Night Penalty on fighters

[Myrten]

Does anyone have an idea how night penalty works now when on air superioriy/intercept mission?

Are air-air radars and radio navigation worth it for fighters?

 

[Dman1791]

According to the wiki, the only relevant penalty to a fighter due to nighttime is -20% air detection. If the wiki is correct, that means that fighters basically do not care about night, especially if you have state radar built. I feel like AA radar would only be useful on dedicated nighttime interceptors (and even then it's very expensive), which you'd really only be using if the enemy were doing night-only bombing.

CAS have to deal with -90% damage though, so radio nav certainly might have a place there. CAS, naval strike, and strat bombing all also have to deal with -50% accuracy, which reduces the number of planes that even get the opportunity to do damage (IIUC, at least). So I feel like radio nav is worth it on planes that do any sort of surface attack, and ATG radar should also be good for them, except CAS.

EDIT: Seems the wiki was missing a new -50% air attack penalty (thanks @Mister Analyst), so AA radar would actually make a pretty big difference during night operations. I still doubt it's worth the considerable expense on every fighter (it's 4/6 IC for a kinda meh -20%/-40% penalty, and it only works for interception), but a few specialized night interceptors could potentially trade more favorably.

 

[Mister Analyst]

@Dman1791
The wiki page is currently missing the night penalty -50% air_attack_factor which was added per the HOI4 1.12 Avalanche release.

@bitmode
Do you have any insights regarding how this modifier acts in-game?

From HOI4 Avalanche file Hearts of Iron IV\common\modifiers\00_static_modifiers.txt:

night = { # On province. Multiplied by amount of darkness.
    air_bombing_targetting = -0.5
    carrier_traffic = -1.0
    naval_hit_chance = -0.25
    naval_retreat_speed = 0.1
    air_attack_factor = -0.50
}

 

[Myrten]

@Dman1791
The wiki page is currently missing the night penalty -50% air_attack_factor which was added per the HOI4 1.12 Avalanche release.

@bitmode
Do you have any insights regarding how this modifier acts in-game?

From HOI4 Avalanche file Hearts of Iron IV\common\modifiers\00_static_modifiers.txt:

night = { # On province. Multiplied by amount of darkness.
    air_bombing_targetting = -0.5
    carrier_traffic = -1.0
    naval_hit_chance = -0.25
    naval_retreat_speed = 0.1
    air_attack_factor = -0.50
}

This looks quite severe, any idea what values 'amount of darkness' has?

 

[bitmode]

This looks quite severe, any idea what values 'amount of darkness' has?

In theory there is a very narrow twilight zone between the night and day areas. Practically, almost all applications of day night applications, including this one, use a strict cutoff (DAY_NIGHT_COVERAGE_FACTOR), making the modifier apply either 100% or 0%.

@bitmode
Do you have any insights regarding how this modifier acts in-game?

The air_night_penalty modifier (e.g. air_wing_experience_bonus_max = { ... air_night_penalty = -0.2 ...}) multiplicatively modifies air_attack_factor (as well as defence and agility if they were present) in the night modifier block. Modifiers to air attack stack additively, so a green wing without doctrines will have a bad time during the night.

For attack (and analogously for defense and agi), all of these stack additively:

• attack from wing experience
• attack from weather
• attack from night
• air_home_defence_factor (not for agi)
• air_power_projection_factor (not for agi)
• mission type specific mission efficiency