a simple offine mission with the same settings we used and a LW spawn nice and close to the formation for easy quick testing.
Of course, it shouldn't be too easy for an individual attacker to approach a formation. In an event the defensive fire is being slit between multiple attackers.
Note, when we had the initial hard gunnery settings, I was definitley getting shredded on HO passes. Suprisingly so. I had to limit myself to high angle diving 10-2 clk attacks.
It's a learning process. ;)
Sounds like the hard setting is about on par with what you have to do against the better human gunners. The easier it is to set up your gunnery, the easier it is for them to set up theirs. ;)
Wiley.
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My testing experience was a slash attack across the entire formation from 4K above them and 9-3 oclock, no hits or damage to me but ack was going all over the place and I peppered them pretty well. Did a uturn after gaining some alt back and slashed through again from 11 - 6 oclock. Still no damage to me. I did saddle up on a B17 on the left side since the formation was pulling away from me and managed to bring that one down but got shot to pieces in the process by him and his friends. They got my eng, right aileron and placed some nice air conditioning in my wings. Managed to land it then reupped but couldn't take up a 190D again. I had to change planes then reupped and went back at them but noticed frame rates got so low for about 5 mins otw back that if I had a fight it would have been bad for me. Frame rates seemed to fix themselves and I was still otw back but then there were no more B17's.
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My testing experience was a slash attack across the entire formation from 4K above them and 9-3 oclock, no hits or damage to me but ack was going all over the place and I peppered them pretty well. Did a uturn after gaining some alt back and slashed through again from 11 - 6 oclock. Still no damage to me. I did saddle up on a B17 on the left side since the formation was pulling away from me and managed to bring that one down but got shot to pieces in the process by him and his friends. They got my eng, right aileron and placed some nice air conditioning in my wings. Managed to land it then reupped but couldn't take up a 190D again. I had to change planes then reupped and went back at them but noticed frame rates got so low for about 5 mins otw back that if I had a fight it would have been bad for me. Frame rates seemed to fix themselves and I was still otw back but then there were no more B17's.
That doesn't sound too unreasonable. The biggest concern was making to gunner too deadly. That is the typical complaint agains AI bombers. I think we can use that dispersion variable to dial-in the optimal range. We jsut need to play with it. I'm thinking it needs to be bumped up just a tad from what we ran in that test, IMHO. Not much.
I hit a bad frame rate period also near the end. I don't even think I was near the bombers at the time. Weird. Maybe that was when the last of the AI were killed and the server was unloading the mission. :headscratch:
During the battle when there were bombers and gunners firing and escorts around, was the FPS OK then? (I was way behind the formation most of hte time covering some stragglers.)
:salute
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I hit a bad frame rate period also near the end. I don't even think I was near the bombers at the time. Weird. Maybe that was when the last of the AI were killed and the server was unloading the mission. :headscratch:
During the battle when there were bombers and gunners firing and escorts around, was the FPS OK then? (I was way behind the formation most of hte time covering some stragglers.)
I was thinking the same about the server and logs being recorded as the reason for the FPS issue. I was a ways away and flying through mud.
During the battle, flying across that island of B-17s, I did't have any frame rate issues at all. Everything seemed fine during all my attacks and gliding to a nearby base. It was just when I re-upped and was maybe 1/2 way back I noticed the FPS bog down.
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I'm curious if it was the fact that the bombers were bailing out?
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Quite possible, not sure how all that works but it was very near the end. I was racing back trying to get a few more.
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I'm curious if it was the fact that the bombers were bailing out?
They were dropping like flies at the end...
21:53:04 Shot down a B-17G flown by AI38.
21:53:11 Shot down a Chute flown by AI48.
21:53:21 Shot down a Chute flown by AI53.
21:53:27 Shot down a Chute flown by AI37.
I wish I was that good to be able to hit a chute with the 57mm! :rofl
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They were dropping like flies at the end...
21:53:04 Shot down a B-17G flown by AI38.
21:53:11 Shot down a Chute flown by AI48.
21:53:21 Shot down a Chute flown by AI53.
21:53:27 Shot down a Chute flown by AI37.
I wish I was that good to be able to hit a chute with the 57mm! :rofl
Chute-shooter shall be prosecuted!!!!
(https://images.jpost.com/image/upload/f_auto,fl_lossy/t_JD_ArticleMainImageFaceDetect/415371)