Agility, range, firepower, speed, and detection all have a complicated relationship in terms of fighting the air war.
This will be kind of long, so if anyone isn't interested in this, just skip right on over my post and look up my fighter builds from other threads.
To begin with, we need to understand that with poor detection in an air region, you get wildly divergent air to air combat results. One of the earliest tests I did many years ago gave me odd results like airplanes with superior firepower and agility losing to inferior planes. Turns out, detection was so bad that instead of getting consistent battles in the air region, I was instead getting inconsistent battles where RNG mattered a lot more than anything else due to an insufficient number of combats taking place to establish a base line of performance. So, when thinking about air combat, you will see odd results in areas with low detection. We will return to detection later.
That being said, let's make sure we understand what agility and speed (there's a reason I am talking about them together) can and can't do. Agility and speed modify base stats of the plane in air to air combat when compared to the opposing plane's agility and speed. The wiki has the formula here. There is a cap to this effect, although the difference in speed/agility has to be substantial before this cap kicks in. But agility has a secondary impact on combat. There is a component that just compares agility on top of the other formula. This effect is also capped.
I bring all this up for two reasons. First, there is a point in fighter design where adding engine upgrades (speed and agility), agility boosts from design companies, and agility boosts from doctrines reaches a cap in effectiveness. Against other fighters, assuming same tech level, you won't hit this cap. But against things like STRs and TACs, stacking agility doesn't help that much. But all this speed and agility is a modifier to defense and attack values, so adding better guns to a fighter, even if it lowers agility a bit, increases effectiveness against bombers. It also increases effectiveness against other fighters when applied properly alongside engine upgrades. You don't want a 1940 light fighter with +5 guns and no engine upgrades dogfighting other 1940 light fighters with +2 guns and +3 engines, but you also don't want to be the+5 engine guy who won't add guns to his fighters even when the enemy has gone +5 engines and +2 guns. You'll lose. You want Mustangs, not Zeroes.
That's also why we stack all those agility boosts; it gives us room to put more firepower on the fighter. And that firepower will make a light fighter better at shooting down both enemy fighters and bombers.
Before moving on to range, I want to point out that the heavy fighter has terrible agility. Assuming both heavy and light fighters have 100% mission efficiency, there is no scenario where both sides have design companies and equal XP applied to planes (and equal doctrines) where heavy fighters are cost effective against light fighters. This is partially because the light fighter design company boosts agility while the medium aircraft design doesn't boost heavy fighter agility. It's also because of terrible base agility. But heavy fighters shouldn't be fighting light fighters in those situations. Heavy fighters should either be fighting in areas where range matters or they should be an adjunct to shooting down bombers (because heavy fighters absolutely obliterate unescorted strategic bombers better than anything else, including 1945 jets).
Turning to range, mission efficiency has a large impact on combat. And you need range to get full mission efficiency. Thus, range matters. But range is, in many respects, competing with other aspects of aircraft design when it comes to fighters. I've already discussed the heavy fighter, but when designing light fighters, range costs XP and reliability that might better be invested in guns. From long experience, I tend to put some range on light fighters, but I tend to focus on guns and engines more. This is partially a byproduct of playing mostly majors in semi-historical MP where I know I don't need to do things like base RAF fighters in Turkey to intercept US bombers over Kuwait while bombing Anarchist Spain in Rhodes. I know my zones, and I know my air bases, and I go from there. In the Pacific, I favor a mix of heavy and light fighters (favoring one or the other as suits my whims and strategy in a particular game), because there are a lot of gigantic air regions over there. And because you can seriously screw up CV operations by putting heavy fighters in air superiority over a sea zone.
But what I don't try to do are things like design a 1940 light fighter that can escort bombers to Berlin, or a Soviet light fighter than can fly from Kiev to Bucharest. I try to confine operations to areas where I know my light fighters will do well, rather than try to push light fighters to the extreme of range. It's also why I like to push to the 1944 light fighter; it has better default range. Again, you want Mustangs, not Zeroes (although in this case it's because the Zero is a 1940 light fighter).I want to return to detection. The wiki has good information on that topic, but I want to emphasize that getting to 100% detection can be difficult for newer players due to the required number of planes plus RADAR on top of how weather and night reduce it. But detection is also quirky, so it's worth reading the wiki when planning big and extended air operations. I will also add that night bombing technically makes it harder to detect and shoot at bombers with fighters, but with enough fighter and RADAR coverage, the bombers flying in by night can be easily targeted while they are doing less damage because bombing at night does less damage. So, don't bet on night bombing unless the enemy has zero RADAR or poor air forces (and if they have those two problems, why waste time night bombing?).
A word about reliability on fighter aircraft:
Most new players think reliability on fighters is super important. I see people putting their reliability up to 100%. That is not necessary and is a waste of XP. For SP against the AI, your goal should be 60% reliability on light fighters. Why? Because you can kill more enemy planes by investing more in range and guns than you save by stacking reliability. In MP, some players will drop reliability down even lower due to the huge air battles we get. If 7000 planes are fighting 7000 planes, then an extra +1 to range or guns will kill more enemy planes per month than an extra +1 to reliability will save in accidents. I don't go below 40% on fighters, but I've seen 30% work in hotly contested zones. Note that this advice is completely void if you face zero air resistance. In that case, there's no enemy planes to shoot down, so accidents kill more planes.
With bombers, it's different. Fighters are jousting with each other every damn day. Bombers are not trying to get into air battles, and when escorted properly, may not fight at all. So, accident losses make a bigger difference here. This goes double with STRs. They are so expensive that even losing 5 extra bombers a month to accidents can be painful. And it's not like you can make TACs or STRs better at fighting other planes by lowering reliability. (Engine upgrades don't hurt reliability.)
Last edited:
- 3
- 2
