Why is it so hard to shoot down enemy fighters/bombers?

Xiao Xiong said:

Yeah, but, a single bomber is not a big deal. It's when the AI hits you with 15 bombers that you suddenly appreciate the way fighters work. Each fighter/AA on intercept will stop ONE bomber, and even if it doesn't kill that bomber, it will stop it from doing damage to your units. And after a few turns yes the bombers will be back at base healing -- but that means they aren't attacking your units either.

So what if the fighter didn't actually kill the bomber? It kept your battleships, artillery, infrantry, etc., alive so that could continue attacking the city. Or if you're the defender, it kept those bombers from damaging your city, buying you a few more turns to wipe out the idiotic AI units that are jumping in and out of the lake by your capital.

I find that fighters are VERY effective -- you just need to understand their purpose is to provide air cover to keep your other units alive. And they do that pretty well.

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you can take sortie promotion also for some fighters!

sortie supposedly means the unit will intercept 2x per turn

the positive side is that you get more bang for your buck from the fighters, which are normally strategic resource limited military unit.

If you can get more intercepts per turn, than the enemy, with same resources, then that should be a good advantage, right? It means you can have more battleships or carriers online using that oil, instead of having to use that oil, on fighters.

the downside is that you lose chance for early air repair promotion (I think). IF you make second interception per turn, at heavily damaged, then the enemy will also receive less damage. That's the downside too.

In this manner, the fighters act as sort of damage sinks vs bomber attacks. You take bombing damage into fighters, instead of your land units. You transfer the damage from your land units, to your fighters instead. Because your land units will always be little bit damaged by the bombers, in any case.

Fighters interception range is of course greater than AA gun or Mobile SAM.

Fighters aren't terribly useful units on their own. If enemy has no aircraft, then you use pure bomber attacks. Or if you're Japan but you lack oil for bombers, then you must build zero fighters instead, or simply get more oil.

If enemy has fighters and bombers, then the sortie promoted fighters could be useful in certain conditions. Maybe in case of a naval invasion? When you have to use carriers to protect the invasion fleet, then it's always positive that you can maximize interceptions per turn, because number of aircraft on-board is limited number.

Or you could just nuke the enemy city, nuke the city, enemy loses his air units

You can take sortie promotion for all fighters, and it absolutely means that the unit will intercept 2x per turn.

I found that my sortie-promoted fighters frequently died from defending against heavy bomber runs. My solution to this is to get air repair first.