Its time to nerf CAS

[Gwydion5]

I hope you are not too disappointed in those changes.

I'm keeping my expectations low but I would honestly be surprised if there wasn't some tweaks to the air combat mechanics.

It is for this reason that threads like this one during the next 6 weeks or so are more important instead of less. This is exactly the time to make your voice heard on what needs to change with air war.

Well if I was to make a suggestion, it would be that air superiority offers a buff and/or debuff to air stats. IE If 60% air superiority versus 40% air superiority then CAS, TAC's, Strats, Nav's suffer 10% loss of air defense value, while fighters and heavy fighters gain 10% air attack. If 70/30 then -20%/+20% and so on up to 50% for a max bonus. I guess I would start with something like that and make adjustments tweaks. Like air interdiction missions is more likely to happen first prior to ground bombing, while air superiority will likely happen after ground bombing.

The thing is Dalwin, that until we get an idea of what they are doing for the Air Warfare, it's hard to make any points on what they should do. I also imagine that planning the changes to Air Warfare are done on paper so changing course or trying to redesign now is probably not in scope or practical. So I just figure it's best to wait till 1.4.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Alex's suggestion regarding allowing FTR to force CAS to abort would also help somewhat..

Actually it's not really as much of a suggestion, I'm pretty sure this type of disruption is what FTR were doing when intercepting all types of bombers before it broke in one of the patches

I do agree that unescorted CAS should also be easier to shoot down in large numbers as well ( which is a balancing issue that has been present since release ).

 

[Dalwin]

Well if I was to make a suggestion, it would be that air superiority offers a buff and/or debuff to air stats. IE If 60% air superiority versus 40% air superiority then CAS, TAC's, Strats, Nav's suffer 10% loss of air defense value, while fighters and heavy fighters gain 10% air attack. If 70/30 then -20%/+20% and so on up to 50% for a max bonus. I guess I would start with something like that and make adjustments tweaks. Like air interdiction missions is more likely to happen first prior to ground bombing, while air superiority will likely happen after ground bombing..

That is not a bad suggestion, but there is a definite reason why I prefer the idea of tying it to having enough fighters to cover your bombers and CAS instead of tying it to regional AS.

I want to set my air missions and leave them until something changes on the map or until I have more air units to assign. I do not want to get involved in a micro-management game of whack a mole (which is something I already see too often in MP with strat bombers). With a plan based on regional AS, it becomes advantageous to stack your fighters into just one or two regions to maximize your bonus and then shift them when you run short of targets.

For me at least, having such a penalty tied to regional AS would make the game worse instead of better. No flying whack a mole please.

The thing is Dalwin, that until we get an idea of what they are doing for the Air Warfare, it's hard to make any points on what they should do. I also imagine that planning the changes to Air Warfare are done on paper so changing course or trying to redesign now is probably not in scope or practical. So I just figure it's best to wait till 1.4.

I agree that we could better target our air comments if we knew more, but as far as we know the air content might be in the final DD before release. They talk about things that are done rather than being still a work in progress. Once it is done it becomes much harder to convince them to make alterations, even if it has not yet been released. It is something of a catch 22. How do we know what changes to ask for if we do not know what they are doing, but once it is done it is generally too late to ask for changes.

The best solution I can see is to try to pick problem areas in the current system and lay out clear plans for improving those. If they have already done these things it is still a win. If they have not, we might push them to do so. Even if they make wide sweeping changes that invalidate the very concepts we were discussing (and I am betting against this.) we still entertained ourselves in the meantime.

 

[Gwydion5]

That is not a bad suggestion, but there is a definite reason why I prefer the idea of tying it to having enough fighters to cover your bombers and CAS instead of tying it to regional AS.

I'm not sure I follow. Are you implying a new mission type for escorting? In terms of my suggestion, I guess I'd have to think about how you would handle fighters engaging fighters + bombers. I'd probably just keep it simple and do an order of battle. Like :

1. Fighters on Fighters interdicted : Fighters on AS or INT engage fighters providing escort to the bombers.
2. Fighters on Bombers not interdicted : If the wing size of the fighters trying to engage the bombers is greater than that of the fighters escorting them, then these are the ones that get through for full stat values with respective bonuses mentioned in previous post.
3. Interdicted Fighters on Bombers at reduced air attack value : These are the fighters remaining from phase 1 that get an engagement against the bombers. Due to phase 1 of combat their effectiveness should be reduced by some RNG amount of 40-60% (low ammunition, damage, etc...)

I do not want to get involved in a micro-management game of whack a mole (which is something I already see too often in MP with strat bombers).

Yeah not sure what to say about that. I guess improve effectiveness of the ground based AA produced through the construction screen. Not necessarily in casualties alone, but perhaps in strategic bombing value.

With a plan based on regional AS, it becomes advantageous to stack your fighters into just one or two regions to maximize your bonus and then shift them when you run short of targets.For me at least, having such a penalty tied to regional AS would make the game worse instead of better. No flying whack a mole please.

I'm not exactly sure it makes it worse than what is currently implemented. Based on my tests fighter wing sizes don't matter, if a wing of 1000 fighters attack a wing of 250 CAS, the CAS take less casualties than if it was a CAS wing size of 1000. I'm not proposing any changes to that, just changes that would up air casualties for non-fighter based aircraft operating in an area where the enemy has air superiority to stop CAS spam as being effective strategy.

But if I was to propose something to address wack a mole gameplay, I would propose an experience like system that divisions have, but for wings operating in a region and from an air base. The longer they operate in a region and from the same air base, the more effective they area. Moving them around from airbase to airbase or region to region would reduce their effectiveness for a time. Or perhaps just tie it to mission efficiency. New Wing, New Airbase = -25% penalty to mission efficiency for the first 2-4 weeks, 4-8 weeks = 0% 8-12 weeks = 25%

I agree that we could better target our air comments if we knew more, but as far as we know the air content might be in the final DD before release. They talk about things that are done rather than being still a work in progress. Once it is done it becomes much harder to convince them to make alterations, even if it has not yet been released. It is something of a catch 22. How do we know what changes to ask for if we do not know what they are doing, but once it is done it is generally too late to ask for changes.

In terms of community engagement they could use some improvement. Like that poll about if they should work on War Screen Information or Trade Screen Information. Without having any idea what that means it's kind of hard to pick one, and they don't exactly communicate what it is they are looking to improve. For example if they asked the community how we felt about adding Industry Values on the War Summary Screen, I would think the community wouldn't find that very useful or a desired feature for the game. Or perhaps another way to look at it is if the community was tasked on what War Information we would like to see, I don't think our collaborative efforts would lead to Industry Values on the war summary screen as being a desired feature.

The other part is that why spend time coming up with ideas or solutions if nobody is listening, or the ideas are not welcome? I've only been around here since late December, so I could be wrong about this. But generally I feel that the HOI4 team is too busy with their current community engagement efforts (DD's, Bug Reporting, Specific Posts like the AI Feedback Thread. ) to really focus on or leverage the community to come up with creative ideas to improve gameplay. This thread is a good example, where as far as I know there hasn't been any request to the community to help them. So I just figure, especially this close to release, that the planning and design for the Air Warfare changes are already complete and thus making suggestions is just noise to them at this point.

I don't know. Based on my experience I simply deduce that if they were interested in our opinion they would ask, or threads like these would be engaged by the team because they are interested in the ideas and discussion. So I am generally reluctant to put time in to something, if the other side is not interested.