I agree that the game should model air war much better, and get rid of the large air regions. Each state should have its own air region.
In game AA is basically like overtuned for both static and divisional AA.
Why CAS and Air are Worthless in Combat
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In game AA is basically like overtuned for both static and divisional AA.
The OP example is done to prove a point and that is how much damage the AA can do over time in combat versus how much damage the CAS do in return. This is just an easy way to test it and show that discrepancy. It is not meant to be a realistic situational test. In a tank divisions you might also put in a bit more AA since that division is more important.
Things that could be changed:
- Fighter doomstacks should not be so effective, currently 3 Aircrafts can fire upon each of your Aircrafts which mean being outnumbered in the air will snowball to losing Control over the air with more casulties than your enemy. Bombers should be harder to protect and take more losses than simply proportional to their airwing size.
- AA should not be that good against Aircrafts and should maybe have better stats against ground units instead. The effect of AA should probably be reduced a bit.
- Naval AA should be more effective than its land based counterpart
- Dug in armies should be more resistant against air superiority penalty and other Aircrafts effects such as CAS damage.
In my opinion AA should not be a hard counter to CAS... it should only be a mitigating factor that you should consider using... it should not be a viable strategy to counter bombers.
Something I haven't seen anyone here point out is that outfitting your entire army with AA is far from cheap either.
It's not correct to compare the cost of 1 divisions AA vs aircraft it can shoot down because the other 95% of the divisions you have will not be attacked by CAS at the same time, and their AA will be mostly useless as a result, but you still need it in case they should be attacked.
If we compare the cost of AA it's 5 per equipment at 1940 tech and to outfit a division with a solid base protection of one Line and one Support AA that requires 50 equipment = 250 cost per division.
The cost of 1936 Light SPAA is 11 and let's say we put 2 such battalions per mobile division which requires 30 LSPAA = 330 cost per division.
Now if we have 300 infantry divisions and 30 mobile divisions that's a total cost of 75000 + 9900 = ~85000 production
This cost can be put into perspective to getting 1000 CAS costing 24 each which is roughly what you need to cover 3-4 key spearhead battles sufficiently = 24000 production.
So you can actually afford to lose ~3500 CAS before you spent more on CAS than your enemy spent on AA (for an army of 330 divisions), and in return you got:
It's not correct to compare the cost of 1 divisions AA vs aircraft it can shoot down because the other 95% of the divisions you have will not be attacked by CAS at the same time, and their AA will be mostly useless as a result, but you still need it in case they should be attacked.
If we compare the cost of AA it's 5 per equipment at 1940 tech and to outfit a division with a solid base protection of one Line and one Support AA that requires 50 equipment = 250 cost per division.
The cost of 1936 Light SPAA is 11 and let's say we put 2 such battalions per mobile division which requires 30 LSPAA = 330 cost per division.
Now if we have 300 infantry divisions and 30 mobile divisions that's a total cost of 75000 + 9900 = ~85000 production
This cost can be put into perspective to getting 1000 CAS costing 24 each which is roughly what you need to cover 3-4 key spearhead battles sufficiently = 24000 production.
So you can actually afford to lose ~3500 CAS before you spent more on CAS than your enemy spent on AA (for an army of 330 divisions), and in return you got:
- More air superiority ( penalties to enemy divisions in combat )
- Bonuses increasing the stats for your own divisions in key combats ( which is impossible to reduce with AA )
- Damage done in key combats, especially importing for reducing the org of enemy tank divisions or 40w divisions making them impotent and allowing you to push them around.
Yes, but their use of such a specific scenario undermines their point. What would be more convincing is if they did an MP game and posted how much CAS they lost in said MP game.
Because like you’re not going to be fighting continuously for a month. You would probably have the same casualty ratios even in WTT if you did so, some people were saying they also had high casualty ratios in WTT.
Sure, AA is a good counter to CAS it seems, which should be nerfed for logic’s sake. But neither does that make CAS useless, especially given that you could literally get like more than a hundred CAS a month with just a few military factories. As Mexico I ended up with thousands of CAS in 1939 and I only put 5 military factories on it for most of the game.
This is certainly a good point but I don't think you would use that much AA and from what have seen in game you don't need even close to that much to do considerable damage to enemy bombers with AA.
I would only stack some extra AA in more costly divisions such as armored or mechanized divisions.
I think we can boil it down to playstyle philosophies.
Some players prefer to win the attrition war and so value IC cost efficiency more then potential buffs. These players cut corners to churn out cheap divisions and eventually outproduce the enemy.
Others like to create an advantage in the short term and so would take whatever buffs they can. These players would use the CAS even in light of its lack of IC efficiency, in the hope of destroying the enemy’s war making capability quickly.
Ironically this is similar to the different mindsets of the major powers in the war.
Some players prefer to win the attrition war and so value IC cost efficiency more then potential buffs. These players cut corners to churn out cheap divisions and eventually outproduce the enemy.
Others like to create an advantage in the short term and so would take whatever buffs they can. These players would use the CAS even in light of its lack of IC efficiency, in the hope of destroying the enemy’s war making capability quickly.
Ironically this is similar to the different mindsets of the major powers in the war.
But if those divisions aren't the ones being attacked by CAS their AA is wasted and the divisions without AA that are being attacked by CAS suffer.
See this is more of an MP issue than SP because the AI either would give all or none of their divisions AA. And even if they only had some divisions with AA the AI would use them at key points. Heck it can't use mountain divisions in mountains so how would it know where to place the few AA equipped divisions?
That is the real issue here. People are too focused on 1v1 situations and forgetting about the 70+ province frontlines.
I would understand dedicated AA divisions with a low organization/infantry roaming around defensively supporting just to knock down planes but in a World War scenario, it is really heavy to sustain frontlines with multiple AA divisions.
Don't quite follow the logic here given the AA de-buff is immediate.
So you're at a disadvantage a) due to potential AA from the start, and b) from IC inefficiency vs enemy from the start and over time.
Not to mention that levelling up CAS takes time in itself, so no remunerating circumstances to doing that either.
I for one will no longer be building CAS until this is fixed.
And that would work against the player that builds all AA but would be a losing strategy if they don't build those AA units. And the AA strategy is a all or nothing. Either you have to have all of your divisions with AA or you run the risk that your non-AA divisions are being attacked by CAS and the AA ones are wasted.
This is a rock paper scissor situation.
Fighters should be vulnerable to AA, not just planes on CAS missions.
It does look like the damage is too high on AA right now though.
It does look like the damage is too high on AA right now though.
Historically land based AA guns should be pretty close to useless against Aircrafts at around 1940 level. For game balance however AA need to atleast be able to reduce the effect of airpower a bit so you have some options other than losing (as suciding fighters against numerical superior opponent will simply lose you the game).
AA crews was far more vulnerable to fighters than the opposite.
This. Infantry has a ton of hit points, so each CAS hit only destroys a small part of the (already cheap) infantry equipment. CAS were never efficient against pure infantry.
Using a different template would be more representative - though I doubt it's going to change the conclusion, given how one-sided the figures are.
Armor? Even most CAS-specific craft lacked large amounts of armor, usually just enough enough to protect the most important component, the pilot, from some angles, and then only from rifle-caliber ammunition. The famous IL-2 is something of an anomaly with its armored tub protecting the engine and radiator too, and it's 12mm thickness at maximum still is not enough for to protect from cannon (20mm+) fire, it's not even enough to withstand .50 calibre AP rounds.
Other than the very specific case of the IL-2 (and IL-10), the armor isn't protecting anything but the pilot, so naturally that armor isn't going to be doing anything to protect other extremely vital components and systems such as the engine, radiator, propeller, fuel tanks control surfaces like ailerons and rudders and elevators, and of course the airframe structure itself that makes up the tail and wings are all very vulnerable and are often made up of material that's not fond of explosive shells like wood, sheet metal, fabric, aluminum, mild steel...
Any ineffectiveness of anti-aircraft guns could be attributed to their primitive tracking and thus lack of ability to actually hit an aircraft. The shells themselves are perfectly potent should they ever hit, and a 37mm or 40mm HE round is perfectly capable of downing a fighter-sized target, while a handful of 20mm's can do the same.
As has been said previously, while the post does a good job of showing the AA gun's effectiveness against CAS, it doesn't do enough to show how much damage the CAS are doing in return.
AA Shells lose Power as distance increase and they also work against gravity making them lose Power even faster which mean the Aircrafts do have decent chance to survive even if hit as the most devestating damage would most likely be done if the Shell pentrate and explodes inside the Aircraft. Also a hit may also miss the vital parts of the Aircraft. On other hand fighter guns would devastate AA crews without much trouble.
In older versions of the game, 1936 support AA was just a small debuff to the air superiority bonus and it might bag a few CAS now and then. To get some real coverage from your AA, you'd need 1940 AA and the intervening techs that passively boost the firepower of AA. And the heavy hitters were always the SPAA (due to variant boosts).
I'm not sure 1936 AA should be as potent as it is.
Yep. While an arcane mechanic, it's a decent multiplier.
In our MP mod, we reduced it from 3 to 2 in combat where you are outnumbered. This added a bit of sanity to the way the air war was fought (although we still get some doomstacks when a critical amphibious operation or offensive is happening... 4000 planes on each side over Italy, for example).
It isn't, but you bring up what I like to think of as the "Immunization Problem."
For some kinds of weapons, it pays to immunize the entire army from a type of attack. AT and AA are primarily the examples of this. In short, since you can never be 100% sure from where you will be attacked, you want maximum coverage of AT and AA so that no matter where the panzers or planes go, you can counter them. But doing so is prohibitively expensive for most countries, as the size of your army dictates how much immunization you need. The Soviets want support AT in every division? Be prepared to pay for it. You want AA in every division? Be prepared to pay for it.
However, while the ideal would be to immunize everything via AT or AA, the reality is that you can prioritize and concentrate the appropriate counter in theaters or sectors where the fighting is most important. Similar to concentrating TDs and AT in areas where Germany is concentrating the panzers, you could do the same thing with AA. You don't create AA specific divisions, but you create a group of higher quality divisions with at least support AA that can be sent to shore up the defense of an area under heavy attack. Once they arrive, the CAS will find itself getting shot down in that sector of the front, blunting the attack.
If 1936 AA in support companies is as potent as the tests indicate (and let's be honest, it's worth retesting), then it shouldn't be hard to massacre CAS in cost effective ways even if it's expensive to immunize the entire army. Just get the requisite divisions to right part of the front and murder the planes.
There's also another wrinkle to the cost of AA. It only uses steel, not the more valuable tungsten or chromium or fuel (like AT, SPAA, H-SPAA). Spamming regular AA guns might be easier (in terms of resources) than some other things.
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