It looks like they may have fixed aircraft carriers and AI use of air units?

[cerberusiv]

Playing my first late game since the patch for GS. I only have the base game so I am getting that brought into line with the GS stuff.

First piece of good news - you can (at last) deploy fighters from aircraft carriers to protect groups of ships. I'm still working out how to move carriers and rebase fighters to them so as not to leave the fighters behind but it is at least possible to provide air cover away from friendly airbases now.

Second - The AI is definitely capable of actually using air units. A bit hard to tell fully as most of the civs in my game don't have aluminium so can only build the rather feeble biplane. They have used them to attack my ships but they are one-shotted by defending jet fighters and don't inflict much damage on missile cruiser armadas.

The interesting one was Teddy Roosevelt. As I don't have GS he can build P-51's without needing any strategic resources. So he did - and quite a lot of them. What I thought would be a walkover with groups of battleship armadas and ironclads/destroyers to take his coastal cities turned into a tactical withdrawal (aka run away before you lose all your ships - 2 P-51 attacks can sink a battleship armada now and the P-51's don't take that much damage).

A Scythian bomber attacked one of my submarine armadas in mid ocean (how the hell did they spot that?) and nearly sank it.

So the AI definitely can and does use air units.

The bad news? - the "rebalancing" meant to tilt combat in favour of air units and against ships may have gone a bit too far. What they seem to have done is (rather crudely) removed supporting fire from adjacent ships to the target. With that in place a group of missile cruiser armadas would shoot down several jet bombers before losing a unit. Now I suspect it will be very difficult to send naval task forces against AI civs that have serious air forces without nuking their cities and aerodromes first. It would have been better to have given bonuses to certain air units attacking ships or penalties to ships under air attack (WW2 era fighters never had the weaponry, except as kamikazes, to seriously dent battleships, jet fighters and jet bombers routinely carry medium/long range missiles that can. Then again nothing hostile is going to be flying around in range of a Ticonderoga class cruiser for long).

So a significant improvement although I am thinking it isn't quite right. Anybody else played around with these units enough to have an opinion yet?

I would particularly like to know how restrictive the resources system in GS is when wanting to field a lot of naval and air units?

[Traveler]

Bombers are way op in their bombard strength vs. ships. It's easy to fix by editing the units.xml file.

[pitonsnaboca]

I've seen them using fighters against me, while defending their territory, just like a human player would.

[cerberusiv]

Originally posted by Traveler:

Bombers are way op in their bombard strength vs. ships. It's easy to fix by editing the units.xml file.

That is one of the things I think is not yet right. Yes, ships have historically not stood up well to air attack but it seems to be too easy now.

I have jet bombers in my current game. 110 and higher defence strength cities take forever to reduce the defences with only naval bombardment but just 4 jet bombers, eventually 6, allowed me to overrun the Arabian core cities, taking 6 cities in 7 turns. Too easy. Even levelling a city just leaves piles of rubble that defenders can dig into.

[Traveler]

I lowered the bomber (not jet) tho be the same as an arttilary unit. And upped the Destroyer AA a bit. Probably makes it to weak against cities but at least one bomb run wont sink an entire armada. Now if I could stop the ai from seeing subs that are not compromised by units or encampments ect.

[cerberusiv]

I may have to look at that.

[Nugz]

i think the aa should be a couple techs before where its at... Usually countries have aa (anti air) before planes.. Maybe im doing the tech tree wrong but it seems it comes out later than the planes

[cerberusiv]

Originally posted by Nugz:

i think the aa should be a couple techs before where its at... Usually countries have aa (anti air) before planes.. Maybe im doing the tech tree wrong but it seems it comes out later than the planes

Historically it is not entirely clear. The earliest AA guns were converted from conventional artillery pieces and intended to deter rigid airships (which do not feature in this version of civ). Then aircraft came along. The early AA guns were not particularly effective so it is down to when you think AA guns should be regarded as effective.

I rarely get to use them although I do make use of SAM's to protect my artillery/rockt launchers.

[cerberusiv]

I have been playing around with carriers and it is now easy to position a carrier, deploy a fighter/jet fighter over the carrier (protecting the carrier and units in adjacent tiles) then next turn move the carrier then deploy the fighter to the new carrier location. So that is my original complaint fixed.

You may have to base a second fighter on a carrier to provide air cover for naval units that are not adjacent, which means no room for a bomber on that carrier. But that is not a major issue.

It is just annoying that to make ships more vulnerable to air units the balance has been, imo, pushed too far the other way. Even if bombers should be able to destroy battleship armadas with a couple of strikes fighters definitely should not. I may have a look at the files and see if I can give fighters a penalty when attacking naval units.

The other thing I have just noticed is that previously a missile cruiser could fire at air units sitting on an enemy aerodrome and destroy them. That has been taken out. So something else I would not have changed.

[FearSunn]

Has anyone seen AI using Carriers?

[Traveler]

Originally posted by FearSunn:

Has anyone seen AI using Carriers?

Yes. But they never seem to actually have any planes on them.

[FearSunn]

Originally posted by Traveler:

Originally posted by FearSunn:

Has anyone seen AI using Carriers?

Yes. But they never seem to actually have any planes on them.

This is my observation also. It seems by "fixing" ground attack (strafe) Rebase and Deploy by AI was broken.

[cerberusiv]

I have now played enough against AI civs that have air units to draw some rather depressing conclusions. Essentially AI use of air units is still broken, just in some new ways.

This is all based on the base game without R&F and GS but after the update which was intended to bring the base game more or less in line with GS.

The good news is that the issues around not being able to deploy fighters from aircraft carriers is fixed. It now seems to work well. You simply select the fighter, click on the deploy button and choose the tile you want the fighter to protect. It will then intercept airstrikes on that tile and those immediately adjacent. When you move your carrier just do so, then select the fighter, select the deploy button and click on the new location for the fighter (I have only been positioning fighters directly over the carrier. That is enough to protect the carrier and up to 6 naval units in the adjacent tiles. If you want to cover a larger or different formation then you will need more fighters).

The AI will attack naval task forces even if they have enough fighters or jet fighters to take down the defending air cover. Then they pile in whatever they have left on the carrier then the other naval units. The effect is that there is a narrow window when you have battleships in which they can be used to bombard enemy cities down to the point they can be captured. Once the enemy has air units the removal of supporting AA fire from adjacent ships means that your naval units cannot go within range of enemy air units. In this case 2 P-51's were able to sink a battleship armada with around 20% damage to each of them. I don't even want to think what jet bombers could do. So if you get aluminium you have a virtually certain game winning advantage over an opponent who does not.

There is a further issue in that the AI appears to be able to see naval units, specifically submarines, when it has no units within legitimate spotting range.

The AI no longer appears to deploy fighter units defensively. In my current war Scythia has both bombers and jet fighters yet I am taking their empire apart with 8 jet bombers and 2 Helicopter armies. The jet fighters are not being used to protect AI cities from my jet bombers and no AI units are bombing my newly captured cities in order to reduce the defences and enable a ground unit to retake the city.

So the devs have fixed some things and basically broken several others in the process. Not for the first time.