Why is Provincial AA almost pointless right now?

[Hakello]

This is how I see heavy AA

Now take into account that tactical bombers only got about 20% of their bombs within a 1000m of their target (on average, depending on conditions ofcourse), and then take into account that strategic bombers probabbly have a much lower accuracy (and were mainly just carpet bombing factories and harbours and often ended up at wrong targets). I end up completly agreeing with this thread.

Altough making them strategicly redeployable sounds awesome, I agree that the AI would prob screw things up, so its better to just keep them as buildings

It would be very nice if there would be much more modifiers so mods can balance it to their view. The air war was very influencable by a lot of factors, like weather, wind (wind has a big impact on where bombs will fall), if under attack (less manouveribilty due to formation flying) etc. Aside from causing casulties, AA in the province also caused bombers to be less efficient, because they had to minimise losses and thus had less exposure time over their target.

I must admit I don't know much about how radar impacted all of this, but I can only assume it improved accuracy quite a bit, for both AA and bombers alike.

 

[Kovax]

AAA suffers the same problems akin to fortifications:
Two many provinces to cover & too costly to build it everywhere you need it.

They are worthwhile on remote locations (like all these small pacific islands, Gibraltar, Malta, Hong Kong and maybe Singapor) and maybe important harbors (I usually build AAA level 10 in Wilhelmshafen as GER), but there is no point in building a "Flakwall" like you do in AoD. I guess they could be more important in Multiplayer, when strategic provinces become more significant, but never really played any HoI3 MP games - so I can only guess.

Apart from that - does AAA even deal decent damage nowadays? I have never noticed any significant effects, neither when I was on defence nor when I was on the attack.
I remember giving it +100% efficiency modifier during war time in my vanilla mod and increased their efficiency gain from AAA tech to +50% per level, but even then I rarely saw any damage on enemy bombers - even a single STRAT wing could complelty obliterate them without taking any serious damage.

Although that was quite some time ago - was anything patched in this regard?

Under the current game mechanics (since patch 1.4 broke them), they're all but useless in ANY location. I've never seen more than about a 1-3% Org damage to the bombers after a couple of days of Strategic Bombing a province with a Level 5-6 AA battery, and even less actual damage. By the end of those few raids, the AA is reduced to about half strength, which means it's essentially doing nothing after that. In other words, it's got a trivial effect for the first couple of raids, then it's gone until it rebuilds; not worth a quarter of its cost in any situation I can think of. Rather than build 5 levels of AA, I'd much rather have 1 Interceptor, which will do 10X the damage and can be reassigned as needed.

 

[Slan]

Again, the main problem is that the AA gets destroyed during bombing of the industry and resources... In HoI2, you had to specifically target the AAs to damage them, no?

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Again, the main problem is that the AA gets destroyed during bombing of the industry and resources... In HoI2, you had to specifically target the AAs to damage them, no?

Afaik you had to differ between "installation strikes" and "industrial bombardment" - although that might actually come from AoD instead of vanilla.
But speaking of AoD: I really like what they did to AAA. The ability to finally attack any planes flying over their province and the ability of RADAR to increase AAA efficiency allowed the construction of decent static AAA positions for almost any country without rendering the regular airforce useless.

 

[comsubpac]

But speaking of AoD: I really like what they did to AAA. The ability to finally attack any planes flying over their province and the ability of RADAR to increase AAA efficiency allowed the construction of decent static AAA positions for almost any country without rendering the regular airforce useless.

that was already the case in hoi2 when i remember correctly.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

that was already the case in hoi2 when i remember correctly.

No, definately not. Neither did AAA cause damage to units flying over it, nor did RADAR increase AAA efficiency.
You could see the smoka of AAA fire, but alas, it had no effect

 

[Slan]

Except for the Radar coordination part. Or at least I don't remeber that one. Then again, in HOI2, aircraft only went one province an hour at most. I was told that in AoD, this is no longer the case, which should make tracking the planes and allocating the damage bit more difficult...

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Except for the Radar coordination part. Or at least I don't remeber that one.

Radar coordination was an air-to-air modifier, giving attacking enemy planes a combat penalty.

Then again, in HOI2, aircraft only went one province an hour at most. I was told that in AoD, this is no longer the case, which should make tracking the planes and allocating the damage bit more difficult...

It has been quite some time since I played AoD, but iirc planes just flew over several provinces within a single step (hour). And I remember testing overflight damage for lvl 10 AAA / radar provinces by saving and switching to the attacker. Iirc there was a seperate modifier in the defines.txt that reduced AAA damage for overflight to 25% or something like that.

 

[comsubpac]

No, definately not. Neither did AAA cause damage to units flying over it, nor did RADAR increase AAA efficiency.
You could see the smoka of AAA fire, but alas, it had no effect

i am sure they did damage planes flying through the province and you could see the cannons fire...

 

[Laurwin]

Again, the main problem is that the AA gets destroyed during bombing of the industry and resources... In HoI2, you had to specifically target the AAs to damage them, no?

yes I seem to recall that AA wasn't taking dmg from strategic bombing in hoi2, but even there its use was limited, only really for high priority targets like big naval bases and such.

from my understanding of the matter, AA defences and the strategic bombing used good amounts of deception and passive means, as well as active means such as better equipment/radar/bombs etc...

In the big Soviet bomber attack against Helsinki in February 1944, the Finnish defense had some good radars bought from Germany, as well as 88mm flak guns, and there was a system of basically lighting huge bonfires a good distance from the city. Effective barrages of multilayered heavy and medium flak, together with the ruse of war and relatively poor training of the crews and development of soviet strategic bomber doctrine meant that only minor damage was sustained by the city.

British and Americans used more advanced bombers, with pressurization in the case of B-29, so in an ideal situation they would effectively bypass the 88mm flak, and only the heaviest guns could really have any effect. The idea was to fly very high to diminish the chances of successful interception and flak fire. Even though in practice the Tokyo bombing was conducted with low altitude raids of B-29s.

Certainly there was also quite a bit of deception as in chaff, false signals, and such, which all combined into a possibility of interception, and location of the bombing target. The British used the Thames estuary successfully as a defensive strongpoint during the Blitz like it has been mentioned already in the thread.

Certainly in gameplay terms, I don't think that flak is too good at doing much of anything, but equally it shouldn't be an excuse not to invest in extra interceptor protection. Basically AA alone cannot really give you control of the air, this has been true for pretty much all modern wars. Much vaunted and feared Soviet air defence probably hinged a great deal on the fighter aircraft as well, even though it was a SAM that downed the famous spy plane. North-Vietnamese had SAMs they were still bombed a whole lot, without even too many bomber losses (and indeed they had MiGs as well). Gaddafi to my understanding has also SAMs and some credible fighters, but as it is the fixed SAM sites are supposedly neutralized by now and and they're on the receiving end of it.

when you really think about the whole strategic bombing war. Quite frankly, it's not very profitable in-game. Strategic bombers are the most expensive bombers in the game, and they can only log.bomb and strat.bomb. Strategic bombing doesn't fundamentally work very well against a credible air force, the bombers are just intercepted and torn to shreds, mostly due to lack of interceptor range to cover the bombers' path. Multi-roles don't really help either in covering the strategic bombers, they more or less get torn to shreds instead; they're more expensive than interceptors and worse in air-to-air at least for the early/mid-war tech

It's only at it's most effective, if you basically bomb a defeated adversary (the lands of which you could easily invade at that point with the IC invested in ships, tactical bombers, tanks and marines): first you damage all his interceptors, damage the runways and infra so he can't repair the aircraft easily and intercept, then you start hitting the industries. Then you hit again at his interceptors and repeat the process.

Basically strategic bombers on their own aren't very useful, they can't damage units like TAC or CAS, but I guess they could be useful as an addition to an Allied strategy. If you can simultaneously grind at the enemy's interceptors, industries, tank forces, the repair cost starts to grow quite a bit, and you will divide the attention of enemy interceptors at least?

I think I did see once in a HoI2 multiplayer AAR how strategic bombing was successfully used though. I think in that game the Axis were heavily defeated, and Japan was pushed back into the home islands, with their air forces and and heavily fortified coastal defenses. For some reason the Japanese player was developing nuclear waste bomb at this point! USA player then reinforced a whole bunch of surrounding islands and launched a massive strategic attack to cripple Japan. Eventually Japan was at something like 10 effective IC with no means of finishing nuclear the final reactors needed to make nukes, or effectively resist, so the bitter Japanese resistance ended at that point

 

[misterbean]

I agree with making AA reduce strat bombing efficiency while only being targetable with installation strike missions (which are pretty much useless right now).

 

[harezmi]

AA was quite useful in HOI II . you can sustain high damage when you attack a 8-10 AA province. i just played one game in HOI III but i can say AA doesn`t have any impact and receives damage from strategic bombardment as well. i built 10 AA in most of my high industry provinces in the Ruhr and after a few bombings from UK both AA and industry drop to 0. I just had to send an interceptor wing to take care of the STRAs after i realize that AA doesn`t have much affect.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Strategic bombing in general is a bit flawed in HoI3.

Since provinces can repair for free, strategic bombing is a tedious and almost never cost effective. Interceptors are much cheaper than strategic bombers (unless you mass them as USA), so any equal sized nation can easily defend itself.

Logistical strikes on the other hand are completly overpowered. Just bomb four or five provinces and half of the enemy frontline will be out of supply...

 

[Qitbuqa]

This is how I see heavy AA

Looks more like 15 cm schwere Feldhaubitze 18 or 17 cm Kanone 18 to me.

 

[jju_57]

Looks more like 15 cm schwere Feldhaubitze 18 or 17 cm Kanone 18 to me.

Maybe it's shooting at very low flying planes.

 

[Slan]

Or planes on the ground? You know, best defense is offense! The best way to shoot down the British Bombers is to deploy your AAs right outside of Podington

 

[Hakello]

It would explain their ineffectiveness I guess

Ok ok, you guys are prob right, I seem to have had to much faith in the internet (the picture came from a site talking about british AA), but the point beeing was that when I think of heavy AA I think of a sandbag emplacement or something instead of Darkrenown's pictures of actual buildings/towers for provincial AA, as I had never seen those before.

But uhm, lets not derail the thread and just forget about that picture and discuss on how to improve provincial AA

The problem was provincial AA getting destroyed/annihilated by strategic bombers making no sense, plus the fact they need a buff.

 

[brisduv]

Agreed, thoroughly.

Changing Provincial AA to be attackable by aircraft as ground targets, instead of being part of the factory complex, would be far more realistic. You should be able to damage them if you specifically go after military targets (the heavy AA batteries were too slow to track fast, low-altitude fighter-bombers that were sometimes used against them; that was the job of the lighter AA as used in mobile AA brigades), but not by strategic bombing.

Actually, converting them to military units with 0 movement (strategic redeploy only) would make a LOT of sense, because they WERE semi-mobile. The game would then have Mobile AA and Heavy AA brigades. The typically 76-150mm guns could be redeployed, as they occasionally were historically, but new emplacements would need to be excavated or built up. If the attack delay after redeploy could be modified to disallow them any attack during that time (while they re-emplace and then set up the guns), that should model their historical use fairly well. It would also allow them to be used defensively against ground targets (with relatively low values) and especially against armor in a pinch, as was also historically done.

[Note: the infamous German "88" Fleugzeug Abweher Kannon (FLAK) gun was considered a "light" high-altitude AA piece, and was fairly mobile as a towed gun. The 105mm was also commonly used by Germany for static AA defense, but could also be moved with a similar carriage to the "88". Lighter and even more mobile 20mm and 37mm AA cannon were commonly used for defense against strafing and dive-bombing attacks. The Allies relied on at least one 90mm AA gun and some larger models. The US used .50 calibre MGs for "point defense", as well as the 40mm "Pom-Pom" gun for intermediate ranges, which I believe was originally based on or licensed from a Swedish design.]

Don't agree - the Flak towers of Berlin were NOT mobile, they were huge AA towers dedicated to the defense of the city. That is how I see the AA right now, permanent positions dedicated to the defence of that province. We have mobile AA already, they should be able to help defend against tactical attacks. I think that provincial AA is too vulnerable to STAT bombing but this is not the solution.

 

[Slan]

Don't agree - the Flak towers of Berlin were NOT mobile, they were huge AA towers dedicated to the defense of the city.

AFAIK those were not really that common, were they? Yet, AAs are all over the place in every country.

 

[unmerged(47028)]

The AI doesn't handle units well in general, if it does it is a pleasant surprise. Point being: this would only add one other aspect the AI can't handle that well and I doubt it'd be game breaking.

Yes but what if AI starts sending HAA to front instead of defending factories and those HAA simply evaporate? Basically AI would be worse off than it is now.