What happened to the Naval spotting range of airships?

[Christolos]

Ok, so I just started playing again after a good while, and have been noticing all kinds of new changes, like planes able to attack in bad weather, but i was surprised to see that airships now only have a naval spotting range of one, when I seem to remember is was much larger. Am I remembering wrong, and if not, why was this so drastically reduced? Shouldn't airships be able to see further out than 1 hex, like Maritime bombers, by virtue of patrolling?

[Platoonist]

Shouldn't airships be able to see further out than 1 hex, like Maritime bombers, by virtue of patrolling?

If just starting out in 1939 those are the correct stats for airships. Airships only really come into their own with Long-Range Aircraft research as their naval spotting range increases by +2 hexes per level with each upgrade. Fully upgraded they have a staggering strike range of eighteen hexes and a naval spotting range of nine. That might be the appealing aspects of airships that you are remembering from earlier games. We tend to recall how units ended up when fully researched, but not always where they started.

level four airship.jpg (71.78 KiB) Viewed 519 times

However, even with a level 0 airship, you should be able to give it an order to search like a maritime bomber in one direction out to ten hexes. It will spot one hex out on each side of the hex row.

airship spot.jpg (110.37 KiB) Viewed 520 times

Like so---

airship spotting II.jpg (151.52 KiB) Viewed 520 times