...only supAA but If a person invests a custom AA division like (8AA+3INF) -which he can do only 2-3 divisions- just to mess with planes, I would commend him for trying different things.
Why CAS and Air are Worthless in Combat
- Thread starter TornadoWatch
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In certain situations, especially when pushing into mountains, CAS is one of the few ways to actually make breakthroughs. Additionally, when enemy is attempting a panzer breakthrough CAS can halt it in its tracks, even making up for the high casualties.
I did not say it wasn't. Just the assertion in the title that CAS are worthless is obviously false.
Everything else being equal yes the side with air superiority wins. However, what Tornadowatch said is that the investment cost to get and maintain Air superiority is much higher than just putting support AA in your units and calling it a day.
The person who invests in aircraft technology and factories is unfortunately in the worse position because the cost is so high in research and IC. AA costs 6 times less IC than a fighter. As was pointed out it never has to be upgraded to be very effective. It doesn't require research into aircraft models, doctrines, and only uses steel which is abundant compared to aluminum and rubber. You can put support AA in 100 40 width divisions for the cost of 300 level 1 fighters. And 300 fighters is not likely to win anyone air superiority.
So although building fighters to get air superiority is not as messed up as the CAS vs AA results because the fighters don't take AA damage. Air superiority alone does not have enough of an effect on ground combat to justify the investment made to get it. It still seems currently cost/benefit it is best to ignore the air war unless it is needed to defend from Strategic or naval bombing. My experience since the patch matches the OP's analysis really well. AA was already overpowered in WtT. In this version it was crazy to see the CAS casualties being taken.
It makes me wonder what static AA in provinces vs the cost of strategic bombers balance is like? Time to play against myself and test it out.
But against other major countries it is quite allot a game of resources so that currently make CAS very bad since the take too much damage.
And land based AA often would be stationary and easy prey for Aircrafts who Obviously had good reason to take out the AA. For armies the best way to counter Aircrafts was to hide.
The only advantage land based AA may have had over ships was probably that Aircrafts attacking land target may fly closer but it simply indicates how harmless land based AA was. WW2 Aircrafts could be quite armored and thus survive the light damage the land based AA could deal out.
It's worse from my experience, the static AA killed 100 strategic bombers when maxed out. Like AA has been overbuffed by paradox due to the previous air meta.
It depends on which country you are. If you can take the big cost in IC then sure, CAS could be useful. It's the same with strat bombers. They also cost massive amounts of IC for proportionally little gain, but they are still abused by the Allies due to superior resources and industrial capability.
OK I made some fresh testing and these are my conclusions:
The defines ANTI_AIR_PLANE_DAMAGE_FACTOR and ANTI_AIR_PLANE_DAMAGE_CHANCE have no effect on AA dmg to CAS. I don't know what these defines are for. They might be broken or maybe they affect something else like state AA? I did not try to figure that out but at least we know that they don't affect AA dmg to CAS.
EDIT: I confirmed with further testing that these two defines are for state AA shooting down TACs/STRATs
The navy defines ANTI_AIR_TARGETTING_TO_CHANCE and ANTI_AIR_ATTACK_TO_AMOUNT do effect the AA dmg to CAS. I highly doubt this is intentional. I cannot balance the land AA vs CAS situation without messing up navy AA. One possibility is Paradox did not know this is the case and unintentionally made land AA broken OP when playing with navy defines to balance naval AA.
ANTI_AIR_ATTACK_TO_DAMAGE_REDUCTION_FACTOR define is almost certainly set to a wrong value. This is set to 1 and at that value, I estimate that 1 air attack gives roughly 20% dmg reduction from CAS and the function is linear. The rng factor is pretty strong here so my estimation might be somewhat off but it certainly isn't off enough that this value being set to 1 would make any sense. lvl 1 support AA gives 15 air attack so provides roughly 300% dmg reduction which is scaled down to 75% because of the maximum limit, which is determined by the define ANTI_AIR_MAXIMUM_DAMAGE_REDUCTION_FACTOR. Sensible values for ANTI_AIR_ATTACK_TO_DAMAGE_REDUCTION_FACTOR would be in the range (0.05-0.15).
The defines ANTI_AIR_PLANE_DAMAGE_FACTOR and ANTI_AIR_PLANE_DAMAGE_CHANCE have no effect on AA dmg to CAS. I don't know what these defines are for. They might be broken or maybe they affect something else like state AA? I did not try to figure that out but at least we know that they don't affect AA dmg to CAS.
EDIT: I confirmed with further testing that these two defines are for state AA shooting down TACs/STRATs
The navy defines ANTI_AIR_TARGETTING_TO_CHANCE and ANTI_AIR_ATTACK_TO_AMOUNT do effect the AA dmg to CAS. I highly doubt this is intentional. I cannot balance the land AA vs CAS situation without messing up navy AA. One possibility is Paradox did not know this is the case and unintentionally made land AA broken OP when playing with navy defines to balance naval AA.
ANTI_AIR_ATTACK_TO_DAMAGE_REDUCTION_FACTOR define is almost certainly set to a wrong value. This is set to 1 and at that value, I estimate that 1 air attack gives roughly 20% dmg reduction from CAS and the function is linear. The rng factor is pretty strong here so my estimation might be somewhat off but it certainly isn't off enough that this value being set to 1 would make any sense. lvl 1 support AA gives 15 air attack so provides roughly 300% dmg reduction which is scaled down to 75% because of the maximum limit, which is determined by the define ANTI_AIR_MAXIMUM_DAMAGE_REDUCTION_FACTOR. Sensible values for ANTI_AIR_ATTACK_TO_DAMAGE_REDUCTION_FACTOR would be in the range (0.05-0.15).
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Atleast you can focus down static AA and it is very expensive for something with very limited purpose.
People are on this forum saying the fix to this problem is to build small numbers of CAS and don't fly them. Just threaten with them so your enemies have to build AA.
I am speechless.
I think it currently is best to invest in AA and Fighters... it still is useful to get air superiority.
Against the AI then CAS is very effective since the AI hardly use AA at all so the effect of them make little difference. Anyone who draw experience from mainly SP would not really notice this problem is my guess.
try amphibious landing without your own CAS against enemy with CAS!
The cost of victory is never too high!
But the AI hardly build any AA so you would probably not notice it much...
So is this really just a MP problem then because of min/maxing?
If I'm reading this correctly, it seems that every point of anti_air_attack adds directly to the damage reduction factor, up to 75%; but is it added at 1 for 1% (0.01) or 1 for 100%(1.0) or what? (Assuming the default 1.0 factor from defines, that is.)
Also, a quick check of anti-air equipment vs ship modules shows that for land equipment the value is called "air_attack" instead of "anti_air_attack", and is generally ~10x larger. If these values are internally considered the same (not a given; might be a hidden factor somewhere), would it make sense to simply divide air_attack (in AA/SPAA/etc. equipment) by 10 across the board to get the "intended" balance?
If you use mainly 40width divisions you probably need more then just support AA but even that should do significant damage currently.
No... any player who happens to build at least semi historical divisions in any normal SP game would also notice how much enemy planes they shoot down with AA, so it is a SP game problem too.
But I don't have to upgrade nor train those fighters. They are not being shot down by AA and they provide a combat bonus. You changed the equation by saying 300 fighters are not likely to win air superiority. Against 0 fighters 100 wins it.
Now the equation is side A to counter the AA spam builds their divisions without AA (saving that IC) and just builds fighters. Side B has wasted their AA as there are no CAS to shoot down. Now they also have to build fighters else they lose air superiority.
See the OP's situation is not easy and straight forward. He said AA is a hard counter to CAS. Yes it is. But if I have no CAS and just build more fighters with the IC that was going to build CAS then I win air superiority and win the battle.
Alright my big problem with this analysis, is that it uses pure infantry as the division getting whittled down by CAS. It also keeps the CAS going for an entire month. These are both conditions that obviously lead to an IC imbalance. A counter-example would be the case of a Panzer division. If a Panzer division with similar or better AA is damaged by CAS to the degree that CAS can damage in game already, i.e. 50+ strength damage, then the enemy is losing hundreds of tanks which more than makes up for the cost of the CAS casualties. So CAS in this sense is much more useful defensively.
Also from my experience the casualties aren't that much higher than pre-1.6 for CAS, and they were considered balanced at that time. Maybe the meta was wrong and players didn't figure out how OP AA was until now. But CAS definitely cannot be called useless, just 'inefficient' in the same manner that Super Heavy Battleships are inefficient.
If they added the ability to control which battles CAS fight in it would be much better, and the loss ratios currently would be more acceptable.
The obvious fix would be to nerf both AA and CAS, AA slightly more, to prevent the CAS meta of before from returning but restore AA to logical levels.
EDIT: I also disagree with the reduction of effectiveness to IC loss ratios. By that metric tanks are pretty ineffective as a skilled player can encircle tanks with just infantry and then you lose all your thousands of IC invested into the division. Pure infantry with a few bonuses can already hold off tanks for a long time, if maintaining technological parity.
Also from my experience the casualties aren't that much higher than pre-1.6 for CAS, and they were considered balanced at that time. Maybe the meta was wrong and players didn't figure out how OP AA was until now. But CAS definitely cannot be called useless, just 'inefficient' in the same manner that Super Heavy Battleships are inefficient.
If they added the ability to control which battles CAS fight in it would be much better, and the loss ratios currently would be more acceptable.
The obvious fix would be to nerf both AA and CAS, AA slightly more, to prevent the CAS meta of before from returning but restore AA to logical levels.
EDIT: I also disagree with the reduction of effectiveness to IC loss ratios. By that metric tanks are pretty ineffective as a skilled player can encircle tanks with just infantry and then you lose all your thousands of IC invested into the division. Pure infantry with a few bonuses can already hold off tanks for a long time, if maintaining technological parity.
Pretty sure the only land based AA system that had some sort of actual sucess was Heavy static AA which used up massive amount of ammunition but atleast did some sort of damage. Many AA systems used in ww2 was designed when Aircrafts was slower and less armored so they was fine for that time but pretty much obsolete during ww2.
Unlike ships who could make use of medium AA effectively because ships could be fitted out with machine driven mounts who could move the gun quickly enough to be relevant as well be equiped with radar, water cooling and centralized fire Control the land based versions would often be using hand driven air cooled guns who was pretty much useless because they are simply too slow and have worse rate of fire.
Also ships would move while land based AA would be mostly static so Aircrafts could attack the crew of land based AA quite easily while trying to do the same on ships may be harder and far more risky due to the deadliness of getting close to ship AA.
How armies countered air superiority was to hide and dig in as well using Aircrafts who unlike how the game show could often shoot down escorted bombers, it was only when the allies started to actively hunt the enemy fighters Deep inside enemy territory that the enemy fighters was mostly nullified.
Unlike ships who could make use of medium AA effectively because ships could be fitted out with machine driven mounts who could move the gun quickly enough to be relevant as well be equiped with radar, water cooling and centralized fire Control the land based versions would often be using hand driven air cooled guns who was pretty much useless because they are simply too slow and have worse rate of fire.
Also ships would move while land based AA would be mostly static so Aircrafts could attack the crew of land based AA quite easily while trying to do the same on ships may be harder and far more risky due to the deadliness of getting close to ship AA.
How armies countered air superiority was to hide and dig in as well using Aircrafts who unlike how the game show could often shoot down escorted bombers, it was only when the allies started to actively hunt the enemy fighters Deep inside enemy territory that the enemy fighters was mostly nullified.
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