So, I’ve done an artillery spotting mission today. All messages were deemed to have offered no intel.

They were all apparently wrong location even when I was flying almost straight above the line between waypoints. At times, I might have ventured a bit towards my frontline, but I kept eye on the enemy at all times.

Third one says wrong altitude (2415 ft). Two others say wrong altitude (basically too low) and low visibility. They’re also garbled, but I’m fine with that. It happened a lot.


The problem is, this doesn’t make any sense. I had to be low to stay below the clouds. At all times I have had a perfect view of the enemy trenches that were being shelled and thanks to the lower altitude, I could see when they fell spot on on an enemy trench or village. Each time I sent a report after seeing a successful hit.

So, overall, the range, altitude and visibility assessment seem incredibly arbitrary. I don’t know how the game calculates these but it’s dead wrong. The precision required makes more sense with photo recon, but not here.

To be in the right location you need to be directly above the target (a front line unit in your case) straight and level not manoeuvering, not following the line between waypoints (use the bomb/camera view). Altitude is not the height given by your altimeter (which is set at sea level), but height above the ground - in Flanders. Marne and Verdun there is not enough difference to create a problem, usually, but in Alsace the difference can be very great. There is a certain amount of leeway in both altitude and location (more so I think in altitude than location). Poor visibility is a roll-of-the-dice, I think, dependent on the amount of cloud cover (i.e I don't think the game takes into account your position above or below a cloud layer). On a cloudy day the chance of success is slim. Other things, like over-exposure (photo) or garbled transmission (wireless) are somewhat random, I think. Yes, I agree, the outcome can therefore be a bit arbitrary at times, but if you go in at the correct altitude and send the transmission or take the photo directly over the target whilst flying straight and level you will have some chance of success. With 5 photos/transmissions you should succeed more times than not, on a clear day, if you carefully set up each photo/transmission. You only need one successful photo or wireless transmission for a successful mission.

You are right that the precision required is unnecessary, looked at in historical terms, but it makes both photo-recon and art.obs. missions difficult enough to be challenging in game terms. Historically, art.obs. aeroplanes did not transmit from directly over the target, but hung around at about 3000-4000 ft somewhere midway between their own firing battery and the target so that they could see both the shells falling on the target and the messages laid out on the ground by the firing battery. Similarly, photos were often taken as obliques rather than verticals (less so in British and French practice than in German), and in that case the aeroplane would not need to be directly over the target. Taking oblique photos does appear to have been standard practice for German tactical photo-recon missions, as they had the means to convert oblique photos into vertical photos, and had plentiful very high quality lenses of 50 cm and 70 cm focal length that were required to either take oblique photos for tactical recon from their own side of the line that could then be converted to vertical photos for map tracing, or take very high altitude vertical photos of the back areas for strategic photo-recon (and they also had a number of film cameras developed from their movie cameras that could take a large number of overlapping images that could cover a much greater area in one flight than could be achieved with glass plate cameras). At the start of the war the British had very little access to the optical glass required to make long focal length camera lenses, and British industry did not start producing this glass until near the end of the war, and therefore relied heavily upon lenses with c. 20-25 cm focal length for most of the war (with just a very few cameras with longer focal length lenses captured from downed German aeroplanes or supplied by the French), and they did not have (or did not use) the technology at that time to convert obliques into verticals for map tracing. So they had to take verticals from directly above the target from relatively low altitudes (6000-7000 ft) right up until the last year of the war, which is why, I think, they were so vulnerable and why the British had to take the fight over to the German side of the lines to protect the photo recon missions. The French had industrial access to optical glass of the quality required to make camera lenses of a similar focal length to that of the Germans and could therefore take vertical photos from twice or three times the altitude (so not as vulnerable) as the lower-flying British, particularly so as they often had a close escort, but like the British they did not have (or did not use) the technology to convert oblique photos to verticals for map tracing.

I also feel like, given the opportunity, OBD will revisit this and make some alterations once WOtR gets a look at...

If for "bad weather cancels fights" you choose "optional" or "off" in workshop settings (page2) you will be able to fly in weather that was unsuitable for the mission. You will fly lower (due to cloud cover) etc but the mission will likely fail though as you are not at the usual required height and visiblity etc.