Slitherine

How are experience points calculated/accrued in airforce?
They seem to be pretty random to me e.g. in gc42 i just had a Bf109g fighter take 3 off (and kill/finish off ) a lagg 3 but only gained two experience points. I am interested in building it up to get a few more stars.
I am also interested in how fighter- bombers and strategic bombers accrue experience.
what does it depend on?
thanks for info

Ages ago, there was a post from Rudankort about experience. It didn't provide a full explanation of the mechanics,, which remain a mystery to me, but confirmed that experience gain takes account of relative cost of your unit and the unit you are fighting.

Based on observation of experience gain after attacks I can offer the following:
. Experience also has an effect. I know for sure your experience matters (though not how much), but I don't know if the experience of your target matters.
- It also appears to make a difference if you kill suppressed strength or not.

For strategic bombers, bombing cities appears to give a fixed experience and I think that neutralising a city gives a bit more.

So it's still a bit of a mystery but for best gain, take out more expensive units, preferably when at least some of the strength is unsuppressed. In theory, you should get a slight benefit if you can attack a stronger unit where you have a good chance of getting a lot of kills and are very close to the next star (eg 298).

If you attacked a weak unit with 1 or 2 strength left you might just tick over to 3*. Next turn you take 10 points off its neighbour but you are more experienced so you don't earn so much. If instead you take the stronger unit first, you get experience for maybe 10 points of damage and jump well into 3* experience. Next turn you take out the 1 or 2 strength unit and instead of a small bit of experience get a bit less. Net result should be better if you can do this every time you are close to the top of one experience level.

Exact formulas to calculate experience are a bit involved, but if anyone wants to know what exactly is going on, here goes...

A combat round involves one unit (Attacker) shooting at another unit (Defender). Typical combat has two separate rounds, more if there is defensive fire involved. Experience is calculated in each round separately.

In each combat round, the Defender gets experience bonus equal to two times its losses. So for example, a unit which lost 5 points of strength gains 10 exp.

Attacker case is where things get complicated. I'll show the formulas first:
As we can see, there are two factors. DefBonus determines how dangerous out opponent is (i. e. how much damage it can inflict with return fire). AttBonus shows how difficult the opponent is to penetrate. The sum of these two factors, which is normalized to remain in [1,15] range, is how much exp we gain for each point of strength killed. Suppressing units like artillery are a special case: they use hits instead of kills. Also, for artillery DefBonus is always zero, because it is not subject to return fire.

After we have calculated "raw" experience, it is reduced depending on how much experience a unit already has. Exp growth rate is configured in gamerules.pzdat file. Difficulty levels and experience caps configured in the scenario also affect how much we gain.

These formulas are used for all units, not only air.