large formations in campaign spawns

[33lima]

DC Dildy in his recent Osprey on the BOB says He111s tended to bomb from 4,000m/13,000 feet; a diagram in the same book shows an escorted bomber formation between 10 and 15,000 feet. In his 'LW Handbook', Alfred Price has a graphic showing a 'typical dive bombing attack by a Junkers 87', the dive starting at 15,000 feet, a figure also given in the accompanying text. A similar graphic in the same author's 'Bomber Aircraft - combat development in WW2 has a similar graphic for a Ju88 which shows 8,000 feet as a typical altitude at which the diving attack is started.

It will not be a coincidence that the 3.7cm Flak was reportedly designed to engage targets flying at up to 4,200m - if that's the sort of effective range of typical automatic AA guns of the late 1930s, you don't want to be approaching a target in level flight, and certainly not on a level bombing run, below that height, if you can avoid it. So around Angels Fifteen sounds acceptable for a typical 1940s daylight bomber formation of any kind.

[33lima]

I just checked out the spawns posted in #17 and #22 in the next campaign mission and maybe I installed them wrong (the #17 d/l extracted into my CFS3 eTO/spawns folder, which is where I ahd the original MrJMaint BoB eTO spawn files they replaced) followed by the set in #22, then deleted the Huricane recce one.

Accepted an intercept mission over Horsham (ie inland a bit).

First indication of anything strange was that the blast pens at Beaulieu were inhabited my MS406s - can't rule out them being there before, but I definitely never noticed before this mission.



Warping took me up to the usual 20,000 feet plus.

Arriving within c.5 miles of the target area, strange things happened. I didn't see the enemy in the direction of the purple arrowhead. Not unusual but looking down and at the TAC, there was still no sign of enemy aircraft.

I did hear and see flakbursts, which seemed to be aimed at and to track my formation!



Looking down I could see the signs of a ground battle - artillery bursting, not bombs. Switching the TAC to all targets as I descended so the Huns were no slipping by below and outside of the TAC's 4-like radius, I saw the TAC pick up red enemy ground target triangles.



One I padlocked was a tent-like building.

Spiralling down, I then ran into a large formation of He111s at about five to seven thousand feet.



This was the fun part of a strange mission.



As I said, I extracted those spawns into the folder of that name in my ETO install - namely Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Games/CFS3 ETO Expansion/spawns folder. This is the right place per the BoB ETO instructions which says:

"Copy the following BoB Campaign folders to your main CFS3 – ETO game folder:
(Overwrite if necessary)

Aircraft BoB Missions

CampaignsSpawns


3. To use the BoB campaign spawns you will need to copy the contents of the “Spawn Selector Files - BoB Modified” to The “Spawns” folder of your CFS3 – ETO main game folder. You will need to answer yes to overwrite the files.
This will modify the original CFS3-ETO spawn selector to offer you two more choices. A BoB Axis and a BoB Allied Campaign spawns."




So the big formation was there but VERY low and in the middle of a ground battle with enemy forces apparently bringing us under AA fire. So the invasion had started and French allies had taken over our base!

[Daiwilletti]

Hi 33 Lima, a couple of suggestions:
1 if you have installed the spawn selectors correctly you will have the two extra Bob options when you run the spawn selection process in ETO. (Bob allied and Bob axis)
2 "First indication of anything strange was that the blast pens at Beaulieu were inhabited my MS406s - can't rule out them being there before, but I definitely never noticed before this mission." The reason for this is a feature of CFS3 which is one of the biggest problems for the way ETO eras are run. In reality you would need to run a different country.xml file for each era, in order to stop random nationalities "owning" a facility like an airbase. And it would not be too hard to add a set of Country.xmls into the .bat files, just as there already is for QC and uires, etc.

What CFS3 does is when populating facilities with random spawns (ie anything like vehicles listed in the facility .xml prefixed with a #), it decides for the purposes of interest to choose any allied nationality for allied facilities and any axis nationality for axis facilities. This has several weird outcomes - when you fly over frontlines (or in QC mode where everything around your airbase is a frontline), you will find artillery with a Spanish flag, or a Finnish flag over a dugin tank facility.

For your airbase, CFS3 decided to have a bit of fun and flag it as France_free. One way to reduce MS406s from popping up at your airbase is to specify specific aircraft at locations in your airbase, and minimise the use of the # random selector in an era like Bob where there should only be about four nationalities at best (Germany, Italy, Britain and Britain_FAA). Named airbase facilities should not have #fighters or #fighter_bomber. For Bob-era airbases, the british airfields can be full of named british aircraft.

If a countryRAF.xml was created with only these four nationalities listed (or just Britain and Germany), it could be swapped with the default country.xml in one of the bat files like the era selector. But the reverse would have to be written into the era selector, for switching from Era 2 to another era.

Setting up different country.xmls is something I've always meant to get a round tuit.

[33lima]

Thanks Daiwilletti, I checked the Spawn selector when re-checking my BoB-ETO campaign install after reverting to the OIF files when I recently restarted with CFS3 (having realised the era files were messed up before but not done anything about it). I just checked again and yes the Axis and Allies BoB spawn selection options are there.

I recall reading that as far as CFS3 was concerned, there were two sides and that was that. I'd thought maybe the NEK incorporated in the ETO might have prevented unusual spawns but that's obviously beyond its scope.

I might try one more mission with these new spawns just in case the ground battle was unconnected and I've done so badly that we've been invaded already - which would leave the large formations working but still coming in way too low for the 'typical' BoB raid, anyway.

[rince33]

This is why I prefer to use a dedicated Bob install and reworked the spawn files for the Bob alpha stock version originally. You don't get strange non era aircraft appearing in your missions if they aren't in the aircraft folder. In the aircraft xdp file, the He111 is catagorised as a level bomber with ju87 and ju88 as tactical bombers. I set the altitudes only for the tactical bombers, and not level bomber spawns, however some of the level bomber spawns may have been originally created with low altitude values, I will have to check. Low level he111's are probably a quirk of playing the campaign as apposed to flying scripted bob individual missions where everything can be controlled by the author, a reason why I never played campaigns in the past. Thanks for the info on stuka attack altitudes, I'll reset the values to 15000 feet. Some spawns are specifically designated as low level tactical bomber bomber attack spawns and were originally set at 900 feet, maybe I'll set these to 3000 feet.

[Daiwilletti]

Thanks Daiwilletti,
. . .
I recall reading that as far as CFS3 was concerned, there were two sides and that was that. I'd thought maybe the NEK incorporated in the ETO might have prevented unusual spawns but that's obviously beyond its scope.

Hi Lima33, it would be nice if things were that simple!
Yes, as far as AIR spawns, and what nations spawn, only one allied nation and one Axis nation will spawn aircraft as random spawns per the air.spawns file. To change those two allied/Axis nations, the order in which nations are listed in the country.xml needs to be changed. This is explained in a post in the knowledgebase thread. Summed up, the second allied nation in the country.xml, and the first axis nation listed will be the nations that appear when the air.spawns are triggered.

For scripted missions, nationality of air spawns and ground spawns and ship spawns can be defined but sometimes these missions rely on some random spawns as well. For campaign missions, you can edit the nationalities of aircraft appearing as mission objectives in the cap.spawns, sweep.spawns, intercept.spawns and associated xmls. However the nationality of random air spawns encountered during the campaign mission are controlled by the country.xml file.

As I mentioned, for vehicles and aircraft generated in facilities by using the # randomiser in the facility's xml file, CFS 3 will just pick any old nation as long as it is on the correct side - Axis or Allied. Ships and vehicles generated as ground.spawns will have the two nationalities as controlled by the country.xml file. But ships and vehicles called using the # randomiser in facilities can be any of the nationalities listed in the country.xml.

For Bob as a stand-alone install, the advantage over NEK is that you only need two (or as I've done sometimes four) nationalities listed in the country.xml file. You also don't need all the NEK nationalities in the vehicles and ships folders. So you won't get the whole grab-list of ETO nationality vehicles and aircraft appearing on airbase, factory, port or other facilities.

In ETO, when your campaign airbase is generated in say Era 3, you may have noticed that the flag (and associated vehicles) can be from any old nation - US_Marines, Free_France, anything. For your airbase where the MS406s appeared, the flag would have been matching the nationality of the aircraft parked around the airbase facility.

There is a really good explanation of all this in a .pdf document in the MAW install. When I'm on my CFS3 computer and remember, I'll upload the document under CFS3 Other.

[rince33]

I don't seem to have full editing functionality of my posts, like adding attachments and having images showing in the post...strange. Anyway, this is an image from a book titled "Images of War The Battle of Britain Luftwaffe blitz by Philip Kaplan". https://i.postimg.cc/y6PFMcdL/he111.jpg The caption reads as follows"Heinkel bombers cruising low over the English Channel to avoid detection by RAF radar in the autumn of 1940." This must have been a regular occurrence.

[33lima]

I don't seem to have full editing functionality of my posts, like adding attachments and having images showing in the post...strange. Anyway, this is an image from a book titled "Images of War The Battle of Britain Luftwaffe blitz by Philip Kaplan". https://i.postimg.cc/y6PFMcdL/he111.jpg The caption reads as follows"Heinkel bombers cruising low over the English Channel to avoid detection by RAF radar in the autumn of 1940." This must have been a regular occurrence.

I doubt that very much. While Kriegsberichter often flew and took pics on combat missions, pics like that one are liable not to have been taken on ops and some are even composite pics - fakes.

There are several such pics of what looks like the same formation of 111s over the waves and they all look suspiciously like composite pics to me. The fast shutter speed needed to stop motion blur would make it very difficult, with any film speed, to get sufficient depth of field to have both foreground (waves) and background (fast-moving bomber formation) even remotely in focus simultaneously.

Captions are notoriously unreliable and often repeated when pics are re-published without serious research. If that isn't a composite pic then I'll eat my flying helmet - a statement I can make easily as I don't actually have one

Besides, only a few units were trained and capable of low-level navigation and attacks, like 9/KG76, which hit Kenley on 18th August and whose disastrous losses from that raid appeared to have put off the Germans from over-using the tactic. The jabos of ErpGr 210 would have been an exception. Possibly also anti-ship specialists KG26, one of whose Heinkels may have sunk one and possibly two German destroyers - Max Schulze and Leberecht Mass - in low-level night attacks in the North Sea in February 1940: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wikinger

The other exception would have been the 'pirate' raids by single aircraft usually (maybe pairs, but not formations) flown by experienced crews making low-level attempts at pinpoint daylight attacks during bad weather and using cloud cover.

[33lima]

Anyway the mystery of the Morane cuckoos in the RAF nest is solved.

That leaves me still wondering what the Germans were doing on the ground (and firing at my Hurricanes, cheeky beggars!) well inland near Horsham (which like the 406s may be nothing at all to do with the new files) and wishing the Heinkels were not operating below ten thousand feet. If their target was obscured by low cloud, I understand they would likely have turned for home not descended below it, such turnings around reportedly accounting for at least some RAF accounts of bomber formations being turned back by fighter attack.

[rince33]

Wow! now that I take a closer look at the photograph I can see that it doesn't look right. I didn't see it because I didn't expect to see it.

[rince33]

Are you easily coping with the larger numbers of enemy aircraft?

[33lima]

I only tried that one mission so far. There were no escorts and I just breezed through the Heinkels, setting them on fire as I went - claiming one 'Destroyed' and two 'Probably Destroyed' before I ran out of rounds

So no worries there - we are the boys who fear no noise...nor large formations, for that matter. All I could wish for was that they came in at between ten and fifteen thousand feet, with any close escorts at no less than the same height. Oh yes and for the wily Huns not to go staging invasions without me hearing so much as a church bell ringing

Admittedly two, probably all three, of the damaged bombers in these pics are the same machine

[rince33]

I could add escorts of various sizes to the level bomber spawns, but you could end up being overwhelmed if the sim adds an escort spawn to the mix.

[33lima]

Without trying to reproduce huge raids (which often split up anyway, to attack individual targets) the ideal would be to try to arrange spawns so they simulated a representative German raid and escort and a representative RAF response, something like this:

- each raid to be of gruppe strength = a minimum of 18 medium or dive bombers (2 staffels of 9), a maximum of 30 (3 staffels of 9 plus staff flight of 3 A/C); and
- each raid to have a close escort (flying the same route fuel permitting and zig-zaging if feasible, within close sight of the bombers) of gruppe strength, between 2 and 3 staffels of 109s or 110s. Two 4-A/C schwarme is a reasonable representation of a staffel effort so a close escort of between 16 and 24 109s or 110s; and
- each raid also to have a fighter sweep operating in the general area at the same time, but out of sight (to simulate either the one going ahead to 'clear the skies' ahead of the raid, or the one covering the raid's withdrawal), at the same strength as the close escort; and
- a low percentage possibility (say 10%) that either or both of the close escort or the fighter sweep will not be spawned (to simulate operational failures or similar difficulties, so you would sometimes run into unescorted raids);
- some variability in raid and escort sizes, so they are not always exactly the same strength; and
- a high percentage possibility (say 60%, slightly better than even) that up to two AI RAF fighter squadron will also operate in the area and independently of one another not together, intercept the raid or its escorts,while the player is trying to do the same (better to simulate 11 Group scrambling successive or pairs of squadrons, than 12 Group's hopeless 'big wings').

Not sure to what extent any of this is feasible, but (provided the raid is at 10-15,00 feet and the escorts at say 15-20,000 feet) something that looks and feels like the above should be quite realistic and give the player the feeling he's really flying in the Battle.

[33lima]

PS being overwhelmed happened so would be realistic and enhance the feeling of 'the Few' against 'the many'. Of course it's no fun if you get wiped out on every mission but the solution to this is to reduce the lethality of the combat so that even a big one-sided scrap doesn't involve the losers getting wiped out every time. One way of doing this would be an ammo lethality mod. Burning Heinkels and 110s two or three per mission is fun but far too easy at the moment. That big raid was just sitting ducks, tho maybe not so easy if their formation hadn't stretched out a bit when I went through them.

I have AI gunnery at the lowest setting in WotR as otherwise massacres, especially bomber massacres, are way too common.

[33lima]

Grrrr - a post describing a second mission just completely disappeared!!!

In short the Germans HAVE invaded and are now occupying a lot of SE England. This could be an irregularity with the campaign not the modified spawn files, I'm thinking. It's certainly not what should be happening, after just a handful of missions, successful or not.

Warped to the objective, ending up at 20,000 feet. No Huns in sight or on TAC. Just the purple marker ahead of us, then slipping underneath us. At Angels Twenty, the TAC even at 4 miles should have been able to pick them up.



Spiralled down and the TAC suddenly picked up a cluster of white squares ahead of us, well inside TAC range. It was like they had suddenly popped into existence, right there and then.



Saw no actual A/C till I got closer - it was ten-plus Stukas at just under Angels Seventeen.



Set a couple on fire, taking some hits in return.



Was coming in for more when my kite suddenly blew up.



Future spawn testing will be done in a new campaign, just to be safe. This campaign I will revive by reverting to the old spawns from a back-up, and to a mission saved before the new ones were applied.

[rince33]

Your kite suddenly blew up? Looks like the campaign mission generator suddenly went "Grrrr". Would add smiley here if my emojis were working....... sigh. I humbly apologise, I'm happy today for no apparent reason."smiley"

[33lima]

Current plan is to try out your original fileset in the BoB mod which I installed relatively recently, and for which it was designed. Messing up the campaign installation had me starting over and I've yet to install the update for the campaign, fearful of another self-inflicted disaster on a scale which would make exploding Hurricanes seem a mere inconvenience. But will install the campaign update soon, install the files and report back on the results!

[rince33]

I prefer the eto bob era terrain to the bob alpha terrain. If you are of the same mind, you can replace the bob asset folder with the eto one.

[33lima]

Thanks for the tip - I was wondering how to do that, in either direction. ATM I like both, in their way, so I'm still sitting on the fence! The BoB's more grannular appearance possibly better suits the English countryside in the era before industrialised farming, but repeating texture patterns are sometimes more obvious. I did prefer the ETO's more green inshore waters to the very blue ETO ones, so have already swapped over those textures.

[rince33]

Some of the bob alpha tree masks don't match the terrain, the only reason why I prefer the eto terrain.

[rince33]

You may want to give this a try:https://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforu...ork(small-mod)

[Daiwilletti]

Some of the bob alpha tree masks don't match the terrain, the only reason why I prefer the eto terrain.

Hi rince33, there are a few things that can be fixed in the trees as buildings files in both ETO and Pat's Bob. Here is an example of what I'm talking about, I think I've found one or two more things since then.
http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforum....php?catid=155

HTH,

[rince33]

Will check this out, thanks mate!

[33lima]

You may want to give this a try:https://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforu...ork(small-mod)

Those trees look really good - I don't suppose they work with the BoB Alpha mod, which has some very bright green trees?