How to defend against SAM launchers ?

[Niedowidek_slith]

I find SAM launchers crazy effective. Once my opponent starts fielding them, the area becomes a kill box for my bombers. They also have quite a range.

Is there any way to attack areas covered by enemy SAMs? Anything helps? Like faster planes or attacking with more planes ? Or is it always a suicide mission when SAM is in range ?

[Soar_Slitherine]

The main weakness of SAMs is that they're very expensive to produce, particularly in terms of Machinery. There's not really anything you can do to stop your aircraft from getting shot down in large numbers if you send them on missions into SAM range, but if the opponent does not have a very robust Heavy Industry or is short on IP production, it may be possible to out-attrition the SAMs by attacking the SAMs with waves of aircraft with lesser Machinery costs.

Missile Launchers or Rocket Launchers can potentially be used to snipe enemy SAMs, particularly if the opponent elected to go light on the armor. Armoring them is expensive, and SAMs don't really need it to fight off air attacks if distributed across multiple hexes, since the ones not currently under attack get lots of free shots either way.

Another alternative is to use your air units to strike where the SAMs aren't. Producing enough SAMs for comprehensive coverage is expensive, and they're easier to knock out with air attacks the fewer are in the same area mutually covering each other. Resources being poured into SAM coverage are not being used to produce ground combat units or aviation. Consider targeting any industry, logistics assets or aircraft stacks that are outside of SAM range. Having aircraft with good range helps.

[Niedowidek_slith]

Thank you for your comprehensive response.

I tried long range bombers and they had many successes for some time. Now SAM launchers are spread among enemy cities so the raids had to stop.

I didn't try attacking SAMs directly with airplanes though. I catched some of them off guard with my ground forces by chance once.

Thank you for confirming my suspicions that SAMs are extremely deadly no matter what plane I produce.

[Niedowidek_slith]

top gun maverick defending smaller.gif (501.67 KiB) Viewed 3892 times

[Clux]

Unless you can win a battle by attrition, your best option would be to keep pushing with armor units. Unless we get electronic warfare and HARM missiles, there won't be any hard counters to SAMs