How to attack a carrier based air squadron

You should never attack an air group, instead, you should make it so that the patrol ranges overlap.

Here, a simple explanation from @darksoul111.

darksoul111 wrote:

If he is patrolling and you are at war :

- Send patrolling interceptors, to patrol in the patrol circle of the enemy planes,

- Shoot rockets at his planes,

- Send an anti-air force under the patrol radius.

HOWEVER, UNDER NO CONDITION, NO CONDITION I REPEAT shall you do that :

- Send interceptors to attack this patrolling stack of planes.

You might wonder why. This is because when an attacking air unit comes to attack anything, and goes inside the patrolling radius of enemy planes, it takes damage without giving any back, before proceeding for its attack. So if you send an interceptor to attack the patrolling stack, you will enter their radius, they will do damage to you, without you doing any back, before then you will attack, with a significant disadvantage health-wise.

Patrolling is the way to go.

Unless the air mechanics have changed, that is incorrect.

Patrolling air units attack everything in their radius every 15 minutes. Units attacked this way will fight back and will damage the patrolling aircraft.

The reason the original poster took lots of damage was probably because his air units were also attacking the ships the enemy air units were stationed on. He had 4 interceptors which do very little damage against ships.

The Carrier Group and the air group had different designators. I definitely ordered an attack on the air group. However, as I watched the attack, I'm quite sure that my planes did attack the ships.

Also, the planes I was trying to attack do not patrol. They simply sat on the Carrier until I sent in a patrol as bait (I thought). Then they flew an attack on my patrol plane. If I patrolled over the aircraft, the ships would kill me.

I've had no luck at all with interceptors, except as scouts. They are way too expensive to just serve that way.

Keep in mind that air are displayed separately from other units that are on the same "point". So it might have seem like they were separated from the ships but actually were not.

If you're sure they were separate, maybe it was a glitch. Maybe lag caused you to have old info and they were actually refueling on the carrier when they got attacked.

Keep on using those interceptors. It is vital to know how to use those to be good at this game.

All CoW units do splash damage to anything in a radius of I think 10 or something like that so if the attack bombers where right on top of the carrier then the carrier would receive and deliver damage since it makes sense that if your interceptors where trying to destroy the planes on the carrier then the carrier would fight back.

I understand the "splash" damage, but don't understand why the targeted attack Bombers received zero damage. The purpose of interceptors is to kill other planes, but mine were totally inneffective. Totally. And I spent days researching and building them.

You said the attack bombers attacked your patrol before you attacked them. Does that mean they were currently refueling when your attack happened? In that case the aircrafts are considered as light armored ground units until the refueling is over. Interceptors deal only little damage against light armored ground units, which could explain why they barely got any damage. Also as was mentioned before the damage was spread to all enemy units in a radius of 5.

It could also be an espionage display issue: If you are currently seeing the army as a spy snapshot (your first patroling interceptor created such a snapshot) then you might see them with their old health. You can see this if the zoomed in army label has a small espionage icon, and also the army bar mentiones "intelligence from ...". You will only see their updated health when you uncover them again.

if the naval bombers were a much higher level then that could be a potential answer.

if the fight happened over the ships then they could have dealt AA damage.