Welcome to this weeks Development Diary.
In issue #9, I’m going to introduce you to the remodeled Air War Combat mechanics, as well as to the radar and AntiAir system.
As you maybe recognized from earlier diaries, air superiority has become a much more important aspect of the game. As your country becomes quickly defenseless in terms of a lacking interceptor or fighter grid, your industrial centers will lie wide open to any strategic bomber force which is now capable to literally bomb you back into the stone age (remember the new infrastructure slider).
But interceptors alone are very inefficient. They have no eyes and no ears without a working radar coverage and intelligence reconnaissance. Radar stations dispersed among one’s own territory are now linked together in an invisible network to guide Planes on Air Superiority Missions towards enemy bomber and fighter groups.
Radar now directly improves the effectiveness of AntiAir. AA guns are now a valuable part of a nations air defense as they do more direct damage to planes flying over them. They also reduce the damage a bomber squadron can actually do to a province by forcing them to fly higher - the result of this is that they miss a lot of targets due to less accuracy because of the greater altitudes.
To avoid massive quick rebasing like in previous HoI versions, we introduced a "negative organization" modifier. You get, depending on distance, an organization malus for every rebasing.
Planes who are disorganized are not able to perform any missions or rebasing - you’ll have to wait until they are organized again. This concept tries to model the need to transport spare parts, engineers and the whole logistics and support infrastructure. It tries to avoid the rebasing of complete bomber fleets in unrealistic short time frames, e.g. a thousand bombers from the pacific to Europe in 24 hours. We also added a fix that you are no more able to give orders, like cancel mission, to planes who are currently engaged in combat. This exploit had lead to to much frustration in previous Multiplayer games and should now be corrected.
What comes in pretty handy for bombing with planes and also with rockets is our new dispersion and force distribution concept. No more will all bomber planes attack a single stack and avoid all the others around him – they will now split up according to the best chances a unit has in engaging different ground targets.
So for example, the CAS stack will aim for the single ARM division, while those nice Tactical Bombers are engaging a big horde of lightly armed militia infantry in the neighboring province.
When choosing Industrial or Strategic Bombardments with V1 or V2 rockets, you will quickly notice that they will spread nearly evenly on the industrial centers and important backbones of an enemy country. This comes in very handy for late war gameplay as the handling is now severely simplified.
When the enemy now approaches an airfield, planes automatically rebase themselves to a near and safe airport.
As mentioned in earlier DD’s, we changed the way “Runway Cratering” works (as it is now Airfield strike and does damage planes stationed on the field), added the “Industrial Bombardment” Mission and also added to the “Logistical Strike” the addition that it destroys the carried supply stock of a unit. As mentioned “Strategic Bombardment” now serves as a combination of attacks on all kinds of provincial targets with no special preference.
Being the same as with naval units, you are now able to select for all missions the scale of operation, e.g. be it a single province, an area or a region. And you can now also set it on an infinite running length.
The Combat Mechanics themselves have been slightly tweaked, as now more variables are taken into account for determining a winner. Of course all modifiers and values for this can be found and edited in the misc.txt file.
I hope I could give you a little insight into the new Air Warfare System. Stay tuned for next weeks episode of our DevDiary when I will talk about the remodeled Artificial Intelligence (AI).
To show you what we are currently developing, I attached a small eye candy of the so called new "National Ideas" with settings from Germany.
In issue #9, I’m going to introduce you to the remodeled Air War Combat mechanics, as well as to the radar and AntiAir system.
As you maybe recognized from earlier diaries, air superiority has become a much more important aspect of the game. As your country becomes quickly defenseless in terms of a lacking interceptor or fighter grid, your industrial centers will lie wide open to any strategic bomber force which is now capable to literally bomb you back into the stone age (remember the new infrastructure slider).
But interceptors alone are very inefficient. They have no eyes and no ears without a working radar coverage and intelligence reconnaissance. Radar stations dispersed among one’s own territory are now linked together in an invisible network to guide Planes on Air Superiority Missions towards enemy bomber and fighter groups.
Radar now directly improves the effectiveness of AntiAir. AA guns are now a valuable part of a nations air defense as they do more direct damage to planes flying over them. They also reduce the damage a bomber squadron can actually do to a province by forcing them to fly higher - the result of this is that they miss a lot of targets due to less accuracy because of the greater altitudes.
To avoid massive quick rebasing like in previous HoI versions, we introduced a "negative organization" modifier. You get, depending on distance, an organization malus for every rebasing.
Planes who are disorganized are not able to perform any missions or rebasing - you’ll have to wait until they are organized again. This concept tries to model the need to transport spare parts, engineers and the whole logistics and support infrastructure. It tries to avoid the rebasing of complete bomber fleets in unrealistic short time frames, e.g. a thousand bombers from the pacific to Europe in 24 hours. We also added a fix that you are no more able to give orders, like cancel mission, to planes who are currently engaged in combat. This exploit had lead to to much frustration in previous Multiplayer games and should now be corrected.
What comes in pretty handy for bombing with planes and also with rockets is our new dispersion and force distribution concept. No more will all bomber planes attack a single stack and avoid all the others around him – they will now split up according to the best chances a unit has in engaging different ground targets.
So for example, the CAS stack will aim for the single ARM division, while those nice Tactical Bombers are engaging a big horde of lightly armed militia infantry in the neighboring province.
When choosing Industrial or Strategic Bombardments with V1 or V2 rockets, you will quickly notice that they will spread nearly evenly on the industrial centers and important backbones of an enemy country. This comes in very handy for late war gameplay as the handling is now severely simplified.
When the enemy now approaches an airfield, planes automatically rebase themselves to a near and safe airport.
As mentioned in earlier DD’s, we changed the way “Runway Cratering” works (as it is now Airfield strike and does damage planes stationed on the field), added the “Industrial Bombardment” Mission and also added to the “Logistical Strike” the addition that it destroys the carried supply stock of a unit. As mentioned “Strategic Bombardment” now serves as a combination of attacks on all kinds of provincial targets with no special preference.
Being the same as with naval units, you are now able to select for all missions the scale of operation, e.g. be it a single province, an area or a region. And you can now also set it on an infinite running length.
The Combat Mechanics themselves have been slightly tweaked, as now more variables are taken into account for determining a winner. Of course all modifiers and values for this can be found and edited in the misc.txt file.
I hope I could give you a little insight into the new Air Warfare System. Stay tuned for next weeks episode of our DevDiary when I will talk about the remodeled Artificial Intelligence (AI).
To show you what we are currently developing, I attached a small eye candy of the so called new "National Ideas" with settings from Germany.
