Air unit interception range

[Alekseyev_]

I had always been wondering in the past about why there appears to be so little air-to-air combat when one would expect much more to take place. I never investigated it, but a lot can simply be attributed to the AI's aversion to building proper airforces.

What I did however come across recently when randomly browsing some old files and reading the German manual of my Civ3 vanilla installation, is that air units on interception duty only intercept enemy air units in an interception range equal to half their normal operational range. This appears to be the intended behaviour, but I never saw any mention of it anywhere on these forums. So today I am posting this thread to raise awareness.

Love the detailed manuals of old times, spent so much time reading the physical ones back then as a kid.

 

[tjs282]

What I did however come across recently when randomly browsing some old files and reading the German manual of my Civ3 vanilla installation, is that air units on interception duty only intercept enemy air units in an interception range equal to half their normal operational range.

There is also the problem that the Air Superiority mission is bugged in the unmodded* .exe: (1) it does not activate on the interturn directly after being selected, so if the town is already getting bombed by Bombers, then those Fighters which "should" be defending that town will instead be destroyed on the runway (air-bombardment of towns targets air-units first; this is why the AA-ability, Airfields, and Flaks/Mobile SAMs needed to be added to Conquests), and (2) if a player has "Cancel Orders for enemy combat unit" switched on in their Preferences, then the AS-mission will need to be reassigned every time a Fighter is successfully activated.

*I cannot remember offhand if the AS-bug has (already) been fixed by @Flintlock's patch-system for the GOG/ Steam/ PCGames executables.