VERY easy to send an entire squadron on a recon mission.

[sloanjh]

I'm putting this in the bugs (rather than suggestion) thread because it's an interface design issue that has a fairly major impact on game play and can't be recovered from.

As part of logging the previous bug (about SetupStrike SetTarget) I tried to launch a manual recon sweep.  I selected a squadron, set it to recon, set it to 1 plane, selected another target, and hit "launch".  Note that I was very careful to set the # to 1 plane, since I've had problems with multi-plane recon before.  Did the same thing again (not sure of exact order), still thought I was being careful, and ended up sending the remaining 18 DB in the squadron on a recon mission to a single point.  Hitting the "Stand Down" button results in a "not ready" message.  Fortunately I just did a save file for the other bug so I can roll back, but in most cases that's not the case.

Suggested fixes:

1)  Set # field to 1 whenever mission enters "recon" (including when checking the checkbox for the squadron)
2)  When the "ready" or "launch" button is clicked, do a state check (similar to the one telling me I can use a heavier load for my DB strike) and warn if there are more than 1 planes in a recon mission.
3)  Allow the "Stand-down" button to abort the readying process.

[JagdFlanker]

i'm finding selecting planes in a sqn and setting it to a number to be unreliable and random

i'l send a sqn out for a strike, it says the carrier only has X torps, i look at the sqn and calculate the sqn amount leftover after the rest stay fitted out for torps, select that number and set them for heavy loadout so that the sqn amount remaining should match the torps available, but then it seems often the results are that sqn broken up into a bunch of small groups that are all still set for torps

perhaps consider adding a 'split air unit' button to allow the player to divide his sqns as needed in a clear-cut way, or have it so when you select aircraft to split, the sqn immediately splits so you work with the results.   a consolidate button might be useful too to combine small units back to sqn size

also if a carrier only has X torps left, then the game should automatically assign only X aircraft on that carrier to have torps, while the rest should automatically be given a heavy (or whatever) loadout

[dorn]

Issue is that UI is not well managed.

There are some suggestions which simplified a lot squadron management in battle.

On top of that I suggest in some other thread having possibility to start recon again (one buttom) as is set up at start of mission using angles for start and end of part circle.