There are two questions here. One is whether patrol should have greater range than escort. I would argue not, at present for air cover we have GS escort, AS and Patrol. Of these Escort and AS have the shorter range, AS uses up fuel and ops losses even when there is no combat while Patrol can cover a greater area and uses up no resources unless there is combat. And yet it can deliver a high percentage of fighters to a combat even at it's maximum range. To provide cover to those end of range hexes it would have to be flying a lot of patrols and the game doesn't expend any resources for it to do that.The basic concept started from the idea that escorts must meet up and fly with slower bombers, thus, by the time they arrive at the target, they have less fuel available than aircraft that fly out to the target location. Is this all simplified and not 100% accurate. You bet it is. Gary's system of putting patrol over a ground battle was something he added for a number of reasons. It does take control away from the player, but it is attempting to make sure there are some fighters over a ground battle. It's more liberal with these, allowing them to fly out to the further range instead of using escort range. We're juggling things in the air game, and part of the juggling is between trying to keep things easier for players and easier for the AI, but also allowing lots of player (micro)management in a lot of areas. If we limited Patrols to escort range, we'd probably see more cases of bombers getting no protection at all, especially by the AI (I know some of you don't care about the AI, but the overwhelming majority of users play against the AI).
Trying to get more control of air directives during the ground phase would be a huge change in the system, requiring lots of rework and a huge risk of new problems being added. This would involve Pavel's time, as he wrote all the air phase AD design, but only some of the ground phase air code. The list of work for Pavel, including some of the air items that can and will eventually get looked at is already long enough (like the low chance of intercept of GA ADs). Redesigning the basic system isn't going to happen. We do agree there is confusion with the color circles that we could have handled better and hope to improve in the future.
However this is just my opinion about the game design and I can accept that there are the considerations about fighters flying escort with bombers and further just because I disagree with a design element it doesn't detract from playing the game.
The second question is about the range circles. Fighter range circles are important, I use them all the time both for planning the ground war and for positioning aircraft for GS and fighter cover. And fighters on the same 'orders' have differing range circles depending on how the engine decides to use them for a particular combat. In other words one of the tools we are using to play the game is not working in play. Do the benefits of having two different ranges for fighters outweigh the cost to playability because of this. I would say no, my preference would be to have just one range for fighters whether they are on escort, AS or patrol. Should it be the shorter range or the longer one, am not sure - possibly the longer one because I think the game underestimates the ability of fighter air groups to move forwards to newly captured grass airstrips.
This is not the case at all, especially for Airbase<->Airbase transport missions.
