Aircraft reliability problems?

[cheatereater]

Is anyone else having serious issues with mechanical issues of aircraft? I've played 20s-40s, and each time it seems like at least 1/4 of any strike is grounded before it can even take off. I tried to get 4 recon TBs going just now, and imagine my surprise when 3 of them had mechanical issues! This seems unrealistically high to me; I read things like, "Nagumo launched his initial attack on Midway, consisting of 36 D3As and 36 B5Ns, escorted by 36 Zero fighters," and I wonder how many they tried to put up; If I did 36/36/36 I would end up with more like ~30 in each. This doesn't even account for the operational losses and damage.

Is this historical? How does everyone else deal with it? Do I just need to always prioritize reliability, trying to get "good"?

*edit* I thought to check in a new battle with carriers. For two carriers, their combined carried complement of dive bombers/torpedo bombers is 64-32. At the start of the battle, 48-25 are available, or about 75% of each. I ready all that I can of both, and in the end I get 41-20, for a bit over 60% of each ready. This is in 1948!

[garrisonchisholm]

The percentages you are seeing is what is common to see in the game. It is true that it is impossible at present to get off a strike with even only 1 drop-out from each flight. The percentages were set at this level based upon theater averages from WWII, so it perhaps could be brought up for an adjustment of some kind. There is a lot of work queued ahead of this, but thank you for raising the issue.

[blarglol]

I noticed huge reliability issues in RTW2, but they seem much less in RTW3. Regardless, I design pretty much every model now with reliability as the first priority. It doesn't matter how good your plane is at fighting if it can't get in the air or simply falls out of it...

[cheatereater]

Feb 3, 2024 14:42:47 GMT -6 garrisonchisholm said:

The percentages you are seeing is what is common to see in the game. It is true that it is impossible at present to get off a strike with even only 1 drop-out from each flight. The percentages were set at this level based upon theater averages from WWII, so it perhaps could be brought up for an adjustment of some kind. There is a lot of work queued ahead of this, but thank you for raising the issue.

So I don’t have sources to really dive into the numbers, but to give a quick example, we can check aircraft at Midway, just from Wikipedia. We can focus on the TBs, as DBs were used as scouts too and fighters were used for CAP. Yorktown carried 15, Enterprise 14, and Hornet 15, and 6 were at the base. We can confirm that there were only 6 at the base, and all 6 did take off. 29 TBs are reported taking off from Enterprise and Hornet combined, which is their full listed complement. 12 are reported from Yorktown, out of 15, so in total 47/50 are accounted for. To get 47 in the air at a rate of 60%, there would have to be nearly 80 TBs in the order of battle, and I don’t think there are ~30 hidden away. For the DBs, there were 67 from Hornet+Enterprise, out of 74 listed, or 90%. DBs from the island, 27/36, 75%. We can also look at the B-26s (4/4) and the B-17s (15/17), or the fighters at Midway that intercepted Japanese bombers (26/28). It would be impossible for a player to get a Midway-sized strike while bringing Midway-sized aircraft complements.

I was curious, so I spot-checked the strikes at Coral Sea, and the IJN launched 36/42 listed DBs (they used TBs as scouts), for 85%, and I’m suspicious they wanted nice even numbers anyway since it was 18/36/24 F/DB/TB. The USN launched 53 DBs and 22 TBs, out of 70 and 25 respectively; even with scouts out, they reached 75% of their DBs fielded, and 88% of their TBs. I think the checks of two major battles doesn’t support a 60% in-service rate; perhaps the numbers from different theaters are skewed for long-term service issues? I can assume that if a carrier is launching bombers every day in support of an island invasion, they will suffer a lot of mechanical issues.

I know these numbers are from Wikipedia and won’t be perfectly reliable, so there may be aircraft that were out of service and not listed or the specific conditions of the different aircraft aren’t mentioned. But it at least gives us some rough numbers. I find that the reliability issues have some serious effects on gameplay. For example, because fighters are always getting damaged or going out of service, it becomes much more difficult to keep a number and reserve and keep CAP up, so I almost never have enough fighters for escort missions, as it’s not escort vs. CAP but escort vs. CAP + mechanical breakdowns.

Another minor issue I’ll point out is that when aircraft are readied, mechanical problems can force aircraft out even if there are spares. If I ready 8 fighters and have 12 available, 2 might go down when being readied, but the extras aren’t thrown it. It may help if aircraft are readied from the entire pool, and then any with mechanical issues can be replaced, so if I ask for 8/12, and 2 have mechanical problems, I can still get 8 at least.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to look at it when you have the time, I’m sure there’s plenty to adjust with ~30 years of new gameplay.

Feb 3, 2024 15:46:58 GMT -6 blarglol said:

I noticed huge reliability issues in RTW2, but they seem much less in RTW3. Regardless, I design pretty much every model now with reliability as the first priority. It doesn't matter how good your plane is at fighting if it can't get in the air or simply falls out of it...

I've thought about focusing on reliability too, and it would be helpful to have some idea how much reliability affects the readiness numbers, is poor to good 60%->70% or 60%->80% or what? It's one of the reasons I find the system so frustrating, compared to every other part of aircraft stats. You can't see the reliability before you select the aircraft, then it's unclear how much the reliability really matters. I need to run some tests with my aircraft sometime...

[blarglol]

In my experience in selecting reliability, you have a great chance to get "average," and maybe one or two "good" models. You also will have some poor ones as well, but I retire them as soon as find this out and have an available replacement.