1. Please go for diminishing returns for stacking penalties
so that when your (or allied) air missions overlap it isn’t a massive disaster all of a sudden when 8 planes merge in the same province causing massive damage to all your planes. I think it would also be good for land combat, but its more manageable there.
+ stacking penalty for a single wing is just...odd. (Hughrocks123)
2. Wings should look to the worst plane when deciding to stop or not, not the mean value.
Currently planes check their org and/or strength and decide if they should stop their mission depending on if their stance is on passive/defensive/agressive. They use the mean value of all planes in the group, this causes planes to be permanently lost even on passive when using groups of 4. I sometimes see a group flying out while having a wing with less than 3% strength left.
3. Wings should go to a “rest” state when they decide to stop, not cancel the mission
Planes simply cancel their mission when they’ve taking too much of a pounding, it would be nice if they would ‘rest’ untill fully restored and then continue again.
4. The reserve mission could do something usefull
I’ve tested it a bit with single plane wings and the reserve mission did not behave as expected (as far as I could tell, it did nothing). Why not have planes on reserve simply rotate flight duty with active planes. For instance 2 groups of 4 wings of interceptors sit in an airbase, 1 on intercept mission 1 on reserve. When taking off the game could check which of the 2 wings is the least damaged and send that one out, keeping the other in reserve, or just rotate them after each run to keep things simple.
5. Length of air combat
You fight for domination of the skies, I don’t care about the result of a single engagement, I want to see the result of the campaign as it progresses. Land combat doesn’t restart everytime there would be a new ‘assault’ either, it continues for days showing you the progress on an abstract level and the result when the enemy stopped fighting. As a bonus air combat would become much more manageable on faster timescale because of the lower damage planes will get as a result (mean damage would ofcourse stay the same). Distance to the airfield could be modified to be an important modifier. (I know this is prob not gonna happen, since its basicly rewriting air combat entirely, but hey
)
6. Have runway cratering damage the planes stationed on the airfield
Port strike has this just fine, I’ve never really understood why runway cratering does not, especially since the pop-up seems to indicate its to ‘catch airplanes on the ground’
7. Clean up the missions/techs
7.1 Is it really necessery to have both ground attack and interdiction?
7.2 Remove greyed out missions on land provinces (just like it works on sea provinces). For example when not clicking on a province with an airfield, why not remove the rebase and reserve mission from the list. (btw while checking this ingame I noticed its possible to run the reserve mission for hostile airfields lol)
7.3 The target focus/selection techs really don’t serve any usefull function and for some reason they are difficulty 5(!) that means its harder to tell your pilots to target a big plane instead of a small one then it is to research most of the weaponry found on the battlefield
7.4 What exactly is “airborne assault tactics” supposed to do? Increase the efficiency of a plane mission that runs for an hour and should be unopposed? On top of that its difficulty 5 as well.
7.5 The organisation penalty reduction techs do not seem to do anything. I’ve never seen planes lose organisation for just doing a mission and they still lose org in air combat even when I cheated the tech up to -100% (just for testing purposes mind you :sleep.
These techs should either be made more usefull or just removed as all they are now is confusing clutter
8. Replace strength percentage by actual number of planes (Floodturka)
For example 100/100 interceptors, 25/30 CAG
9. Experience (pilots) should play a greater role in air combat (Cybvep)
Experienced pilots were often more important than numbers (and to a certain point technology), it should have more effect than in land or sea combat. It would also be great if fighting over enemy territory resulted in more experience lost (pilots dropping in hostile territory). In addition to this it would be better to have the training technologies dictate the amount of experience instead of a law.
10. Air combat should only have single wings (SirDraco)
This would be the most easy change in terms of total rewrites of air combat. All combat will consist of 1 wing, with all others in the group assigned to reserve, this will remove stacking penalty problems, force players to spread their planes around and as a bonus it would be more realistic too, making air campaigns last much longer with smaller engagements
11. Planes should require officers (SecretMaster)
This could represent pilots
+ A better system would be where there would be a seperate pilot pool (like officers) and couple pilot training to techs/laws and/or officer recruitment. (Corner79)
+ As suggested earlier, training pilots should cost fuel, also see Alex_brunius' post explaining this in more detail
12. Air superiority needs to be more effective (MnPlastic)
Currently planes only fly around in patterns but ignore any plane that is spotted, they only engage when they happen to be in the same province. It would be much better if they still intercept spotted enemy planes that come into reach and for example target supplies when they have nothing else to do (going after trucks&trains and stuff).
13. Paratroopers should take losses when attacked by planes (or AA) while flying. (MnPlastic)
Historians seem to agree that sitting inside a plane that is going down is very bad for your health.
14. Seperate chain-of-command for air (and naval) units (Corner79)
What I would love to see is that airfields and harbours act as HQ's. You assign a leader to it giving a bonus to all planes based there and assign the airfield to the theatre that controls the province the airfield is in. You should be able to give the ai control per airfield, just like you can do with HQ's. And just like with land HQ's it would be nice if it gave you an estimate of enemy airpower and the possibilty for different stances (fighters, bombers, naval bombers instead of land, air, naval)
15. Weather and nighttime should have a bigger impact on aircombat
Air combat at night without any kind of radar? Good luck finding anyone. Nighttime combat should be close to impossibble untill you researched radar. For bombers it should be a bit higher as well, navigating towards the target would be pretty damn hard at night, let alone hitting anything.
Severe weather could simply be a -100% modifier as it basicly means you shouldn't be able to fly.
Discussion/suggestions welcome and first post will be modified with new or altered ideas.
The idea of this post is to give paradox some idea’s of what we would like to see different in the air combat aspect of the game, as they have stated they will be “adding features and ideas requested by their active and involved international online community.” with this expansion.
so that when your (or allied) air missions overlap it isn’t a massive disaster all of a sudden when 8 planes merge in the same province causing massive damage to all your planes. I think it would also be good for land combat, but its more manageable there.
+ stacking penalty for a single wing is just...odd. (Hughrocks123)
2. Wings should look to the worst plane when deciding to stop or not, not the mean value.
Currently planes check their org and/or strength and decide if they should stop their mission depending on if their stance is on passive/defensive/agressive. They use the mean value of all planes in the group, this causes planes to be permanently lost even on passive when using groups of 4. I sometimes see a group flying out while having a wing with less than 3% strength left.
3. Wings should go to a “rest” state when they decide to stop, not cancel the mission
Planes simply cancel their mission when they’ve taking too much of a pounding, it would be nice if they would ‘rest’ untill fully restored and then continue again.
4. The reserve mission could do something usefull
I’ve tested it a bit with single plane wings and the reserve mission did not behave as expected (as far as I could tell, it did nothing). Why not have planes on reserve simply rotate flight duty with active planes. For instance 2 groups of 4 wings of interceptors sit in an airbase, 1 on intercept mission 1 on reserve. When taking off the game could check which of the 2 wings is the least damaged and send that one out, keeping the other in reserve, or just rotate them after each run to keep things simple.
5. Length of air combat
You fight for domination of the skies, I don’t care about the result of a single engagement, I want to see the result of the campaign as it progresses. Land combat doesn’t restart everytime there would be a new ‘assault’ either, it continues for days showing you the progress on an abstract level and the result when the enemy stopped fighting. As a bonus air combat would become much more manageable on faster timescale because of the lower damage planes will get as a result (mean damage would ofcourse stay the same). Distance to the airfield could be modified to be an important modifier. (I know this is prob not gonna happen, since its basicly rewriting air combat entirely, but hey
)6. Have runway cratering damage the planes stationed on the airfield
Port strike has this just fine, I’ve never really understood why runway cratering does not, especially since the pop-up seems to indicate its to ‘catch airplanes on the ground’
7. Clean up the missions/techs
7.1 Is it really necessery to have both ground attack and interdiction?
7.2 Remove greyed out missions on land provinces (just like it works on sea provinces). For example when not clicking on a province with an airfield, why not remove the rebase and reserve mission from the list. (btw while checking this ingame I noticed its possible to run the reserve mission for hostile airfields lol)
7.3 The target focus/selection techs really don’t serve any usefull function and for some reason they are difficulty 5(!) that means its harder to tell your pilots to target a big plane instead of a small one then it is to research most of the weaponry found on the battlefield
7.4 What exactly is “airborne assault tactics” supposed to do? Increase the efficiency of a plane mission that runs for an hour and should be unopposed? On top of that its difficulty 5 as well.
7.5 The organisation penalty reduction techs do not seem to do anything. I’ve never seen planes lose organisation for just doing a mission and they still lose org in air combat even when I cheated the tech up to -100% (just for testing purposes mind you :sleep
.These techs should either be made more usefull or just removed as all they are now is confusing clutter
8. Replace strength percentage by actual number of planes (Floodturka)
For example 100/100 interceptors, 25/30 CAG
9. Experience (pilots) should play a greater role in air combat (Cybvep)
Experienced pilots were often more important than numbers (and to a certain point technology), it should have more effect than in land or sea combat. It would also be great if fighting over enemy territory resulted in more experience lost (pilots dropping in hostile territory). In addition to this it would be better to have the training technologies dictate the amount of experience instead of a law.
10. Air combat should only have single wings (SirDraco)
This would be the most easy change in terms of total rewrites of air combat. All combat will consist of 1 wing, with all others in the group assigned to reserve, this will remove stacking penalty problems, force players to spread their planes around and as a bonus it would be more realistic too, making air campaigns last much longer with smaller engagements
11. Planes should require officers (SecretMaster)
This could represent pilots
+ A better system would be where there would be a seperate pilot pool (like officers) and couple pilot training to techs/laws and/or officer recruitment. (Corner79)
+ As suggested earlier, training pilots should cost fuel, also see Alex_brunius' post explaining this in more detail
12. Air superiority needs to be more effective (MnPlastic)
Currently planes only fly around in patterns but ignore any plane that is spotted, they only engage when they happen to be in the same province. It would be much better if they still intercept spotted enemy planes that come into reach and for example target supplies when they have nothing else to do (going after trucks&trains and stuff).
13. Paratroopers should take losses when attacked by planes (or AA) while flying. (MnPlastic)
Historians seem to agree that sitting inside a plane that is going down is very bad for your health.
14. Seperate chain-of-command for air (and naval) units (Corner79)
What I would love to see is that airfields and harbours act as HQ's. You assign a leader to it giving a bonus to all planes based there and assign the airfield to the theatre that controls the province the airfield is in. You should be able to give the ai control per airfield, just like you can do with HQ's. And just like with land HQ's it would be nice if it gave you an estimate of enemy airpower and the possibilty for different stances (fighters, bombers, naval bombers instead of land, air, naval)
15. Weather and nighttime should have a bigger impact on aircombat
Air combat at night without any kind of radar? Good luck finding anyone. Nighttime combat should be close to impossibble untill you researched radar. For bombers it should be a bit higher as well, navigating towards the target would be pretty damn hard at night, let alone hitting anything.
Severe weather could simply be a -100% modifier as it basicly means you shouldn't be able to fly.
Discussion/suggestions welcome and first post will be modified with new or altered ideas.
The idea of this post is to give paradox some idea’s of what we would like to see different in the air combat aspect of the game, as they have stated they will be “adding features and ideas requested by their active and involved international online community.” with this expansion.
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