Planes vs Ships - can they sink them?

[Bluefusion]

No they don't. I would say they designed it this way because you don't even really "control" the air units. You just set them on intercept and they randomly do a % dmg to any other air unit. Since they can never kill a unit you specify, they have no means to earn experience. And bombing an improvement is nothing more than pillaging, which yields no experience as well.

I like Swat's thinking in that bombers should be non-lethal but fighters could be. I must admit, the bomber radius is too large to allow them to be lethal. However, weaker jets certainly could take advantage of lethal "bombing".

However, you're still left with the fact there are few air unit counters until you've researched flight yourself.

[swat-spas2]

I could live with a fighter-bomber type craft that is somewhat less effective at AA, lethal bombing at all targets, but less effective at it than bombers, and half-way in cost for the higher flexibility. Fighters i would still leave lethal against boats i should think. Yamato was sunk by over 700 air sorties from various aircraft, you'd kill almost any boat eventually without air cover with enough attempts by your own planes.

Jet fighter looks like F-16, which other than some mig versions, is just about the most produced jet in the world anyway (just about all of our allies have used them at one time or another). Civilopedia portrait is bigger than the ingame icon.

As far as aerial promotions, I would regard these as more important than ground. Research during WW2 found that only about 5% of pilots accounted for almost ALL confirmed air to air kills. This would obviously suggest that not everyone was good at air to air dogfights. And basically most people were cannon fodder for the good ones. Bomber crews with lots of experience were hard to come by, and obviously had better success dealing with flak and still bombing the target. I would stick to mostly promotions dealing with anti-air or countering surface to air.

Counters: essentially the only counter is to get an air force yourself. This seems to be what most countries have done in history. If you can't get to flight or aluminium for a while, you could be in for a long game trying not to piss someone off. I could conceive of MGs/Infantry having a very small AA chance, but primarily the counter was radar, your own aircraft, barrage balloons, naval guns and flak. What is missing is a building representing SAM emplacements or flak batteries. But again, these would come into play around the same time in game as planes themselves.

Edit: You could give Artillery a promotion for AA. You can get it well before planes. Most of the guns used as flak were also designed as anti-tank guns which are basically high velocity artillery. This would also extend the usefulness of artillery past planes.

[snafuc4]

Originally posted by swat-spas2
I could live with a fighter-bomber type craft that is somewhat less effective at AA, lethal bombing at all targets, but less effective at it than bombers, and half-way in cost for the higher flexibility.

Umm.. I'm not sure if I understand you here. 'lethal bombing at all targets but less effective than bombers?'

Fighters i would still leave lethal against boats i should think.

Agree to differ here?

I would stick to mostly promotions dealing with anti-air or countering surface to air.

Counters: essentially the only counter is to get an air force yourself. This seems to be what most countries have done in history. [...] I could conceive of MGs/Infantry having a very small AA chance, [...] What is missing is a building representing SAM emplacements or flak batteries.

Totally agreed

Edit: You could give Artillery a promotion for AA. You can get it well before planes. [...] This would also extend the usefulness of artillery past planes.

Very good idea!

[swat-spas2]

Originally posted by snafuc4


Umm.. I'm not sure if I understand you here. 'lethal bombing at all targets but less effective than bombers?'

Agree to differ here?

Very good idea!

-- Fighter-bomber unit (or fighter if you don't add the thing), would be less effective as far as a unit rating for bombarding units, just as the fighter is now. But it would have a lethal bombard, and should be more expensive than a regular fighter (think how much a F-15 costs compared to the F-16, which is a pretty small interceptor design, even though its used for bombing) because of the units' greater flexibility. Bombers you could leave the same. The things are pretty potent as is as far as city killers. Units at half strength with no city D bonus are as good as dead unless you somehow didn't bring tanks and infantry.

--Thats fine. I'm thinking more in terms of just modding the existing fighter itself probably. If you work this in conjunction with promotions, which currently do not exist for AA, you could still have very effective BARCAP, plus some attack aircraft.


--Thanks. I'm not sure why that didn't occur to me earlier (battlecards does this)

[Shr3dZ]

Now that Destroyers have a 30% chance of taking out a plane, and planes have a -50% dmg adjustment, is there really any point to attacking boats with planes? Plus if you have too many planes your opponent will just build subs so you cant hittem~

Just wondering, can planes be on CAP while loaded on an A/C ??

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Shr3dZ
..., and planes have a -50% dmg adjustment, ...

Just wondering, can planes be on CAP while loaded on an A/C ??

Only bomber types have the -50% vs. naval units, not fighters.
Yes, you can put fighters on intercept while on carriers.

[Shr3dZ]

Ah you beat me to it, I just read in the manual (pdf) that its only the bomber - hmm so fighter can still knock a boat down to 1 HP and then a boat can take it out ? Or does the fighter have a limit on how much dmg it can do to a boat (50%) ?

So if you have multiple destroyers in a sea square, is it still only 30% interception ? edit: I guess the same question applies to multiple planes on CAP~

reading the manual: Fighters have 15% bombard BUT Jet Fighters have only 10% ? typo?

[snafuc4]

Originally posted by swat-spas2


-- Fighter-bomber unit (or fighter if you don't add the thing), would be less effective as far as a unit rating for bombarding units, just as the fighter is now. But it would have a lethal bombard, and should be more expensive than a regular fighter [...]

Yup, I'll go along with all of that

--Thats fine. I'm thinking more in terms of just modding the existing fighter itself probably. If you work this in conjunction with promotions, which currently do not exist for AA, you could still have very effective BARCAP, plus some attack aircraft.

Umm.. right. I'm still in favour of a seperate fighter/bomber strike unit though, with halfway-house expense/resource cost, as I suspect promotions to existing air units could easily be abused if they (the existing units) are made too flexible

[Bluefusion]

Originally posted by Shr3dZ
Ah you beat me to it, I just read in the manual (pdf) that its only the bomber - hmm so fighter can still knock a boat down to 1 HP and then a boat can take it out ? Or does the fighter have a limit on how much dmg it can do to a boat (50%) ?

Any air unit can only take any naval unit down to 50% health.

At least I know this for sure with battleships and destroyers, but I don't see why it wouldn't apply for carriers.

[Thalassicus]

You have to remember that injuries have a quadratic effect on combat readiness: a 50% strength unit is fighting with both half health and half damage per round of combat.

To give a numerical example, a Destroyer (30str) facing a full-strength battleship (40str) has a 20% chance of winning, with an average 22 strength remaining on the battleship.

A destroyer attacking a half-strength battleship, however, has a 90% chance of winning (97% with Combat II).

A destroyer attacking a half-strength destroyer has literally over a 99% chance of success, with an average 23 strength remaining on the attacking destroyer.

Just soften up the ships with fighters, then take them out with destroyers. Non-lethality encourages combined arms; whether or not that is a good thing is up to you

[Bluefusion]

Yeah but don't forget, if the guy has a stackorific stack of destroyers you can kiss your fighters bye-bye. That's an aweful waste of hammers to just increase your chances of winning for forces you already have to have.

I'm not even considering the possibility of a few carriers, which nearly always will intercept your fighters if they're fully loaded.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Bluefusion
Yeah but don't forget, if the guy has a stackorific stack of destroyers you can kiss your fighters bye-bye. That's an aweful waste of hammers to just increase your chances of winning for forces you already have to have.

The catch is, if you don't use airplanes to soften up the enemy first, you need a larger navy to do the same job. Without air support, and assuming equally powerful ships, it takes a lot of numerical superiority to attack successfully because the defender is given a slight advantage. In the first battle each defender is involved in, the defender is more likely to win than the attacker. The only way for the attacker to shift the odds in his favor is to use numerical superiority to mount additional attacks against the (presumably) injured survivors of the initial attacks.

Aircraft can change that situation radically by weakening the defenders to a point where the odds are significantly in the attacking ships' favor in the first attack. With enough air support, it is possible to wipe out an enemy naval force with only a slight numerical advantage in ships, or even, with a little luck, with only an equal number of ships. Moreover, with air support, a lot fewer ships will be lost attacking the enemy ships, which reduces the cost of replacing the naval losses (albeit at a price of having to replace whatever aircraft are lost).

So it's not a question of building an air force in addition to the ships you were going to need anyhow. Rather, it's a matter of using air power to reduce the number of ships needed to do the job.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by snafuc4

My main concern is that there seems to be a gap in the tech tree here. As well as not allowing for pre-SAM AA units (or installations - bunkers don't count) we seem to have no air power that can perform 'surgical' strikes against particular target(s), whether they be land or sea, unit or installation. There is the promotion - actually, no there isn't according to my manual, it's a task - but this /shouldn't/ be a promotion or task; airstrike units, whether for naval or land offensives, are designed completely differently from the ground up for the task in hand & have been since just after the end of WW1 (or just before). Only just lately have we seen multi-role aircraft become the norm rather than the exception, & even then the crews tend to focus on a specific role even if the aircraft remains nominally the same.

To the best of my knowledge, America never had a specialized ground attack aircraft along the lines of the German Stuka or its Russian counterpart in WWII. Instead, much if not most of the low-level ground attack role was played by fighters that had originally been designed with air-to-air combat as their primary mission. The F/A-18 Hornet introduced a new designation when it was officially designated as both a fighter and an attack aircraft, but the underlying idea of fighters' having a secondary ground attack role is not new at all.

As for the question of whether or not lethal sea bombardment belongs in Civ, I see two critical issues.

1) Normally, the turn-based nature of Civ does not pose major balance problems because the attacker and defender engage in combat at the same time. But bombardment follows a completely different model, a model that makes something like the battle for the Coral Sea where American and Japanese aircraft were bombing each other's carriers at essentially the same time impossible. The mechanism for reflecting simultaneity in air operations, and especially carrier-based air operations where both sides' carriers are likely to send airstrikes at each other at once, has not yet evolved in Civ to a point where it is possible to have fair battles with lethal air-to-sea bombardment.

2) In World War II, the bombers that were highly effective against ships were very different aircraft both from fighters and from conventional bombers. Even though their design superficially resembled fighters, they were too slow, clumsy, and poorly armed to be particularly useful for intercepting enemy aircraft. They also were not not nearly as good at bombing most types of ground targets as conventional bombers. Allowing an air unit to sink ships without giving it those limitations in what else it can do would be both unrealistic and unbalancing.

In the modern era, purely from a realism perspective, the situation changes dramatically. A modern surface navy is a sitting duck for enemy aircraft if it doesn't have air superiority over its ships. Further, with the advent of smart bombs and guided missiles, a much wider range of aircraft have the potential to be highly effective against enemy ships.

Purely from a perspective of land-based aircraft attacking ships, it wouldn't be hard for Civ to model that reasonably well. But when two fleets that both include carriers go at each other, we're back to the Coral Sea problem: both fleets' carrier aircraft ought to be attacking each other's ships at the same time. Air combat in Civ games has not yet evolved to a point where it can handle lethal air-to-sea bombardment in a balanced, reasonably realistic way.

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by nbarclay


To the best of my knowledge, America never had a specialized ground attack aircraft along the lines of the German Stuka or its Russian counterpart in WWII. Instead, much if not most of the low-level ground attack role was played by fighters that had originally been designed with air-to-air combat as their primary mission. The F/A-18 Hornet introduced a new designation when it was officially designated as both a fighter and an attack aircraft, but the underlying idea of fighters' having a secondary ground attack role is not new at all.

They had em they just werent as common as the Stuka or Stormovik (since they were mostly naval AC).

[swat-spas2]

Originally posted by nbarclay


To the best of my knowledge, America never had a specialized ground attack aircraft along the lines of the German Stuka or its Russian counterpart in WWII.

As for the question of whether or not lethal sea bombardment belongs in Civ, I see two critical issues.

This is correct sort of, USA did have A-20, A-26, which were attack aircraft, along with the B-25. These were all generally used to make low-level attack runs. But since there were so many P-51s/P-47/P-38, these were used often. Germans hated/feared the P-47 especially. Russian one was Il-2.

The at-sea carrier battle does pose a problem. There are some issues still with it. First, a defender may apply his fighters in an interception role and shoot at the offending bomber runs. This fulfills the attack-defender shooting at the same time capacity. Second, if they do not, very often in real life the two carrier air wings would be seeking the other carrier and strike at it. This is a problem. The number of times this happens in game is probably small, your aircraft generally have softer targets than a carrier first.., but it is an issue for which I do not have a gameplay address with present implementation. Even in RL however, the Coral Sea problem is rare. If the other guy finds you first, your strike may never be launched at all, and you are dead meat unless you get those interceptors up right quick. Midway is a good example.. Japan shot down one strike, then was a sitting duck for the next because its fighters were on the deck.

Making specific aircraft, such as torpedo bombers or attack bombers would help somewhat, since these would be deployed differently, allowing you to free up fighters in BARCAP duty. This would in theory alleviate the problem since there would be at least interceptors giving your own carrier a fighting chance at survival to launch its own strikes (unless you happened to be invading China or USA with the thousands of aircraft on the mainland).