Give me back Control of the Air Wing Size

[mdrdcd]

I've been out of game for sometime, back for new DLCs, and found out that air wing size is locked.

Really?

If AI can't cope with it, you fix the AI, or If there's a balance issue, you fix the balance, NOT removing a feature and limiting flexibility for the player.

Division Template, Ship, Tank, or Aircraft Designer were all meant to give the player flexibility, the very control on how to fight the WW2. That gives the player realistic immersion that we are actually in charge of a country. I believe that gives the player the joy in playing HoI series.

So, Give me back the Joy of building my own wings.

[Big [REDACTED] Marty]

no, you've been a naughty boy!

when you've earned it, you can have your air wing sizes back

[CommanderWayan]

Exactly, I cannot customize the size of my air wings especially in carriers. Either you have a 100-plane air wing or 10-plane ones. Super annoying.

[Big [REDACTED] Marty]

i love how the system to make organizing wings easier made organizing carrier wings harder, as if navy needed more reasons to avoid it

[Cal Corgan]

I'm actually kinda growing into it. Instead of one big air wing I now have air groups which I can customise for optimal mission functionality. An air group of 200 fighters and 200 dive bombers can now support an army as a unit. The only thing I would like now is to be able to give heavy fighters the ability to escort strategic bombers. In other words; create an air group of 200 strategic bombers and 200 heavy fighters for long-range bombing. The bombers do their work and the fighters do theirs; protect the bombers.

[fakemon64]

nah, air wing changes were for the best. its much easier to work with and balance standardized numbers.

[RoastCoffee]

Originally posted by fakemon64:

nah, air wing changes were for the best. its much easier to work with and balance standardized numbers.

Totally agree.

[TasteDasRainbow]

Firstly, to disclaim those claiming the system/AI improves from it, that's overtly false. The AI still will deploy too many fighters through underfilled wings, leaving us with the same issues as before.

Secondly, yes, losing control over air wings was one of the worst decisions possible. It was a lazy attempt to hard lock the ai that still didn't work, and now players lose control over how they deploy their air force.

And before anybody says so, nobody cares that aces are optimal at 100 wing size, any player can more than easily beat AI without optimal play, especially something as minor as that. It is not remotely a valid reason to hardlock player choice.

[Rabob]

Originally posted by fakemon64:

nah, air wing changes were for the best. its much easier to work with and balance standardized numbers.

For land based yes, but for carriers it's a mess. I think there are even modules (Japan?) which increase the decksize to an uneven number, making it impossible to fill out, or you overstack which gives huge penalties.

[Včelí medvídek]

Originally posted by mdrdcd:

Division Template, Ship, Tank, or Aircraft Designer were all meant to give the player flexibility, the very control on how to fight the WW2. That gives the player realistic immersion that we are actually in charge of a country. I believe that gives the player the joy in playing HoI series.

It make perfect sense the wing size is fixed, exactly same as batallion size, combat width or units benefiting from general bonus are fixed values for land combat. (and they have no other reason than game is set around those values)

The freedom of airfoce composition or design same as for template is still there (and was not before actually)

It was important and very good step for game balance.

[Včelí medvídek]

Originally posted by Calgoran:

I'm actually kinda growing into it. Instead of one big air wing I now have air groups which I can customise for optimal mission functionality. An air group of 200 fighters and 200 dive bombers can now support an army as a unit. The only thing I would like now is to be able to give heavy fighters the ability to escort strategic bombers. In other words; create an air group of 200 strategic bombers and 200 heavy fighters for long-range bombing. The bombers do their work and the fighters do theirs; protect the bombers.

Just set the fighters to air superiority that is how escorting works.

[CT]

I have to say that I miss the ability to set the air wing size too.

Without changing any of the other new features, it would have been ideal to allow smaller air wings. For example, the British used to get about 250 tactical bombers at the start or you could easily get that number before war. Split into wings of 50 each, you could cover all the adjacent waters around Britain including Norway, which radically impacted the U Boat onslaught. Now it seems that tac or naval bombers (longer range) are quite expensive to build and so I can never get more than about 100 tac bombers built in time (without totally skewing my build priorities), and this is just one air wing covering just one sea area. Being able to split it into two would at least cover the North Sea and the Western Approaches, the two most important seas (the Channel I cover with short range naval bombers).

Also, previously I used to pull all the carrier planes off and train them up, then redistribute them onto my preferred carriers, ensuring the carriers were the strongest I could get them when they actually entered battle. Now, they slowly fill across all carriers and if you remove them to land, they automatically become 100 plane air wings. This is definitely a poorer outcome than before the change.

If you do what I do, which is to build 4 Ark Royal class carriers before the war and two 1940 class carriers as soon as the tech is reasonable to research, you can find that you need a lot of factories on carrier planes to have any carriers in battle with full and fully trained air wings. The ability to dismount the air wings for training and reallocation meant I had new carriers in port with no planes as I slowly built up the reserves to stock them. Planes are fast to build, ships not so much, so drip feeding the new carriers into the mix like that worked well. Now, I have untrained and under-strength air wings or keep all carriers out of the fleets until the air wings are fully populated and I have had a chance to train them: the way I play that can be mid 1940.

[Včelí medvídek]

Originally posted by CT:

Ithem onto my preferred carriers, ensuring the carriers were the strongest I could get them when they actually entered battle. Now, they slowly fill across all carriers and if you remove them to land, they automatically become 100 plane air wings. This is definitely a poorer outcome than before the change.

.

There is nor reason wait for carriers - just create the wing and train it in advance (it will have size 100 but ti will shrink down once moved to carrier with no XP loss)

[budisourdog]

Originally posted by mdrdcd:

If AI can't cope with it, you fix the AI, or If there's a balance issue, you fix the balance, NOT removing a feature and limiting flexibility for the player.

100% agree. Carriers are even more of a headache than before, minor countries need to shift a lot more production to planes if they want to have an airforce, Axis countries like Germany and Japan find themselves wasting a lot of fuel keeping 100 craft wings flying in zones when 30 could just passively deter bombings just as well or even better if we got something akin to the naval strike force order, aircrafts only launch when necessary to defend like IRL, not fly all day everyday wasting fuel.

[budisourdog]

There was an argument that the ace buffs got broken funny when you put them on a tiny airwing; ok so just fix it. I never noticed or even heard of this before, only as an argument that the change was necessary.
It certainly doesn't fix the AI either, I can't count the number of times they stack hundreds more planes than the airbase can handle into one, and there's two empty bases in the neighboring states. They don't even seem to prioritize by distance, well not quite the right wording but like the AI will stack naval bombers in bases along the European frontlines where I'm trying to use my fighters and CAS to support the front; they just want to bomb convoys they could be doing this from England or Norway but no, gotta use the Netherlands bases...

[Včelí medvídek]

Originally posted by budisourdog:

There was an argument that the ace buffs got broken funny when you put them on a tiny airwing; ok so just fix it. I never noticed or even heard of this before, only as an argument that the change was necessary.
.

ACE bonus was always 100% for 100 wing size but calculated proportionally - hence with 10 wing size you could utilize 1000% ACE bonus.

And in opposite using large bomb wing like NAV or CAS made them overstack in single combat day and encounter caused to single unit/ship extreme damage (and in case of ship usually sink them way too easy) - this was never intended and bomb forces in region were still limited by combat width or weight that should in theory result size of wing does not matter at all but with combination how the wing participated in combat it was the truth.

And yeah by standarize the wing size to default that was always intended and optimal they solved all those balance issues + it streamlined airforce creation and management.