1.5.0 (9515) Land based fighters ignore naval air combat

[macegee]

Description of issue
Land based fighters ignore naval air combat

Game Version
1.5.0 (9515)

Enabled DLC
Together for Victory,
Death or Dishonor,
Waking the Tiger, All of the above

Do you have mods enabled?
No

Description
Trivia: AI Japan invades my Midway. I have two fleets next to island. One of them is a CV fleet that is engaged with IJN carrier fleet. There are three land based wings on Midway, two of them are fighters: 100 fighters on air superiority mission and 50 heavy fighters on air intercept mission. All within the range of where the battle takes place.

Problem: 150 of my land based fighters completely ignore naval air combat going on within their area of responsibility. Fighters on air superiority mission do fly their mission, but since the air combat ui is separate from the naval combat ui, they don't engage anyone. Interceptors simply sit idly on an airfield and do nothing. They obviously should engage enemy naval fighters and bombers. That's the main reason I put them there in the first place.

Steps to Reproduce


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[Vidkjaer]

Land based planes does not get into Carrier air combat. They do however if the carrier planes are set to do other missions than carrier combat mission. Landbased fighter planes air superiority mission makes carrier planes be very inefficient. You can see this on the penalty Carrier combat planes to to enemy airsuperiority.

 

[macegee]

Yes, I see now the sortie debuff from air superiority. Not something one should expect, but better than *nothing*.

Problem tho, in my particular case, it's... minus 0.8% sortie efficincy for the enemy. I have 100 P-40s at 21.6% mission efficiency. How that translates into "Enemy air superiority -0.8%"? That's literally almost zero effect.

 

[Vidkjaer]

Yes, I see now the sortie debuff from air superiority. Not something one should expect, but better than *nothing*.

Problem tho, in my particular case, it's... minus 0.8% sortie efficincy for the enemy. I have 100 P-40s at 21.6% mission efficiency. How that translates into "Enemy air superiority -0.8%"? That's literally almost zero effect.

Because they cant cover the entire region. There are 2 things in relation to efficiency. One is the efficiency of your planes - they cannot cover the entire region because of range. That is your 21,6% efficiency. The second thing is how large the region is and how much your airwing can cover of that.

Eg (extreme example) is you have an airwing consisting of 5 airplanes of each 5.000 km range. That means you would have 100% efficiency towards range, but your 5 planes cannot cover the whole region on one time. That efficiency is shown if you hover over the air superiority bar and wait for the tooltip text. you would need 100% region coverage - you properly have something like 1% region coverage to get 0,8% air superiority.
So you will need more planes - therefore heavy figthers is good in the pacific because of the large regions.

 

[macegee]

OK. I've found that magical air superiority number. And tried 150 P-38s. The result: 1.9 air superiority score (1% coverage) and -1.8% sortie debuff. Hardly any difference at all. I even tried 200 P-38s. Same -1.8%. Completely pointless.

 

[Vidkjaer]

That is because the air region is so big. On a smaller region you will do better with these number of planes.
200 planes on such a big region. Would they cover every km2 IRL? No. You need more planes and/or planes with better range.

Each air region different sizes explained in pixels (and that is as far as i understand it).

 

[macegee]

That's the thing, I don't need them to cover the entire area. I need them to help me defend the island. Naval combat takes place like.. 100km fron the airfield. Naval combat debuff should reflect/take into account that.

From what I've seen, land bombers on naval mission are limited by their range from the airfield to the exact position of the fleet in the naval region. They don't attack ships anywhere in the region, but only within their range (cirle shown while hovering your mouse over the airfield).

Bottom line, if 150-200 P-40/P-38s have only -0.8-1.8% impact on naval air combat happening under their nose, it should definitely be adressed by the devs, IMO.

 

[Vidkjaer]

I agree, but i dont think it is considered a bug.

 

[WildMarker]

It gets even weirder when you consider Carrier CAS. The entire function of those little things is to help from the carrier, but they're useless in the pacific because even if you are stationed right at the shore of the island, they must cover the entire seazone or their efficiency drops, meaning you only get like 2 planes in combat while invading because all the other planes are faffing about lloking to do ground support on the water.

 

[Enfield_PDX]

Hello and thanks for the report. I'm not 100% certain on how the two types of air combat should interact but I'll try and find out and come back with a solid answer.

 

[Enfield_PDX]

So after some digging (and one audible WTF) I can conclude this is working as designed even if it doesn't make much sense logically. The game bases an air wings effectiveness on their ability to cover the whole air zone. This unfortunately can lead to cases like yours where the 150 P-38's operating out of Midway can't seem to do have much impact on the battle taking place a couple of kilometers from the airstrip.

Rest assured the dev team are well aware of this "quirk" of the system

 

[macegee]

Thank you.

 

[Gr1pen]

Happy the team is fully aware! That's part 1.
What I think would be the absolutele best is to completely remove the current AIR ZONES.
We already have the range on the airplanes from the airfield, it is displayed, just use that!
It's way more realistic and makes sense. So let them operate in that zone and even MUCH better would be if we can color a part of that visible range, I guess a bit like how it operates in HoI III. It makes a lot of sense to me.. ?

 

[WildMarker]

Fun fact: they kinda sorta do already.

Remember those carrier CAS I talked about? Since they weren't many anyway, I tried using TAC to support the fight on the island. The TAC had enough range to cover maybe 40-50% of the zone. So all good right? Well it turns out, their range circle didn't get to the island and none of them participated in combat.

So for ground support, you need to cover the zone AND reach the combat with your range.

The thing about the airzone coverage is that fighters don't target specific places. And Naval Strike missions make sense that they would need to cover the zone since they're hunting for ships. So I think changing CAS missions to be range-based and leaving the rest airzone-based would be a good compromise.

 

[BoomKidneyShot]

Didn't HOI3 have a system where you could specify where you wanted planes to attack?

Implementing that again or simply using their basing location and range to establish where they can engage would make this issue go away.

 

[Gr1pen]

Yeah that's what HoI 3 had. And people kind of liked that I think? So if they keep what they have, remove the airzones and just use the range or selectable tiles it's fixed I think? it makes much more sense.

 

[WildMarker]

For bombers, people liked that.

For fighters, people absolutely hated it. And to be honest even for bombers it wasn't all that great. It was nice to have some degree of control, but you still had to micro every damn plane.

I like the automatic "follow army" bomber control you can have now in WtT. I think that coupled with a change in how bombing efficiency is calculated would be ideal (it's ok for fighters to have to cover a whole area, not for bombers unless it's strat bombing I guess).

 

[Gr1pen]

Yeah the follow army is great, for CAS and INT but not sure if it is very efficient for the rest...
I think it would be best if you could just set bombers to for example to bomb cities and it will bomb the big cities within range. And if needed that you can also color the states/tiles you want to bomb within the range on enemy territory. That's for an entire airwing ofc.

 

[WildMarker]

Yeah the follow army is great, for CAS and INT but not sure if it is very efficient for the rest...
I think it would be best if you could just set bombers to for example to bomb cities and it will bomb the big cities within range. And if needed that you can also color the states/tiles you want to bomb within the range on enemy territory. That's for an entire airwing ofc.

Yeah but like I said, for NAV and STR the current system is ok, since NAV is supposed to hunt a seazone (so efficiency and coverage makes sense) and STR i suppose to bomb entire states. CAS is the only weird case where you just attack a single place (maybe port strike since those are also meant to target one tile, but you could argue that they have to scout all the ports in the zone).

 

[Fast00000000000]

Maybe the Midway was not getting enough supply to launch fighters