Upgraded AA can act as a cheap replacement for AT so you will only use the AA support company. That might be a way to equip all you INF divisions and still have some penetration for when tanks show up.
Why CAS and Air are Worthless in Combat
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This is largely incorrect though the basis of the misunderstanding is reasonable.
It is true that all shells lose kinetic energy over long distances. However, all dedicated AA guns (.50 caliber/12.7mm and above in size), don't rely on kinetic energy do damage. All AA ammo belts of .50cal/12.7mm/20mm+ rely on distance or contact-based high explosive or fragmentation rounds that cause significant damage by virtual of the explosion and resulting fragmentation.
If AA guns used AA ammo belts of armor piercing ammo, then yes their performance would seriously degrade over large distances, because AP ammo do damage by virtue of their kinetic energy only. However, because planes in general either are relatively unarmored or have lots of unarmored sections even with partially armor, and because AA fire occurs typically over long distances, AA guns use HE/Frag belts to do damage to planes. Thus, AA guns and their HE/F shells don't significantly degrade in their capabilities over long distances, as HE/Frag damage is independent of the shell velocity when it hits for contact fuses or gets near the plane for timed distance-based fuses.
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That being said, they do need to tone down ground divisional AA. It seems to be doing far too much damage to CAS. And convoy AA also needs a significant look, as its far more effective than even large fleets of actual naval AA.
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But as I said the fighter Aircrafts could kill the crews of AA guns without much issue something the game dont represent as fighters don't suppress AA guns. AA guns would in fact be one of the easier targets to attack as it is a static target that is very exposed.
It would make fighters a bit more useful even if the enemy don't invest into an airforce. Heavy fighters could be given a bonus here to give it Another advantage over normal fighters.
Like for example operation Tungsten which was one of the attack against the German battleship Tirpitz, British fighters caused around 400 german casulties by attacking the AA crews while only losing 4 Aircrafts.
AA should be resonable effective against alone CAS but poor if you have enough fighters to suppress the AA guns
It would make fighters a bit more useful even if the enemy don't invest into an airforce. Heavy fighters could be given a bonus here to give it Another advantage over normal fighters.
Like for example operation Tungsten which was one of the attack against the German battleship Tirpitz, British fighters caused around 400 german casulties by attacking the AA crews while only losing 4 Aircrafts.
AA should be resonable effective against alone CAS but poor if you have enough fighters to suppress the AA guns
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You’re sort of proving my point here, as you’re focusing mostly on IC efficiency instead of the effect balancing.
I focus more on the massive benefits that having CAS gives you even if the enemy has AA.
So that is my point about it being a playstyle difference.
That would be very gamey as CAS would be even better at suppressing AA gun installations.
Fighters was used for AA suppression but then again many fighter types were pretty decent in the ground attack role, especially later in the war. The reason was that as the enemy fighter cover declined you needed a secondary role for your fighters.
If you only used CAS and the enemy had no fighters there are zero reason why you need fighters to do AA suppression instead of an air-frame made for ground attack.
That’s cause CAS are less agile so can’t avoid being hit as well as fighters
Im mostly thinking about balance because if CAS counters AA it basically counter its own counter which is pretty strange. It would be like a tank countering AT guns because tanks can very well kill AT guns.
Also it would give especially Heavy fighters a new role which may be something they need.
That's not really how it work if you intend to attack a ground target... it is not a dog fight...
But AA should not be a counter in the first place, it should be a mitigating factor or an augmenting factor to the general air game.
But AA should not be effective if suppress and it could often be a Death trap such as operation Tungsten, 400 casulties and a damage battleship for 4 shoot down Aircrafts is a very poor trade.
Unlike later AA ww2 AA often had its crew very exposed which made them very dangerous to operate. Arguably AA should suffer massive losses to any air attack against the division as it would be a priority target and probably one easy way to cause huge casulties to the enemy if they dared to man the AA guns.
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But this is too detailed for the game to model. The game should model the effect of AA as it was used in reality. AA on the ground was mainly to disrupt bombers and on occasion some planes was shot down.
So AA should lower the bonus you get from air superiority and reduce the damage from CAS and on occasion shoot down CAS. This is the best overall abstraction of how AA worked in real life. If the enemy has air superiority then AA alone should not save you but it can be one factor to slow the enemy down and strategically make you survive if lucky. At least it could halt or blunt an attack.
Fighters can strafe AA setups pretty easily, and would be a fairly easy target. Only "fairly" because it's still got a rapid-fire cannon on the other end. Even easier targets would be anti-tank gun crews and artillery, simply because they can't shoot back. Leg infantry would also be fairly easy albeit small targets but, well, there's a lot of them.
I figure the way that vulnerability is "simulated" is by giving arty/AT/AA battalions a very low HP value relative to infantry battalions. Probably not the best way to do that, but it's a way.
The first target you want to eliminate is the one that actually can shoot back, after that AT guns and such can be destroyed without too much issue.
The question is if divisional AA was effective at all. I can only think of a few cases in which AA actually was resonable effective and all these cases AA guns had fire Control and access to radar. As far as I know many AA guns used by divisions had more reputation as infantry killers and such rather than effectiveness against Aircrafts.
Germany during 1944 pretty much did Everything it could to avoid enemy airpower, it did not build a few AA guns to reduce air superiority effects like you can do in the game.
In real life you basically bombed whatever target you found and that's it. Since AA shoot back at you those are also likely targets because they are easily identified. You also want to get rid of them as they are the biggest threat to you and other air-crafts.
It certainly is not easy to destroy stuff by air, the best you could hope for was that enemy morale was hurt and you keep their heads down long enough for your land units to attack. Or you might blunt an enemy attack by halting it as formations runs for cover.
Planes basically had the same role as artillery.
However it is much easier for air to destroy stuff on the ground than the opposite with ww2 technology which is a reason why AA vs Aircrafts would favor the Aircrafts and the best option for the ground forces was to hide, not fight back.
I thought that NAV vs naval overall AA was lopsided as I have been losing too many airplane.
But this is a serious problem that need to be looked at for sure.
But this is a serious problem that need to be looked at for sure.
Yes... sure... but it did not make AA weapons worthless because without them you would pretty much not be able to move at all if the enemy had total air superiority such as the German faced in 44/45 for the most part.
The difference between having or not having AA weapons was probably very small and from what I understand with allied total air superiority the was completely lost as there was nothing the germans could do other than hope that the weather would not allow Aircrafts to fly.
From what I have heard Germany started to avoid moving units during Daylight due to how dangerous it was as moving units are very exposed to Aircrafts.
The difference between hopeless and more hopeless is not something that really matters. AA did not stop allied airpower from being extreamly successful and may even have hurt the german war effort by the huge cost it took to just kill a single bomber. And for division AA Im not sure it had any real impact at all, allied airpower was so effective it basically paralyzed the german army.
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