Personally, my biggest issue with HoI 4 is how air warfare takes place.I just don't find it very engaging or interesting dumping 20.000 fighters into Northern France and having them buff my ground troops and fight battles I don't even notice is happening.Having tried HoI 3 I know that I do not want to go backwards and return to confusing mirco hell of that game where airplanes do nearly nothing anyway and are just a way to waste IC instead of building more tanks but I do want to see some sort of rework.We received a naval rework so I think that an air rework is on the cards but it is a difficult subject because how do you fix it?One thing I did like about HoI 3 was that you would order planes to operate in a radius rather than a state. It makes me angry when in HoI 4 my planes in Paris perform poorly because they do not have the range to reach the other side of France where fighting is not even happening. It would create a more interesting heat-map of air combat too if it was not tied so strictly to states.
>>1836763My main issue with air is the fact that CAS is so insanely strong. CAS was primitive in WW2 and even modern CAS isn't as strong as it is in this game.I would rather the main value of air to ground planes shift from just doing ungodly amounts of strength and org damage in individual combat, to their actual role of aerial interdiction--isolating a given battlefield from supplies and reinforcements by loitering roads and striking bridges and trains. Maybe allow them to cause heavy damage to divisions moving (especially strat redeploying) and reduce supply throughput in areas they cover. In exchange, maybe direct CAS damage in combat could afford to be a lot lower, or instead reduce entrenchment level or something. Or maybe different CAS weapons could be specialized for different jobs.This is part of a larger issue in that HOI4 chooses to abstract away roadways as a vague statewide infrastructure whereas in reality they were more important strategic terrain that railroads--because the game is made to pander to russians and their front is the only one where roads didn't matter--and thus the role of planes in supply interdiction has to be abstracted away to just gradually depleting rail and truck stocks.
The issue is that its the main way to push now. They need to rework almost every system but they have proven they are not up to the task.
Can you stop opening a new hoi4 thread every fucking day?
I really hope HoI's next major expansion is a total air rework but I know it isn't as they've basically said its Wunderwaffe related with vanilla Germany rework. Trainable airwings(current system is trash), actual ground crew integration, flight/squadron leaders, air marshals OoB with ranking officers, night fighters rework etc A few unique portraits(about 6 each) already exist of USAAF, RAF and Luftwaffe squadron leaders and air marshals but weren't implemented due to the fact the original pre launch air war OoB design was scrapped due to time. Those files are still ingame.Air wings being trained like ground units with a ground crew unique support companies for repairs,rearmament, experimental weapons,ground protection,logistics etc would be sweet that boost the stats of the airwings which are limited to historical size.Its so shit how you can have max experience airwings and then if you delete them and restart them, its back to square one. its so unrealistic.Pilots=experience not aircraft. Pilots via wing training would be retained for new planes in a seperate pilot manpower pool divided into untrained/trained/experienced/aces that each month a certain chunk of population say 20 in every 1000 mobilised(can be improved with tech and policy and scales dynamically with nation population size) enter the pilot manpower pool and can be used for training aircraft wings(each type of aircraft has a different training time) representing the length of time it takes to train an air force and its pilots and command structure. This system would keep it so the largest nations have the largest potential air forces/naval air forces and the smallest ones have a much smaller but specialised air force type so air doctrines reworked make a bigger impact.The support company manpower for these trainable airwings will be taken from the standard manpower pool though.Am I mad for ranting that this is a great idea and will make air gameplay immersive,involved and more realistic?
>>1836868>Managing separate manpower pools God no cause you know the navy fags will demand one for navy.
>>1836868Make it so you create an air group that comprises 48 aircraft at game start. This number can be increased with doctrines. The air group just serves as a container for the planes and crew and can be moved to reserve. Make it so you can move air crew which halves the experience of one group but gives another a 50% head start and an xp gain boost to reflect the green crews being trained by the regulars.Bombers need to be rebalanced overall as well. Make tacs stronger, and cas weaker, and you give heavy fighters a bit of a niche again
>>1836763By Blood Alone was the air rework desu. I doubt we're getting another.Personally I'd do something like air armies. Rather than defining individual wings you define air armies formed of a mixture of planes with their own generals which can be assigned to specific tasks. This "new" task system is what I'd use to replace range. Also, I'd add elevation as a stat for planes.
>>1836853They cannot, no.
>>1836853Yes, you are aware you're on /vst/, right?
>start building Mustangs with HMGs>train the crews into using those Mustangs>cannons are researched, give them to the aforementioned Mustangs>Mustangs with HMGs can't be refitted with cannons, they must be built from scratch>my crews forget how to fly them, despite being essentially the same planePlease do what the OP says, and quickly!
>>1836763Significantly higher night penalties for any plane that isn't specialized for night operations.
>>1836853This.
>>1836779I've done some general reading of how things were going for the Germans between '41 and '43, and something I've seen is that they often got saved by the Luftwaffe. It makes sense to me since they flew ground attack missions in huge raids of hundreds of aircraft. Organisation at the very least should suffer. >because the game is made to pander to russians Your problem is that Paradox is retarded and incompetent. >>1836763Has anyone figured out how this shit actually works yet? I remember trying to find some info on it a few years after the launch and there seemed to be nothing except some vague idea of increasing air attack and health but nobody seemed to know exactly what the calculations were. The entire game is fucked for many reasons, but I feel like the air warfare is particularly fucked and it's probably because WWII aerial combat is too complex for the monkeys at Paradox to figure out a way of integrating it into the engine.
>>1836868>>1837066I'm sold, I really want this.
>>1837066>just have 6000 wings of 48 aircraftsounds amazing
>>1839550>something I've seen is that they often got saved by the LuftwaffeYou know they lost the war, right?The luftwaffe's impact on the overall battlefield after 1942 was limited due to a chronic shortage of aviation fuel. There's a few isolated instances of them having considerable tactical impact, like destroying a tank formation in the opening week of the battle of Kursk, but largely their impact on the battle was limited.Close Air Support in general was not very effective from any side throughout WW2 due to a lack of effective ground-to-air communication. It was risky providing direct support to engaged units because it's nearly impossible to tell friend from foe in the air. Typically air support would come in before a battle, dropping bombs on pre-designated targets like bunkers and machinegun positions as part of the overall artillery bombardment, and would then shift to loitering the backline well behind the actual area of combat, mainly covering major roads. The main purpose of air support was to 'isolate' the battlefield by making major roads unsafe for logistics or reinforcements to traverse and destroying those that tried. In this respect planes did get a lot of tank kills on both sides, but these were not the units actually engaged in combat--they preyed on the units that were redeploying in vulnerable columns down exposed roads. The western front also saw air power employed as artillery counterbattery to great effect but that was a stopgap during the D-Day landings when the allies couldn't yet get enough of their own artillery and supplies on the ground.The point is that most of the casualties close air support inflicted wasn't on actively engaged units but on second-echelon units that were moving to reinforce ongoing battles. The way it works in hoi4 is completely apocryphal.
>>1839578Uhhhmmm I've played Company of Heroes and I can tell you that actually you're wrong. The Nazis loved dive bombers called "Stukas" and they would fly into the middle of a battle with pinpoint accuracy to snipe a tank for Nazi stormtroopers.
>>1839567No one has that many wings.The mighty USAAF(everyone forgets USAF didn't exist yet) had 1300 squadrons across several hundred groups by the wars closing months. It started to rapidly reduce after the end of the war as the demobilisation and dismantling of military equipment and resources began.pic related how they were organised in Feb 1945 with plane numbers and type per squadron.
>>1839631ok and im waiting for the part where that means i dont have 400,000 fighters in hoi4
>>1839578Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel single handedly wiped out 800+ USSR armoured ground targets(inc 2 warships) and 9 aircraft, he is the most decorated close air support attacker in history and earned the *only* Knight's Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds with his Stuka or ground equipped FW-190 combat actions and his attack pattern became the main influence on the famous A-10's method of attack as he was brought in to advise and consult on its design and was a lead planner for close air support tactics in a potential conventional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Not surprising considering NATO was heavily manned by Nazi's and even lead by them several times and its sole mission is the destruction and dismantlement of Russia."NATO was formed from the International brigades of the SS" as SS-Oberst Gruppenführer Paul Hausser famously declared in 1949.Close air support is literally what it says, the direct assistance of frontline ground forces in active combat. What you are talking about is supply disruption, usually done by medium bombers at higher altitude in local strategic bombing. In areas where AA was miniscule or non existent, ground attack aircraft would have secondary goals to eliminate enemy logistics or infrastructure with very close range cannons,rockets and unguided bombs.Of course it was easy to identity friend or foe, aircraft were unique to nations and had distinctive looks, all aircraft were also painted underneath with symbols of their branch and nation. In fact, ground AA were taught to identify the silhouettes of friendly and enemy aircraft and the vector of arrival to determine what direction they came from and if its allied or enemy. These examples can still be seen in museums and private collections today. However its true, friendly fire incidents in pretty substantial numbers did happen especially in the early years from the initial total collapse panic and development of new tactics and technologies.
>>1839578>The way it works in hoi4 is completely apocryphal.How? When you have multiple divisions engaging one another, it's not like every single soldier in them is engaged. I just opened up Glantz's translation of 'Belorussia 1944 Soviet General Staff Study' and it doesn't go into minute detail, but it basically says that you can't do shit if you're being bombed, and air attacks are particularly effective for helping to finish off dense encirclements. I remember once pushing to Berlin as France with just infantry and tanks, no AA despite being bombed all the way so it's not like having one less plane means you instalose. I also can't be bothered to drag out some earlier citations since I don't remember which books they were from but it all basically went the same way: >bajillion soviet tanks and infantry penetrate german lines>germans almost rout until soviets lose communications and are endlessly bombed >counterattack by panzers>1 million killed and capturedFor all the game's faults, I don't see CAS being one of them. It's an abstraction of what's going on at ground level and a 'battle' is an engagement that lasts days or weeks at various levels of intensity. Just to make that point, one of the actions around Vitebsk that the study directly attributes to successful use of air power widened a penetration by 50km and deepened it by 10, which is what? 1/4 of one of the little provinces you're stacking 4 divisions into, if even that?
>>1839657>basically says that you can't do shit if you're being bombed, and air attacks are particularly effective for helping to finish off dense encirclementsPrecisely why Ukraine can't do anything at all in their own country because Russian aviation dominates them, not allowing them to move without being hit. Helicopters at long range,close attack aircraft, drones,flying bombs(honestly game changing) and missiles.Zaporozhye 2023 was a modern day Kursk and was a catastrophic total defeat for the Ukrainians and its long term impact is still being felt. The Russian air force and its liberal use of FAB's played a key role in annihilating the massive Ukrainian forces that went into that horrific meat grinder. 200k casualties inc 94k KIA and 1800 vehicle losses for absolutely nothing, quite literally. It was a humiliation for NATO aswell as they directly planned it for 12 months with their "expert" war planning teams in Brussels and Rome and hyped it up through the mainstream media.Same thing happening in Kursk itself right now, even Forbes and The Economist called it a disaster and that was back on 17th August where they confirmed over 700 vehicles losses including 410 armoured losses. Russian aviation in the form of helicopters, flying bombs, four confirmed SU25 attack runs and many missiles aided by ground based suicide drone teams once again exterminating ground forces and Ukraine can't counter it due to lack of electronic warfare and mobile AA. The fact people today still underplay the massive advantage that air power brings is actually shocking. Yes air power doesn't win wars alone but it plays a massive role in bringing that victory by reducing enemy military capabilities,industry,energy production and logistics.In HoI IV I think CAS is fine, like you say it's an abstraction of what's going on in the ground battle. I think heavy strat bombing should be far more severe in its effects though which scales up the further the number of aircraft involved.
>>1839682>The fact people today still underplay the massive advantage that air power brings is actually shocking. Yes air power doesn't win wars alone but it plays a massive role in bringing that victory by reducing enemy military capabilities,industry,energy production and logistics.>In HoI IV I think CAS is fine, like you say it's an abstraction of what's going on in the ground battle. I think heavy strat bombing should be far more severe in its effects though which scales up the further the number of aircraft involved.I agree but please don't bring the modern war into this because nobody fucking cares and I don't want my WWII history discussion derailed. It's bad enough that WWII history on the Internet is basically a proxy war between /pol/ and /leftypol/.
>>1839657you literally cannot damage units not in combat>>1839654>the exception proves the ruleyou should still be able to attack divisions not in combatbut this can't happen because you'd be attacking the entirety of northern france rather than what you want tothey changed it this way to prevent sniping but sniping is exactly what cas is for
>>1839697It's fine the way it is, and it certainly isn't even up there on the list of biggest problems in the game. Should a preliminary bombardment be something activated by PP that damages an opposing division without engaging? Should rocket artillery only be useful in the first day of an attack? I mean I'm all for airpower, but having units just walking around in range of bombers and suffering damage sounds hilarious, but also really really annoying and, ultimately, would do the exact same thing that the current system does. A much bigger problem I've identified with air combat is that AI Germany will stick 75% of its factories into manufacturing Focke Wulfs and therefore have no tanks and start running out of artillery and infantry equipment a year into the war, which I find far more annoying than bombing not being exactly true to life.
>>1839713>having units just walking around in range of bombers and suffering damage sounds hilariousI think the way to do it would be to reduce supply throughput to frontline tiles under air attack, slow the movement speed of units trying to enter those tiles and apply a one time org/strength hit for them when they enter.My point isn't that in combat CAS should be worthless, but rather that CAS should do a lot of useful supplementary things instead of just being a huge set and forget combat damage source
>>1836763Air is fine, simpler is better
>>1839713>and, ultimately, would do the exact same thing that the current system does.no, you fucking idiot, it would notwe literally have hoi3 as an alternative to compare things to and in hoi3 you can and should snipe armored divisions with your cas particularly early on or when you are a minor with limited resourcesin goi$ you have absolutely no control and whether or not cas even decides to show up in key battles is a dice rollyou can't tell all 200 of your bombers to go to the battle where they're actually needed because instead 12 will show up and the rest might be involved in other unimportant friction>having units just walking around in range of bombers and suffering damage sounds hilarious, but also really really annoyingthe only reason it can't work is because in goi$ you assign wings to massive regions rather than actually issue them ordersit isn't hillarious in hoi3 because it just makes perfect sense and it should be annoying getting bombed to keep you away from the frontthere is even a specific order for interdiction in hoi3 where your bombers target units in transit since they are more vulnerable as they aren't entrenched you know in the same way bombers are actually used in warit does force you to keep valuable divisions safe when you can't guarantee their airspace and gives garrison aa an extra purposegoi$ is not a game about strategic warfare or maneuvers it's just a game about stacking meme bonuses and grinding your enemy down in a vapid machineto even attempt to play otherwise means you're constantly wrestling with the ai and the obnoxious battle planning systemair power doesn't even serve a purpose unless you're a major who can spam it to a ludicrous degree but then everyone can easily become a major in goi$>something activated by PP kys
>>1836763Fundamental issue of Hoi4 is that air war is something that happened in background, When in Hoi3 air war is in front of you like land or naval combat because aircraft is actual unit and you know it have to actually fly.Heck you can even group airwings of aircraft together and give general to command, Yes there is Air force general in Hoi3 with different traits.
>>1840078HoI 4 has combat aces. Next lies about the game?
>>1836763Aircraft don't take or hold ground. They should remain a support concept.
>>1837362The irony is that one of the earliest armament fits for the P-51 when it was a low altitude strike aircraft was a quartet of 20mm cannons...
>>1836763What if Strat bombers destroyed Inf/Civs/Mils for real instead of just breaking them? Would you rike it?
>>1840413That would make them overpowered instead of useless.
>>1840413That would be really, really imbalanced, especially when you consider that yellow air basically reduces bomber interceptions to nil and someone can spend months under constant bombardment before shifting the air balance enough in their favour to start actually doing something about it.The main problem with strategic bombing is that it follows a weird curve. A thousand bombers can cripple about 40% of a country's factories, but afterwards will basically cease to deal any more damage. There's hidden diminishing returns that make it almost impossible to ever cripple more than 50% because at that point you're dealing so little damage that autorepair is matching your pace. Same reason that bombing airports doesn't really work--you can take a few levels off a few airports but you can never truly cripple an airport let alone a cluster of them and so putting bombers into contested air is basically never worth it.I don't know why they designed things that way since it basically means strat bombing will never deal enough damage to justify its own cost, but if they just adjusted those diminishing returns to be less extreme then it would definitely help make strat bombers less of a trap.
>>1843601>Same reason that bombing airports doesn't really work--you can take a few levels off a few airports but you can never truly cripple an airport let alone a cluster of them and so putting bombers into contested air is basically never worth it.t. Hermann Goring.> The main problem with strategic bombing is that it follows a weird curve. A thousand bombers can cripple about 40% of a country's factories, but afterwards will basically cease to deal any more damage. There's hidden diminishing returns that make it almost impossible to ever cripple more than 50% because at that point you're dealing so little damage that autorepair is matching your pace.t. Ira C. Eaker
>>1839567>it is increased by doctrinesRetard
>>1839645Fighter spam is a consequence of air zones being infinite. All that needs to be done to fix it is cap out how many active air groups can be doing missions at a time in an air zone.
>>1843990That doesn't solve anything.If two sides are using equal designs then the winner would be the one with a deeper reserve of replacement fighters. All you'd do in practice is slow the resolution of the air war down to a glacial pace. And now all the Axis has to do is rush out enough 1940 fighters to cover the D-Day airzones and they'll effectively stall allied air superiority indefinitely.The air system sucks from the ground up but one of the core issues is that HOI4 treats 'are superiority' as though you just annihilate the entire enemy air force in sustained dogfighting and call it a day. In WW2, local air superiority was achieved by striking the other side's airfields, and by forcing their fighters to engage yours in the sky in order to protect their airfields. But none of that is modelled here, which reduces aerial combat to a pure IC check.But I get that their goal with air is to avoid forcing you into microhell when you want to be focused on clicking tiles and drawing circles with your tanks instead.
>>1844076>In WW2, local air superiority was achieved by striking the other side's airfields, and by forcing their fighters to engage yours in the sky in order to protect their airfields. But none of that is modelled here, which reduces aerial combat to a pure IC check.Sounds like a system that creates mission boxes for air units would work then. That is, to run an air superiority mission you'd need a "box" of fighters and tac bombers. The latter is to force the enemy's planes up, and the former is to shoot them down. Ground support would require a "box" of recon and ground attack planes, though you could also add fighters too for interdiction. I don't know how this isn't still an IC check though and desu the air war should be imo.
>>1843990that wouldn't solve anything>>1844076imo one of the fundamental problems is that air superiority inherently gives you a huge debuff in the form of -50% toughness with no requirement for cas particularly when recon is already a modelled feature in the gamehoi4 is not about precise strategic maneuvers the entire game is just about ic checking and stacking buffs to give yourself leveraged ic>But I get that their goal with air is to avoid forcing you into microhell when you want to be focused on clicking tiles and drawing circles with your tanks instead.you mean clicking on your focus treeswings don't have org anymore so the air war is just this constant grind in the background which really is just an ic funnel whereas before you could disrupt org and org recovery to keep a relatively superior airforce grounded you simply can't anymore and hoi3 did not have a great air system but it was leagues better than what we have nowin hoi4 nothing stops you from just dumping 2000 fighters into an airfield and having them rape the enemy tomorrow whereas before it was at least possible to catch them and pound the airfield before they could get rolling forcing them to take terrible low org engagements to try and wrestle for superiority>>1848312this solves literally none of the problems all you're doing is changing wings from one type of craft to multiplethe fundamental problem with hoi4 is it treats everything like an ic check and the game is just a meat grinderyou are never supposed to overcome superior odds or steal victory through a tight plan you're supposed to just set the ai meatgrinder on go and conjure more factories with mana because there's no locality to anythingthe fact you can't direct your cas, which may be very limited, to join specific battles where you need it is telling about the entire attitude: it's just there to help wear down the enemy war machine not do what cas does and snipe key targetsif you could it would use phone mana too
>>1836868Include the mechanic where you can promote Air Officers into Chief of Airforce/Military High Command and it's perfect.Fixes the issue of countries easily making a 2000 Air Wings.
Are heavy fighters worth it or are they a meme?
>>1848464>the fundamental problem with hoi4 is it treats everything like an ic checkt. Adolf Hitler.
>>1848474Regular fighters are more cost effective. The only point to heavy fighters is their range, because some regions of the map are just set up so that airfields are too spaced and airzones too big for light frames to cover. If you're not fighting in such a place, stick with light airframes.
>>1839682god you retards can't just stay in your threads
>>1839856Air is anything but simple in HoI 4. It is extremely detailed and complex if you think that it is simple then you obviously are a bad player. It is so complex that the AI is not good at it and most players are not too so you can still play while being bad at it. Unlocking the power of the sky is very powerful and makes you a much better player.
>>1852381>design simple, long established and extremely well-understood fighter template>put 50-150 factories on it>upgrade your airports>spread planes through airports>set fighters to air superiority and put them in airzone>wait to win the air war and enjoy 50% stat increase on the ground in the meantime>once air zone turns green, deploy CAS that literally just maximizes 'ground attack' and nothing else>now your 10w infantry will successfully push tanksLike most of HOI4, the complexity is illusionary and the multitude of stats and mechanics only exist to obfuscate a simple path to optimization that requires little decisionmaking at all. The only interesting aspect of air at all is securing enough rubber to fuel your production, but in practice that just means importing from southeast asia, conquering southeast asia or building a bunch of synthetic rubber plants if you don't have access to southeast asia.
>>1852389>The only interesting aspect of air at all is securing enough rubber to fuel your productionTo an extent, I don't get what you want desu. We don't play on the tactical level in any way so it's up to the game to represent the operational and strategic levels. The air war in both is a matter of production at the end of the day with a little bit of operational decision-making about when is the best time to go up for the conservation of resources. Everything else is motivation and experience management.
>>1840087>B...but Ace pilots!Next goalpost about the game?
>>1855418There is no difference between air generals and air aces.
>>1855840Before NSB sure, if on a much reduced scale, but with the introduction of divisional officers air aces are more like them than generals.
>>1836868I wouldn't mind Air OoB similar to ground. My biggest gripe with planes in HoI IV right now is the retardation of having to use tiny wings capping at 100 but needing tens of thousands to do anything.Planes should just move around the map like ground units but not be restricted/tied down by ground units and return to base automatically once bingo fuel.
>>1858996>implying hoi4 has an oob
