Air combat: make fighters offensive and strats defensive
Suggesting the following for CoW1.0:
Fighter attack vs air: +25%
Fighter defense vs air: -25%
Strategical bomber attack vs air: -50%
Strategical bomber defense vs air: +50%
Result:
* Using airplanes would become more tactical, interesting, diversified, realistic and intuitive. Currently the only reasonable way to use planes is to form stacks of 5 or 6 fighters, add whatever bombers you have and send these stacks on patrol forever... you can also do that for hours or days above enemy territory without bigger sorrows even if your enemy has equally strong fighters.
This is boring for experienced players - once you understood that principle, you always do the same without thinking. Secondly it's not realistic by any means. And thirdly, this deviation from realistic plane usage makes it very difficult to understand for new players. Is also frustrating for new or bad players, because they don't see a way to defend against that.
* This change would often make it desirable to launch a direct air-to-air attack. Which is a beautiful manoeuvre, in reality as well as in CoW. It would be fun to use planes that way.
* Due to the above, the speed of air units would become a relevant factor (like it was in reality), because it allows you to be the attacker more often. Which would add one more interesting aspect to the game.
* You would often have to think when you should split your fighters from your bombers, because when going out for a direct air-to-air attack, you in many cases won't want bombers to slow down your attacking stack and you don't want to let your precious bombers take damage. So there would be more tactical decisions and we would be much closer to realistic plane usage. In reality when starting an interceptor mission, you wouldn't take bombers with you.
* This change would make the beeswarm-exploit of sending several stacks of planes underneath a patrolling enemy air stack and avoiding own offensive patrol tick way more seldomly usable.
* The strategical bomber unit would be way more realistic. No strategical bomber ever actively engaged in a air-to-air dogfight during WW2. Because that was impossible. They had way too low speed and manoeuvrability to do so; also their board cannons were positioned exclusively for defensive purpose, none of them pointing at a straight angle to the front.
Note that this applies almost the same for two-propellar medium tactical bombers. But since the tactical bomber unit in CoW might also represent single-propellar dive bombers / light bombers, I'd like to leave their air attack/def values balanced. Same thought for naval bombers, which obviously represent both long-range, two-propellar naval patrol planes as well as single-propellar naval dive bombers or torpedo bombers.
* Also for fighters the change would be realistic. The attacker often had an advantage, in particular when coming from the side or from behind / when not being spotted by the attacked planes early enough. There also was the tactic to attack with the sun behind, which made it additionally difficult for the attacked planes to see the attacker early enough and even if they did, gave them dificulties to aim at the attacker due to being blinded.
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