| Title | Eagle Day: behind the Stone Curve |
| Author | Bruce Geryk |
| Posted in | Game diaries |
| When | August 30, 2011 |
If you read my previous game diary about War in the East, you might be all ready for me to start playing Eagle Day and RAF, pull a few history books off the shelf, find some random paragraphs that support whatever point I'm making at the time, and still manage to lo
Read the full articleThat does sound good!
That does sound good!
I think your 'rough' calculation of the air superiority ratio is extremely flawed: you assume that the number of aircraft is fixed to the start value. Obviously that will not be the case. And given that the British score comes entirely from it's aircraft, the value of German damage to infrastructure will increase with each destroyed aircraft.
From a quick search I found the following numbers: Germans lost 1100 aircraft and the British lost 650. With your (admittedly generous numbers), that gives a 8.2 air superiority!
The wikipedia numbers are a bit different for starting aircraft as well so I'll take the percentage or aircraft lost listed there any apply them to the 3000:1000 starting numbers from the game. 74% for the Germans and 78% for the British leaves us with 1780 points for the Germans to 288 for the British for a 6.18 air superiority score.
I can't find two agreeing sets of statistics on losses in the battle anywhere. One site will say the Brits lost 1087, the Germans 1562, another says 650 to 1100 .
Brian:that's a good point about the changing numbers of aircraft making the score fluctuate, and one I address in an upcoming article. You're going to have to bear with me on this, because I don't want to get all into the numbers analysis before I even start playing the game (the next piece actually has gameplay in it, I promise), but it's even more artificial to just subtract the British and German losses from the respective aircraft totals because (1) British aircraft production did a good job keeping up with losses (it was a shortage of experienced pilots that plagued the RAF) and (2) German losses outstripped British losses pretty much throughout the whole Battle. That's why I say the "most favorable ratio" was at the start of the Battle. Pretty much from the get-go, the Germans started losing planes faster than the British, and the British has a really good replacement pipeline, while the Germans did not. A comparison of aircraft totals further into the Battle would likely have been more favorable to the RAF. But like I said, I'll get there.