Bomber losses being tallied incorrectly?

[Fishbreath]

I'm noticing some strangeness in the Strength page, the Mission Folder, and the losses reports--it seems like my level bombers are being reported lost in much greater numbers than they're actually being lost after I frag in and dogfight (I haven't checked to see what happens if I don't frag in).

I've attached four screenshots below: first, my mission folder for July 11th, with R003 (Stukas, reported correctly, consistent between Resources window, Gruppe diary, and Mission Folder tally) and R005 (reported incorrectly). Note that R005 lists no bombers survived of the two staffeln (22 bombers) that went on the mission. It also seems like the losses side of the Mission Folder tally is only reporting bomber losses.



This is the Gruppe diary for I./KG 51, the Kampfgruppe that flew the mission. It reports two losses.



This is the Resources screen at the start of the next day. I clearly didn't lose 22 Ju-88s, nor did I lose 48 He-111s in a raid the day before, as the mission folder and Review->Aircraft screens claim.



Here's the Review->Aircraft screen. According to the Resources window, my Ju-88 strength is 116, and my He-111 strength is 244.



The Review->Aircraft page claims I lost 34 Ju-88s destroyed and ten damaged, which is an obvious impossibility; this is the first Ju-88 raid I flew, and only 22 bombers took to the air. Moreover, the daily losses tally on the day-end screen for July 11th was wrong, claiming 61 losses that day. Even tallying up the inflated losses from the Mission Folder, I only lost:

22 Ju-88s
11 Ju-87s
14 Bf-109s
3 Bf-110s

For 50 aircraft, which is also incorrect. Going by Gruppe diaries, I lost these assets destroyed (with some others damaged):

2 Ju-88s
11 Ju-87s
10 Bf-109s
2 Bf-110s

For a somewhat more respectable total of 25. Am I misunderstanding something?

[Fishbreath]

I tried a few more things to see if I could work out what was happening.

When I watched a mission from the campaign map, everything worked as I expected; Gruppe diaries and all the tallies matched up. I went in again with a 3D mission and paid close attention to the bombers rather than trying to shoot down fighters. I noticed that a lot of the bombers seemed to hit the straggler code. It seems to me like the campaign layer loses track of the bombers that turn back--I watched the original formation, down to eight bombers, drop their bombs and turn to egress, then I popped back to the campaign map and saw one Staffeln icon with 8 aircraft left, and that was all; the other 14 were listed as destroyed. I didn't follow those other 14 back in 3D to see, but as far as I could tell, they peeled off without being pursued, and the Gruppe diary says that 13 of them made it home safely, plus the other 8 that were still on the map.

It's mostly a cosmetic issue, I think, since the game doesn't actually dock me the aircraft per the Resources screen and the available units for missions, but it's bothersome having to work out my actual bomber losses on my own, rather than being able to use the Review screen for that. At the end of the last day I played before I copied my saved game for testing, I saw that the end-of-day screen said something about a morale hit due to high daily losses (which seem to forget about the bombers that turn back). If that's an actual hit to Gruppen morale, then there's a gameplay effect.

I'm also curious if this is just something unique to my install, or if anyone else has seen something similar.

[Buddye]

First, I am not a good Campaign player so you will need to wait for one to showup.

Second, IMHO, the damaged bombers that straggled (IMHO most will have engine damage) and turn for home or continued to bomb then head home will have a hard time getting back home as engine damage gets worse as time goes by until the engine stops.

[Fishbreath]

Unscientifically, it did look like a lot of them were turning back with smoking engines as opposed to wing/cockpit damage. That said, though, something definitely seems off with losses reporting somewhere; the Gruppe diary reporting two losses, the mission folder reporting 22, and the Review->Aircraft screen reporting 34 plus 10 (which actually comes to 44, twice as many bombers as actually flew), and the Resources folder (reporting no Kampfgruppen that appear to have lost 22 Ju 88s today) are telling wildly different stories. Actually, if you look at the He 111 column on the Review->Aircraft screenshot, it says I lost 48 destroyed and 12 damaged. I only flew one He 111 raid at that point in the save, and that one involved 30 bombers, so Review->Aircraft was exactly 2x the total number of bombers again.

My suspicion grows that it has something to do with the frag in/back-to-map switch—bombers that were visible on the map when I frag in aren't anymore when I go back to the map, and those ones are the ones that seem to be reported lost in some places but not others. If you want, I can start another save and see if I can reproduce the issue from day 1, rather than only noticing it on the second day of the campaign. Maybe something I did threw a wrench into the works.

That said, though, I'm having a blast—flight sims just don't have dynamic campaigns like this anymore.

[stickman]

two27 only fixed the Review Reports.
The tallys shown in the Mission Menu and those in the Diary menu still do not always add up correctly. He could not get them to work any better than before.
So.. Only the reports in the Review menu is good.
Here are his release notes concerning Reports:

Review Reports

Review-Strength:
Useful information contained in last two lines Combat Ready and Full Complement.
Combat Ready shows flyable aircraft and updates at beginning of each phase (0630, 1100, 1600).
Full Complement shows all available aircraft at the beginning of the current phase whether flyable or in the repair queue.

Corrected code error that was calculating Category wrong for RAF (LUF was fine.).
Finally achieved consistency between Review-Strength's Combat Ready value and that of Review-Aircraft.
They will be identical on each turn start and will only diverge during a turn by the number of newly damaged aircraft.

Review-Aircraft:
Aircraft and its counterpart Review-Enemy are the two most useful reports.
Lines either reviewed or modified for this revision are B/F Combat Ready, Repaired, New, C/F Combat Ready, Max Production, and Aircraft in System.

Changed Review-Aircraft header line for both sides so it is no longer truncated on RAF display and maintains consistency between the sides.

B/F Combat Ready – This line has been modified so it includes repairable aircraft for newly activated units.
Previously such aircraft were omitted.
It now reports every aircraft in all units whether active at the beginning of the campaign or activated later, regardless of repair status.
One other change here was to correct an error that was taking 1/3 of all newly arrived LUF aircraft and placing them incorrectly into New.
Line updates at start of day if new units arrive.

Repaired – All units repaired through the start of phase maintenance routines are tallied here.
Change was made to sequencing of activation of LUF units so new arrivals could get their repairable aircraft into the morning repair cycle
rather than the midday cycle. No known exceptions to repair cycle runs. Line updates at start of each phase.

New – Most drastic changes in code relate to this element.
In order to identify precisely how and where aircraft production originated in the code, extra production was eliminated when discovered.
Extra production amounted to bonus aircraft allocated to 13 Group and a special scrap aircraft routine that applied only to the RAF found
in both the 3D damage model and the RAF repair routines. These have been nullified rather than removed for the time being.
For now intent is to establish what baseline production should be and how game behaves with only that.
Then CRO (Civilian Repair Organization) rebuilds and a possible German counterparts of the CRO (depot rebuilds) can be added in.

C/F Combat Ready – Formula for C/F = B/F + New – Destroyed – Aircraft In System.
This is a composite figure with B/F calculated each day start, New and Destroyed are live figures, and the Queue updates at the beginning of each phase.
When considered in combat commander terms, it is easier to count new and destroyed items than to determine the state of damages in the heat of battle.
When I looked through the RAF's daily reports (filed during the evening of each day) it made clear the commanders of the Groups, much less Dowding,
didn't have any idea of what they were losing or gaining until the sun set. They issued orders, their men fought, the beans, planes, and bodies were
counted when time permitted. The C/F line updates when the Review button on the main panel is clicked.

Max Production – At present I can only say that this looks to be a direct entry from the aircraft rate schedule. Why the uncertainty?
There is some overlap in numbers with the factories and I haven't begun unraveling those yet.
One may influence the other or one may be more important than the other in actual rate determination.
When you look at the arrival of aircraft in the New line, I have managed to get the timings right.
For example, if 35 aircraft per week are supposed to be built, then you should expect that to be 5/day. That one is pretty easy to check in the report.

Aircraft in System – Chumleigh and I have have been calling this the Queue. We thought there was a Queue mechanic for aircraft
that could be repaired on the turn they were damaged. There isn't. Aircraft in System is simply a tally of all the unrepaired aircraft carried over to the next phase.
How the repair system operates will be clear when I have time to write it out; this is an area that needs attention.
If you look back at the Review-Strength screen, the difference between Full Complement and Combat Ready is the number of aircraft counted in AiS (Queue).

Other reports (Assets and Claims) were not touched except as below:

Increased unit claims to included lightly damaged. May need to reduce once skill system effects fully evaluated.

[Fishbreath]

Review->Aircraft seems to be accurate for everything but level bombers, which show much heavier losses than they could have taken given the number that flew.

I suppose I'll just start keeping a tally of bomber losses on a pad by my computer, going by the Gruppe diaries and the Resources page. Those figures seem to line up, and Kampfgruppe availability or lack of availability are predictable based on those numbers.

[Fishbreath]

Another thing I noticed after a mission targeting Woolston was that, after I fragged in over the Channel, the Gruppe diaries for the bombers said 'Reconn' instead of 'Raid'. Does that mean that they couldn't find the target, or didn't make it in the first place?

I'm also curious about how the simulation engine handles the whole of England. Is there a 'simulation radius', beyond which units are abstracted? Is it possible that my units are getting lost in the handoff when I stay over the Channel and they go on ahead?

Edit:

Finally achieved consistency between Review-Strength's Combat Ready value and that of Review-Aircraft.
They will be identical on each turn start and will only diverge during a turn by the number of newly damaged aircraft.

This doesn't seem to be happening for me--for this campaign, starting at the Convoy phase, the numbers only match for Bf 110s. All of the other types are off to a greater or lesser degree; there doesn't seem to be a correlation between the losses/damaged statistics on the Review->Aircraft screen and the difference between Review->Strength and Review->Aircraft's totals.

[stickman]

The Diary code was not touched. I do know that it has always indicated strange and untrue things.

I will let two27 answer anymore about reports.

[Fishbreath]

Okay. Now that I know which losses reports I can rely on and which I can't, I'm not as worried about that.

I am more worried about the bomber icons disappearing from the map. It seems to happen when I frag in and get into a dogfight and the bombers go on ahead—during my Woolston raid last night, I watched three or four bombers (out of three Gruppen) go down before my Staffel peeled off (a few miles southeast of the Isle of Wight). I got into a dogfight for 15 or 20 minutes, and left 3D at 8:10, five minutes after my bombers should have been over Woolston. None of them were on the map, all were listed as lost in the Mission Folder, and Woolston was undamaged. I ran the raid two more times from my morning save, this time watching it from the map rather than fragging in, and both times it reached Woolston with losses of 6-10 and did light to moderate damage.

In fact, all three times I've seen the inflated bomber losses in Review->Aircraft and the 0-bombers-left status in the Mission Folder, I've stayed behind to dogfight while the bombers go ahead, and in at least two of the three cases (possibly all of them), the raid hasn't done any damage, although plenty of aircraft should have survived to make it over the target.

None of this seems to have troubled Heinkill during his 2.12 beta campaign at the SimHQ forums, so I'm willing to bet that some interaction of my settings has produced a corrupted save or run into some corner case in the code. I have two guesses off-hand, unsupported by anything except general programming experience and gut feeling:

1. Saving, quitting, and reloading while raids have been planned and are on the map. I think this one is less likely.

2. Having the gun camera option set to 'trigger' and watching replays from the replay button on the campaign screen. One time, I waited a few in-game hours before watching a replay, and when I exited, I had gone back in time to the time at the end of the replay, which suggests to me that the replay has something to do with the transition between 3D and 2D. If so, maybe watching replays from the campaign screen has broken my saved game in some way.

I could also see a case where the game looks at the replay file after a mission to say, "Okay, this bomber Gruppe is more than X km from the player, so I need to keep track of it from this point forward." If that's how it works, I imagine it would make a temporary one if the gun camera is disabled, or just use the full replay file if the player is keeping one of those. I can also imagine a user replay file (whether Trigger or On) overwriting the temporary one, and the 2D engine never realizing that it needs to be keeping track of bomber Gruppen that fly too far away if Trigger is selected.

Edit: some testing with a fresh campaign suggests it isn't either of those. I was able to reproduce my vanishing Staffel icons by starting a new Convoys phase Luftwaffe campaign, ordering a three-Gruppe raid against Tangmere, and dogfighting away from the bombers. Sure enough, when I left 3D, I saw either no bombers or, in one attempt, one Staffel on the map; the other 80 bombers were reported lost, but were mainly safe and sound at their airfields, minus a loss or two per Gruppe.

[Fishbreath]

I imposed upon a friend of mine to see if he could make his bombers vanish, and lo, he couldn't. I'm going to try a complete uninstall and reinstall of the game, and with any luck that'll fix it.

[stickman]

A new install may help. I have re-installed countless times doing development, and only 2 times did a re-install turn out bad.
It is usually something very blatant that points to a bad install, like an error message about a missing file, or missing gun sounds and such.

As per the Campaign, there is a general feeling amongst the BDG that the SAVEGAME folder can hold all sorts of problems,
when a lot of different Campaigns are started and saved.

It has long been known that any saved game with a .BSR (RAF) or .BSL (LW) and the AutoSave file can be deleted OK.

However, there are two more files that are generated when a Player starts a new Campaign:
blank_nt .DAT
Package .DAT

We do not yet fully understand exactly what blank_nt and the Package files do.
They do get updated as a Player progresses through the Campaign.

blank_nt.DAT
This file first opens when you choose a Campaign. Even if you Quit and Save nothing.
As it's name may suggest, it seems to be a "clean virgin slate" of a Campaign choice.

Package.DAT
This one updates and has the same date and time stamp as the last AutoSave file has.

Both of these files are .DAT files,
which means that they keep track of aircraft damage and losses, and airfield, factory, docks, naval base, and other Target's damage.

How the these two files interact with each other, and with a saved game, or with many saved games,
we do not exactly know.

I have found that deleting them is OK to do so when I want to start a new Virgin Campaign.

Never delete the three files marked here with red lines!
All else is fair game for killing when you want to start a new "virgin" Campaign, in my opinion and experience. But.. I do not know the code.


Anyway.. the SAVEGAME folder may hold conflicting data with many saved games in it,
and I wipe out every file in there (except the three red-lined files shown above) to insure that I have a virgin.

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HHhhmm..... I feel a sudden need to mop & clean the ceramic tiles on my house floor, and give another polish to them.
Have not done that since just before Christmas Eve.
When I do this, I load in some CD's of old Irish pub songs. Turn it up! Easy to swing a mop with that.
My Filipino and Pacific Islander neighbors might not like Irish music to their virgin ears, but I have had no complaints yet.
Next Door Neighbor to the west, is a Honolulu Police Department motorcycle cop from Ponape.

[Fishbreath]

A little bit more testing suggests that a bad save is the case--a clean install and a new campaign didn't display the bug. I moved my save files back over, and I saw the bug again (a formation of Ju 88s not more than a few hundred meters away in 3D didn't show on the map later), and so again in a fresh campaign without re-virginizing the SAVEGAME directory. I was only into the 12th of July on my keeper save, so I'll just clear up my saved game folder and start fresh tomorrow.

Thanks for all your help in locating the source of the issue. I'd be glad to pitch in for 2.13 to see if I can come up with a workaround. It occurs to me it might not be all that hard to have the save game code move the .dat files and the save game to a named subfolder, and have the load game code copy the files from the subfolder back to SAVEGAME for the game to load, although I admit I don't know how much access to all aspects of the code you have.

[stickman]

Fishbreath,
(BTW, I love your nomen. Anyone hailing by the name of Fishbreath bears a second look, or is it sniff?)

Thanks for all your help in locating the source of the issue.

You are welcome. Sorry I am that I did not point my finger at a possible suspect, sooner.

I'd be glad to pitch in for 2.13 to see if I can come up with a workaround.
It occurs to me it might not be all that hard to have the save game code move the .dat files and the save game to a named subfolder, and have the load game code copy the files from the subfolder back to SAVEGAME for the game to load, although I admit I don't know how much access to all aspects of the code you have.

Are you volunteering for the BDG?
We love volunteers that like to fix things better and kill bugs!
In the last month, since release of v2.12, we have two new men that can code,
and have volunteered to attack "The Code" which we do possess.

I am not a coder. Only a Staff Sergeant and artist and gauge calibrator.
Buddye is the man you need to write to if you want access to the Code.
Many coder volunteers in the past have volunteered to make code changes,
but when they "Saw The Elephant!"
they ran away.

Never the less.. I always encourage volunteers to step up onto the firing line.

Here is one song that I have on a CD, that I play when I mop my floors:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_Ig1BGt ... re=related

[Fishbreath]

Fishbreath,
(BTW, I love your nomen. Anyone hailing by the name of Fishbreath bears a second look, or is it sniff?)

Like all good nicknames and callsigns, it was given to me rather than chosen by me.

Are you volunteering for the BDG?
We love volunteers that like to fix things better and kill bugs!
In the last month, since release of v2.12, we have two new men that can code,
and have volunteered to attack "The Code" which we do possess.

I am not a coder. Only a Staff Sergeant and artist and gauge calibrator.
Buddye is the man you need to write to if you want access to the Code.
Many coder volunteers in the past have volunteered to make code changes,
but when they "Saw The Elephant!"
they ran away.

Never the less.. I always encourage volunteers to step up onto the firing line.

I'm well-known for over-committing myself, but I'd be willing to step up and see if I can work around this issue in particular. Guess I'll send Buddye a PM.

Edit: turns out I'm still seeing the problem--Review->Strength and Review->Aircraft are inconsistent.

[nats]

I also am seeing some inconsistencies in the German tallying in my British campaign - recently I reduced the Stukas to 35 planes and that figure has remained pretty stable lately but the last mission they managed to put 110 Stukas into the air yet the claims table still says 30 odd air worthy. So where did they get the other 70 from all of a sudden? Plus I am sure I have been shooting down lots more than the final 35 over the last few missions but that figure never seems to get any lower.