Focusing Close Air Attacks

[Corner79]

Hi everyone

I am not sure if this has been discussed or not, but I wanted to bring up the question since it came to me watching the Word War Wednesday.

While watching WWW, I watched carefully as Daniel placed his fighters, dive bombers and tactical bombers to each region and then select which missions they engaged in. Then a couple times he commented about waiting to see if any of his bombers would join a battle or if he would just maintain the air supremacy that he generally had like in his Japan WWW.

So my question, is it possible to tell some of your dive bombers, etc to focus on this one small battle because maybe it is a key battle and the AI programming is not realizing it? @podcat

So focus dive bombing on this province rather than just any battles across the state. I guess sort of like telling some of your divisions to alternative attack with a manual click and than afterwards return to normal overall state wide missions.

This question actually reminds me of back in the HOI2 days when you could only assign bombers to a region and were left hoping if the AI focused where you wanted to and it was fixed with some mods later and furthermore with HOI3.

Anyways, any information on it would be grand.

In a final note, I can seriously say that I am beyond excited for this game and feel like it is the game of the decade! I am a long time HOI fan since my college days and I don't get easily hyped for games anymore. However, HOI4 has made me "giddy as a school boy" just like Henry Jones Sr. in the Last Crusade and just by watching all the WWWs and reading daily on the forums it appears that the devs have outdone themselves on HOI4. So I thank them all for listening to the players and caring about the game development as much as they do!

Aloha from the red, white and blue

 

[BurdenedWarrior]

From what I have read and watched I don't think you will be able to tell planes to attack a specific province. Just hope that the planes will attack in that area. Not sure how the ai dictates the priority of this but perhaps @SteelVolt can answer? Although this is a limitation I do believe in the idea that less is more in the case of hoi4 and also towards your later comment. I am SUPER stoked on hoi4. It's going to be the game of the next couple years for me!

 

[Mannstien]

If they at some point expand the air war portion of the game I'd like to be able to assign planes to Armies as well and they basically only support the army they are assigned to in attack/defense/air defense etc. as I think this would be an even better balance between HOI3 micro and their current design.

 

[fabius]

If they at some point expand the air war portion of the game I'd like to be able to assign planes to Armies as well and they basically only support the army they are assigned to in attack/defense/air defense etc. as I think this would be an even better balance between HOI3 micro and their current design.

That's a nice idea too.

In WW2 Air power took time to really improve the Air-Ground co-ordination. It took doctrine, training tech and equipment (different wavelength radios for communication with birds above)

I thought that maybe it would be an idea to tie the ability to focus/ target ground support to a specific province or Army to a late-ish Doctrine Tech.

 

[Denkt]

I think aircraft do priorities joining battles then harassing the enemy who is not engaged.

 

[fabius]

I think aircraft do priorities joining battles then harassing the enemy who is not engaged.

Yeah, I take OP to ask can player set the which battle to prioritise rather than it be automated (maybe random in player eyes).

 

[Victor Cortez]

If they at some point expand the air war portion of the game I'd like to be able to assign planes to Armies as well and they basically only support the army they are assigned to in attack/defense/air defense etc. as I think this would be an even better balance between HOI3 micro and their current design.

This idea has been going around for a while now and I think it makes sense, especially as @fabius said if it were linked to doctrines.

 

[linen]

+1 to attaching to Armies/Certain generals.

More encircling with tank/motorized armies supported by aircraft please.

 

[Mannstien]

This idea has been going around for a while now and I think it makes sense, especially as @fabius said if it were linked to doctrines.

Way back when the Air War DD came out I specifically asked about this or for this lol. Thankfully we still bring it up to remind the Dev's it would be a great feature as part of the Battle planning tool.

 

[Victor Cortez]

In any case, we should see how the game behaves first.
Maybe it simply detects what battles in that zone are more intense and planes are automatically directed there.

 

[Denkt]

Maybe it simply detects what battles in that zone are more intense and planes are automatically directed there.

That is probably how it works, the game probably assign a weight to each province and then divide the aircrafts over the provinces.

 

[fabius]

Way back when the Air War DD came out I specifically asked about this or for this lol. Thankfully we still bring it up to remind the Dev's it would be a great feature as part of the Battle planning tool.

Yeah, I have hopes; suspicion that the planning tool will evolve at times through HoI4's childhood and teenage years.

In any case, we should see how the game behaves first.
Maybe it simply detects what battles in that zone are more intense and planes are automatically directed there.

That's just it. What if the most intense is not the players focus. The largest battle could be a holding battle. But the player wants to break a quiet, smaller battle quicker so he can rush encirclement forces through. Or break out of one.

 

[ComradeCommissar]

I wonder if it can be made so that aircraft bombing will have different priorities and targets. For example, one targets reserves moving up to fight, another targets troops already in combat, another hurts retreating troops, etc.. Would be good for stuff like breaking through, so you hit the reserves of your enemy and break their defense to collapse their front.