air suppression

[gwgardner]

I played a lot of Road to War and don't think in that game one could do true air suppression - no attacks directed at an enemy aircraft. Air-to-air combat in that game was incidental.

In ToW, much to my surprise, one can actually target an enemy air base, resulting in air-to-air combat. Really cool.

This opens up whole new tactics and strategies. An actual Battle of Brittain is now possible. A player may be tempted to keep air units closer to the front, for deeper recon to find those enemy air bases.

[Mr. Stik]

RtV did allow you to attack enemy air bases. It's just that most of the time enemy aircraft based far enough behind the front lines that you rarely saw them--most units only spot 3 or 4 hexes. If you made a big breakthrough, you could often overrun and wipe out the enemy airforce on the ground, or you could attack them directly with your fighter for an air-to-air engagement. Hope ToW has retained that. I just downloaded the free upgrade. Ready to play soon.

[Mr. Stik]

Another way to force counter-air engagements in RtV was to repeatedly attack targets in a given area where you had air superiority. For example, you could force a Battle of Britain by attacking units in and around London. The British and US air units would rise to fight, but if you had air superiority, you generally did more damage than the enemy in such attacks.

[Chocolino]

Yes, detection of enemy aircraft usually prevented air-to-air combat in RtV even though you could often guess where the enemy aircraft are located. But it required visibility to attack them. I think that the new air reconnaissance feature in ToW will really be a big improvement here. Now you can first scout the location where you think the aircraft are and if you were correct, you can attack them subsequently.

It may even turn out to be a significant disadvantage for the currently defending player since he has to helplessly watch how is one air army is repeatably attacked by different opposing air armies even though the defending player may himself have some other air armies in the vicinity. But the defending player is not at liberty to throw those into battle as he would do in real life. They have to watch as their comrades are destroyed at the ground.

[cpdeyoung]

Proper placement of air units was always important, but now might be more so. It adds a nice hide and seek feature. There are so many more air units in ToW that operations that we did not consider in RtV are now probable.

Chuck