Question about Preference settings

[Nitram Draw]

I want to start a new generated campaign but do not want to have any air strikes. I set the air strike preference to 0 for both sides before I chose my core. When I went to fight the first battle I had 10 air strikes available.

Is there some other setting that needs to be changed if I don't want air strikes?

[DRG]

As I recall...... that preference does not apply to campaigns only single battles. If you don't want any airstrikes, don't buy any but the AI might. It is a campaign after all and the likelihood of there being no air available in a RL campaign situation is nil

Don

[Nitram Draw]

I was just hoping to avoid having AI buying 8-10 air strike groups. My system is kind of slow and watching 16-20 planes fly across the screen every 3-4 turns gets time consuming. I was hoping to entice it to buy additional off map artillery by eliminating air strikes.

[Mobhack]

There is no way to have a campaign with no air strikes allocations, bar a user campaign where the designer made it so.

The air strikes preference is only used for individual battles in the battle generator, campaigns (apart from user ones) treat it as XXX. About the only time yje air strikes is referenced is in the initial core purchase - set it for P1 in order to have air units available to buy, if you want helicopters in the core/ But its been a while since I bothered with core air in MBT, so it may be a case that if not offered air formations then exit and restart till you do applies in that case.

What you could do is back up the OOB(s) the AI will use, then find the strike air formation in mobhack, and overwrite that with a formation that has what you desire and that is date valid as well (i.e. copy an existing arty formation). Remember to copy back the originals after you are done.

[Nitram Draw]

Thanks

[FASTBOAT TOUGH]

You might want to consider setting your artillery to fast artillery to speed the process up as well. The AI has always in my experience, liked to buy artillery. Another reason why I'm set to AI Tank Heavy-On/Fast Artillery-On/and as a more personal choice Artillery Effectiveness to 90%.

With AI Tank Heavy-OFF and this going back to my early playing days, the AI seemed more infantry heavy and definitely more arty heavy as well beyond what it still likes to buy now. A slight exaggeration but, not by much, on my old PC XP SP3 when running it with 3GB of RAM I had time to go to the "reading room" and the the AI Arty phase would just be finishing-the airstrikes didn't seem so bad then!?!

But I understand your pain-but there have been some software fixes I believe over the years since and the above might get you back some time as well.

Regards,
Pat

[Suhiir]

Since I play the USMC a lot I leave Tank Heavy OFF, but that's because the USMC isn't designed/intended to fight armored opponents.

I see a significant increase in the amount of AI artillery/mortars/MPADs because of this; tanks are expensive after all, if the AI's not spending points on them it's got lots for this sort of stuff.

So it's really a matter of what you want to see on the battlefield ... lots of armor or lots of support weapons.

[Imp]

Not sure but I think the tank heavy setting actually has much impact on the forces bought.

[DRG]

There are a host of variables not just in the code but in the nation being played and the level of technological development........Running tank heavy in a nation with very expensive and therefore high capability armour will chew through more points buying that armour than you would if you used the same setting for a nation that was using tanks that were a decade or two behind the cutting edge versions and that would allow a wider variety of other units to be bought BUT both games have code that reduce arty and anti armour unts bought if the setting is tank heavy and much depends on how many points you use to start with AND the built in variables like

if (Tank_Heavy && Random(99) > 66

that are scattered around to ensure that if you used the same setting over and over there will be some variablity just as auto deploy ( what the AI uses and Humans player can too.....) in our games does not give the same deployment over and over

Don

[Mobhack]

AI Tank heavy tends to buy infantry by the platoon when it would have bought a company, and mech inf if it can afford it, but as Don says you will need to allocate a decent amount of points for it to spend on tanks. So it wont make much difference on say a 2000 point buy in 2010, but that 2000 points may be adequate to see more armour in 1940.