[propbeanie]

Originally Posted by gap

Wow, I wasn't expecting so many answers that soon!
Thank you very much propbeanie, your wisdom places you on the ligh side of the Force, Yoda appreciates that

That said he (Yoda) still has some doubts regarding your replies that I would like to ask in his behalf, if you don't mind...


Well, my question was more elementary than your answer seems to imply; I will give you an example. Let's say that I have an enemy airbase in range of an U-boat bunker, for it to spawn airstrikes at random intervals. If the airbase has bombers and fighters in the same airgroup, will they attack all together? If the answer is no, I am afraid that the only way to simulated raids with escorted bombers would be by scripting them, but that would be a more "expensive" solution (both in therms of pc resources usage and of work require by the modder in order to set up the attacks) and not as random as the airbase-spawned strikes thing.
The game "intelligence" will send airplanes out randomly, and bases the amount sent as response, apparently on the type of target, such that a submarine usually "qualifies" for what seems to eventually be 7 airplanes. An "enemy" corvette might get a 1 or 2 plane response, a DD gets 2 or 3, etc. What Fifi, s7rikeback and I discovered in Fifi's SH4 Dark Waters was that Brest "qualified" for a near-continuous air attack, which would commence shortly (roughly 20 minutes) after the player spawned into the game and was leaving port. I do not remember what he did to minimize that... About the only way to "fix" that is to alter the AirStrike.cfg, make the nearby enemy airbases with smaller, shorter-ranged planes, and to script with either Groups / Units and / or RGG / Random Units, with what you do want to show and when. The shorter-ranged planes at "specialist" AirBases is something we've used in FotRSU also, in an attempt to minimize the "Normal" AirBases sending an air response from beyond a mountain range that only results in innumerable airplanes crashing into the "terrain" near the player's sub, resulting in a similar amount of "Survivors". I do not know if SH5 does similar or not. But in SH4, every plane crash has a chance to generate a "Survivor" pilot...


I doubt that, but let's see if someone pops up with some idea. I know there is a global paparameter controlling the chance of aircraft spawning at night, but I don't see anything that might tell the game which aircraft should fly at night and which ones not. I am actually surprised that devs didn't think to add such a basic feature; a simple flag in aircraft cfg or sim file would have been enough
Yes, it would have been nice, and I do not know of anyway to control that either. As you mention, perhaps someone else has an idea about this. The "tag" for that could be "is this plane equipped with flight radar?"...


Roger that lol



Indeed f you script aircraft in campaign you can specify whatever loadout you want, but from your answer I get that airbase/carrier-spawned aircraft will only use the default loadout. Is that correct?
That is correct. The game will use the "default" loadout, found listed first in the eqp file in SH4, usually with a "; Basic Loadout" comment. The cfg file will not list that loadout, but only the additional ones built for the plane. One way to counter that behavior is to do small clones, with the cloned plane having a different basic load-out (and name, of course), and then place both planes in the base's AirGroup. However, it is still a "chance" thing in that the game chooses which plane(s) to send based upon chance also... You might get a PBY plane one time, a Mustang the next, and then a B-24, all dependent upon what is in the AirGroup at that time, and a roll of the dice, in conjunction with plane range. This is SH4 behavior...I wonder how SH5 handles GR2 planes, as well as their load-outs?


What about other sea unit types? I am mostly interested in types 6, 7, 10, 11 (capital ships other than carriers), 101, 102 and 108 (freighters and tankers)....

Unfortunately in SH4, if it is NOT a CV-type, it will not generate an airplane, whether you have an AirGroup attached or not. So our cat ship and one of the aux cruisers with an airplane to launch are set to either Type=8 or Type=18 in FotRSU, and you will "see" a plane spawn after the player's sub is detected. The plane will not spawn within the "spawn range" though, but like all things 3D in the game, will do so beyond the "horizon".