HoI 4 - HOI4 [1.5.3][30ec] Land based CAS/TAC/NAV overperforming vs carrier aircraft

[RetroFade]

Description of issue
HOI4 [1.5.3][30ec] Land based CAS/TAC/NAV overperforming vs carrier aircraft

Game Version
Cornflakes 1.5.3

Enabled DLC
All of the above

Do you have mods enabled?
No

Description
Land based support planes such Close Air Support, Tactical Bombers and Naval Bombers overperform in Air to Air combat during sorties that assist in friendly naval combat vs enemy Carrier Fighters, Carrier Close Air Support and Carrier Naval Bombers.

Steps to Reproduce
1. Start the game as the UK in 1939.
2. Open the console and turn the AI off (type "ai").
3. Create a naval fleet that includes Carriers and Admiral Andrew Cunningham, minus any submarines.
4. Send the created UK fleet to Search and Destroy in Tyrrhenian Sea. Unpause the game and wait for the fleet to arrive.
5. Open the console and tag switch to Italy (type "tag ITA").
6. Create a naval fleet of all available Italian ships minus all submarines with any admiral.
7. Send the created Italian fleet to Search and Destroy in Tyrrhenian Sea. Unpause the game and wait for the fleet to arrive.
8. Delete all Italian airwings.
9. Create a new CAS airwing at Latium (next to Rome) with all available CAS planes.
10. (Optional) Also create a new TAC airwing of 100 planes and NAV with all available NAV planes
11. Set the new CAS airwing to BOTH Close Air Support and Naval Strike missions, No Retreat and Day missions only in Tyrrhenian Sea. Unpause the game and wait for the airwing to deploy and gain 100% mission efficiency.
12. Open the console and allow all diplomatic actions (type "adiplo").
13. Declare war on the UK and unpause the game. Wait for the fleets to engage each other.
14. Once the fleets are engaged in combat, open the combat screen and watch as the land based Italian airwings shoot down a number of UK carrier based aircraft.
15. Open the combat report report once fleets have finished engaging for the final losses.

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[DeValiere]

I can confirm that there does indeed seem to be something amiss - I was conducting amphibious landings as Japan in the Java Sea area and was repeatedly losing my entire carrier fighter strength (200 odd fighters and half that again in torpedo bombers from 4 carriers) to US and UK Interwar and low / mid tier TAC bombers. No mention in the after action reports of enemy fighters at all. Just TAC. Unless I missed something, TAC bombers like the B25 and the Wellington were not known for their dog fighting abilities against A6Ms. Even though I'd supported the landings with additional land based heavy fighters to get the distance as best I could, the pride of the Imperial Navy's fighter wings were decimated by the mighty Interwar bombers of the Commonwealth forces. Clearly I over-estimated the value of carrier fighters and should have just spammed clapped out old bombers instead.

 

[Huandor]

same here, all CV planes get insta-Wiped at start of battle, can't keep up with CV Fighter/NavBo production fielding 10 CV (each 60-100 planes), having 40 MILs assigned to CV planes.

They get wiped out by TACs and land based NavBo.

 

[Equilibrius]

Can confirm my carriers were stripped of planes in my attempt to control the english channel versus UK despite yellow airzone, it happened almost instantly.

 

[Cpack]

I can confirm this also

 

[Bambilambi]

I can confirm this as well.

 

[Huandor]

Did another run as USA and combined the CV Fleets with up to date BB and CA.
Seems that AA of BB and CA took care of landbased planes and shot them down. Still had a pretty high loss on CV planes, but this time it was manageable, even in the med with enemy air sup.

 

[Wenzington]

Yup something is amiss with land based planes vs carrier air groups. 200+ mixed carrier planes getting destroyed by 30 antiquated tac bombers.

 

[schnupfi]

I can confirm this severe bug.

 

[RetroFade]

the seabattle summary/ combat report window at the end. (at least not in the middle, only on the sides)

Don't look at the middle with the illustrations of all ships and planes, it does not take into account the entirety of all losses as the airwings enter and leave combat multiple times. Hence why in my screenshots that I attached, I show the details in the sides of the naval combat window, which leaves me asking:

Can you post multiple screenshots of your findings (for results reliability)? And use both the Air GUI plus the detailed naval combat results window. Ship AA kills are also displayed in the naval combat window and it actually displays what ship shot down what. This could be a lead for further investigation. All ships have 90% accuracy vs Planes.

 

[Napoleonetniet]

running some more tests atm, see if its consistent that i only lose planes to ship AA
218 uk ships (4cv) vs 149 ita ships

looks like the carrier-fighters were actually going for ships in my case(s).

tbh it doesnt look bad to me, not the total result of the battle nor damage done by both sides planes. Less landbased shot down by AA jumps out but imo due to there being way more sorties total from the carriers than from the shore, so way more opportunities to shoot at them. (ita: 37 landbased cas-1. vs uk: 12 cfighter-1, 36 iwcfighter, 54 ccas-1, 54 cnav-1) - and the carrier planes depending on where the fleets meet f.i. can have an efficiency of 53% vs the 100% of the shorebased cas

Anyway just posting them because you asked. I was a bit quick to post last night , after thinking more and doing more runs i wanted to delete my post and post something better later, meanwhile think of better ways to test it (f.i. only 12 of the carrierfighters (sea-gladiators 450kmph) are actually fast enough to catch the landbased cas-1 with its 390kmph - all the other carrier planes in the test are way slower : Nimrod carrier fighters 93kmph slower - the Sharks (carrierNav-1) even almost half its speed (207kmph or 183 slower), or I would not re-post at all if it gets to misty or takes too much time I thought, before drawing conclusions (so far i cant say anything is over/underperforming anyway) so i deleted it and then saw your reply right after that, so had to at least dig up the shots

For instance using the same type(s), level(s) and number(s) of air units (and equal number of reinforcements available of only that level - either 0 or tons i suppose) with equal fleets (rather same ships even to have same hp to check damage done on ships way more easily too - and have the same AA damage levels f.i.), no production going on both sides or at least nothing that can interfere with the reinforments of air or compo of the fleets etc. etc. would be a more balanced test?

 

[DicRoNero]

Have just had this:

Sweden only starts with 36 CAS and 12 NAV and I didn't build any more, so that's the very max I could have had by the battle start, i.e. it's super skewed.

But I actually had far less than that.

 

[Napoleonetniet]

yay, finally managed to reproduce it and carefully watching both Seabattle and air region screen hour by hour (wave by wave) , I come to the conclusion that what you see is actually (in my case) the landbased fighters kills -of the fighters that wont show in the naval battle screen- show in the naval battle as being done by the landbased bombers .. but it is visible in the air region screen.

all the kills over the battle get added up and in the end it just looks wierd, but it was the total kills of all the waves of your bombers (a fraction of the total) PLUS the kills done by your landbased fighters. The only 'problem' or bug is that the fighters involved in shooting down the landbased and carrier stuff of the enemy arent themselves showing in the naval battle screen but I suppose so we dont lose any numbers the kills get shown as done by one of the currently active wings



this ... i'll dig up the air screen showing the airscreen with the fighters in a sec too, out of the 400 shots i took but need a cuppa coffee first..

This is day 6 of the battle. The kills you see in the tooltip from my current wave of CAS in the naval battle there (the NAV one show 1 kill btw) are actually the total kills over the entire battle of the cas AND from my wing of 100 fighters (the cas actually only did a few)
the air screen here is actually showing me losing 16 landbased bombers (my entire wave) to the enemy's landbased fighters

the totals in the airscreen losses to the right show: 1 fighter (1 to AA) , 110 bombers (1 to AA, 109 airbattle), 19 support (1 AA, 18 airbattle) = airbattle 127. That's for the entire battle ofcourse for sure.
totals in naval battle screen plane tooltips : "CAS" : 126, NAV: 1 = 127.

(below)
the last day of enemy missions in airscreen show my fighters engaged 384 bombers total, shot down 81 and AA downed 2. Thats just today .. i'll have to dig alot in the screenshots to destill the real number of planes shot by the CAS in this battle (guestimate 1 or 2), but its safe to say that

TWASNT the CAS/TAC/NAV , they just took the credit *nevermind , only looks that way untill theres actually nothing else there that could have done the killing.


..mehhh after going back to the save and fiddling a bit midfight with wing sizes im not so sure anymore either tbh . "Ghost" intercepts that do kills makes me wonder wth is going on aswell hehe. Higher losses to the enemy when I use less fighters or none. Guess i need to do some more tetsing to find out where it gets to wipefest - even if only to know more clearly what to try to avoid until fixed

 

[Misaka_Complex]

I've had a similar problem but it was more about jet tactical bombers destroying all my carrier based planes in my Chinese achievement runs. I suppose there is also a huge UI element to the problem with what destroyed what not being displayed properly.

 

[Taraphir]

I have encountered this unfortunate faulty mechanic too. At present carrier based aircraft are even then pretty useless in HOI4, when such a naval force has a vast numerical and technological superiority. This simply can't wait for a fix till the next dlc is published in a couple of months, unless paradox wants to lose the confidence of many customers in the time between.The latest patches have without doubt broken air combat to the disbenefit of carrier based planes.The state of this affair is intolerable, and in my opinion gamebreaking. It is imperative that the developers among a great many other things, deal efficiently with that naval airpower problem in the upcomming weeks, and actively communicate with the community about that.

 

[Napoleonetniet]

after more testing it looks like the Carrier Cas gets "confused" in a storm when the landbased cas comes in for a wave.. they suddenly start to act as if they're fighters on intercept AND as if they're able/allowed to respond (its a storm they shouldnt even be able to take off).
as soon as this happens the high casualties / cas kills come into action, and after the storm (might take a wave or 2 extra with a smaller loss to 'fix' hte confusion - i.e. the C-CAS suddenly goes on their own window IN storm) before normalling out again to only getting AA hits from the ships, and no flying in storm again till a landbased wave comes in in a storm again and there we go again

so the cas actually engage eachother (carrier-cas scramble to intercept it seems only when they havnt had their own window of opportunity used because of the same storm where they correctly couldnt fly)

think we miss an efficiency check somewhere in the forumulas and / or role check.

So far i havnt seen it happen without a storm yet, i'll keep testing for a while longer to see if i can find a situation without a storm. If not then i think we found the problem here.

prolly goes for fighters aswell , just havnt had the time to test that aswell, plan to do it later to not get confused by multiple different tests when its 28C brain melts easily.
but i have seen carrier fightrs in a game go do minimal damage on ships while you'd expect them to go for bombers.. maybe it suffers from the same thing.

can reproduce it quite reliably (as long as the weather cooperates)
in my test it gets light at 22:00, dark at 10:00, all air set to normal operations, day only.

getting a few normal waves of carrier at 2:00 , 6:00 and 22:00 - and landbased waves possible at 1:00 and 9:00


we have a storm going here first time this battle, and so far so GOOD the carrier-cas isnt flying.

After this the trouble starts at the next opp. for the landbased. STILL A STORM.. but its "Go!" time

5 sovjet landbased shot down in airbattle and 3 japanese carrier cas lost in airbattle.. this is just the beginning...
1hour later CCAS window, they dont fly since its still storm (correctly) and same goes for 6:00 window..

extra screeny for hits and stuff before really wonky damage comes in

9:00 (still storm) here's the jackpot: 75 (!!) kills this wave by landbased cas on the carrier cas, in the window for landbased.

Now, next window for CCAS they correctly dont fly again - its still storming...
then the landbased come in for their wave at 1:00, and again our CarrierCAS seem to have scrambled for intercept or something and lost 84 (!!) more (btw i did check the carriers for damage they didnt get any in this whole time)

after the storm a few waves later things go back to 'normal' with AA kills.

that's how we get results that look like this:

 

[Alex_brunius]

Carrier bombers always have been able to shoot down enemy bombers ( both land and carrier based ) in HoI4. That is nothing new.

The same with fighting in Storm/Night/Bad Weather. Carrier airplanes always have been able to shoot down enemy airplanes ( both land and carried based ) even when bad weather set their air efficiency to 0%. This is since Air Efficiency for Carrier planes actually only impact how much damage they do to enemy ships ( despite what it sounds like ). It can be easily tested in any Carrier battle where both sides planes will shoot eachother down during night as well as day.


So unfortunately neither of these help explain why suddenly a few airplane of one type can shoot down hundreds of another.

 

[Napoleonetniet]

good to know about the intercept part , I either didnt know or forgotten about it , thanks .

then its just the damage they get is way out of proportion prolly the 0% eff. calculated into the damage/kill numbers they suffer themselves?

and maybe not seen without the storm because the wings normally did do their own run, but now are 'free' in some way to intercept?

so far i've not seen it happen with extreme numbers without a storm starting it off, but will keep on going to see if i can find that aswell.

 

[Napoleonetniet]

Carrier bombers always have been able to shoot down enemy bombers ( both land and carrier based ) in HoI4. That is nothing new.

The same with fighting in Storm/Night/Bad Weather. Carrier airplanes always have been able to shoot down enemy airplanes ( both land and carried based ) even when bad weather set their air efficiency to 0%. This is since Air Efficiency for Carrier planes actually only impact how much damage they do to enemy ships ( despite what it sounds like )

hmm interesting, thanks. Now i notice this at the time the carriercas is intercepting landbased in the tooltip ^^

 

[Napoleonetniet]

is it also normal that only 1 out of 3 carriers intercept on those landbased or should it be all? i'm only seeing 58 out of 171 scramble from the carriers as if they have 34% eff. or maybe tis coincidence but its exactly the wingsize on my 1st and 2nd carrier in the fleet list , but then only 1 carrier wing joins (but 100%)
-- nvm found out how this works --