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[Sputty]

Destruction!!! (and post-destruction)

Okay, I'll be more specific:
-dynamic damage (not a scripted model)
-physical craters
-more bailing options
       -random chance for failure, badly packed chute, poor quality, etc
       -chute dm, based on fire mostly in fighters and attackers, but in a bomber would be affected if shot as well, for those that had chutes stored away from the    '        men inside
       -bail procedure, clickpit for things like canopy ejection and/or parachute retrieval, but also buttons to activate the chute manually
       -better ejection seats, ones that have realistic parachute activation time!   
       -possibility for pilot injury outside the aircraft, whether by being shot or rough landing
       -an incredibly small chance of surviving a fall from your aircraft sans-parachute, based on statistics and impact location 
-realistic gear damage
-more realistic crashes
       -no detonation without fuel or active bombs
       -detonation that doesn't guarantee complete disintegration of the aircraft, if you've seen a CF-18 airshow crash from a few years back, that's a good example
       -part of a true dynamic damage system, soft body physics/crumplycrumplycrumply

[Fresco23]

A useful tool would be the ability to place large groups of aircraft at once..  such as a B-17 Box formation or a full squadron of 109s including the 'Stab' flight and thus direct their initial path with only one set of waypoints.

[Pursuivant]

My problems at the moment are ones of scale.

Say you fly a bomber mission. Your target is a busy train depot. You drop your payload spot on target and it is out of service. This is easy to apply into the dynamic mesh, and the effects of your actions directly relate into the game.

However, in a war a country doesn't fly one sortie a day. Hell there can be thousands. So how do I solve that problem?

My first reaction would be to see how other game designers handled the same problem, or possibly even license an existing computer game to handle the abstract elements of aerial warfare. No use reinventing the wheel.

If you want to keep it very simple, use the mechanics from a board and counter wargame. Over the decades, there have been several games which model squadron or group level ops in the ETO, some of which did a pretty good job, although they tend to model weekly or monthly operations. Otherwise, there are several old computer games which went into obsessive detail on the topic. One of them is here:

http://www.matrixgames.com/products/320/details/Gary.Grigsby's.Eagle.Day.to.Bombing.the.Reich

In effect I would model key people from history and give them control of strategy. So the British could have Bomber Harris, Germans Hermann Göring.

Basically, you're wanting to model skill level, efficiency of command and control, degree of aggression, and preferred tactics. Again, there have been board and computer games which have covered this ground, although not very well.

Command and control determines the number of units you can command, the speed at which you can deploy or repair them, and the range at which you can control them. The other factors are fairly obvious.

Beyond that, you get into logistics, which trump even the best commander's abilities. Even on a good day, not every plane in the air force is going to be flyable, and not every crewman is going to be ready for duty. Supply and manpower shortages limit sortie rates. Damage takes a certain amount of man-hours to repair. Arming and fueling planes takes a certain amount of time. Sadly, daily readiness reports aren't readily available, and sometimes aren't available at all. Information on exactly how long it took to prepare an airplane for combat is also extremely hard to come by. The only game that tried to get into this level of detail was B-17: The Mighty Eighth, but that only operated on the squadron level, and only covered B-17 ops in the ETO from 1944-45.

The same would have to be created for other time periods.
 
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