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Air Changes | Developer Corner

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Hey Everyone! I am back this week to talk to you a bit about some changes we are making to air management and combat. The first thing I want to get out of the way is that this is not a “Man the Guns” style rework of combat and management systems. Our focus on air changes have mostly revolved around quality of life and balance changes to existing systems, while largely maintaining the structures people are familiar with (with a couple of exceptions). So, let's get into it!

Starting off with a QoL change I am very happy about: Simplified Wing Deployment. Anyone who has experience with managing air wings probably has some complaints about how deploying wings works. The live system requires three clicks in the best case (four if you include choosing a base) to deploy a single wing into an empty airbase. In the worst case this requires more clicks and doing some math for creating a large wing that can later be divided evenly. Now, we are adding quick deploy buttons to the air base UI to allow deployment of a wing in a single click. We are also keeping the old deployment menu for more advanced deployment options. Also, in this menu, we have simplified the flow for deploying single and multiple wings at once.

WIP UI design of simplified wing deployment tools. Note the art style here is not indicative of a change in art direction for our UI. In the first image we see the setup that can be done to select fast deploy options from any air base.
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In the second Image we see the newer version of quick deploy within the advanced deployment menu. You now have a set of filters to only show planes of a specific type, and you can now set the reinforce preference on all of the wings you are about to deploy, or individual ones.



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One of the most visible changes to air management, and hopefully a big quality of life improvement for most people, is the addition of Air Groups. The first thing I want to say is this is not Army Groups or Fleets. For now, and the foreseeable future, we are not adding Air Marshals or any sort of mechanical impact to using Air Groups. Air Groups are an organizational structure and nothing more. What it will do is enable the grouping and selection of multiple air wings across multiple locations bases for easier management. These groups will be displayed when in the air map mode so that you do not have to hunt down your wings on the map when you want to interact with them.

A very much WIP view of our current air groups
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Of the changes we are making, one of the most notable is moving to standardized/fixed wing sizes. This change comes with a loss of flexibility in some situations and makes managing smaller numbers of airplanes a bit more complicated. However, I think that real air combat in HoI4 is measured in thousands of airplanes and not dozens. We are currently looking at 100 sized wings for most aircraft, with size 10 wings for a few specific equipment types(scout plans, CV planes, ect). This allows us to streamline wing deployment and some other management stuff such as not having AI take up weird percentages of air bases. It also makes balance easier and fixes a few exploit cases. This may take some getting used to but I feel it improves the overall experience of managing large numbers of aircraft.

The final change I want to discuss today is an addition to the combat system. We are adding a new mechanic for intercepting planes in regions enroute to their target. In most cases, engaging planes in their target region will still be most effective. But in others, such as when range is a factor, the region being crossed has a bunch of engagement and spotting bonuses, and in a few other cases leaning into combat in an intermediary region can be a good idea.

Beyond these more concrete changes we are doing a balance pass on existing air combat mechanics. A lot of this is still too WIP to discuss, but I would like to highlight one of our objectives which is decoupling agility and speed with more impact given to speed in later air superiority fighter designs, but more on that at a later date.

As always, I wish you all the best and don't hesitate to tell us how these changes make you feel.

Until next time o7
 
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Regarding the matter of plane size of air wings, can this be a solution.
- Change airfield concept from number of planes (that now is obsolete) to wing slots. So a 200 planes airfield goes to be 2 wing slot Airfield.
- Consider all wings default size for wing airfield slot 100.
- Let wings get filled as player wants from 1 to 100. If we want to be more quick, let fix bunches of 10 or 20. This will be the reinforce limit. You can build a wing, set its plane cap to let's say 20 and then put the wing in an airfield consuming a slot.
The problem right now is the increasing work to control small wings that you want to be small due to lack of resources due to country circumstances, not to be draining your plane production to fill the 100 gap.
The explained method has the advantage of not having spamming 1 plane wings trick, as you lose one complete airfield slot. So in one 6 slot airfield (prepared for 600 planes) you only can display 6 planes if you are trying to be tricky.
 
I have to say most things in the update feels good, but I so far do NOT like fixed airwings. In a game which takes pride in it's a historical accuracy and micro managment being forced to deploy planes in a wing of 100 feels like a major step back. Like I might only have a lvl 1 airbase available during a campaign and want to deploy both fighters and cas. Used to be as as easy as clicking in 50 of each, now i have to deploy 100 of both, wait for them to actually be deployed, then split them and delete the rest. I do not think this is a good update and I hope paradox adds the option to turn it off or remove it completely.
 
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I have to say most things in the update feels good, but I so far do NOT like fixed airwings. In a game which takes pride in it's a historical accuracy and micro managment being forced to deploy planes in a wing of 100 feels like a major step back. Like I might only have a lvl 1 airbase available during a campaign and want to deploy both fighters and cas. Used to be as as easy as clicking in 50 of each, now i have to deploy 100 of both, wait for them to actually be deployed, then split them and delete the rest. I do not think this is a good update and I hope paradox adds the option to turn it off or remove it completely.
Or at least give the opportunity to selected it in the custom game rules options. Very good explained the added lose of quality of life produced by this change. Thumbs up.
 
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I overall like the plane builder. It lets me do phenomenally stupid things like fill heavy bombers with gas tanks so that I can strategic bomb Germany from Maine and Japan from Hawaii (Fun fact: the B-36 has its genesis in that strategic question). It lets me be incredibly annoying to my friends about how actually the Westland Whirlwind was a great plane (it was) and totally should have been built in large numbers (it shouldn't have). That said, I think there's a lot of oddities and generally strange things that could probably stand to be cleared up.

I feel like some things feel like oversights, and some are just arguable:
  • Mandating torpedo mountings in order to conduct naval patrols is really weird. Really, really weird actually. The US' starting P2Ys are specifically designed for patrol, bombing wasn't even a secondary mission for them and ingame they can only do naval strike and not maritime patrol because they can't mount torpedoes. Even more ridiculous, I'm pretty sure Coastal Command's Liberator GR Mk Vs wouldn't count. (Disregarding that you can't mount its rocket rails on a heavy plane either). Delightfully, as a descendant of the Manchester, the Lancaster could carry torpedoes and thus is a valid patrol plane despite never doing either. I'd strongly recommend that a lot more modules allow the mission, especially the following:
    • Flying boat/floats specifically gives bonuses to naval detection. It should allow naval patrol.
    • Air-ground radar is the definitive maritime patrol enhancement. It gives strong bonuses to naval patrol. It should allow naval patrol.
    • Anti-ship missiles. If carrying torpedoes allows a plane to spot ships and radio home, why not an anti-ship missile?
    • Honestly, give it to some combination of carrier light planes, extra fuel tanks and dive bombers. It's more than a bit silly that an SBD Dauntless or SB2C can't look for ships. Those planes are by doctrine the equipment of the US carrier air group's scout squadrons for crying out loud. I really don't think it's a huge problem if people can have planes scout naval zones.
  • Requiring the exact same mission capability from a plane to allow it to replenish squadrons without even allowing intentional changes is really frustrating if you, for example, switch from pure fighters to multiroles.
  • Having quad heavy machine guns, and double cannon but not double heavy machine guns or single cannon give logistics attack is just strange to me.
  • Jet engines having no range reduction versus piston engines is really strange, considering that the limited range of early jets was one of the main limitations of allied jet operations.
  • Because forward mounted guns give air attack on all missions the same as if they were mounted on a fighter, you get into a very weird situation where a B-25J or similar strafing medium bomber mechanically speaking has the utterly ridiculous firepower of a YB-40 when trying to fight against interception (escort B-17 variant they tried out where it had sixteen .50 and heavy armor). Believe me, the strafer nose on those medium bombers was not for ACM. Plus it's weird that it allows circumventing the limits on turrets.
  • Small bomb bays seem strange. Bomb locks and rocket rails can go empty on a fighter mission but a bomb bay can't, it always adds the weight. Additionally, none of the speed benefits of internal stores carriage are actually modeled, so small bomb bays become useful only if you want to put as many points of soft attack into a plane as possible, rather than a specific thing to try to keep the resulting plane fast and long ranged by reducing drag. None of the historical planes that fit in the small bomb bay category have a notably large bombload.
  • Medium bomb bays feel like they're in an incredibly bad place. They offer a fifth the strategic bombing of a large bomb bay, so why would someone take a medium bomber for that, especially since they aren't even weight efficient? If you want to run medium airframes for close air support, logistics strike or anything else, it's honestly arguable whether you'd want them rather than some machine guns to fill the primary slot so you can just load up on bomb locks, which give twice as much ground attack for less weight, with the only downside being agility, or if you desperately want agility rocket rails, which are strictly massively superior sources of ground attack. Heck, anti-tank cannons are also much more efficient sources of ground attack in every way. I promise you, mid-late war medium bombers didn't get made with bomb bays by accident, they did it on purpose.
  • (Totally subjective quibble) It feels really weird to me how you're encouraged to be space inefficient and pile on as many light machine guns as possible because they're more weight, agility and production cost efficient than the other options. Gameplay wise, it might make sense as an advantage for having more open slots, but it really feels off with how rifle caliber machine guns were pretty much flatly obsolete against targets with self sealing fuel tanks and armor. It feels like the weight of fire downside of heavy machine guns and the difficulty getting good mounts for cannon are modeled but not the critical, disqualifying downside of rifle caliber guns that relegated them to only places where they couldn't fit anything else.
 
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I have to say most things in the update feels good, but I so far do NOT like fixed airwings. In a game which takes pride in it's a historical accuracy and micro managment being forced to deploy planes in a wing of 100 feels like a major step back. Like I might only have a lvl 1 airbase available during a campaign and want to deploy both fighters and cas. Used to be as as easy as clicking in 50 of each, now i have to deploy 100 of both, wait for them to actually be deployed, then split them and delete the rest. I do not think this is a good update and I hope paradox adds the option to turn it off or remove it completely.
Came here to post this, it's a completely retrograde step and limits ability to have a scaled down (e.g. for volunteers, or minor fronts where I still want some air cover) air presence. And as a simplification aid it's completely self-defeating, as if I want a large group operating out of a single airfield (say a 600 bomber fleet in SE England for use against Germany) it now means you get a cluttered UI with it displaying 6 separate 100 size airwings.
 
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