All I want to know is If Japan's Yokosuka suicide craft were finally fixed to actually be able to kamikaze strike as currently they count as rockets rather than aircraft and cannot do suicide missions.
HOI4 Dev Diary - Air Improvements
- Thread starter podcat
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Hmm interesting, one thing you need to do is reduce the planes on those airfield, each one hold 200 planes. Should be reduce like 30-50 at least. Playing on my mod with 30 planes each airfield seem about right to me.
@podcat
- Can we now assign different aircraft types all at once into their own wings, instead of one-by-one/type-by-type?
- Do we now get a button to not upgrade air units?
- Can we now assign different aircraft types all at once into their own wings, instead of one-by-one/type-by-type?
- Do we now get a button to not upgrade air units?
Looks really good. That radar thing and all these plane imps., the old plane menu was a bit hard to understand 
Could you set the default air missions to 'Normal Operations' instead of 'No retreat' ?
Maybe have an ai_strategy for the ai when they are losing a war to change them to 'no retreat'
Maybe have an ai_strategy for the ai when they are losing a war to change them to 'no retreat'
To piggy back on this, can we get air wing commanders that can gain experience and some with pre-existing experience?
Also, I'd love to be able to use old fighters and captured fighters to train new pilots. Maybe have a certain percentage of trained pilots on a global scale (x% of total pilots are trained to levels x, y, and z) that can have benefits according to distribution across wings?
Wald
Love your work and I look forward to playing the focus trees and mechanics in this dlc/patch.
One thing that always bothered me that I would like to see worked on is to add a equipment selection for planes like for ground forces. Say as the UK, I want to have low grade fighter wings in Asia which will not be reinforced at all with my new spitfires. I also want to be able to have wings with long range variants separate from ones with better combat stats even tho they are both say, mrk I. Spitfires.
I also find that I need so many factories for a viable air force (not to mention one with different types of aircraft) It seems to soke up far more IC than all types of land forces combined. I think they may need to be cheaper or something.
I no you have a ton of things you and fans would like but I thought I would put it out there.
Keep up the great work!
One thing that always bothered me that I would like to see worked on is to add a equipment selection for planes like for ground forces. Say as the UK, I want to have low grade fighter wings in Asia which will not be reinforced at all with my new spitfires. I also want to be able to have wings with long range variants separate from ones with better combat stats even tho they are both say, mrk I. Spitfires.
I also find that I need so many factories for a viable air force (not to mention one with different types of aircraft) It seems to soke up far more IC than all types of land forces combined. I think they may need to be cheaper or something.
I no you have a ton of things you and fans would like but I thought I would put it out there.
Keep up the great work!
Can you please make it so the map mode doesn't change when clicking on an air base or port? Or simply make it so that the map mode NEVER changes without being explicitly told to. The current auto-change when mis-clicking on said air base or port is a major P.i.t.a.
Looks great guys! Also glad that you're aware that the air zones are too big. Hopefully we can get that addressed in the future. One other thing I would like is more control over bombing targets. Like perhaps a priority list. So for strategic bombers if you really wanted to target dockyards you could set that at the top and your bombers would target those more often.
Anyway I'm happy with the direction you're taking so far! Really excited for this DLC
Anyway I'm happy with the direction you're taking so far! Really excited for this DLC
This looks like a great start! I´m looking forward to the rezising of the air zones in the future. As some said earllier, they are way too big now.
You still have the long term statistics thing to flip out like before for that. A lot of this data we show makes little sense over very large timespans, and also eats a bit of memory so we felt this worked quite well
screenshot is from a test scenario for CAS interception and the bases on german side are heavily stacking penalized, so its intended. If you mean from realism standpoints its because its too much of a PITA to manage small bases when playing.
we had issues with beginner players not understanding why their planes didnt fly when this was default, so not sure. its easier to click "lets be safer" than wonder why nothing happens etc
Maybe something like in Stellaris can be done? I mean you customize your first sector and then next one you create follow the same customized rules.
No, No ,noooooooo
It needs to be simplified that way. What the devs need to do is make the ai use air regions further away also like the player can.
I agree that this is the best solution. However, you need to fix the huge AI bugs regarding this that I reported in the bugs forum please. The AI only evaluates adjacent air zones, so US/ENG ai Will never bomb germany as long as germany holds the land provinces in belgium/holland. This really gimps the AI and is a very big limitation in advanced mods. It would be okay if you allowed this only for strategic/naval bombing I guess.
Thanks podcat, the new interface looks nice.
I'm all in favor of using similar display / rules for Land / Air / Naval units, as the division system could fit quite well for all.
I'm looking forward to trying this out ingame ! Cheers
Sorry but, Land units behave differently than Air units and Air units behave differently than Naval units. so the division system is not a one size fits all.
I think this attrition idea is a good compromise.
It seems to me that a good way to do this would be to have drop-down menu for "Default Air Wing Behavior" in game settings - why not give the player control? Needless to say, such a menu could have tooltips to show what each behavior will mean for your air forces.
A question I have regarding the air improvements:
Is there still no way to determine A) what specific kinds of enemy planes yours are encountering [apart from the pictures in the new combat window] and B) for what country those planes fight?
e.g. Destroyed Planes 5 [tooltip: 3 Heinkel He-111s (German Reich), 2 Ju-87s (German Reich)]
Enemies Engaged 183 [tooltip: 183 Me-262s (German Reich)]
or at the very least, you could break it down by plane type rather than specific model.
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Cheers for the DD Podcat and the extra info Pallidum . The overhaul of the UI looks terrific – a huge improvement in useability and surfacing of information, and I have no doubt it’ll help players really get into the air war . Am a particular fan of air wings on the map and the ‘battle’ interface helping players see the immediate impact of what’s going on.
I very much appreciate that everything can’t be done at once, and think what has been done is excellent, so don’t take the below as criticisms, but rather constructive suggestions (other than those already made by other posters - lots of good stuff in this thread from a layman's perspective at least - as always, please ignore anything that’s not of interest) :
If it helps (and if you don't already know about it) @Balesir did some great work with smaller air zones with their Waltzing Matilda mod. There may well be benefit in piggy-backing off a lot of the work done here to speed up the process. I know it's not as simple as just grabbing it and throwing it in, just mentioning it in case it helps.
I'd +1 for this being on the list to sort at some point in the future. It's a bit counter-intuitive to be able to drop in 1000 fighters into a zone, but to do similar with CAS is to severely limit their impact on the ground battles there compared with 100 or 200-sized wings.
Top post. Only thing I'd add/caution would be with the aircraft types (for example, just having fighters/heavy fighters/bombers/heavy bombers takes away from dedicated attacker/torpedo attack craft (the Sturmoviks and Dauntlesses for example) and I'm not sure where a Stuka would fit into that classification as well (it's too small to be a bomber, but it would make the world's worst fighter/heavy fighter). If you were going to go down this path, some kind of single-engine 'attacker' type would probably add value.
On jets, if logistics gets a nip and tuck, the extra logistic requirements of jet aircraft could make it sensible to keep them separated. If the devs didn't envision this though, then wrapping them all into the same type makes a lot of sense, particularly given how an air 'wing' can represent all aircraft of a certain broad type in a large region.
In the game, the airfields don't represent a single field, but rather the combined airfield capacity of a state. Even provinces at the HoI4 level often held multiple strips. If we reduced the game to only being able to have one historically plausible airfield per state, there wouldn't be many aircraft flying.
It also looks like you've got a 'change all' button for priority in the window now, so would it be easy to 'select all air' and then change priority to the preferred level? If this is the case, then this is a huge QoL improvement and does the job well enough. How about the AI though? The AI going all 'death or glory' with its aircraft can mean they don't provide a consistent threat over time as much as perhaps they could against superior air forces. If there was a way to use AI strategies to set a 'whole of nation' air aggressiveness state, that might help? Not suggesting Steelvolt doesn't have other things to do, just throwing ideas around.
. The overhaul of the UI looks terrific – a huge improvement in useability and surfacing of information, and I have no doubt it’ll help players really get into the air war . Am a particular fan of air wings on the map and the ‘battle’ interface helping players see the immediate impact of what’s going on.I very much appreciate that everything can’t be done at once, and think what has been done is excellent, so don’t take the below as criticisms, but rather constructive suggestions (other than those already made by other posters - lots of good stuff in this thread from a layman's perspective at least - as always, please ignore anything that’s not of interest)
:- Maybe have the anchor for the naval bomber on the opposite wing for the jet ‘triangle’? That way there’s room for jet naval bombers in the future as well.
- On the whole ‘intercepting planes’ thing. Assuming a ‘straight line’ path of attack and allowing interception on that path is likely to give a more plausible strategic result than assuming no interception at all, appreciating that this was far from always the case historically (in other words, it’s not strictly historically plausible, but it’s a lot more historically plausible than the current situation). Some thought bubbles on how to achieve this in a relatively simple way include:
- For every ‘free’ (ie, not otherwise engaged) fighter flying interception or air superiority in a zone, X number of bombers are shot down and Y numbers of bombers are disrupted on the way in (most important) and X number shot down on the way back (disruption not an issue here). It can be calculated simultaneously with the mission (again, not strictly historically plausible, but a lot closer to what’s going on here). X and Y can be formulas relating the average capabilities of the fighters vs the average capabilities of the bombers. Viewing the bombers in the new battle window could also show the number of aircraft shot down or disrupted on the way there).
- Allowing interception would go a long way to reducing the ‘air zone shuffle’ that’s currently a substantial part of gameplay. That said, appreciate that allowing interception would require the AI to learn how to deal with it (my best guess is that this’d be the hardest part of the process).
- Techs (doctrine – airborne radar) /radar could also play a part in improving the ratio of enemy bombers shot down/disrupted – a la the Battle of Britain and the air defence of Germany.
- Some kind of basic interception system would also be invaluable for naval air operations. This would require allocating carrier fighters to offense and defense (might be worth setting this at some default level initially (50/50?), perhaps with the player or AI able to adjust as appropriate), but once this had been done, bombers attacking ships with air defence could have one pass of the ‘interception formula’ to see how many got through.
- On naval air, it’s probably outside the scope of 1.4 (but don't think this is me trying to discourage you ), but in the off chance, AA having some disruptive power, as well as just shooting down enemy aircraft, would help reduce the lethality of naval warfare on carrier wings, and better manage the lethality of aircraft on ships. Tech/doctrines could also impact on this. Allowing AA between ships to support each other (with the effect adjusted by tech/doctrine modifiers) would also go well, with some kind of formula that balanced the supporting effect by the number of ships supported.
- With aircraft and their interaction with fleets, at the moment the aircraft seem to find the ships every time. This was far from the case, particularly pre-widespread use of airborne radar (but even afterwards it was not a guaranteed thing). Having some kind of mechanic for whether aircraft (including from carriers) even turn up at a naval battle might help better simulate things, without adding micro or a lot of extra design/AI/UI work.
- This is a very “in the off chance” request, but if it ever became possible to mod the basic air missions (so adding different missions, rather than modding which aircraft get to use which types of hard-coded missions) it’d be all kinds of awesome (and even moreso for naval missions, although I know that’s well outside the scope of this DD).
- This might be more one for a logistics overhaul, but over very long distances (think Britain or Africa to Asia, or US West Coast to Hawaii/Phillipines) for many types of aircraft, it was necessary to send them by sea instead of by air, increasing both the time they took to arrive, and the chance of being sunk by submarine. I'm not advocating introducing aircraft transports or using CVLs/CVEs as such (although, as before, don't let me stop you - I would like this but suspect it's a tad too detailed for your design, and can't think of a way that it wouldn't add fiddly micro), but if after a certain distance between bases (based on some relationship between the minimum range of the aircraft in the air wing and the distance being travelled), aircraft had to be shipped by sea, it would add some depth to the Pacific War (the US resupplying aircraft in , and make it harder for Britain to just dump 500 modern interceptors in Singapore and make life all sorts of hard for Japan. Not sure how to manage this with reinforcements, but would be great if they could be worked into this kind of mechanic as well. Appreciate it's an off chance, but doesn't hurt to throw the idea around .
If it helps (and if you don't already know about it) @Balesir did some great work with smaller air zones with their Waltzing Matilda mod. There may well be benefit in piggy-backing off a lot of the work done here to speed up the process. I know it's not as simple as just grabbing it and throwing it in, just mentioning it in case it helps.
I'd +1 for this being on the list to sort at some point in the future. It's a bit counter-intuitive to be able to drop in 1000 fighters into a zone, but to do similar with CAS is to severely limit their impact on the ground battles there compared with 100 or 200-sized wings.
Top post
. Only thing I'd add/caution would be with the aircraft types (for example, just having fighters/heavy fighters/bombers/heavy bombers takes away from dedicated attacker/torpedo attack craft (the Sturmoviks and Dauntlesses for example) and I'm not sure where a Stuka would fit into that classification as well (it's too small to be a bomber, but it would make the world's worst fighter/heavy fighter). If you were going to go down this path, some kind of single-engine 'attacker' type would probably add value.On jets, if logistics gets a nip and tuck, the extra logistic requirements of jet aircraft could make it sensible to keep them separated. If the devs didn't envision this though, then wrapping them all into the same type makes a lot of sense, particularly given how an air 'wing' can represent all aircraft of a certain broad type in a large region.
In the game, the airfields don't represent a single field, but rather the combined airfield capacity of a state. Even provinces at the HoI4 level often held multiple strips. If we reduced the game to only being able to have one historically plausible airfield per state, there wouldn't be many aircraft flying
.It also looks like you've got a 'change all' button for priority in the window now, so would it be easy to 'select all air' and then change priority to the preferred level? If this is the case, then this is a huge QoL improvement and does the job well enough. How about the AI though? The AI going all 'death or glory' with its aircraft can mean they don't provide a consistent threat over time as much as perhaps they could against superior air forces. If there was a way to use AI strategies to set a 'whole of nation' air aggressiveness state, that might help? Not suggesting Steelvolt doesn't have other things to do, just throwing ideas around
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