stuka's missing things by miles

[Pancake]

im trying to get Stuka's to do a attack on a convoy I have them flying at 1500m and on the ground attack paice of the attack I have the attitude set at 200m and one of the ships marked as the target,

But every time they preform a dive but there bombs are getting now where near there targets.

The dam brits get a bit wet but that it.

[III./ZG76_Saipan]

higher....try 3000m

[Osprey]

That may be the problem, but Stukas do seem to me a bloody nightmare - not sure if this is because of TF4. I spent forever and a day trying to set stukas to bomb land targets, and the Dunkerque beaches, but they were terribly inaccurate, and in the mission player the bombs didn't even go off. Yes I know about fuses and things.

I posted here but didn't get a response.
http://theairtacticalassaultgroup.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6779

[LG1.Farber]

I find with AI Stuka the waypoints spacing is most crucial... Takes a bit of getting used too, here check out this example.

7280

unpack with winrar... In this mission they turn a little and nose down before the dive, if you want the propaganda attack, on there backs and dive, then make the first waypoint before attack go beyond the attack waypoint...

[Headshot]

I came across a large formation of Stukas the other night online. They looked great and I followed them to they're target (shipping) I thought after watching them dive "that ships history' , but they missed by miles , every one of them. :(

[9./JG52 Hans Gruber]

When attacking ships AI Stukas need to come in head-on with their targets with as little angle as possible to their approach otherwise they will corkscrew in their dives and miss by a mile.

In this example the Stukas will sink almost every ship.

7285

[Osprey]

Interesting. So object alignment on the ground matters. What a PITA.

Good information though, thanks.

[9./JG52 Hans Gruber]

Interesting. So object alignment on the ground matters. What a PITA.

Good information though, thanks.

Yes, it's a lot of trial and error. Imagine a mission like Kanalkampf where over 4 hours you have this large convoy moving and Stuka waves trying to attack it every hour or so. Trying to get the waypoints right was a nightmare and I spent many many hours running the mission over and over in accelerated time to see what they do. The end result is ok, a flight of 9 will typically destroy 3 or 4 ships depending on the circumstances. If human bombers destroy a lot of ships the AI has to adjust their aim and then the results can be poor.

Other odd AI Stuka behaviors:

- There seems to be bug if you use a large number of Stukas against ships their bombs will simply disappear in the water and never explode. I have tried 50+ Stukas against a convoy and literally only a single bomb will explode. Reduce that number to 12 or so and they destroy several ships.
- On land the angle of approach doesn't matter. They should have clean dives if used from a correct altitude but they tend to favor attacking artillery. So even if you designate another object as their target they will attack the flak guns instead. Put an artillery piece close to what you want them to attack.
- Sometimes when they spawn on trigger, a plane in the formation will fall behind. If you run them at full throttle (i.e. 300kmh) this a/c has no chance of catching up. If you keep their airspeed at about 270 kmh or less he has a better chance of closing the distance.

[DUI]

- There seems to be bug if you use a large number of Stukas against ships their bombs will simply disappear in the water and never explode. I have tried 50+ Stukas against a convoy and literally only a single bomb will explode. Reduce that number to 12 or so and they destroy several ships.

Interesting. We had a self-hosted training mission with a lot of objects (and scripts) last week in which we experienced this kind of bombing problems with our human flown JaBos as well: Trying to ditch bombs into the ships did always result in a non-exploding (and non-ditching) bomb. It seemed to work though if you had made a direct hit on the ship. On another map with much less objects and without scripting ditch-bombing worked as always.