A more realistic way to represent agility in air combat?

[Jack Hanson]

Hi, there, I come up with an idea to improve how agility of aircrafts affects air combat.
The basis of this idea is to make aircrafts conducting different missions suffer a respective rebuff on its agility and maybe air defense/attack.
First of all, the current mission types maybe separate into four groups:
Group I: Ground Support Mission. Aircrafts conducting ground support will enjoy its full agility.
Group II: Logistic Strike, Naval Strike, Naval Patrol... Aircrafts doing these missions suffer some agility loss, and maybe loss of defense and attack.
Group III: Strategic Bombing, Recon. Aircrafts doing these missions suffer heavy agility loss.
Group IV: Dynamic. This group includes two mission types, escort (air superiority) and intercept, both agility loss are determined by the aircrafts they are escorting or intercepting, if they are intercepting aircrafts doing strategic bombing, then they also suffer heavy agility loss.
Now, to reduce the agility debuff, you can research mechanical and turbo superchargers in the air designer, they should come with different levels to represent tech difference. Also, there maybe other techs affecting agility loss, such as better airframe and so on.

Do you think it's possible with a mod?

 

[Cavalry]

But what is the current problem?

Agility is the ability to avoid hit and hit enemy fighter or targets.

 

[Corpse Fool]

I'm not really sure what the point of a lot of those debuffs, is? The types of planes you 'should' be sending on those sorts of missions, by virtue of the types of modules they mount, will tend to fall within the same pattern of levels of agility.

I don't have BBA, so maybe there are some more examples of designable planes that don't fit into that pattern... but even then, what does it matter? To the best of my knowledge, agility is a combat effectiveness modifier when it comes to air combat (and getting shot at by naval AA, which is a joke anyway), and so the groups are really 'fighters' and 'everything else'. The 'anything else' group should be getting an escort of fighters to protect them from the other sides fighters.

I'm also not really seeing a problem with the way that agility works. It is both an offensive and defensive modifier, your ability to keep yourself in or out of an advantageous/disadvantageous position. Which is the basics of how it functions in game, but perhaps some of the specific values are a bit off.

 

[Jack Hanson]

I'm not really sure what the point of a lot of those debuffs, is? The types of planes you 'should' be sending on those sorts of missions, by virtue of the types of modules they mount, will tend to fall within the same pattern of levels of agility.

I don't have BBA, so maybe there are some more examples of designable planes that don't fit into that pattern... but even then, what does it matter? To the best of my knowledge, agility is a combat effectiveness modifier when it comes to air combat (and getting shot at by naval AA, which is a joke anyway), and so the groups are really 'fighters' and 'everything else'. The 'anything else' group should be getting an escort of fighters to protect them from the other sides fighters.

I'm also not really seeing a problem with the way that agility works. It is both an offensive and defensive modifier, your ability to keep yourself in or out of an advantageous/disadvantageous position. Which is the basics of how it functions in game, but perhaps some of the specific values are a bit off.

The problem is that the current game fails to represent why Japan found it so difficult to intercept Flying Fortress, and I'm trying to represent how altitude affects agility, and thus set up a clear performance difference between fighter aircrafts of different countries.

 

[Dimmie_Dumm]

The problem is that the current game fails to represent why Japan found it so difficult to intercept Flying Fortress, and I'm trying to represent how altitude affects agility, and thus set up a clear performance difference between fighter aircrafts of different countries.

This rather requires a new parameter of its own. Now it's possible to intercept post-war B-36's with biplanes by sheer numbers, and it will remain so under your proposal.

 

[Corpse Fool]

The problem is that the current game fails to represent why Japan found it so difficult to intercept Flying Fortress, and I'm trying to represent how altitude affects agility, and thus set up a clear performance difference between fighter aircrafts of different countries.

If you were taking the altitude angle on this, I think it would have helped my understanding if you had mentioned that anywhere in the original post, lol. I guess the mention of the superchargers and stuff on the engines should have given it away, but here I am.

Altitude is something I had hoped they would have introduced with BBA, exactly because it was a real thing and there were specific things added onto engine to increase performance at altitude. Considering how far they dug into the weeds for the type of suspension on the tanks to be its own thing, I figured they might have had a similar eye for 'detail' when it came to planes. I was mistaken.

I'm not sure if you could mod in some sort of stat like that, without doing heavy modding work with scripts and stuff, like the mod team doing the tank designer had to do before PDX announced their own.

 

[Gran Strategist]

My suggestion for the simplest way to introduce altitude would be having it based on engine tech level.

It's not a direct representation of the ability to fly higher but engine effectiveness often allowed and still allows planes to fly higher.