BtS Air Combat

[Solver]

Yeah, okay. Attacking fighters also can intercept. Odds for the attacker in a round are indeed 100*12/24, which means equal odds. Damage per round would be 50 for either Fighter.

Now the 5-round combat kicks in, and it will actually be no more than 4 rounds, because either Fighter can kill the other one in 2 rounds. So right you are.

[Shrapnel12]

Re: BtS Air Combat

Originally posted by =DrJambo=
Second, it appears that it's now possible to intercept and attack enemy air units when it's your turn!

How do you do this? I was trying to use my fighters to clear out enemy fighters so my bombers could hit their targets safely, but I saw no option on how to attack an air unit directly. I had to bomb the city and hope the fighters would intercept me.

[Shrapnel12]

Bump. Does anyone know the answer to this question?

[=DrJambo=]

Just send your fighters on a bombing or air strike mission.

[Shrapnel12]

Originally posted by =DrJambo=
Just send your fighters on a bombing or air strike mission.

Ok, then it's not possible to directly target an opposing aircraft. I'm not seeing much difference from Warlords. In fact this makes air combat rather annoying because how do I protect my bombers if I can't use my fighters to go up against other fighters? One fighter will lay waste to a whole fleet of bombers making them useless or too expensive to use (this is realistic but that's why fighters generally escort bombers). There should be some kind of air support mission for fighters. Also, I'm finding that when I do use my fighters for air support, combat often favors the defender even if its say a jet fighter going against a normal fighter. It's looking like air combat is borked too.

[Blaupanzer]

Guys who think things are "borked," are welcome to try their hand at the code. Otherwise, face the realities of the game programming, and figure ways around them. If the odds favor the defender per combat, send more attackers or use air support differently.

[Shrapnel12]

It's just a figure of speech, a way to say I don't think it should work that way. I'd love to hear some ideas of working around it. Sending more units is not a solution because it's just not worth it. Bombers are supposed to be units you use more then once. I'll just use cruise missles if I'm going to sacrifice units. Unless somebody has a better idea, I'll probably just use fighters and forget about bombers unless my opponent doesn't have flight yet.

[=DrJambo=]

If you'd read the thread, you'd know that the odds of a full strength attacking or defending fighter winning a duel is 50/50. The only time this changes is if one of the fighters is wounded. If it's the defender then the chances of intercepting in the first place diminishes.

[nbarclay]

If the number of air units allowed per city and the intercept probability are both in XML files, that would be enough for those of us who think the power of air attacks has been nerfed too much to move the balance of power back in the direction of what it was in earlier versions without having to dig into the code itself. The down side is that with a lower intercept probability, it would take more fighters to generate enough intercepts to damage all of an enemy's fighters before bombers move in.

[Ari]

Awesome thread! Glad I could finally figure out the math going on in air combat (especially since it's omitted from the combat log). Several questions/comments, though:

- Against non-flying units with intercept capabilities (destroyers, SAM infantry, mech infantry, etc), it seems that the defender can *never* be damaged in an intercept, though otherwise the math at least "acts" identical (a bombing unit simply takes no damage each turn it wins). As an aside, this seems slightly unrealistic (taking out SAM sites seems like it would be a vital primary mission).

- If the above is true, I'd think that destroyers would *never* be able to take out fully healthy airships, bombers or fighters (since in 5 combat rounds, they could never do more than 75% damage), yet I'm fairly sure I've seen this on rare occassions. Am I wrong in assuming the math is the same, or wrong in thinking I've seen this happen?

-Also if the above is true, SAM infantry without intercept promotions could "almost" never shoot down fighters or bombers that are fully healthy, since they'd have to win all 5 rounds. Airships would actually still be toast, but almost anything else, even fighters, would have a good chance of winning at least one round. Otoh, when comparing combat strengths in this situation, is a SAM infantry's unmodified stats used, or are ALL normal modifiers applied (fortification bonus, combat, city defence, hill, etc)? Because if they are, then SAM infantry would actually be quite likely to win even 5 consecutive rounds, since their strength could easily be 30-40. Would first strikes be relevent in any way?

-A 70% damaged fighter on defense is in some ways more threatening than one at full health. Full-health fighters will always intercept, and so you can throw your own fighters at them until you have air superiority (all defending defenders are dead). A damaged fighter, on the other hand, can "evade" attempts for you to kill it, since there's no direct way of attacking it, and thus still threaten your super-vulnerable bombers (and a 70% fighter is still quite capable of shooting down a bomber). Slightly unrealistic, and counterintuitively weird, it seems.

-Ace for a fighter seems a little strange, since probably the most important function of fighters is to knock out enemy fighters, paving the way for bombers. Yet ace fighters are actually *worse* at this, since they will actually bomb the city sometimes, instead of taking on the enemy fighters. Maybe it would have some use as a specialized "destroyer-bomber," but otherwise, it almost seems like a DEmotion, assuming your enemy has their own fighters. To chime in with the posters above, we really need an "air superiority" mission, where you're actually *targeting* defending fighters, rather than going after them in this roundabout way.

-Finally, assuming your enemy has fighters and you don't, why on earth would you NOT give your SAM infantry 2 intercept promotions? Intrinsically, after all, they're pretty poor units *except* for their SAM capability. Yet I just fought a long-ish war with Napoleon where I was the only one with flight (and radio, and eventually advanced flight and stealth, mwahaha) and never once saw SAM infantry with even 1 intercept promotion. Granted, many of these units were upgrades, but surely once the many, many bombs starting falling, you'd thing the AI would get with the program on that.