INT vs FIG, which ones to produce?

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Pandrea

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Jun 18, 2013
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  • Crusader Kings II
  • Europa Universalis III Complete
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After many years I am still a noob in DH with many questions.


One of the main ones is about INT and FIG: which is better? Is it true that INT should go against bombers and FIG against INT to defend your bombers?


As Italy or other nations with little IC should I do INT or FIG? As Germany or Uk or Ussr is it worth producing both?
 
INT get a bonus against bombers (in vanilla, mods may change this).
FTG don't get a bonus against INT, just to be clear.

They are both expensive, so with limited IC, or just min-maxing, choose 1 and ignore the other.
 
I like the longer range of fighters and their better ability to ground attack and ground support so I build them when I can afford to. But distances are short in Western Europe, so interceptors and Tacs are fine for Italy, same for GER, plus CAS. Some techs, like radar benefit INT but not FTG. But fighters get a boost from certain land doctrines. Once you get into the cold war techs, you can choose air doctrine techs that benefit one over the other. At least you can in the Cold War Tech Tree, not sure about vanilla.
 
Depends. Fighters are pretty great for germany in some mods, during exactly the time when you are going to be invading stuff, you can get to have planes that do the trick both as dogfighters and troop bombers. The buff against bombers is strong though, especially as a smaller country. This same buff makes your CAS absolutely shred as well.

Basically to air defend as a smaller country, remember the 3 buffs: The INT.vs Bomber buff, the radar buff, and the buff (or debuff for the enemy) to range from air field.

Add that together and you can punsh far above your weight class the AI will mindlessly wait for their bombers to repair then send the same mission again, players will either leave you alone or tripple their investments. In all 4 situations you win (Pulling significant enemy air forces away from were the player had originally intended to use them is win)
 
As Italy or other nations with little IC should I do INT or FIG? As Germany or Uk or Ussr is it worth producing both?
Figther or Interceptors?
I went with interceptors for Germany and fighters with China.

Fighters are more versatile: If they aren't needed for air superiority, they can assist the army. They have a very low soft and hard attack, though. But it certainly helps raising experience and levels of the commanding officers very fast.
Fighters have a longer range. That was the deciding factor why I used fighters as China, distances are rather long and often enough an interceptor couldn't even had reached adjascent regions.

Interceptors are cheaper and better in their core role: fighting enemy bombers. They are so good in it, that it would be a waste to let them do anything else as long as there are enemy bombers in the air. They are an about even match for fighters. Later on they also get a lowly soft attack, so in theory it would be possible to use them, similar to fighters, also in gound attack/support missions.
Tech-wise the newest interceptors can be researched 1 year before multi-role fighters.

For Italy:
Depends what you plan to do. If you only want to go for North Africa, distances there inbetween regions are rather small, so interceptors are fine.
If you want to conquere all of Africa, you'll need fighters and TAC because distances inbetween regions get vast and interceptores/CAS don't have the range. Especially vs the lone enemy militia in a desert or jungle which can be only reached by a 6-month tour, TAC are great. It might take a while to get that unit wiped out but much better than trying to encircle a lone militia in a 3-6 month campaign.
 
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What I forgot to mention and to strengthen Rosa Park's points from above post:
Interceptors excell especially in a defensive role against strat bombers (for example Germany at the western frontier and along the coast during the invasion of Poland). That means they are best used with "Air Scramble" strategically stationed on airports along the border (but ideally with one friendly region inbetween airport and border). This results in the following:
# radar bonus (if you built them)
# in the airport and adjascent regions the 15% bonus ( think it is 15%) from "nearby airfield"
# 25% interceptor only bonus when fighting bombers (including NAV and TAC, I think)
# support from static AA built in the border regions (if you have built any)
This adds up to a lot fighting power. And 3 of the 4 above listed boni also apply when interceptors are attacked by fighters. Or the other way around, 3 out of the 4 boni also work when using fighters (but usually those, due to their longer range, are more offensively used, which often means over enemy territory to protect CAS or TAC).

Additionally, if you have littered the border regions with airports and stationed 2 interceptors or fighters on each, they can often enough help each other out, either by ordering them manually or automatically by overlapping fields of air scramble.

This, of course, works also vice versa, attacking enemy planes over their home turf gives them many boni and makes fights considerably more difficult.

PS: The mission "air scramble" is a bit hidden and is enabled by researching in the industrial tech section "Radar Warning" the first tech "Basic Decimetric Radar Warning Sites" (1936). It gets improved within the "Air Doctrines" section eg "Home Defense" and others. Great mission: saves fuel and automates defense (a bit whacky, though, as long as the mission efficiency is still low).
How much the mission efficiency of air scramble is improved or even enabled by nearby radar station I don't know, though.
 
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Playing the 1933 mod (Egde of Darkness) I alway start out with two runs of 99 Interceptors and 99 Fighters. So in 1941, Barbarossa, I have at least 4000+ fighters, of which circa 900 are escortfirghters. This mean I can deploy at least 1600 real fighters against the Red Airforce, + the 900 escortfirghters. In my last game I had more than 4000 combat aircrafts assulting on June 22. In the west and in the mediteranium I had 17 interceptor divisions with perhaps 1400 combat aircrafts.

Almost all airdoctrines researched, and so I actually mannaged to put up a good fight against the Red Airforce, attacking some provinces wit as many as 2300 aircrafts!

Also, make sure all your infantry for Barbarossa cannot be reinforced. This will make your airunits reinforced much faster.
 
Speaking of air units, how many naval bombers is optimal to have in one unit to be effective convoy bombers?

Having 4 is expensive and seems like overkill. I think you could cut them in half to spread them out more without much effect on efficiency.