usually u want around 20ish lines(thats more aluminium then the allies and soviets have) so 15x20? 300?
But thats an ideal, actual numbers may vary depending on the situation
Strategic Bombing - overpowered?
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But thats an ideal, actual numbers may vary depending on the situation
Yeah, your test was what I was referring to with "another recent test".
Ok, this is helpful info. Thank you.
Now I want to know, is it best to max out guns over range/reliability vs LF?
No dont do it fulmen, Just do range reliably and engine. Everyone ive seen try guns always gets gutted
Sure, and I thought the same. But most of those observations are pre-DoD. My recent observations do suggest that range still trumps guns when you have RADAR, and you usually do have RADAR. So the real question is, how important is reliability? If it's more important than guns then the upgrade order for LF hasn't changed at all with DoD.
I'd like to see some monthly statistics on air accidents, e.g. 88% reliability vs 40% reliability.
That entirely depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you have more MIC invested in fighters and better gearing than your opponent you'll want to create as brutal air-combats as possible. Even though guns lower the defensive stats you'll still shoot down way more aircraft in shorter time which will mean less time before the results starts to get lopsided. Both sides losses will increase and that's to your benefit if you're producing more than the opponent. It usually ends up with the one producing less to get stockpiled aircraft into the wings due to losses and then all their agility and range boosts are diminished.
Also the gun upgrades are beneficial to shooting down everything else that flies such as CAS/NAV/STRAT where the speed and agility stats do little and here's where the IC benefit of guns come into play.
I normally go max agility first then reliability and guns to max at the same ratio and if I feel like it +1 in range leaves me with 72% reliability in fully upgraded fighter 3 air xp is not the problem after a while you normally don't know where to put it anyways as you have enough. More range is not needed in my eyes in the European theatre. The efficiency drop changing lines for slowly upgrading your variants is not an issue once you have fighter 3.
Works pretty well.
Works pretty well.
Why doesn't Paradox just put in an "efficiency growth" mechanic similar to how naval landings work for swapping air regions?
When you change to a new region, different missions should have to ramp up in efficiency over time for an air wing. If you add planes to a wing, it reduces the mission efficiency until those planes get up to speed (to prevent folks leaving size 1 wings everywhere to max efficiency, and then just bumping them up to 1000 planes later. So the efficiency needs to drop by an appropriate ratio when a wing changes size). Different missions could grow efficiency at different rates.
Slower efficiency growth (maybe 7 days to 100%)
- Strat Bombing
- Port Strikes
- Air Supply (new patch)
Moderate efficiency growth (maybe 4 days to 100%)
- Close Air Support
- Naval Strike
- Kamikaze
Quick efficiency growth ( maybe 2 days to 100%)
- Aerial Superiority
- Interception
So that'd simulate some of the planning and growth of familiarity for pilots tackling a job in a new region of the world. Jobs like "fly around and hunt other planes" are easier to get up to speed. Jobs like "bomb this specific factory over here" require more planning and growth of learning the terrain in the region. Mechanically, it'd considerably neuter whack-a-mole.
When you change to a new region, different missions should have to ramp up in efficiency over time for an air wing. If you add planes to a wing, it reduces the mission efficiency until those planes get up to speed (to prevent folks leaving size 1 wings everywhere to max efficiency, and then just bumping them up to 1000 planes later. So the efficiency needs to drop by an appropriate ratio when a wing changes size). Different missions could grow efficiency at different rates.
Slower efficiency growth (maybe 7 days to 100%)
- Strat Bombing
- Port Strikes
- Air Supply (new patch)
Moderate efficiency growth (maybe 4 days to 100%)
- Close Air Support
- Naval Strike
- Kamikaze
Quick efficiency growth ( maybe 2 days to 100%)
- Aerial Superiority
- Interception
So that'd simulate some of the planning and growth of familiarity for pilots tackling a job in a new region of the world. Jobs like "fly around and hunt other planes" are easier to get up to speed. Jobs like "bomb this specific factory over here" require more planning and growth of learning the terrain in the region. Mechanically, it'd considerably neuter whack-a-mole.
That depends on the situation.
Reliability IMO is never worth it if you have active combat going on most of the time, then the other things will be more important. It can be worth it if your enemy gives up fighting you in the air at all, or if your enemy is in a position where they spend very little time engaging. Accidents will not be big compared to losses from active combat even if you ignore reliability.
Range is also situational. If you play whack-a-mole it's key to be able to respond faster with less rebasing, and it's also important when you are the attacker to give range to escort your bombers, or more important in the Pacific or doing invasions.
The balance between guns & engines depend on what you expect to face. The more bombers and less fighters the more important getting some guns too becomes, but you probably shouldn't skip engines entirely since that is the main thing what makes your fighters beat other fighters.
I think this would be an interesting solution and I have suggested similar things before. First you need to scout the targets, then you need to plan and prepare, then you need to learn about the enemy defenses (painful experience) and in the end after some days or weeks you reach something approaching good efficient operations dishing out consistent results.
This is surely why my tests yesterday shows that if you go +5 engines +5 guns you shoot down 14% more enemy +5 engine planes then they shoot down yours ( all else equal ). If you didn't bother to test it please don't base your opinion on old or unscientific data.
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Allow me to also intervene and give my opinion on strategic bombers. As many people on this thread found out, cancelling out a "small" number of strat. bombers is easy and intuitive. You match these with an equal amount of fighters and even if some bombers do manage to avoid your interceptors, the quantity was so small that the damage delt is negligeable.
I like to think of infantry and arty as the most cost efficient thing to build on the ground and tanks as the most combat width efficient piece of equipment on the ground.
The way I think of the air war: fighters are the infantry of the skies and strat bombers are flying tanks. The reason why tanks are so good at pushing is because they concentrate an incredible amount of statistics into a very small combat width and if the enemy does not have armor/mechs of their own (on plains for the purpose of our example), the infantry will loose the battle no matter what (assuming no airforce comes into play).
There are certain instances where strat. bomber concentration (what some of us in MP call the "critical mass") is such that they can take over certain airzones no matter what. A good exemple is Singapore/ Siam airspace. The Allies have good quality airfields in range for their bombers (think Singapore, Philippines and the sometime upgraded Dacca airfield). On the other hand, the Axis have few such airbases from which they can mount an efficient defense of the skies in South East Asia. Even if built up, Siam, Saigon or Malay peninsula airbases are in different regions and will get blown up by the strat bombing campaign of the Allies. Why should this example matter to you then? The Allies are not even bombing industry... And the reason you should care is because Japan can be stopped from ever posing a credible threat to RAJ and Singapore by massing enough of those bombers in range of South East Asia. The Japanese army will be out of supplies in no time. The issue is that the capactity for the Axis to put an equivalent number of IC days in the air to counter Allied bombing can't be achieved in certain critical zones.
Strategic bomber is the easiest way in the game to bring the fight to the Axis power at very little skill for decent trades still. More than simply stopping Japan in South East Asia, a USA player using strategic bombers can halt Barbarossa in a similar fashion by targetting Berlin, East and Western Poland air space as the Germans push into the emptyness of Russia. At the very least, credible counter measures can not be properly setup in Eastern Poland (the zone is held by the Russians and they won't setup AA for you) and the inherent lack of factories in this zone (or Western Poland) almost guarantees that any bombed building will be an infrastructure level or an airbase. In my experience, large concentrations of fighters are needed from both the Soviets and the Germans for Barbarossa and airbases are in very short supply on both sides leading to both players building some extra capacity. Knocking down one level of an airfield 2k planes out of 2k planes renders them completely useless until they are rebased properly... Seriously hurting the Axis's ability to keep the airwar going their way against the Soviets if the knocked down airfield forces them to rebase at the back either to fight off the bombers or to keep fighting the Soviet airforce at a possible loss of efficiency.
So, while it has been proven that you can somewhat efficiently kill off some strategic bombers for some cheaper fighters (about 1 for 3 IC trade), we are still far from the ratios observed when fighters are intercepting CAS and we likewise agree that it is almost impossible to stop an escorted wing of strategic bomber. And while I have also heard people advocating state AA, I believe it is important to mention that 5 level of state AA is worth about 1.8 Military Industrial capacity... So, assuming you are overly enthusiastic and build 50 ( the number popped up in the thread earlier), you could have built about 50-80 MIC instead (50 with some refineries for instance to build yet more planes)... Just the threat of strat bombing sets back the German player by such a big amount and the Allies have yet to even fly the bombers over Germany in this scenario.
To conclude, it should be much MUCH more IC efficient in my humble opinion to kill/ disrupt bombers than it currently is with fighters so that they only really shine when properly escorted by heavy fighters or light fighters. Even with the losses, it has been proven in this thread that you need a similar amount of IC days in the air to somewhat properly stop the bombers... Is there a more efficient way to tie up such a large amount of Axis industrial capacity this easily for the Allies with so little skill? (Bear in mind... D-Days are hard, Africa must be won to have Italy garisson itself properly, convoy raiding the Axis does not work because they trade on land, etc...)
I like to think of infantry and arty as the most cost efficient thing to build on the ground and tanks as the most combat width efficient piece of equipment on the ground.
The way I think of the air war: fighters are the infantry of the skies and strat bombers are flying tanks. The reason why tanks are so good at pushing is because they concentrate an incredible amount of statistics into a very small combat width and if the enemy does not have armor/mechs of their own (on plains for the purpose of our example), the infantry will loose the battle no matter what (assuming no airforce comes into play).
There are certain instances where strat. bomber concentration (what some of us in MP call the "critical mass") is such that they can take over certain airzones no matter what. A good exemple is Singapore/ Siam airspace. The Allies have good quality airfields in range for their bombers (think Singapore, Philippines and the sometime upgraded Dacca airfield). On the other hand, the Axis have few such airbases from which they can mount an efficient defense of the skies in South East Asia. Even if built up, Siam, Saigon or Malay peninsula airbases are in different regions and will get blown up by the strat bombing campaign of the Allies. Why should this example matter to you then? The Allies are not even bombing industry... And the reason you should care is because Japan can be stopped from ever posing a credible threat to RAJ and Singapore by massing enough of those bombers in range of South East Asia. The Japanese army will be out of supplies in no time. The issue is that the capactity for the Axis to put an equivalent number of IC days in the air to counter Allied bombing can't be achieved in certain critical zones.
Strategic bomber is the easiest way in the game to bring the fight to the Axis power at very little skill for decent trades still. More than simply stopping Japan in South East Asia, a USA player using strategic bombers can halt Barbarossa in a similar fashion by targetting Berlin, East and Western Poland air space as the Germans push into the emptyness of Russia. At the very least, credible counter measures can not be properly setup in Eastern Poland (the zone is held by the Russians and they won't setup AA for you) and the inherent lack of factories in this zone (or Western Poland) almost guarantees that any bombed building will be an infrastructure level or an airbase. In my experience, large concentrations of fighters are needed from both the Soviets and the Germans for Barbarossa and airbases are in very short supply on both sides leading to both players building some extra capacity. Knocking down one level of an airfield 2k planes out of 2k planes renders them completely useless until they are rebased properly... Seriously hurting the Axis's ability to keep the airwar going their way against the Soviets if the knocked down airfield forces them to rebase at the back either to fight off the bombers or to keep fighting the Soviet airforce at a possible loss of efficiency.
So, while it has been proven that you can somewhat efficiently kill off some strategic bombers for some cheaper fighters (about 1 for 3 IC trade), we are still far from the ratios observed when fighters are intercepting CAS and we likewise agree that it is almost impossible to stop an escorted wing of strategic bomber. And while I have also heard people advocating state AA, I believe it is important to mention that 5 level of state AA is worth about 1.8 Military Industrial capacity... So, assuming you are overly enthusiastic and build 50 ( the number popped up in the thread earlier), you could have built about 50-80 MIC instead (50 with some refineries for instance to build yet more planes)... Just the threat of strat bombing sets back the German player by such a big amount and the Allies have yet to even fly the bombers over Germany in this scenario.
To conclude, it should be much MUCH more IC efficient in my humble opinion to kill/ disrupt bombers than it currently is with fighters so that they only really shine when properly escorted by heavy fighters or light fighters. Even with the losses, it has been proven in this thread that you need a similar amount of IC days in the air to somewhat properly stop the bombers... Is there a more efficient way to tie up such a large amount of Axis industrial capacity this easily for the Allies with so little skill? (Bear in mind... D-Days are hard, Africa must be won to have Italy garisson itself properly, convoy raiding the Axis does not work because they trade on land, etc...)
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You do bring up alot of valid points Grant, but 50 states with maxed out AA is probably significant overkill for most situations. AA should IMO go in your states containing valuable things like airbases, refineries, lots of MIC/CIC slots and so on, it isn't needed everywhere because you can let the free repair work for you a bit as well when defending against strategic bombers.
Something else to consider is that I've seen up to 100 strategic bombers shot down per month by maxed AA in a single airzone, That's equal to the output of 15 MIC not counting how much MIC/CIC worth of damage reduction it saved you.
The big issue is that Heavy fighters which are the only thing that's very IC efficient at killing unescorted strats are not as "rushable", and are so bad at everything else that they have little role to play. If Heavy fighters were more useful elsewhere or could support in CAS/Naval strikes they would be more attractive overall.
So either that or I can agree it would be good balance to have Light fighters work a bit better against them ( 2:1 ratio of industry with upgraded guns on fighters is decent, but not quite as brutal as unescorted CAS/TAC/NAV that can be slaughtered closer to 5:1 ).
An obvious one would be to add a ground attack value to heavy fighters about the same as TACs, or potentially like 10-20% weaker. So in addition to being useful against strats, they could also be useful on the eastern front in ground attack support roles where the air base coverage isn't quite as good.
edit: another thing that might be a good idea is to swap the research bonuses around and group them more by airframe type rather than mission- currently you often have to choose between light and heavy fighters, and then cas vs. tac. It might be nice if it was choose between light vs cas, and heavy vs tac. This would let you get the heavy fighter AND light fighter research bonuses.
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I tested the +5 guns fighters on accidents and found out that they get destroyed by accidents 8x more times than you claimed. Are you sure your numbers are accurate?
So, you are just going to ignore every single test I posted with escorted strategic bombers taking losses against enemy fighters when the defender has enough planes?
You know what I like about this post? Fulmen actually wants to get more information on the topic so he can make nuanced decisions.
I don't actually have all the answers for you. (I wish I did have all the answers, but I am not prideful enough to think I have every last little thing figured out.) I will say that I think 48% reliability is probably the floor on reliability in high intensity combat areas (excluding ministers); any lower, and you are losing more planes to accidents than you gain in enemy planes killed. If you are patrolling areas with very little air combat, 48% reliability is painful.
I do agree with many people in this thread: the real problem facing light aircraft design is the question of guns versus range. As I've said before in this very thread, the amount of reliability is limited, and if you need range, you just have to have more range.
But I did a test to give you some idea of what reliability is doing. 4000 1940 Light Fighters on each side, max operational integrity on each side, level 3 RADAR (full detection), 30 days, France versus Germany. France ran +2 guns/+2 reliability/+5 Engines on the first test, and Germany ran +5 engines (both sides have 80% reliability). On the second test, France ran +2 guns/+2 range/+5 engines (48% reliability) and Germany had +5 engines.
France won both air battles, but her accidents went from 16 in the first test to 49 in the second test.
Note that I forgot to turn off weather for my tests, and the weather was worse in the second test. This might be significant for reasons I point out below.
A few take aways from the test:
1) The bad weather narrowed France's margin of victory considerably. She killed fewer German planes during the second test.
2) Bad weather hurts low reliability more. If you are planning to operate a lot of planes in areas with horrible weather, reliability might matter more.
3) The change from 16 to 49 planes lost to accidents was not horrible, but it was noticeable. Both sides were shooting down well over 500 planes in air combat during the test. But that's 33 extra planes lost a month per 4000 planes operating. That's 396 extra planes lost a year. Is that enough to make a difference in the long run? Perhaps. Given how cheap light fighters are, it's perhaps not the biggest threat you have to worry about.
4) This test reinforces my current methodology that puts the floor on light fighter reliability at 48%. Any lower, and it would be unacceptable. And having better reliability would also make a difference. Note that this only applies to light fighters. You really should have 80% reliability on expensive planes like strategic bombers. Losing an 10 strategic bombers a month to accidents is far more costly than it appears.
If I had more time, I'd rerun the test with weather on and off, and maybe run it for a few months instead of 30 days. And some day, I have to get around to testing the effect the accident minister has on this issue.
To those inviting me to play MP:
I have to decline your generous offer. I'm already committed to one MP game a week, and we just started a new one on Tuesday. And since I'm Italy, I can't really abandon it. Especially not after the rocky start the Axis has had this time around. It's 1938, so I have to be in top form for the upcoming session next week. I wouldn't want to white peace on Yugoslavia, because I was thinking about another MP game with different rules. Italian diplomats already tried something like that once this game.
Yes, but as I mentioned in the post the numbers of accidents is so small that we would need to run much longer tests for them to be statistically reliable.
Do feel free to run longer tests until you get a few hundred accidents and post your results here.
I've never seen accidents go above 5% of the losses from aircombat though even when they are high but maybe a streak of bad weather can make it happen.
This thread has reinforced for me one idea. High speed MP games with minors producing only along specialized roles are broken. The people that play in that silly format also seem to have a higher than normal tendency to being rude and elitist. These guys actually think referring to SP is an insult. They also think that their form of the game is TRUE HOI. This in spite of how many facets of the game become useless in such a format.
So for those who are reading this thread and trying to get information rather than having their mind already made up in spite of whatever evidence is presented, let me say this. There is more than one MP format. Don't let the elitists convince you that just because something is broken in their format it is then broken in the game in general. We don't need to rebalance HOI4 around speed play. It is a GSG not an RTS.
Slow MP play with a small number of players so that you don't get thousands of planes produced by countries like Hungary, is a much more rational game. In this format strategic bombers are not broken and can be countered. This is especially true if the group is not always "seeking every advantage" (commonly known as abusing exploits). I certainly don't know many MP payers who want to play in a format where each side appoints an Air Marshal (aka whack a mole specialist), who then sits there and clicks air zones every few seconds for hours.
So for those who are reading this thread and trying to get information rather than having their mind already made up in spite of whatever evidence is presented, let me say this. There is more than one MP format. Don't let the elitists convince you that just because something is broken in their format it is then broken in the game in general. We don't need to rebalance HOI4 around speed play. It is a GSG not an RTS.
Slow MP play with a small number of players so that you don't get thousands of planes produced by countries like Hungary, is a much more rational game. In this format strategic bombers are not broken and can be countered. This is especially true if the group is not always "seeking every advantage" (commonly known as abusing exploits). I certainly don't know many MP payers who want to play in a format where each side appoints an Air Marshal (aka whack a mole specialist), who then sits there and clicks air zones every few seconds for hours.
I agree with most of the post but as you say, lots of MP formats are valid. Hungary spamming planes is an allowed option within the game rules and if it is a winning option, there is incentive to use it. Calling something like that an "exploit" is arbitrary and generally indefensible from a coherent logical framework.
Thank you!
I would add to that: This is the general forum and there is a dedicated MP-forum. Apparently people don't post there because it is a barren wasteland. Instead it is often expected that the general forum discussions revolve around MP because SP is silly anyways...
There's something rotten in this logic, no?
To clarify, I didn't directly call the Hungary thing an exploit. Hyper-specialized team play in games with 12-20 players is something my group does not enjoy so we keep the group smaller than that to avoid it. The comment about exploits was in response to a previous poster going on about how their group always did whatever was required to seek an advantage.
I am not a fan of the win at all cost mentality in games (or life in general for that matter). It is fine that others wish to play that way. It is not as welcome when they choose to bully others based on their philosophy.