Consolidated air issues

[Klydon]

I know there has been a lot of discussion in the AAR's and in some of the other forums about various issues with the air model.

I will start a list here and hopefully others can get what I am missing, but there appear to be a couple of major issues:

1. If the defending player leaves their settings where they do intercepts, they try countless times to intercept opposing air recon. This is typically worthless as 10 or more fighters may try to intercept, but it is rare to see a recon plane shot down. In contrast, the air force doing the intercepting just absolutely trashes themselves due to operational losses.

2. There are Soviet players in 1941 that have adopted the tactic of totally shutting off their ground support. Instead, they will use their air force to bomb German airfields and units. While not decimating on its own, they typically do not suffer much in the way of losses and can at least force in the neighborhood of a 1:1 exchange rate in terms of planes destroyed. This is a huge boon for the Soviets obviously who are willing to trade 1:1 all day long.

3. Interception is fairly ineffective, especially for the Germans who scored a tremendous amount of air to air victories against the Red Air force. The game does not currently have this feel to it. When the Germans do intercept and cause some casualties, it typically is not much and of course they take operational casualties as well doing this. You would think the Germans would be capable of keeping air superiority in local areas of the front, but not the entire front because of the vastness of the theater. Russians going after Luftwaffe air bases and nearby panzer HQ's should pay a heavy price for doing so and they currently don't. The Red Airforce historically was not a real issue to the Germans until Moscow to a limited degree, then Stalingrad. It was not until the summer of 1943 that the Luftwaffe basically lost it on the eastern front. They actually did well at Kursk, although they never had total control of the air, but it was the rest of the theater that got them into trouble and then several units were withdrawn after that. Even after that, the German fighter squadrons continued to reap vast amounts of kills where they were. Consider that over 100 German pilots had 100+ kills.

Now, thinking ahead a bit on fixes:

It is not just good enough to fix the interception issues. Careful thought must be taken on this because players are going to adapt tactics to fit the rules and there could be some bad cause/effect issues. What I mean by this is the non moving player has their settings done and they can't change them unlike the player who's turn it is. If a defender has their intercepts set at a low rate, then I know it doesn't do me any good to send out small raids as he will be able to match up with what I am doing to my detriment. Me sending out 2 recon planes and him trying to intercept with 2 fighters doesn't make it worth my while to run a ton of recons in order to operationally attrition him to death. Now, the other side of the coin is that I know I can sent a couple of massive raids and know they will be only intercepted by a few defenders, so I switch my tactics that turn and bomb the crap out of his air fields and units. If he goes with a high intercept amount, then my big air raids would be decimated, but I can turn around and send just a few planes on each raid. They may get shot down, but the defender will operational loss kill himself, which is why I would run a pile of small raids to do that to him. If he runs out of interceptions, I can then change my settings and send in a couple of big raids that will be unmolested for the most part.

In short, the moving player has a huge advantage because they can change their settings while the defender can't. Even if changes to the air system are made, this must be taken into consideration when making those changes.

[magnno66]

Interesting reflections and a good analysis Klydon. Lets see what the developers and testers have to say on this.

[Joel Billings]

While I was away I noticed that Pavel reported that he made a change with the interception doctrine setting effect. I don't know exactly what he did, but I do know that Pavel has been very interested in continuing to work on the air model and perfect it so you can expect continued changes and improvements. He also fixed a problem with air group fatigue reduction (which wasn't happening from what I can tell from the notes).

[Klydon]

Good deal Joel.

IMO, you guys did a outstanding job on the game and it shows with so little cropping up. I have a feeling some of the air issues didn't get discovered by the testers as they didn't use air like several of the players have post release. I have no doubt the air will be a work in progress for a bit, but that in the end, it will be good.