Any benefit to Pilot Exercises for non-Fighter planes, apart from Air XP?

[B2_]

The tool tip says the bonuses for leveling up pilots are:

• Air Attack
• Agility
• Night Operations Penalty

which is great for air-to-air combat. But is that any use for CAS, TAC, NAV, STR? I don't usually have them running at night anyway.

And of course exercises use up more aircraft.

 

[DicRoNero]

which is great for air-to-air combat. But is that any use for CAS, TAC, NAV, STR? I don't usually have them running at night anyway.

But STR (III) is among the best planes for air-to-air combat, so applying yet another bonus atop of its base 150 air attack makes a lot of sense.

Boosting CAS/NAV agility slightly reduces losses from AA, so isn't worthless either. Of course, for fighter vs figher combat XP means most, as agility is such a powerful stat and its practical advantage over foes is never capped (unlike LF vs STR scenarios).

 

[Secret Master]

The benefits of exercising air wings besides fighters is marginal at best aside from the XP. It's also weird that planes like NAVs and CV NAVs don't get better at blowing up ships as the pilots get better at flying.

We ended up modding the game a bit to give bombers slight boosts and penalties to their bombing ability based on air wing XP in our mod. It makes me feel better.

 

[Meglok]

The benefits of exercising air wings besides fighters is marginal at best aside from the XP. It's also weird that planes like NAVs and CV NAVs don't get better at blowing up ships as the pilots get better at flying.

We ended up modding the game a bit to give bombers slight boosts and penalties to their bombing ability based on air wing XP in our mod. It makes me feel better.

It is one of those little details that got overlooked, probably because it was too late to incorporate when it was pointed out. And has sat in a suggestion folder ever since.

 

[DicRoNero]

We ended up modding the game a bit to give bombers slight boosts and penalties to their bombing ability based on air wing XP in our mod. It makes me feel better.

Did you alter naval AA the same way? Otherwise I don't quite understand your reasoning, and naval strikes in vanilla are already extremely OP anyway.

 

[Secret Master]

Did you alter naval AA the same way? Otherwise I don't quite understand your reasoning, and naval strikes in vanilla are already extremely OP anyway.

There are some other changes in the mod, but the real issue here is that we wanted better trained air wings to be more effective at their task, not just fighters.

Some of the changes we made you might not like, though.

For example, we got tired of naval bombers only being short range aircraft (no Condors), so we created a land based NAV that has decent range. But we messed around on aircraft stats and the doctrine trees. And we changed some things with ship modules and stats.

I'm still not 100% sure we have carrier air power set up properly, though. And even after we nerfed subs into the ground, they are still very cost effective.

 

[DicRoNero]

Some of the changes we made you might not like, though.

Well, I'd literally pay for a mod which would allow me to bombard coastal airfields and destroy planes located there. It's just stupid that planes can take off from Diego Garcia and equally grotesque locations, bomb ships nearby with virtual impunity and then 'hide' at their airfields which in fact have hostile 380+mm gun barrels right above the runways (yet unable to shoot).