Can fighters intercept after being used as escorts ?

[PKH]

I suspect not, but from the manual it seems like they're only limited by readiness.

Also, I think aircraft should be able to do two missions per turn. It feels a bit limited at the moment.
Why don't they just use actionpoints the same way as other units ?

[Bonners]

I suspect they can intercept if they've already done missions in their own turn, but the percentage chance is affected by Aps and readiness. I'd like to have this confirmed though.

Aircraft can do two missions in a turn. If you click on an air unit you will see an area of the map greyed out which shows its available range. Once it has flown a mission re-click on the unit and you will see the greyed out area has become smaller to reflect on the reduced range left. What that means in reality is that where you base your aircraft is very important, remembering fighters and divebombers typically have smaller ranges than level bombers. Put their bases way back from the front and they will probably only manage one mission a turn, put their air bases right next to the front (at risk of enemy air attacking the base) and you can generally get a couple of missions. The other thing to be aware of is that dependant on the first mission the readiness of the unit will have been reduced, so you may not want to fly a second mission.

[PKH]

Ok, thanks for clearing that up. I never noticed aircraft being available for more than one mission, so I thought it was limited. I guess I should move them closer to the front.

Edit: I just did a test on the 1s scenario of the 1st panzers campaign, and they are limited to 1 mission there at least. They start with 100 ap, but doing an attack against an enemy only 4 hexes away from the airport, they all get 0 ap afterwards, and are no longer available for missons.

[Bonners]

Ahh right, didnt realise, I think there are a few 'house rules' for the 1st Panzer campaign.

EDIT: By all means move them closer to the front, but make sure you re-read my comment about enemies attacking your airbases. If they are closer to the front it can get messy very quickly! It really is a judgement call.

EDIT EDIT: ...and if you move fighter units right behind your advancing forces never move them to damaged locations (you get a pop up warning if you attempt this) as these will reduce readiness of the units.

[James Ward]

I think you can fly air units as many times as they have AP's for. I have flow the same unit up to 4 times on Recon missions close to the front in an effort to draw out fighters.

[PKH]

I've only played the scenarios and the linked campaign, and there it only allows one attack per air group per turn as far as I can see.

[James Ward]

^ Run a Recon to a hex close to the air unit and see how many AP's are left after. If you have enough you should be able to fly another mission of some sort. The limiters are the intercept setting and the number of AP's the unit has. I'm not sure if I have ever done both an escort and an intercept with the same air unit in the same turn but it could be possible. It would depend on the order, if you intercepted first and only used say 20 AP's then you could probably escort a mission in your turn. This is why sometimes the Russians don't intercept early in CB because their air units can get AP's penalties and just can reach the hex to intercept.

[PKH]

Just tested, and recon missions works as you say. Attack missions however don't work that way for some reason, and will always clear the actionpoints after 1 mission no matter the distance. At least in the linked campaign, and also the scenarios I believe. In my opinion it would be better if attack missions also used actionpoints the same as everything else.

Edit: I've tested it in the Trappenjagd campaign, and it behaves the same there so it's not specific to the scenarios and the linked campaign. Each aircraft group can only do one airstrike per turn independent of distance.

An alternative to this could be to make short range attack missions more effective than long range ones to simulate that you can run more missions in the same time span.

[PKH]

I guess for airstrikes the aircraft uses up all their actionpoints in the attack. I still feel airstrikes could use some improvement, as they tend to have underwhelming results. I can attacked a tank division with 65 stukas, and only got a couple of pinned tanks. This seems far fetched.