Fighters don't attack planes passing trough.

[kalauer]

What happens if the range *defens* just scratches the rang of the Air Zone they want to protect? -> full protection or not?

It must get "wrong" exeptions with this System,...
Borders are changing and air Zones don`t so stupid thinks will occur in some Events.
Air defens 10km North , 10km West and 10km South with 200km in the East coffered. " because Air zone,..." and no way to change it.
Flying 90% over area A and 10% over target B with no effect over A,...
Industrie overlapping in to 3-4 Airzones and need of 3-4 defending groups.

Regarding your first question: When you assign missions, the range of your planes will be compared with the distance they have to fly to the target. Higher "spare range" means a good "coverage" (compare DD7) which increases fighting capability. On the other Hand, when you have to fly a Long way to your target, your "coverage" decreases. This effectively is an encouragement to sustain multiple air bases and not just a bunch of them barely in range of your targets. It also favors defending. Note that planes (as far as I am aware) do not really travel to hte air Zone, they are assigned there and everything else is abstracted in combat bonusses od Malusses. So in case your planes bareley reach the airzone and in reality had to return right away, I guess coverage malus will be kind of -95% (effectively rendering the planes useless save target practice)?

Now if I take a guess about your second part, you want to point out that attacking planes ignore air zones they only pass through even if it accounts for 90% of their traveled distance. Yes, many people have the same perception. But I don't think this is inevitable. We heard some proposals to fix this (although they certainly are not readily implementabel ).

 

[HerrderGezeiten]

That means if Airfield "A" in Air zone "Aa" is 10 km from Target "B" in Target Air zone Area "Bb" and the Airfield in Air zone "Bb" is 200km from the target you should send your defenders von Aa to defend Bb ?
-> Then maybe a Airfield in Bb would then maybe be even better at defending a place in Aa because of range?
-> When the Attack start on the other side of the Air zone this would change drastic (~200km) ?
So it would be best to decide from Target to nearest Airfield with out thinking about Air zones at all for the best defens?

Air zones,...

My nightmare is that it will be a good idea to stop your borders with the Air zones in your favor.

 

[Jazumir]

Ohhh, i can already imagine the paranoia, that shall grab us all, when we have to deploy our limited fighters over each and every single possible target to fight off an enemy, who we suspect to have nukes soon...

 

[kalauer]

That means if Airfield "A" in Air zone "Aa" is 10 km from Target "B" in Target Air zone Area "Bb" and the Airfield in Air zone "Bb" is 200km from the target you should send your defenders von Aa to defend Bb ?
-> Then maybe a Airfield in Bb would then maybe be even better at defending a place in Aa because of range?
-> When the Attack start on the other side of the Air zone this would change drastic (~200km) ?
So it would be best to decide from Target to nearest Airfield with out thinking about Air zones at all for the best defens?

I have no hard knowledge on this, maybe someone has; but for how understand the System, when you select an air Region, you see (lower left) all your airbases (edit: apparently not all airbases but all wings you created!) and the distance to that Zone. Note that this value seems to be the same for the whole Region. I stated before that the air regions should be a single point in modeling terms ("should" here means they most likely are, it is not a normative Statement). This distance may very well be calculated towards a "middle" of the region, however calculated (weighted by population density, area, IC ...). That means if you want to attack a Region, you should build airbases on your borders, if you want to defend a Region, start your planes from an air base located in the middle of that Region, to have Maximum "coverage". Though at some Point this might not give anything, I guess it will be capped somehow.

Pic related. WWW6.


edit1:So I guess it might at some Point be better to start from another Region if that airbase is closer to the Center of the target Region. But that seems to be very plausible (maybe like defending London from Calais rather than from the edge of Cornwall; assuming this Situation arose at some weird Point).

edit2:But there are no "targets" inside a zone, there are only the zones. Everything else is aggregated to them. You can not bomb Berlin, you can just bomb eastern Germany (and while doing this, certainly destroying buildings in Berlin too).

editx:Another thing worth mentioning is, that this means positioning of airfields is still important. I guess that's good.

 

[Modestus]

I do not agree that Germany can afford to let all IC in occupied countries being bombed when they face SU, GB and USA. They need every bit of IC they can get, not to mention infrastructure and troops beeing stationed outside the core regions.

But even if that is true (also seems ahistorical to me), you would defend threee regions possibly with a roughly equal amount of fighters yet only one third will actually be doing something if the enemy is not plain stupid.

Every fighter in Germany does not try and intercept the enemy no matter what the system you have.


I don’t know if you can completely ignore the air defence of an area like Holland but most of the major military production facilities will be within Germany so those regions will be a priority, I suspect as Germany you will be stretched and that is as it should be.

Edit: I suppose I could add that invading the UK as Germany to deny the enemy airbases will be more important in HOI IV then in HOI III, either way it does look like you will have to give more consideration to the air campaign.

 

[kalauer]

Every fighter in Germany does not try and intercept the enemy no matter what the system you have.

True, but the ones in range should at least try.

I don’t know if you can completely ignore the air defence of an area like Holland but most of the major military production facilities will be within Germany so those regions will be a priority, I suspect as Germany you will be stretched and that is as it should be.

"Priority" does not mean you omit other things completely. But in this system, it is exactly as you say: I would have to focus on the main centers, sacrificing all other regions (unless I have some ridiculous superiority), since every fighter located elsewhere would be strongly missed in Germany. This might happen anyway but it should not be caused by the air system but by strong opposition.

Besides, this is true for any other nation, not just Germany.

 

[Denkt]

We don't know the importance of the range stat, so it may be a wast to try for deep strikes.

 

[Cardus]

Maybe there is a hidden genius behind this: what about an air region = whole world? In this way both defenders and attackers will not be limited by their range anymore and they will all teleport where the fight takes place! It would be a nice introduction to WW2 the next generation.. Who said that abstraction is a bad thing?

 

[Denkt]

Range is not just about which regions you can operate in but also how well you can operate in the region (they are large). Poor range will effect your performance negatively, maybe even in the region your aircrafts are based in.

 

[dav77-b]

I think some semi automatic option to place some wings in the regions where they are needed would help.
So an "assistant" calculates the need of fights according to the last enemy presence and reacts to it. The player could give some wings to the assistant to make sure that his air defence reacts on changeing bombing targets. An enemy human could outdo this by switching targets all the time, but in a normal game, this could help to avoid clumsy no.brain decisions of moveing fighters into the right regions.

 

[Mevsrei]

How about this solution:

You can assign airwings to defend vs a specific country in which case they are not assigned to a specific airzone, but give a attrition effect on enemy bombers that target your territory.

You can think of wings you assign to the task to intercept bombers on their way to the target region and someone else is positioning them accordingly, while the game just needs to change some numbers in the backround. This abstraction doesn't need any pathtracking or additional combats calculated.

Example:

Germany assigns 100 fighters to region A and 100 fighters to intercept british bombers.

The game now calculates some attrition to the bombers according to the number of fighters assigned to globaly intercept them and the bombers escort. Than they fight vs the 100 fighters in region A and the surviving bombers get attrition again to accomodate the attacks on their way back from the globaly assigned fighters.

 

[agentgb]

I know someone already posted this earlier, but thought i'd mention it again

"The bomber will always get through." - This seems to have originated from war games and air defence exercises conducted during the early 1930's. Without the benefit of radar to direct fighters, the chances of a fighter standing patrol catching a bombing raid on the way in was found to be very slim. Consequently, many countries invested heavily in AA guns and searchlights to defend cities. The radar-assisted integrated air defence network pioneered in Britain during the late 1930s was fully vindicated during the Battle of Britain, and broke the myth.

upcoming HBO series done in band of brothers fashion

 

[kalauer]

How about this solution:

You can assign airwings to defend vs a specific country in which case they are not assigned to a specific airzone, but give a attrition effect on enemy bombers that target your territory.

You can think of wings you assign to the task to intercept bombers on their way to the target region and someone else is positioning them accordingly, while the game just needs to change some numbers in the backround. This abstraction doesn't need any pathtracking or additional combats calculated.

Example:

Germany assigns 100 fighters to region A and 100 fighters to intercept british bombers.

The game now calculates some attrition to the bombers according to the number of fighters assigned to globaly intercept them and the bombers escort. Than they fight vs the 100 fighters in region A and the surviving bombers get attrition again to accomodate the attacks on their way back from the globaly assigned fighters.

No offense, but that does sound like hell 5 miles above earth. When doing this, you could just as well getrid of airbases and airzones and reduce air combat on the amount of IC you assign to it.


@agentgb : I am looking forward to it, just hoping it not only focusses on the people shipping that bombs.

 

[agentgb]

@agentgb : I am looking forward to it, just hoping it not only focusses on the people shipping that bombs.

yeah i'm not sure tbh, but i think it is for the most part, it's based on the book, that i haven't read, so don't know for sure, but does look pretty sweet!

 

[Kovax]

So, now that infrastructure and factories require IC to repair, that occupied land can be bombed to force expensive repairs, if the enemy decides instead to use his air force to guard his own "core" factories. Realistically, those planes would contest the bombing raids regardless of whether they were bombing the occupied border countries, or continuing on inland to bomb Germany, but now Germany has to use separate groups of planes to defend both regions. As pointed out, as bomber range increases, the ability to hit zones further inland increases, and forces the enemy to defend more zones, rather than simply boost the defenses at the borders or intermediate zones.

HOI3 had "teleporting" planes, but they only teleported by their hourly move, not the entire distance. For short-ranged flights under 1 hour's distance, you couldn't intercept them along the way, because they'd teleport right through your defenders to the target (the same way as HOI4), but for longer ranged bombing missions, you could hit them at the hourly pauses (which changed occasionally with techs and targets, so it required some micromanagement).

 

[Evil_Jon]

I know someone already posted this earlier, but thought i'd mention it again



upcoming HBO series done in band of brothers fashion

Pretty sure that when that video came out 2 years ago that it was confirmed to NOT be from the Spielberg 8th air force HBO mini series. It was either fan made, or made by a production company to showcase their skills.

 

[Ksyr]

It sounds like this is going to remove one of the big micro managment issues of HOI3. More like a game and less like a job

 

[agentgb]

Pretty sure that when that video came out 2 years ago that it was confirmed to NOT be from the Spielberg 8th air force HBO mini series. It was either fan made, or made by a production company to showcase their skills.

hmmmm, ahh ok, yeah i know it's from two years ago, apparently the HBO version then has been having trouble getting funding, but apparently they have already been filming recently, so i think it's only a matter of time now, if that's a fan video anyway, dam, they gone did a good job althou were some apparent historical hiccups in that trailer.

 

[Ultimate_Hobo]

It sounds like this is going to remove one of the big micro managment issues of HOI3. More like a game and less like a job

Yeah, send all your fighters to the English Channel or, better yet, over England itself so their planes cant reach Germany or even take off. Oh, wait, nvm - their planes dont need to actually fly past yours because they simply teleport directly to where they want to be. I hope youre checking every single air zone because their bombers could be anywhere. That sounds like a lot less micro than simply assigning all your fighters to 'air intercept' over the English Channel.

 

[CrasherZZ]

Question: Is there a final list or details of what air missions and options/priorities will be available? I haven't seen any details since the old Air Combat DD. Is this something that's a work in progress? There are probably lots of "good and bad" in the way air war is being abstracted, but it's hard to judge without the final details.

I apologize if I've missed that in this very, very long thread. I confess that I haven't read every single post...