"European Air War, where interceptors would make one or two passing attacks, then split-s and dive and head home as soon as there was an escort fighter behind them, and on sweep missions you'd go from fighting 12-24 planes in a giant furball (just to think, the standard flight size in that game was 12 aircraft) and then all of a sudden the skies would be clear because all planes on one side had broken off and were heading home ".

Is the above a good description of what goes on?

Hi Uriah, it's been a while,

I don't think your description is accurate. EAW is capable of having up to 256 planes flying per mission but you need a pretty fast computer for it. With the FXEXE's improvements on my legacy 1.7Ghz PIV I often engage in furballs up to 128 planes.

Fighters only return home when they're out of fuel, when the mission objective is completed or when the minimal number of survivors have become so depressed that there's just no reason for them to fight on. There can be additional encounters when fighters return to base as well.

Ofcourse the AI are far more agressive in my game and much more aware of their environment. Players shouldn't allow their fighters to fly off too far, regrouping them regularly has a profound effect on the behaviour you describe. Making it back to base alive to fight another day is more important then getting into a hopeless situation.

Things have changed a lot my friend! The player sets the rules to turn things into an interesting fight, but due to the game's random nature it's not always going to be as exiting, especially not when AI skill and battle size are set to low. What you describe wouldn't have kept my interest in EAW since I first started flying this game but as you can see I'm still flying it each day.

VBH

In the 1.5 series you will encounter new enemy aircraft taking off from some airfields as you fly by on the way home. I've forgotten how low you have to be to trigger them and it isn't every airfield.

And actually, this mod was instituted when SPAW was release so it will work from 1.28c onward.

Now it could be good or bad. If you have ammo left you can catch them low and slow and add to your score without too much difficulty.

OTOH, if you're out of ammo, well, you had better be in the faster plane.

Ralf's encounter group feature allows the random spawning of both friendly and enemy flights with a probability factor in the "eaw.ini" file:

GroundBattle=1
ComputedGunsight=300
ExtraSquads=0
Month=6
Day=19
EnemyEncounter=1
FriendlyEncounter=0
AutoCombat=0
StaticCockpit=0
FadeTime=500
MissionNum=-1

As ever, changing the ExtraSquads value can give large numbers, and I vaguely recall that 17 does something special.

VBH has been able to "LDR" the formations table. Years ago we were both hacking it and we had some amazing results. When 128 was introduced we had taken the table out of the exe as an editable "frmation.dat" file. Using the editor it is possible to produce all sorts of results, but I do not think that many people have played with it, other than for mods they are creating.

There are a few planes here

UAW160 test, Corsairs escorting Lancasters with upkeep bombs:



A bit crowded over the target but the bombs are bouncing, and the ship was destroyed seconds later

Similar mission but with Spit Vs escorting my brother's Avengers with skip bombs:

Someone mentioned EAW in the Battle of Stalingrad forum stating they had fond memories of the air battles in EAW. With the response provided in this thread I posted there a link to this thread. EAW is still in my opinion the only game that has these large air battles.

I just revisited the Corsair escort which previously had no enemy aircraft as it was a test of the bombing routine.
This time I had Ki-96s and Ki-45s

In all,there were 72 Lancasters, 48 Ki-96s, 48 Ki-45s plus the four Corsairs



Under attack


At the target


Many losses, but with only 4 Corsairs and 96 enemy fighters it could be expected:

Out of curiosity I tried an intercept in a Ki-45


I put my 'plane on wing leveller and watched with F9.

There were 108 Lancasters when I did a headcount.
What was excellent for me was that they dropped to a low level to release their skipbombs. I had not checked that this was so in an intercept mission

Rising after the attack, and there is a ship exploding

I took no part in the attack. Much of the time I was viewing the map at 40x accelerated time until the bombers neared the target. I guess that my three AIs were shot down by enemy fire.

When you get back there's still an issue when dropping multiple skip bombs at once. Seems I can only get one or two out of four to work properly.

You wouldn't see this problem with the dambuster or round anti-shipping bomb because they are single drops but with the skip bombs it's possible to have a cluster of them drop all at once.

Also, a lot of times the skip bombs don't work in the lead plane but they do in the rest of the flight.

I am testing UAW160 and do not have that problem
The P61 has four L2 skipbombs

First release, just one:



Second release the other three (as usual)





When I tried the same earlier with L1 skipbombs all four were released when I hit "D" and they all worked.
However, as they are droptanks they are not recognised as weapons. As a result AI P61 bomers in an escort mission did not drop to the right level, and released the bombs nowhere near the target. This is because AI with droptanks are programmed to release them before the attack.

So what could be the reason that mine are not functioning properly?

I mean, it's not like I'm making this up. It is observable and repeatable.

We are not using the same files. I will make a minimal 160 package tomorrow and send it to you at the Gen.

Ok.

There is a "UAW160Patch.exe" (7-zip) in your folder.
Before you get it decide which 150 folder you will run it in, copy the "savedata" folder and re-name it as "Gamedata".
Run the patch. Allow it to modify the "Aircraft_Inventory", "EAW Versions", "Gamedata" and "PlaneSets" folders.

It will install the "PSM160V2.exe" filemanager which is the one which must be used. This program uses the name of the exe you have selected to determine whether it copies planeset files into "savedata" for 150 exes or "GameData" for 160 exes.
I only included planesets 30, 31 and 32 in the patch as these should be enough to test things with.

This shows what I have in my current folder off my old laptop:

You can see the 160 exes and planesets 30-32.

Planeset 32 has a lot of choices to test, including the Ju88A in the last slot which has two torpedoes:

Game testing is important. It is all too easy to test an aircraft's loadout by flying it in a single mission.
However, it is critical to test these new weapon carrying aircraft as friendly AIs in escort missions or as enemy AIs in intercepts. They should behave as bombers, but drop low to release torpedoes or skipbombs

I uploaded two new zip files to your folder.

One contains new loadmsn.dat files corrected as per our offline conversations as well as a few small tweaks to various loadout.dat files mainly to add skip bombs.

The other zip file is for the ordinance 3dz's which also have a few small tweaks, mainly to get the sizes of the bombs correct.

I'm adding the Bristol Beaufort to the plane inventory and then I'll upload that to the server also. Probably take another day or so.

And that's about it, I think the new ETO set should add a nice bit of variety to the EAW world. It will have the best plane models, accurate flight models and some new weaponry for the community to play with.

Next up I will be improving the various X-planes and lesser known variants from my inventory.