Very underrated channel. You've been my go to resource since bba dropped. And for the last few months you've been more informative than most of reddit and many of the other channels on yt insofar as data driven playtesting. Keep up the good work. I recommend you stream some let's plays to draw in some more viewership. You'll get there, just be persistent, and broaden your content style, but not too much.
1. Have you checked the effect of Radio Navigation 2 on CAS/TAC? I think it should be quite significant and worth taking. 2. Because there is a limit on number of planes that can join battle I think maxing out ground attack regardless of IC effectiveness is the way to go in most cases because once you reach that limit the utility of having more planes is zero. There are some exceptions to that, but for most SP games I'd say TACs with max out ground attack are the way to go, even with ~70 IC cost you can still get few hundred by the time war starts as most countries.
2:00 I guess the idea behind Cannon I and Cannon II is that Cannon I is like the cannons on a Ju-87G (wing mounted 37mm) and the Cannon II is like the cannon on a Hs-129 B-3 or a cannon on a B-25G (both 75mm)
Cannon 1 would be more like 20 mm and up, but under 30 mm and cannon 2 would be 30 mm and up (to like 45 mm max). The Hs-129 was never ment for air to air combat.
As someone who plays single player mostly, I think fighter/bombers are a viable strategy for a little bit of additional cas. Especially for nations with weaker industries like Italy or Japan. You obviously won’t get anywhere as much cas damage as you would with making dedicated cas or tac bombers but you can make up for it with sheer numbers as it will still kill the ai, if you make it right, and you don’t need to split production between two planes.
The nice part about a fighter/bomber is that I believe air attack on CAS helps to lower the chance they'll get intercepted and not enter the ground battle. One or two 4x machine guns or a Cannon II would worsen your fighter/bomber's cas ability slightly, but they'll end up killing more and when the air is bad you'll still be able to participate in ground battles more consistently.
If you play as japan you could make great use of the tac bombers. The high(possibly higher range than before), being able to attack both ships, troups defending an island and strat bomb any fort/port on said island is really strong as japan. Tacs would also work amazingly is china's big airzones. But due to the sheer cost you would be forced to ditch a bunch of other production, so thats the main downside. (Just speculations, havent actually tried it myself yet)=
I think your air strat is good, simple and good is better than complicated and great. But if 10ic on fighter/bomber why not 6 on fighters and 4 on CAS and make 2 better aircraft. You don't have to make everything. But grow your variations. It will turn you into a better General, lol.
@@timhand3380 I have just tried doing what i said myself, and the reason why you would focus fully on tac bombers is because, when going for china, you have no air opposition, and when invading indonesia and malasya u have little to no opposition if you quickly strat bomb the airports/do a coordinated landing on the ports and airports. The real moment that u need to diversify if you are a fighting america on american soil or help in europe. Tbh even india doesnt need that many, as tac bombers can defend themselves decently well. You can probably get away with tac AND bomber fighter but its not what i'd prefer to do lmao
Good analysis. I've been a huge Tac bomber stan since NSB. They really give you a lot of value. I think if you are not going to build fully tricked out CAS as a regional power you can do wonders with Small Fighters and TAC.
I think the mounting limits on the anti-tank cannon 1 and 2 is because the AT cannon 2 is something like a 75mm gun like they mounted on some B-25 variants and the AT cannon 1 is like the 37mm wing mounted pods that were on some Ju-87 variants. the AT2 is big enough that you can't mount in on the wings so only 1, the AT1's can be wing mounted because they are a smaller cannon so you can have more than one
I’m glad that I arrived at the same results as you did in my play throughs. Fighters with some cannons and CAS with stacked ground attack are amazingly effective. I hate that people actually believe heavy fighters to be improved with this update. This patch actually makes heavy fighters less worthwhile, because for less cost I can stack cannons on a fighter and still be able to shoot down bombers effectively. The heavy fighter got kicked out of its only niche.
The main point for the heavy fighter meta was the survivability, along with the ability to decimate cheap fighters but at a High starting IC cost. Over time this IC cost will become redundant as your industry will be built up and be able to roll them out to at least 3 heavy fighters a day. While this is happening you are contesting in the skies killing there fighters with less but... losing less of yours if you built them correctly. Eventually they will start having losses and you will get green air.
@@leiaorgana5098 The escalating nature of Industry in HOI4 actually favors the light fighter, because if you produce 6-12 fighters even if you lose 6 a day, still gains you fighter, the Heavy fighter goes 1-3 a day losing 1 is a day is less sustainable. The light fighter could have 18 fighters after 3 days of continuous combats and production, the Heavies will have 6. This requires the HF to be 3x more effective than the LF, and continue to be more effective as time goes on.
@@Sufferingzify Correct, but that's if you a producing the cheap fighter to keep cost low and output high, those cheap fighters will still be getting shot down easily. The heavies can be 3x more effective but 3x more expensive, preferably you would want to have a basic design most of the time and use that design with each new airframe you research. While upgrading tech to make your cannons better for the initial air attack buff it receives. You don't have to fill out all the slots. If you were to upgrade the small fighter as time goes on it becomes more expensive as well from 25ic and up to 35-40 for later models.
We need an update giving some specialize manpower pool to have some interest to lose less tanks or planes crew In reality losing 10 fighters is losing 10 pilots and it was a real struggle in the real war. Building strategies should be influenced by this aspect like it was in reality. For example, USA specifically build the high production cost P47 Merlin which is design to maximize the survivability of the pilot (same for the Sherman). On the other hand Japan have a very fragile plane which become useless when they run out of trained pilot. UK almost run out of pilot and it was the main red line of the Battle of Britain, more than how many planes they can produce. Etc... Also in air combat, the experience of a pilot have a lot of value. So maximise his survivability with high IC cost planes should be compensate with experience gain and combat effectivness or more ACE generated. They also can simulate the recover of the crew if the planes are shut down in friendly territory or under control see. For the tank it can be if it was in defense or attack. Etc. So if the game can simulate this aspect, and if country have different situation, we will have a way more diverse building strategies. The goal is to end the universal optimum "excel proof IC effectiveness" strategies that we have today.
What do you think of using the early or even interwar medium airframes for Ground attack, since they have an extra slot for ground attack compared to the equivalent light airframe? (just put a 2x light MG in the first slot to make it cheap) 1940 CAS is still better i think, but you can start producing the Medium Airframes much earlier.
Question I thought of while watching, since mediums can stack higher air defense, would you lose less planes to AA and enemy fighters, even if you do less ground attack? i feel like in this patch my CAS gets shredded by AA so fast
Thank you for these great simulations. Did you happen to also do some test seeing how these design hold up in contest air space or when the enemy uses interceptors?
this is insane the meta fighter he showed is the exact one I came up with in my single player game lol cheers also thanks for clarifying CAS I was lost on it & kept spaming cas medframes lol
The major thing I’ve learned with some experimentation is that in the majority of cases, go for quality over quantity. I’ve gotten air superiority with a few hundred 1936 fighters over a couple thousand inter war fighters. Plus, if you’re a country that needs a TON of air power , you’ll likely have the industry for it. Countries like Germany and the Soviets have the industry to have green air over the entire front, while places like the UK may have less industry, but are able to hyper focus on where to put it based on where their offensives are taking place. All in all, make the best damn planes you can, update them when new engines and such come out, and don’t worry about IC so much. Tanks can be made so the quantity outweighs the quality, but with planes, 1 great plane is worth 2 mediocre ones.
Quantity win wars, just like in HoI4 and real life. You rather have 50 good enough 40 width medium tank divisions than 10 super good ones, same is true for planes I mean yeah if you fight over Britain sure a few good planes supported by radar could be enough, but have you tried the same with good enough planes that cost way less and you can spit out like no tomorrow? Result will most likely be the same.
we're waiting on a CV Naval Bomber fix, which should be coming down. If we are REALLY lucky, PDX will fix CV Fighters to fend off land based Naval Bombers. I think the meta is stacked Light Cruisers with light heavy batteries and buckets of armor, as destroyers just melt in the current game. For Capitals, I am not sure. Probably just upgrade your starting fleet once you have the designer with Fire Control and Radar. CVs are broken (yes, again). Otherwise, just use Maritime Patrol Craft, as they should attack with the same planes per craft, but hit three times harder (there is a max frontage rule in naval strikes). That means more hits converted to kills.
@@Descolata So as of 1.12.2, the navy was badly bugged, You can look it up on the paradox forums, but the "Speed Fix" was actually backwards. While I was typing a long winded explanation 1.12.3 dropped making the info I was going to give you useless. Now that the ship speed is fixed, I would try those same light cruisers again, and they should get hit now that their speed isn't being doubled while their vis is halved. This was the same across all ships, but it made any ship that was evasion tanking almost immune to taking hits.
The tac bomb cas has the unexpected benefit of rarely dying ever when maxing out armor plating. Keep rushing down engines and plane models for more modules and you'll eventually get to a point where you can produce these CAS behemoths and they'll almost never die. The majority of those lost in my playthrough were from armored trains and static AA when doing logi strikes. I even yeeted them into red air and they didn't care at all. If I replaced a couple modules for Cannon IIs, they might have even out-traded the enemy fighters in terms of IC while they're CASing stuff down. Not sure if it was because of the max armor or the insane speed high-tech engines give, but both mediums and larges get to a point where they'll rarely ever die. Also did the same with large nav bombers. They were also nearly unkillable and didn't lose a whole lot to kill off carriers and battleships. Never yet tried 5x Cannon IIs on medium yet, but I imagine that'd be really good, but they'd need the jet engine to get the plating up to a point where they'd die slower than they're produced.
I go with option 3: 1936 medium frame, small LMG (yes, it's technically a fighter), 3 bomb locks, twin engine 2. 18 ground attack, 28 IC. Slightly more expensive than your "middle-ground" CAS, but works on 1936 tech, so you can get a head start on CAS production, and has the range to do naval patrolling. Only other downside is that it's a twin engine, so more fuel consumption. It's even better on the USA bcs they get a 10% heavy fighter cost reduction.
if you want to minmax its better to start sonner , that way you can train your airwings faster AND if you fiddle with the reinforcement/wings , you could exlusivly train your wings on old planes and switch them to new when they finish as they seamed to boosted accident chances so you do lose more planes more when exercising not to say you can send them to wars early (etiopia or spain) and get both XP and maybe lucky ace
Hey, not sure if they've changed it since I did my test run but I was able to put a single Anti-Tank Cannon 2 *alongside* 2 Anti-Tank Cannon 1s, ends up about 35 ground attack or something. Not sure if that bit extra makes the cost worthwhile, just thought I'd contribute what I saw.
The best MP "copium arguments" for HFs are air wing XP gain and number of planes per base, especially in restricted air zones like Egypt. What's the result of longer term fighter v HF testing and how many of each type can you cram into Egypt air zone from the standard Libya + Marsa Matruh vs Egypt airbases?
@@28lobster28 Competitive against each other, the AI is so bad you can conquer the entire world with inter-war tanks and biplanes and sub 2 spam and random multiplayer games the players are mix of really bad and more into role playing rather than sweating for 5 hours just to have 20 minutes fight.
@@SMGJohn Agreed on the AI, a couple light tanks and you win. That why it's way more fun playing with people that make it actually challenging. If the war only lasts 20min, need your host to do some lobby micro and balance the teams!
yes, this topic would be very interesting. it is very bad not to be allowed to design a NAV for medium airframe, historically, in ww2 the best land based NAVs were medium airframes. in order to reduce IC, i make a design for a medium airframe and put the cheapest machine gun and then as many torpedoes as I can ... so i hunt ships with heavy fighters LoL
It was an oversight from PDX to not include medium CAS/NAV (since you can get heavy NAV...) There were plenty of medium/twin engine planes for those roles irl, but you have to make a heavy fighter to equip either of them (or a TAC which is VERY expensive). Thats one less useful slot, plus messes with deployment. But yeah, I went for the heavy fighter approach, and realised very fast that the only thing going for it is the range, the small one can do the same damage for 30% less cost. In single player a cannon II fighter will trade with the AI like 50:1 even if outnumbered in most cases, and will shoot down like 50 bombers a month too. The jump in damage from HMG to cannons is ridiculously huge. Also found torpedo bombers less useful, since a basic sub III with a single torpedo was able to go toe to toe with AI dessies and even doomstacks and if i set them to always engage they just sank everything with acceptable losses (10x10 stacks operating over a large area). I had to check multiple times to see if my mods broke the thing or not, but they haven't touched air and navy...
@@iandomorocks6731 and now even their naming sucks... earlier at least you got 'historic plane name mk.XXIV' or something, now you get 'medium template mk.II'. But after replaying a few times, I encountered germany with cannon-fighters, that was a first. Usually their planes have like 8-12 air attack, this one had a solid 20, by far the highest I've seen from the AI. Almost traded evenly when I had to drop the self sealing fuel tanks for lack of rubber (although if I count the cas I shot down, it was still more like 2 to 1)
@@bencom01 That and no matter what you make it always defaults to the same picture too so you can have modern fighters that look the same as inter-war.
@@iandomorocks6731 if you select a picture other than the default it will retain that, but if you select the default, it will use the interwar fighter for some reason. for me every country's every carrier fighter will get the jet icon and my heart always skips a beat thinking they rushed jet fighters in '40... :D i wish we had more variety in icons, if at least you could pick from any one and not just your own countries default 3-4, it would be nice.
so i played a bit with the new DLC/Patch. and i noticed that u take insane losses when u do Logi.-strikes with CAS. probably because of the new armored Trains. i wonder if "Tac-CAS" is much better at it because of the higher Defense?
I like to put on one heavy cannon on the small frame and the reduced materials module. Defense is like 7 but attack is like 20 and they cost like 1 allum and 1 rubber.
I found that using the small air frame To build some so-called fighters with two cannons and two bomb racks is very effective. you need less research overall and these things can also be used for air superiority in the beginning of a conflict
You can probably get away with turrets, but you need to have armor, which you give up for having turrets. I did 4x HMG on my full-armor medium CAS to turn them into heavy fighters and they were able to cas and logi bomb under red air, but it wasn't that good. They almost never died, but their cost was insane, so their numbers were meh. I should've swapped a cas mod and the HMG out for air attack cannons. That might've made them feel better and start killing off a lot of their fighters. I'm not too sure if it's even possible to kill off a good amount of intercepting fighters. First they have to find your plane and since AI doesn't do radar, the odds of an enemy plane finding a bomber are small, then your plane has to deal enough damage to kill them, which might be difficult for anything whose primary purpose is CAS. It's probably possible to drop an armor or two in SP and not see losses spike up. AI seems to really like small airframes, which never pack enough punch to bring down survival-oriented larger planes. A turret or two could increase their losses and reduce their interception enough to make the small uptick in your losses worthwhile, but it's really hard to justify skimping on survivability on something that costs this much.
im pretty shure that you can put 2 at cannon1 on cas along with the at cannon 2, it gives something like 30|+ ground attack, unless it was patched that is.
I’d argue it’s worth it to go for max ground attack no matter the cost. As you have limited number of planes in combat. You don’t have a benefit from more CAS Planes.
That's what I was thinking too. Its not about DMG per IC but DMG per Planes actually fighting. Having 3000 cheap CAS vs 1000 Max CAS when only 500 sortie in a battle is all wasted IC anyways. IC efficiency only matters for fighters or minors that can't afford more than the most efficient IC CAS. That is all assuming the old "3x of combat width = plane combat width" still applies.
I think in practicality agility is important. CAS fighting the allies when they have 3k fighters those planes with 3 bomb locks will get shredded. Anti tank and rockets are the best that I noticed
Here's a fun multirole aircraft I played with: Advanced Small Airframe: 2x 2 Cannon II 2x Rocket Rails The design still loses to 71Cloak's design, however it still performs well in combat while doing decent Logistics bombing. Also all the agility on CAS mission and the high Air Attack means it stands a decent chance of shooting down anything that intercepts it. If you want to delete your CAS line and make only fighters, I could see a really good use case for this plane... also it is literally a late Me262's armament
There's no point to multi-role planes though, you can only fit a certain amount of CAS into a battle so you should make them as min-maxxed as possible. Meanwhile fighters need every bit of attack and defence as possible, thus they should be minmaxxed as well.
@@ThatZenoGuy yep, that's what my testing discovered too. That's why I said the multirole design was only able to do a decent job of both air superiority and Logistics Bombing, not CAS. Agility is rather important on CAS actually, and with armored trains getting AA, again the multirole fighter has SOME potential, but it really isn't anything that building a fighter and then a CAS couldn't do better
Its a 10% cost difference between 18 and 6 ground attack. (Or 4 and 12 once rockets are a thing.) Not filling the slots was a meme choice. Similarly, there is a 20% cost between 24 and 18 ground attack (Small bomb bay), so a 20% more cost for 33% more attack? Mind you, if you are worried about interceptors but do need CAS, one possibility is to have an even mix of small bomb bays and rockets. The average ground attack is equal to that of bomb locks, but the average agility cost is only 10. So you can have relatively inexpensive cas that can evade enemy heavy fighters but can still inflict acceptable casualties. Rockets in general are kinda funny for being actually free, and fighter 3's getting a dedicated rocket slot (But you can't assign them to ground pound when there are no enemy fighters present.)
Hey curious what you Think about Feedback’s newest video about this exact thing? He took kind of a different approach when he said he’s not worried about production cost but I think that was only so it didn’t seem like he was copying your stuff like he has done many times in the past.
Feedback doesn't care about Production cost for a very specific reason. He doesn't play MP at all. He literally could not care less about the MP meta and as such all of his plane designs are intended for SP.
Sidenote: if you are building meta planes in SP, it's wasteful anyway. The AI rarely makes anything even close to comparable to meta builds, and the fighters rarely have 20 Air Attack.
I don't know. The base fighter was a bit weak. Once you start using engine 2s and higher speed difference isn't going to be that substantial. At that point you have 3 stats, air attack, air defense, and agility. All 3 of which have their benefits but air attack and air defense are the things your going to care about. You can't control agility in any meaningful way. Only HF vs LF. So really just pick the one you want to use (I prefer light fighters) and then work on attack and defense. Excess thrust giving 3 kmh per 1 thrust is useless so use that thrust for stats. Also don't use 2 engings on light fighters.
@@ezganks71 The point being, that you can do some ludicrously stupid builds in SP, and still win. Mostly because the AI is very very unintelligent with its designs. He (feedback) literally cares not for the IC because in the end, he'll still win. TLDR; Feedback and Cloak are attacking 2 separate problems. Cloak is addressing the multiplayer sweat meta, and Feedback isn't. IC matters way way more in MP metas, because players tend to make more intelligent decisions, this is why Paradox inflates difficulty by buffing the resources of the AI. It literally has to cheat to be difficult. The AI in HOI is just.... dumb to say the least.
As far as the early (1936) design CAS goes, on Germany I design a medium airframe "heavy fighter" (quotes only because of 2 main LMG I put on it) + 3 Bomb locks + 2 Engine 2's + Self-sealing tanks. I generally dislike the idea of med bomb bay and doing it my way it will count as a Heavy fighter to get that extra -2.5% Prod cost from Rudolf Hess
@@uber7586 well you just taught me something new, maybe I should've thought twice about correcting someone with a german username. also I realize now that you said early design. I might have to try this
Can you do a test with high armor and tons of turrets on a medium bomber and a heavy bomber. Like a gun ship idea. To see how well they perform with shooting down planes
IF you have the Industry, maxing out ground attack on Tac bombers is better because of the Plane limit on combat width. You also have the Range to cover some of the stupidly large air zones that are outside of Europe. If it wasnt for these large air zones and how mission efficiency works, CAS would be a lot better.
Anti Tank cannons 1 are like the german 30mm MK 103 cannons, or the russian 23mm cannons, while the AT Cannon 2 is like the HS 129 B-3, with a tank cannon strapped to it. That's the difference, one is using auto-cannons with high pen rounds, the other is a main tank cannon strapped to a plane.
Thanks for clarifying, I totally misunderstood the Bomb locks and small bomb bays completely cause I got bamboozled by how the UI works and shows the stats and hides the stats when you hover over the missions or not or the modules. Very unintuitive. Everything is less intuitive to be quite frank, they achieved the opposite of what they set their goals to be for everything, land, naval, air. Doctrines, designs, templates. Everything is befuddling and complicated.
Food for thought MPs guys prefer the heavy fighter because of the amount range and air superiority it can give aiding ground attack. They don't focus on prolonged combat more about bursts of damage
You get less air superiority from the HF though. Sure it gives 1.25 per plane but if you only have 60% of the planes the enemy has because they are using light fighters then the end result is 75% of the raw air superiority figure. On top of that, how are you bursting done more planes when after a few months you have lost more. That makes no sense. Oh and that's before you consider fuel usage of 0.64 vs about .4. I don't know. None of that seems worth an additional 100 range on your fighters.
rockets are for mostly , for fighters , cost only 1 prod , and when you get air superiority that enemy does not have air , you can switch your fighters to ether logistic strike or ground support:) so you can just slap them on fighters for hardly any cost and no penalties aside from 1 production cost
Since you can't cas stack anymore I think it is better just to get the maximum ic best ground attack cas so that the 300 that go into the battle are insane. That would use the small bomb bays and at 1+2.
you need to test the 2 fighters when they're both shooting down tactical or strat bombers. Yes, ic for ic in air supremacy the light fighter will win due to agility, and it's not that much better, but when it comes to killing bombers i'd wager (haven't tested it) that the heavy fighters will do a better job of killing them.
I think small bomb bay only allows port strikes but not naval strike is because bombs are inaccurate so bombing a non moving port would result in some damage. But bomb bay bombing moving ships would just be extremely hard to hit.........I'm guessing.
Pretty much. Level-bombing ships was a nearly a complete waste of time and ordnance. Bomb locks are for diving attacks, which were the main way to actually get bomb hits on a moving ship.
I'm happy in my first bba play I basically guessed all these builds. I made awesome fighters/cas/all around tacs and had way less planes than usually and always had green air, which surprised me as usually red vs France and mostly green with one zone red vs Sov
@@TopShot501st Except that's not true. The biggest thing I see that people overlook in plane design videos is Air Mission Effeciency, IE how many planes assigned to the mission can actually take part, and the chief contributor to this is the plane's range. If you assign a squadron to a air-zone but that squadron can only cover 70% of that zone, you get 70% air mission effenincy, meaning only 70 planes out of 100 actually do anything. You want you range to be has high as possible without sacrificing air/ground attack, and the easiest and cheapest way is by rushing Aircraft Range Studies and put something like drop tanks on your planes, and ideally you want 700+ km range. Furthermore, you also want to prioritize capturing airfields when pushing your front lines. Not only will this give your airforce a staging point to strike deeper into enemy territory, it'll also force your enemy to relocate their aircraft, and likely dropping their air efficiency, making them less effective and easier to shoot down. It is entirely possible to decimate an enemy airforce that out numbers yours if you have higher air mission effency than your enemy.
I would advise extra fuel tanks instead of drop tanks. More range, and more importantly less weight. Defence shouldn't matter since you will have fighters escorting.
okay so as Japan i need long range CAS cos as you know USSR at the east have large lands and have very low supply even for China, so light cas wont reach. and the allies are separated with big oceans. simply i use Medium Airframe Tactical bombers. my build have 1 fuel tank, 1 armor plate, 1 dual defense tower, 1 tactical bombs, 2 small CAS bombs and 1 locked bomb. i also build 2 other types 1 for naval and 1 heavy fighter and both are long range too.
Considering how the MtG naval designer turned into "spam cheap ships, quality is worthless, if you have more ships than the enemy you win", I have to applaud Paradox for making quality (and arguably more realistic) designs the way to go for planes. This means your planes get progressively better the more stuff you unlock instead of already being "maxed out" with a bare-bones 1936 plane. They might not have done it on purpose, but credit where credit is due.
It's more realistic to an extent, but I don't like how air attack is one single value that makes cannons superior. IRL machine guns were better against fighters while cannons were better against bombers (until sufficiently fast-firing cannons were developed). There is absolutely no reason to ever use light machine guns, because cannons > HMGs > LMGs. If you design historical German planes you're gimping yourself, even though historically it was the industry and usage of the Luftwaffe that doomed it, not the plane designs themselves. Also the lack of downside to squeezing in a set of cannons and 2 sets of 4 HMGs onto regular fighters is pronounced. Sure, you could kill anything you got on target, but you can still shoot only in front and the enormous weight of the guns and ammunition would make dogfighting a bad idea. There's not enough of a downside for regular fighters compared to heavy fighters.
50 cals had one massive advantage though. Ammo. The smaller sizes meant they could carry substantially more ammo. Not that the US didn't try to replace them anyways. There is a reason every nation moved towards 20 to 30 mm cannons as time went on.
@@71Cloak Substantially more ammo, substantially more hits needed to down a target. The small incendiary payloads also meant igniting fuel tanks was a challenge, especially against the new and more resistant jet fighters.
The thing with heavy vs normal fighters is in Single-player. Any enemy AI isn't going to build the most optimal min-maxed plane. So testing the best heavy vs the best normal isn't useful except for MP purposes. In that case I fully agree a normal fighter will be superior in every aspect except range. In a Single-player game normal fighters are going to still take combat losses even while it's dominating. A good heavy fighter design with enough air defense can literally take 0 combat losses in some instances like the Spanish civil war or if you want to send volunteers to China/Japan. Most of the heavy fighters losses will be due to accidents.
@@manaintolerantmage I ain't got time for that, this is pretty easily proved early in a game though. I've also watched his test video, he indeed did not cover what I said. Just send your proposed air builds as volunteers to Spain and watch the losses. You still win but will definitely lose some planes in combat. Send some high air defense heavies and they take near 0 losses in combat.
What to make of the module that reduce the night penalty ? Such as the Ground Radar that reduce that gives a -30% reduction for a 2IC cost. Also, if you play a nation with easy access to rubber, than Self Sealing tanks looks like a god compo to have on.
I really think I was missing out on not getting this DLC. The 'vanilla' aircraft are so bad to the point of being unusable at times. The ones we can get now feel very strong (though not overpowered) and really compliment the ground forces. Still not assigning CAS to armies though. Every time I do they rebase to far off airfields out of range of combat. Micro-management all the way.
I think Tac vs CAS is based on what Nation you play it's more practical and IC cost for the USA and Japan to build Tac Bombers. Also The USA will want A Tac bomber that specializes in Nav Bombing with Floats on it . The Strat Maine Patrol is a IC meme don't built it . Use a TAC with2 Torp Mounts on a Basic Frame and that will last you the whole war. No need to build a small frame Nav Bomber . The Improved or Mitchel is use more fro Ground and Stat . And Logi Stikes. and with the US and USSR you will only ever need the B-17 or Basic Frame for Strat Bombing. Why? Range instead of adding more fuel tanks and making the plane less defensive. If your a european Nation CAS is the the way to go even if you going to do Strat Bombing then dedicate a Tac Bomber for that such as Britain. England and Germany will need small frame NAV Bombers. All nations will need Dedicated Small Fighters Only Major Nations will be able to add Heavy Fighters for Bomber inception (Except England you won't have the production to Make Heavy's)
I wouldn't really bother with them. They can only cas or do supremacy and they are worse at both. If you focus more on the fighter side you get a bomber that does as much damage as the cheap model with nothin on it. If you focus on building one that can do some cas damage then you get a fighter that won't do much. I just don't think they are very worth it.
@@71Cloak Well in the late game you can add both Rocket rails and Bomb locks without sacrificing agility. I think those might be worth it, especially if you are using 1944 airframes since you can also put a lot of cannons and MGs in them (more slots).
unless you are industry giant heavy fighters still more reliable you do lose less plane per combat you can cover more areas with high range no need to build air fields after couple of tiles. Most importantly if you are defending a line and if you did upgraded region AA to max heavy fighters from back of the hot zone can reach red zone easly cover whole area and lose couple of planes while enemy drop down from sky like rocks. i usualy max def instead of attack so i lose only couple of planes while enemy lose so many. Also İC cost is depent on engine you can get away with very cheap engines for heavy figters. ESP on naval areas tac nav bombers are way to go. small naval bombers are crap they lose 30 40 plane per fight against enemy stack fleets. while tac navs only lose 4 5. for CAS tho yea small cass is way better you can stack 1 tier 2 canon with 2 tier 1 canons and put drop tank and seal tank plus radio for %20 night time fighting. yes it does give strat bombing as stat but gives night penalty redu for everything. %20 is huge boost
Very underrated channel. You've been my go to resource since bba dropped. And for the last few months you've been more informative than most of reddit and many of the other channels on yt insofar as data driven playtesting. Keep up the good work. I recommend you stream some let's plays to draw in some more viewership. You'll get there, just be persistent, and broaden your content style, but not too much.
I'd also like to see some Let's Plays, especially if there are some pauses during play to insert his insightful analysis.
His popularity is growing, he is getting there.
Russia:
Write that down!
At cannon and rockets perform very well for me, way less casualities than with bombs.
1. Have you checked the effect of Radio Navigation 2 on CAS/TAC? I think it should be quite significant and worth taking.
2. Because there is a limit on number of planes that can join battle I think maxing out ground attack regardless of IC effectiveness is the way to go in most cases because once you reach that limit the utility of having more planes is zero. There are some exceptions to that, but for most SP games I'd say TACs with max out ground attack are the way to go, even with ~70 IC cost you can still get few hundred by the time war starts as most countries.
The virgin "big stat go brr" vs the chad 71Cloak "If it works in test its good" enjoyer, awesome vid btw
2:00
I guess the idea behind Cannon I and Cannon II is that Cannon I is like the cannons on a Ju-87G (wing mounted 37mm) and the Cannon II is like the cannon on a Hs-129 B-3 or a cannon on a B-25G (both 75mm)
No, anti tank cannons are a specific module that you can put on planes, the normal air-air cannons are just auto cannons.
Cannon 1 would be more like 20 mm and up, but under 30 mm and cannon 2 would be 30 mm and up (to like 45 mm max). The Hs-129 was never ment for air to air combat.
Really appreciate the demos that you run to prove your point and like that you include them in your video. Thanks!
As someone who plays single player mostly, I think fighter/bombers are a viable strategy for a little bit of additional cas. Especially for nations with weaker industries like Italy or Japan. You obviously won’t get anywhere as much cas damage as you would with making dedicated cas or tac bombers but you can make up for it with sheer numbers as it will still kill the ai, if you make it right, and you don’t need to split production between two planes.
The nice part about a fighter/bomber is that I believe air attack on CAS helps to lower the chance they'll get intercepted and not enter the ground battle. One or two 4x machine guns or a Cannon II would worsen your fighter/bomber's cas ability slightly, but they'll end up killing more and when the air is bad you'll still be able to participate in ground battles more consistently.
If you play as japan you could make great use of the tac bombers. The high(possibly higher range than before), being able to attack both ships, troups defending an island and strat bomb any fort/port on said island is really strong as japan. Tacs would also work amazingly is china's big airzones. But due to the sheer cost you would be forced to ditch a bunch of other production, so thats the main downside. (Just speculations, havent actually tried it myself yet)=
I think your air strat is good, simple and good is better than complicated and great.
But if 10ic on fighter/bomber why not 6 on fighters and 4 on CAS and make 2 better aircraft.
You don't have to make everything. But grow your variations. It will turn you into a better General, lol.
@@timhand3380 I have just tried doing what i said myself, and the reason why you would focus fully on tac bombers is because, when going for china, you have no air opposition, and when invading indonesia and malasya u have little to no opposition if you quickly strat bomb the airports/do a coordinated landing on the ports and airports. The real moment that u need to diversify if you are a fighting america on american soil or help in europe. Tbh even india doesnt need that many, as tac bombers can defend themselves decently well. You can probably get away with tac AND bomber fighter but its not what i'd prefer to do lmao
Love your channel, thank you. PS - the last bit about best fighter.., highly valuable.
Good analysis. I've been a huge Tac bomber stan since NSB. They really give you a lot of value. I think if you are not going to build fully tricked out CAS as a regional power you can do wonders with Small Fighters and TAC.
Note to people, main IC cost is tied to the engine now over the airframe after the patch that came out the 8.10.2022.
I think the mounting limits on the anti-tank cannon 1 and 2 is because the AT cannon 2 is something like a 75mm gun like they mounted on some B-25 variants and the AT cannon 1 is like the 37mm wing mounted pods that were on some Ju-87 variants. the AT2 is big enough that you can't mount in on the wings so only 1, the AT1's can be wing mounted because they are a smaller cannon so you can have more than one
I was looking forward to see this video :)
I’m glad that I arrived at the same results as you did in my play throughs. Fighters with some cannons and CAS with stacked ground attack are amazingly effective. I hate that people actually believe heavy fighters to be improved with this update. This patch actually makes heavy fighters less worthwhile, because for less cost I can stack cannons on a fighter and still be able to shoot down bombers effectively. The heavy fighter got kicked out of its only niche.
And you can increase the range of light aircraft quite significantly
The main point for the heavy fighter meta was the survivability, along with the ability to decimate cheap fighters but at a High starting IC cost.
Over time this IC cost will become redundant as your industry will be built up and be able to roll them out to at least 3 heavy fighters a day.
While this is happening you are contesting in the skies killing there fighters with less but... losing less of yours if you built them correctly.
Eventually they will start having losses and you will get green air.
@@leiaorgana5098 The escalating nature of Industry in HOI4 actually favors the light fighter, because if you produce 6-12 fighters even if you lose 6 a day, still gains you fighter, the Heavy fighter goes 1-3 a day losing 1 is a day is less sustainable. The light fighter could have 18 fighters after 3 days of continuous combats and production, the Heavies will have 6. This requires the HF to be 3x more effective than the LF, and continue to be more effective as time goes on.
@@Sufferingzify Correct, but that's if you a producing the cheap fighter to keep cost low and output high, those cheap fighters will still be getting shot down easily.
The heavies can be 3x more effective but 3x more expensive, preferably you would want to have a basic design most of the time and use that design with each new airframe you research.
While upgrading tech to make your cannons better for the initial air attack buff it receives.
You don't have to fill out all the slots.
If you were to upgrade the small fighter as time goes on it becomes more expensive as well from 25ic and up to 35-40 for later models.
We need an update giving some specialize manpower pool to have some interest to lose less tanks or planes crew
In reality losing 10 fighters is losing 10 pilots and it was a real struggle in the real war.
Building strategies should be influenced by this aspect like it was in reality.
For example, USA specifically build the high production cost P47 Merlin which is design to maximize the survivability of the pilot (same for the Sherman). On the other hand Japan have a very fragile plane which become useless when they run out of trained pilot. UK almost run out of pilot and it was the main red line of the Battle of Britain, more than how many planes they can produce. Etc...
Also in air combat, the experience of a pilot have a lot of value. So maximise his survivability with high IC cost planes should be compensate with experience gain and combat effectivness or more ACE generated. They also can simulate the recover of the crew if the planes are shut down in friendly territory or under control see. For the tank it can be if it was in defense or attack. Etc.
So if the game can simulate this aspect, and if country have different situation, we will have a way more diverse building strategies. The goal is to end the universal optimum "excel proof IC effectiveness" strategies that we have today.
Cool stuff, love your channel!
What do you think of using the early or even interwar medium airframes for Ground attack, since they have an extra slot for ground attack compared to the equivalent light airframe? (just put a 2x light MG in the first slot to make it cheap) 1940 CAS is still better i think, but you can start producing the Medium Airframes much earlier.
Thanks a ton for all the info this update.
Question I thought of while watching, since mediums can stack higher air defense, would you lose less planes to AA and enemy fighters, even if you do less ground attack? i feel like in this patch my CAS gets shredded by AA so fast
Thank you for these great simulations. Did you happen to also do some test seeing how these design hold up in contest air space or when the enemy uses interceptors?
Amazing work! Will you be doing naval tests to see the difference since BBA?
this is insane the meta fighter he showed is the exact one I came up with in my single player game lol cheers also thanks for clarifying CAS I was lost on it & kept spaming cas medframes lol
The major thing I’ve learned with some experimentation is that in the majority of cases, go for quality over quantity. I’ve gotten air superiority with a few hundred 1936 fighters over a couple thousand inter war fighters. Plus, if you’re a country that needs a TON of air power , you’ll likely have the industry for it. Countries like Germany and the Soviets have the industry to have green air over the entire front, while places like the UK may have less industry, but are able to hyper focus on where to put it based on where their offensives are taking place.
All in all, make the best damn planes you can, update them when new engines and such come out, and don’t worry about IC so much. Tanks can be made so the quantity outweighs the quality, but with planes, 1 great plane is worth 2 mediocre ones.
Quantity win wars, just like in HoI4 and real life.
You rather have 50 good enough 40 width medium tank divisions than 10 super good ones, same is true for planes I mean yeah if you fight over Britain sure a few good planes supported by radar could be enough, but have you tried the same with good enough planes that cost way less and you can spit out like no tomorrow? Result will most likely be the same.
Nice video. Could you also do one about the naval changes?
we're waiting on a CV Naval Bomber fix, which should be coming down. If we are REALLY lucky, PDX will fix CV Fighters to fend off land based Naval Bombers.
I think the meta is stacked Light Cruisers with light heavy batteries and buckets of armor, as destroyers just melt in the current game. For Capitals, I am not sure. Probably just upgrade your starting fleet once you have the designer with Fire Control and Radar. CVs are broken (yes, again).
Otherwise, just use Maritime Patrol Craft, as they should attack with the same planes per craft, but hit three times harder (there is a max frontage rule in naval strikes). That means more hits converted to kills.
@@Descolata someone already uploaded an fix to the naval bombers on the workshop. But the CV fighters are still bugged
@@Descolata So as of 1.12.2, the navy was badly bugged, You can look it up on the paradox forums, but the "Speed Fix" was actually backwards. While I was typing a long winded explanation 1.12.3 dropped making the info I was going to give you useless. Now that the ship speed is fixed, I would try those same light cruisers again, and they should get hit now that their speed isn't being doubled while their vis is halved. This was the same across all ships, but it made any ship that was evasion tanking almost immune to taking hits.
I literally ended up with the same fighter model, it performs very well on testing
Common 71cloak W
Ye I needed this
Also can u see what all Of the different plane designer of different country do like the chineese Japanese and generic
The tac bomb cas has the unexpected benefit of rarely dying ever when maxing out armor plating. Keep rushing down engines and plane models for more modules and you'll eventually get to a point where you can produce these CAS behemoths and they'll almost never die. The majority of those lost in my playthrough were from armored trains and static AA when doing logi strikes. I even yeeted them into red air and they didn't care at all. If I replaced a couple modules for Cannon IIs, they might have even out-traded the enemy fighters in terms of IC while they're CASing stuff down.
Not sure if it was because of the max armor or the insane speed high-tech engines give, but both mediums and larges get to a point where they'll rarely ever die.
Also did the same with large nav bombers. They were also nearly unkillable and didn't lose a whole lot to kill off carriers and battleships.
Never yet tried 5x Cannon IIs on medium yet, but I imagine that'd be really good, but they'd need the jet engine to get the plating up to a point where they'd die slower than they're produced.
I love the flying tank strategy.
@@Zorro9129 so did the soviets ;)
I trust your more then the MP meta community because you can explain your decisions better then them
I go with option 3: 1936 medium frame, small LMG (yes, it's technically a fighter), 3 bomb locks, twin engine 2. 18 ground attack, 28 IC. Slightly more expensive than your "middle-ground" CAS, but works on 1936 tech, so you can get a head start on CAS production, and has the range to do naval patrolling. Only other downside is that it's a twin engine, so more fuel consumption. It's even better on the USA bcs they get a 10% heavy fighter cost reduction.
Should you build up your airforce with 1936 tech or wait until you have 1940 tech and focus on other Equipment before that?
if you want to minmax its better to start sonner , that way you can train your airwings faster AND if you fiddle with the reinforcement/wings , you could exlusivly train your wings on old planes and switch them to new when they finish
as they seamed to boosted accident chances so you do lose more planes more when exercising
not to say you can send them to wars early (etiopia or spain) and get both XP and maybe lucky ace
Of course, start 1936 and grow it to take advantage of efficiency growth, always start early as much as possible
depends on your nation but air is so important that most nations want to start mass producing planes way before the war.
Hey, not sure if they've changed it since I did my test run but I was able to put a single Anti-Tank Cannon 2 *alongside* 2 Anti-Tank Cannon 1s, ends up about 35 ground attack or something. Not sure if that bit extra makes the cost worthwhile, just thought I'd contribute what I saw.
The best MP "copium arguments" for HFs are air wing XP gain and number of planes per base, especially in restricted air zones like Egypt. What's the result of longer term fighter v HF testing and how many of each type can you cram into Egypt air zone from the standard Libya + Marsa Matruh vs Egypt airbases?
Considering 5 people play hist MP, its an irrelevant argument.
@@SMGJohn Hist MP is definitely a small subset of the community but it ultimately sets the meta since it's the most competitive.
@@28lobster28
Competitive against each other, the AI is so bad you can conquer the entire world with inter-war tanks and biplanes and sub 2 spam and random multiplayer games the players are mix of really bad and more into role playing rather than sweating for 5 hours just to have 20 minutes fight.
@@SMGJohn Agreed on the AI, a couple light tanks and you win. That why it's way more fun playing with people that make it actually challenging. If the war only lasts 20min, need your host to do some lobby micro and balance the teams!
Thanks for video! What would the ideal plane design to sink ships be?
yes, this topic would be very interesting. it is very bad not to be allowed to design a NAV for medium airframe, historically, in ww2 the best land based NAVs were medium airframes. in order to reduce IC, i make a design for a medium airframe and put the cheapest machine gun and then as many torpedoes as I can ... so i hunt ships with heavy fighters LoL
It was an oversight from PDX to not include medium CAS/NAV (since you can get heavy NAV...) There were plenty of medium/twin engine planes for those roles irl, but you have to make a heavy fighter to equip either of them (or a TAC which is VERY expensive). Thats one less useful slot, plus messes with deployment. But yeah, I went for the heavy fighter approach, and realised very fast that the only thing going for it is the range, the small one can do the same damage for 30% less cost. In single player a cannon II fighter will trade with the AI like 50:1 even if outnumbered in most cases, and will shoot down like 50 bombers a month too. The jump in damage from HMG to cannons is ridiculously huge. Also found torpedo bombers less useful, since a basic sub III with a single torpedo was able to go toe to toe with AI dessies and even doomstacks and if i set them to always engage they just sank everything with acceptable losses (10x10 stacks operating over a large area). I had to check multiple times to see if my mods broke the thing or not, but they haven't touched air and navy...
The AI makes terrible templates I don't know exactly what they are making but any random fighter I make will almost always trade 2 to 1 if not better.
@@iandomorocks6731 and now even their naming sucks... earlier at least you got 'historic plane name mk.XXIV' or something, now you get 'medium template mk.II'. But after replaying a few times, I encountered germany with cannon-fighters, that was a first. Usually their planes have like 8-12 air attack, this one had a solid 20, by far the highest I've seen from the AI. Almost traded evenly when I had to drop the self sealing fuel tanks for lack of rubber (although if I count the cas I shot down, it was still more like 2 to 1)
@@bencom01 That and no matter what you make it always defaults to the same picture too so you can have modern fighters that look the same as inter-war.
@@iandomorocks6731 if you select a picture other than the default it will retain that, but if you select the default, it will use the interwar fighter for some reason. for me every country's every carrier fighter will get the jet icon and my heart always skips a beat thinking they rushed jet fighters in '40... :D i wish we had more variety in icons, if at least you could pick from any one and not just your own countries default 3-4, it would be nice.
@@bencom01 There should be an option we can check where we can allow plane pictures that aren't ours.
so i played a bit with the new DLC/Patch. and i noticed that u take insane losses when u do Logi.-strikes with CAS. probably because of the new armored Trains.
i wonder if "Tac-CAS" is much better at it because of the higher Defense?
I like to put on one heavy cannon on the small frame and the reduced materials module. Defense is like 7 but attack is like 20 and they cost like 1 allum and 1 rubber.
We miss you! Can you come back and give us an update on CAS and TAC after all the pathces? 🙂
@71Cloak do you know about the pause_in_hours console command? It's useful for running precise timed tests without having to slow down game speed
nope
Thanks for the info
So basically the best plane for [thing] is a small airframe maxed out to do [thing]?
i hate that the at cannon is not in the air research tab, ive been looking everywhere and was wondering why is there no big ground atk stuff.
I found that using the small air frame To build some so-called fighters with two cannons and two bomb racks is very effective. you need less research overall and these things can also be used for air superiority in the beginning of a conflict
What about radio navigation? Is there a case to be made getting the -20% night penalty, and then bombing at night only?
Good to know. Can you build CAS with armour and turrets that can work without green air in singleplayer?
Against fighters small frame one double lmg turret does the job but if enemy have interceptors with canons u are dead
You can probably get away with turrets, but you need to have armor, which you give up for having turrets. I did 4x HMG on my full-armor medium CAS to turn them into heavy fighters and they were able to cas and logi bomb under red air, but it wasn't that good. They almost never died, but their cost was insane, so their numbers were meh.
I should've swapped a cas mod and the HMG out for air attack cannons. That might've made them feel better and start killing off a lot of their fighters.
I'm not too sure if it's even possible to kill off a good amount of intercepting fighters. First they have to find your plane and since AI doesn't do radar, the odds of an enemy plane finding a bomber are small, then your plane has to deal enough damage to kill them, which might be difficult for anything whose primary purpose is CAS.
It's probably possible to drop an armor or two in SP and not see losses spike up. AI seems to really like small airframes, which never pack enough punch to bring down survival-oriented larger planes. A turret or two could increase their losses and reduce their interception enough to make the small uptick in your losses worthwhile, but it's really hard to justify skimping on survivability on something that costs this much.
I still dont know if its worth to have light or heavy naval bombers can you do an analysis?
im pretty shure that you can put 2 at cannon1 on cas along with the at cannon 2, it gives something like 30|+ ground attack, unless it was patched that is.
what is the best strat bomber is my question, is maxing out bomb bays worth it?
Glad someone does this so i dont have to
I’d argue it’s worth it to go for max ground attack no matter the cost. As you have limited number of planes in combat. You don’t have a benefit from more CAS Planes.
That's what I was thinking too. Its not about DMG per IC but DMG per Planes actually fighting. Having 3000 cheap CAS vs 1000 Max CAS when only 500 sortie in a battle is all wasted IC anyways. IC efficiency only matters for fighters or minors that can't afford more than the most efficient IC CAS. That is all assuming the old "3x of combat width = plane combat width" still applies.
The idea would be to not over produce cas to start with. Build only what you need and use the saved IC elsewhere.
Hey @71Cloak, what about air recon planes? Are they worth it?
I think in practicality agility is important. CAS fighting the allies when they have 3k fighters those planes with 3 bomb locks will get shredded. Anti tank and rockets are the best that I noticed
i think bomb bay only enable port strikes bc ported ships are stationary and level bombing ships is VERY INACCURATE.
Sorry, is escort a separate mission or is it just sticking fighters in the area on air superiority missions?
Just air superiority
Here's a fun multirole aircraft I played with:
Advanced Small Airframe:
2x 2 Cannon II
2x Rocket Rails
The design still loses to 71Cloak's design, however it still performs well in combat while doing decent Logistics bombing. Also all the agility on CAS mission and the high Air Attack means it stands a decent chance of shooting down anything that intercepts it. If you want to delete your CAS line and make only fighters, I could see a really good use case for this plane... also it is literally a late Me262's armament
There's no point to multi-role planes though, you can only fit a certain amount of CAS into a battle so you should make them as min-maxxed as possible.
Meanwhile fighters need every bit of attack and defence as possible, thus they should be minmaxxed as well.
@@ThatZenoGuy yep, that's what my testing discovered too. That's why I said the multirole design was only able to do a decent job of both air superiority and Logistics Bombing, not CAS.
Agility is rather important on CAS actually, and with armored trains getting AA, again the multirole fighter has SOME potential, but it really isn't anything that building a fighter and then a CAS couldn't do better
Its a 10% cost difference between 18 and 6 ground attack. (Or 4 and 12 once rockets are a thing.)
Not filling the slots was a meme choice.
Similarly, there is a 20% cost between 24 and 18 ground attack (Small bomb bay), so a 20% more cost for 33% more attack?
Mind you, if you are worried about interceptors but do need CAS, one possibility is to have an even mix of small bomb bays and rockets. The average ground attack is equal to that of bomb locks, but the average agility cost is only 10. So you can have relatively inexpensive cas that can evade enemy heavy fighters but can still inflict acceptable casualties.
Rockets in general are kinda funny for being actually free, and fighter 3's getting a dedicated rocket slot (But you can't assign them to ground pound when there are no enemy fighters present.)
Has anything changed concerning designs in the last few patches?
hey hope u see this comment I wanted to ask if escort (and it's effecency work now)gr8 video btw
Hey curious what you Think about Feedback’s newest video about this exact thing? He took kind of a different approach when he said he’s not worried about production cost but I think that was only so it didn’t seem like he was copying your stuff like he has done many times in the past.
Feedback doesn't care about Production cost for a very specific reason. He doesn't play MP at all. He literally could not care less about the MP meta and as such all of his plane designs are intended for SP.
Sidenote: if you are building meta planes in SP, it's wasteful anyway. The AI rarely makes anything even close to comparable to meta builds, and the fighters rarely have 20 Air Attack.
I don't know. The base fighter was a bit weak. Once you start using engine 2s and higher speed difference isn't going to be that substantial. At that point you have 3 stats, air attack, air defense, and agility. All 3 of which have their benefits but air attack and air defense are the things your going to care about. You can't control agility in any meaningful way. Only HF vs LF.
So really just pick the one you want to use (I prefer light fighters) and then work on attack and defense. Excess thrust giving 3 kmh per 1 thrust is useless so use that thrust for stats. Also don't use 2 engings on light fighters.
@@manaintolerantmage Why is production only a MP thing? Do build the biggest and baddest Battleships in SP?
@@ezganks71 The point being, that you can do some ludicrously stupid builds in SP, and still win. Mostly because the AI is very very unintelligent with its designs. He (feedback) literally cares not for the IC because in the end, he'll still win.
TLDR; Feedback and Cloak are attacking 2 separate problems. Cloak is addressing the multiplayer sweat meta, and Feedback isn't. IC matters way way more in MP metas, because players tend to make more intelligent decisions, this is why Paradox inflates difficulty by buffing the resources of the AI. It literally has to cheat to be difficult. The AI in HOI is just.... dumb to say the least.
Thank you
As far as the early (1936) design CAS goes, on Germany I design a medium airframe "heavy fighter" (quotes only because of 2 main LMG I put on it) + 3 Bomb locks + 2 Engine 2's + Self-sealing tanks. I generally dislike the idea of med bomb bay and doing it my way it will count as a Heavy fighter to get that extra -2.5% Prod cost from Rudolf Hess
rudolph* and doesn't he take his flight to britain in like 1940? seems like you lose that -2.5% rather quickly
@@currahee You should have a better plane by then
@@currahee Also "Rudolf Walter Richard Hess"
@@uber7586 well you just taught me something new, maybe I should've thought twice about correcting someone with a german username.
also I realize now that you said early design. I might have to try this
@@currahee Had to google his name tbh :) as I'm not german-speaking
Can you do a test with high armor and tons of turrets on a medium bomber and a heavy bomber. Like a gun ship idea. To see how well they perform with shooting down planes
1 problem. you are instantly going to take a -60% penalty to your air attack because of agility disadvantage.
IF you have the Industry, maxing out ground attack on Tac bombers is better because of the Plane limit on combat width. You also have the Range to cover some of the stupidly large air zones that are outside of Europe. If it wasnt for these large air zones and how mission efficiency works, CAS would be a lot better.
But! A patch came out today and they nerfed/buffed certain things, is this still top notch stuff?
Anti Tank cannons 1 are like the german 30mm MK 103 cannons, or the russian 23mm cannons, while the AT Cannon 2 is like the HS 129 B-3, with a tank cannon strapped to it. That's the difference, one is using auto-cannons with high pen rounds, the other is a main tank cannon strapped to a plane.
Yup, seems like AT 1 is 23-37mm, while AT 2 is 50-88mm.
do the changes by today's patch change this by a lot?
I like AT II with rocket rails
i play as yugoslavia, and i have on start unlocked 1936 light airframe, should i use light or medium airframe
Thanks for clarifying, I totally misunderstood the Bomb locks and small bomb bays completely cause I got bamboozled by how the UI works and shows the stats and hides the stats when you hover over the missions or not or the modules. Very unintuitive. Everything is less intuitive to be quite frank, they achieved the opposite of what they set their goals to be for everything, land, naval, air. Doctrines, designs, templates. Everything is befuddling and complicated.
Food for thought MPs guys prefer the heavy fighter because of the amount range and air superiority it can give aiding ground attack. They don't focus on prolonged combat more about bursts of damage
You get less air superiority from the HF though. Sure it gives 1.25 per plane but if you only have 60% of the planes the enemy has because they are using light fighters then the end result is 75% of the raw air superiority figure.
On top of that, how are you bursting done more planes when after a few months you have lost more. That makes no sense.
Oh and that's before you consider fuel usage of 0.64 vs about .4.
I don't know. None of that seems worth an additional 100 range on your fighters.
@@novitrix9671 Absolute schizo reply considering this is a video game we are talking about. Who cares?
rockets are for mostly , for fighters , cost only 1 prod , and when you get air superiority that enemy does not have air , you can switch your fighters to ether logistic strike or ground support:)
so you can just slap them on fighters for hardly any cost and no penalties aside from 1 production cost
Since you can't cas stack anymore I think it is better just to get the maximum ic best ground attack cas so that the 300 that go into the battle are insane. That would use the small bomb bays and at 1+2.
Why can't you CAS stack anymore
Can't change wing size.
does cas getting defence reduce enemy AA dmg?
you need to test the 2 fighters when they're both shooting down tactical or strat bombers. Yes, ic for ic in air supremacy the light fighter will win due to agility, and it's not that much better, but when it comes to killing bombers i'd wager (haven't tested it) that the heavy fighters will do a better job of killing them.
I think small bomb bay only allows port strikes but not naval strike is because bombs are inaccurate so bombing a non moving port would result in some damage. But bomb bay bombing moving ships would just be extremely hard to hit.........I'm guessing.
Pretty much. Level-bombing ships was a nearly a complete waste of time and ordnance. Bomb locks are for diving attacks, which were the main way to actually get bomb hits on a moving ship.
I'm happy in my first bba play I basically guessed all these builds. I made awesome fighters/cas/all around tacs and had way less planes than usually and always had green air, which surprised me as usually red vs France and mostly green with one zone red vs Sov
Thank you for the information, I've been using TAC CAS with med and small bombs bay, to me the cost is good enough for the range it has.
Is strat bombing worth it?
Oooo,so there are things like dive brakes.
I wonder what else...
So, I think:
CAS - Ground attack for obvious reasons
Tac - Strat bomb since it's not good in CAS
Strat Bomber - Nukes if you have them
We need a new version of this video pls :D
Its basically the same but they changed the techs around
@@TopShot501st Except that's not true. The biggest thing I see that people overlook in plane design videos is Air Mission Effeciency, IE how many planes assigned to the mission can actually take part, and the chief contributor to this is the plane's range.
If you assign a squadron to a air-zone but that squadron can only cover 70% of that zone, you get 70% air mission effenincy, meaning only 70 planes out of 100 actually do anything. You want you range to be has high as possible without sacrificing air/ground attack, and the easiest and cheapest way is by rushing Aircraft Range Studies and put something like drop tanks on your planes, and ideally you want 700+ km range.
Furthermore, you also want to prioritize capturing airfields when pushing your front lines. Not only will this give your airforce a staging point to strike deeper into enemy territory, it'll also force your enemy to relocate their aircraft, and likely dropping their air efficiency, making them less effective and easier to shoot down.
It is entirely possible to decimate an enemy airforce that out numbers yours if you have higher air mission effency than your enemy.
I would advise extra fuel tanks instead of drop tanks. More range, and more importantly less weight. Defence shouldn't matter since you will have fighters escorting.
Reasons for AT Cannon I and II is that the single one would be nose mounted, while the other 2 are Wing mounted. If I had to guess.
71: "And all I can say is, Man, old CAS had NO ground attack."
Me: *Ahhhhh shit, here CAS meta go again.*
okay so as Japan i need long range CAS cos as you know USSR at the east have large lands and have very low supply even for China, so light cas wont reach. and the allies are separated with big oceans. simply i use Medium Airframe Tactical bombers. my build have 1 fuel tank, 1 armor plate, 1 dual defense tower, 1 tactical bombs, 2 small CAS bombs and 1 locked bomb. i also build 2 other types 1 for naval and 1 heavy fighter and both are long range too.
is there a difference in plane design for minors vs. majors?
In terms of actual hull or parts stats? No. Modifiers from national spirits are only applied once the design is finished.
How do you escort?
Considering how the MtG naval designer turned into "spam cheap ships, quality is worthless, if you have more ships than the enemy you win", I have to applaud Paradox for making quality (and arguably more realistic) designs the way to go for planes. This means your planes get progressively better the more stuff you unlock instead of already being "maxed out" with a bare-bones 1936 plane. They might not have done it on purpose, but credit where credit is due.
It's more realistic to an extent, but I don't like how air attack is one single value that makes cannons superior. IRL machine guns were better against fighters while cannons were better against bombers (until sufficiently fast-firing cannons were developed). There is absolutely no reason to ever use light machine guns, because cannons > HMGs > LMGs. If you design historical German planes you're gimping yourself, even though historically it was the industry and usage of the Luftwaffe that doomed it, not the plane designs themselves.
Also the lack of downside to squeezing in a set of cannons and 2 sets of 4 HMGs onto regular fighters is pronounced. Sure, you could kill anything you got on target, but you can still shoot only in front and the enormous weight of the guns and ammunition would make dogfighting a bad idea. There's not enough of a downside for regular fighters compared to heavy fighters.
@@Zorro9129
IRL 20mm cannons beat .50's in the skies against any target.
50 cals had one massive advantage though. Ammo. The smaller sizes meant they could carry substantially more ammo. Not that the US didn't try to replace them anyways. There is a reason every nation moved towards 20 to 30 mm cannons as time went on.
@@71Cloak
Substantially more ammo, substantially more hits needed to down a target.
The small incendiary payloads also meant igniting fuel tanks was a challenge, especially against the new and more resistant jet fighters.
The thing with heavy vs normal fighters is in Single-player. Any enemy AI isn't going to build the most optimal min-maxed plane. So testing the best heavy vs the best normal isn't useful except for MP purposes. In that case I fully agree a normal fighter will be superior in every aspect except range. In a Single-player game normal fighters are going to still take combat losses even while it's dominating. A good heavy fighter design with enough air defense can literally take 0 combat losses in some instances like the Spanish civil war or if you want to send volunteers to China/Japan. Most of the heavy fighters losses will be due to accidents.
I tell you what, he said he tested it. So why don't you throw up a youtube video of your meta heavy fighters vs his build and show us the results, eh?
@@manaintolerantmage I ain't got time for that, this is pretty easily proved early in a game though. I've also watched his test video, he indeed did not cover what I said. Just send your proposed air builds as volunteers to Spain and watch the losses. You still win but will definitely lose some planes in combat. Send some high air defense heavies and they take near 0 losses in combat.
Hey, I was wondering what inf template is best for SP / getting achievements?
What is ic
What to make of the module that reduce the night penalty ? Such as the Ground Radar that reduce that gives a -30% reduction for a 2IC cost.
Also, if you play a nation with easy access to rubber, than Self Sealing tanks looks like a god compo to have on.
I love that some guy just decimated this challenge within 11 hours of it being posted. Who knew carriers were so OP 😂
That guy was the one who posted the original challenge.
@@71Cloak Just noticed this comment ended up on the wrong video.
Avalanche 1.12.3 - By Blood Alone - Checksum 6b16
:)
The beta for it wasn't even out yesterday when I recorded this.
I really think I was missing out on not getting this DLC. The 'vanilla' aircraft are so bad to the point of being unusable at times. The ones we can get now feel very strong (though not overpowered) and really compliment the ground forces.
Still not assigning CAS to armies though. Every time I do they rebase to far off airfields out of range of combat. Micro-management all the way.
Tank designer is still cooler IMO.
I think Tac vs CAS is based on what Nation you play it's more practical and IC cost for the USA and Japan to build Tac Bombers. Also The USA will want A Tac bomber that specializes in Nav Bombing with Floats on it . The Strat Maine Patrol is a IC meme don't built it . Use a TAC with2 Torp Mounts on a Basic Frame and that will last you the whole war. No need to build a small frame Nav Bomber . The Improved or Mitchel is use more fro Ground and Stat . And Logi Stikes. and with the US and USSR you will only ever need the B-17 or Basic Frame for Strat Bombing.
Why? Range instead of adding more fuel tanks and making the plane less defensive.
If your a european Nation CAS is the the way to go even if you going to do Strat Bombing then dedicate a Tac Bomber for that such as Britain. England and Germany will need small frame NAV Bombers.
All nations will need Dedicated Small Fighters
Only Major Nations will be able to add Heavy Fighters for Bomber inception (Except England you won't have the production to Make Heavy's)
can anyone else confirm that plane designs (with the new checksum 6b16) are a lot more expensive? (at least the larger airframes with more engines)
They seem more expensive across the biard. Unless you are talking about the beta patch in which case I don't know.
They are.
I slap rockets on my fighters so I can always have some GA
What about fighter bombers
I wouldn't really bother with them. They can only cas or do supremacy and they are worse at both. If you focus more on the fighter side you get a bomber that does as much damage as the cheap model with nothin on it. If you focus on building one that can do some cas damage then you get a fighter that won't do much. I just don't think they are very worth it.
@@71Cloak Well in the late game you can add both Rocket rails and Bomb locks without sacrificing agility. I think those might be worth it, especially if you are using 1944 airframes since you can also put a lot of cannons and MGs in them (more slots).
unless you are industry giant heavy fighters still more reliable you do lose less plane per combat you can cover more areas with high range no need to build air fields after couple of tiles. Most importantly if you are defending a line and if you did upgraded region AA to max heavy fighters from back of the hot zone can reach red zone easly cover whole area and lose couple of planes while enemy drop down from sky like rocks. i usualy max def instead of attack so i lose only couple of planes while enemy lose so many. Also İC cost is depent on engine you can get away with very cheap engines for heavy figters. ESP on naval areas tac nav bombers are way to go. small naval bombers are crap they lose 30 40 plane per fight against enemy stack fleets. while tac navs only lose 4 5. for CAS tho yea small cass is way better you can stack 1 tier 2 canon with 2 tier 1 canons and put drop tank and seal tank plus radio for %20 night time fighting. yes it does give strat bombing as stat but gives night penalty redu for everything. %20 is huge boost
thank you papa cloak can you make more template/designer tutorials for cringe n00bs (me) pls uwu
How to build your naval bombers ? 🤔