AA-guns: Area of use?

[Vissarion]

I recently read in the forums to my surprise that aa-guns only work against strategical bombers, then that they work against ALL aircrafts, including your own.
So do anyone know what they fire at? Is it any use in building aa-guns in provinces where you expect tactical bombing?
(with aa-guns i mean the AA-batteries you construct in a province)

 

[Diefledermas]

I looked into the threads, the rule book, and the various patch readme files - no answer on this.

I'd like to know too.

 

[cfeedback]

From what I can tell AA guns work just as you would expect them to work: they attack all enemy planes and none of your own.

As Germany (in SP at least) I'm too lazy to build fighters so I just build massive amounts of AA in most of my provinces. I laugh as UK tries to ferry planes down to Africa (over the contintent) and they usually only make it halfway before being completely destroyed. You can see little smoke puffs as the planes move through each province, this is them being shot at.

 

[Steel]

Originally posted by cfeedback
From what I can tell AA guns work just as you would expect them to work: they attack all enemy planes and none of your own.

That's my experience as well as far as provincial AA is concerned. Building 4 points of AA (1 year) to a depth of 2 provinces in occupied territory (which only gives a fraction of IC anyway) and then placing a few fighters to turn back the enemy bombers very quickly results in the UK and US losing their strategic bombing forces. My personal theory is that the AI looks at the AA value of the target province but fails to consider AA in provinces in the path to the target. Ooops.

However, AFAIK land units including divisions with AA brigades only fire at air units that are conducting tactical bombing while naval units will only fire at air units that are conducting naval bombing. Haven't really tested this since 1.02 though so I could be wrong...

 

[Vissarion]

Thanks for the feedback.

In my mp group there is a certain sneaky player who when playing UK (and I Germany) builds a lot of bombers (dive or tactical, sometimes as many as 60) and send them all in 1 group and annhilates my france garrisons.

I will try tonight to build aa guns and see how it goes... luckily i have nice band of dive-bombers to ground his 60-something tacticals.

 

[Vissarion]

It seems AA-guns work only against strategic bombers, but at least they dont fire at your own planes.

It is kind of reasonable that they dont fire at tactical bombers, as they are probably supposed to be placed near factories and other places that strategical bombers would target, and not the battlefield.

 

[cfeedback]

Originally posted by Vissarion
It seems AA-guns work only against strategic bombers, but at least they dont fire at your own planes.

It is kind of reasonable that they dont fire at tactical bombers, as they are probably supposed to be placed near factories and other places that strategical bombers would target, and not the battlefield.

While they might not fire at tactical bombers fighting your troops, I'm fairly postive the fire at them if they're just flying over the province. Can anyone confirm this?

 

[Pdubya]

Hmmm... I hope we can get an answer, here are my thoughts

*Logical Spock-mode "on"*

Well, thinking about the tech tree AA-wise, what is the good of having to research the lower caliber (20mm-40mm) flak techs if province AA doesn't provide any protection against ALL attacking air assets?

Taking this whole line of thought one step further... I believe you can make the point that until you research 70-80mm AA tech, you have NO chance of even scratching Strategic Bombers that fly at high altitude. What you can affect is lower flying units with the early 20-40mm calibers. So it seems a bit bass-ackwards in the game currently. Lower caliber AA has the quick-tracking ability required to shoot down low level aircraft; High (80mm and up) caliber has the "reach" or range to effectively shoot at high level aircraft but lacks the quick tracking to target low level planes. Obviously there is room for a "fudge-factor" in the medium calibers as to just when a gun tends to lose its capability to track fast/low targets.

All that aside, I would still like to get a definitive (read: programmer ) answer to whether or not AA/flak in HOI has any effect on air units OTHER than STRAT.

*Logical Spock-mode "off"*

Whew!
Pdubya

 

[unmerged(13777)]

lol the best thing bout AA is that u cant nuke them away with the rest of the province....

 

[unmerged(11148)]

not sure if this helps but i have gotten in the habit of building a lot of AA (Germany) throughout the country (SP game only has i have yet to find a MP grp). This affectively limits UK and US Bombing. Doesn't stop it but definitely puts a cramper on their style.